Antisemitism: a personal encounter

I knew that she was called Ruth and that she was Jewish. I spoke to her only once very briefly, and somehow managed to work some extremely harsh criticism of Israel into the conversation. Similarities with the Nazis were mentioned. She looked at me briefly, but didn’t respond and the conversation was suddenly over.

That was about 25 years ago. I had strong opinions about Israel — so strong that they were almost bursting out of me. I could almost feel my skin reddening, my breath changing and a shot of adrenaline rushing into certain combative muscle groups when I thought of it. Why? I didn’t know much about Israel at all. No, that’s a lie. I didn’t know anything at all about Israel, beyond that there were Jews living there. I saw them as rich and white, and that they had stolen land from the Arabs or something.

Why so much anger? Well, my best friend used to get very angry about it, and I looked up to him. He seemed to know a great deal more about everything than I did. I was about 25, he was in his early 40s, was better educated, had traveled widely, and had a much stronger personality than I did. He seemed to know what he was talking about, and I generally agreed with his (left wing) politics. It seemed important, and I saw how angry it made him, so I identified with his anger. It made me angry too.

But why did I speak to Ruth in that manner? I wasn’t angry with her about it. Why did I do that?

The Guardian publishes old fashioned anti-Jewish propaganda

(NOTE– The update at the end of this post shows that the offending journalist, Adam Reynolds, and the Guardian editors are even more hysterical and ignorant than the post initially implied.)

Jews have built bomb shelters because they’re scared. Let’s taunt them.

This is The Guardian’s latest attack on Israelis. Well actually not Israelis — that would include Arab Muslims, Christians, Druze and a host of other groups. So let’s call it what it is — the Guardian’s latest attack on Jews.

Doomsday dens: Inside Israel’s bombshelters

This propaganda piece is designed to promote the idea that Jews really don’t face any imminent or credible threat to their security. The authors portray military threats against Israel as the kind of vague hypothetical or prophetic prediction that leads to a “doomsday” cult and inspires the paranoid followers to build bunkers.

There are more than a million bomb shelters in Israel, reflecting the nation’s collective siege mentality.

Followed immediately by

This collective siege mentality manifests itself with over one million public and private bomb shelters, found throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories.

The authors assert that not only is there no threat to Israel, but that their bomb shelters are a sign of a “collective siege mentality”, that the hapless Jews have somehow picked up. Collectively. It’s not rockets flying in from Gaza or (increasingly) Syria, or terrorists climbing through a kitchen window and slaughtering a random family at their Sabbath meal, or nuclear threats from Iran. Nope, for the Guardian, it is a “collective siege mentality” that sends the nervous Jews scurrying into their bunkers.

This mirrors (or more likely simply repeats) the age old anti-Semitic stereotype of the cowardly Jew. In 2014 in Berlin on Al-Quds Day — the march that agitates for the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem, a mob marched through the streets chanting something in German that had not been heard since the 1930s: