Fiamma Nirenstein is a name that few outside Italy recognize though she is one of the most active fighters against hate in Europe and was chosen by the Jerusalem Post in June of 2011 as one of the world's 50 most influential Jews. She is a parliamentarian in Italy where she speaks out in support of freedom and human rights, against terror and anti-Semitism, and for a clear-eyed view of Israel and Islam. Nirenstein stands for Western values and against the “leftist ideologies” which, she proclaims, have been used to “justify…violent crimes” and “disgusting verbal attacks” against Jews and Israel.
It was World Jewish Congress Secretary General Dan Diker who called Fiamma Nirenstein "a patriot of Italy and a true friend of Israel and the Jewish people" when she was unanimously elected chairman of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians (ICJP) on 29 JUNE 2011. The ICJP meeting was attended by 55 parliamentarians from 22 countries. The ICJP is sponsored by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and made up of Jewish lawmakers from all continents.
In one of her more recent activities against hate, MP Fiamma Nirenstein chaired the Committee for the Inquiry into Anti-Semitism of The Italian Chamber of Deputies, which presented its Final Report on October 17th 2011. The Committee had been instituted in December 2009 by the President of the Chamber of Deputies and was formed by 26 MPs from the Institutional Affairs and Foreign Affairs Committees, from all the political parties. The hearings and the initiatives that accompanied the Committee works lasted for two years.
The Report was the result of an accurate elaboration of data and studies collected during dozens of hearings. The report acknowledges “a strong resurgence of anti-Semitism in European societies” in recent years. Fiamma Nirenstein said “We have been attempting to understand the new aspects of this phenomenon, which is as aggressive and genocidal as it always was, but it is presently hiding itself by assuming new forms”– a new kind of anti-Semitism that is “less overtly racist, and therefore more subtle and insidious,” than previous varieties, and that is being spread especially through online social networks. As a consequence of this new brand of anti-Semitism, “Jewish communities in various Western countries have had to deal for the first time with a new atmosphere of insecurity” and “a new cultural climate.”
There is no question that anti-Semitism in Europe has been on the rise during the last few years. The European left, for a range of reasons, has gotten into the habit of viewing Israel, and by extension all Jews, as the foremost challenge to peace on earth and goodwill toward men. As Europe’s Islamic communities have expanded, moreover, and their members grown less and less shy about expressing – and acting upon – their opinions, the articulation of anti-Semitic sentiments and the commission of anti-Semitic acts by young Muslim men have increased accordingly.
The data that was examined highlight the escalation worldwide of Anti-Semitism and examine its several faces: according to the polls, 44% of the Italians declare “not to feel any sympathy” toward the Jews. The report analyzes as well the new and widespread phenomenon of an exponential proliferation of anti-Semitic websites and social networks, probably responsible for the 22% of Italian youngsters between the ages of 18 and 29 having a diverse hostile attitude toward the Jews.
Among Italians between the ages of 18 and 34, 22% were anti-Semitic, even though 71% of them “had never had any direct contact with Jews.” Of Italians in this age group, 51% balked at the idea of their daughter being in a relationship with a Jew, 38% didn’t want a Jewish boss, and 25% didn’t care for the idea of having Jewish neighbors. The level of hatred against the State of Israel passes the limits of legitimate criticism and aims to the destruction of the Jews.
The Italian sub-committee interviewed a long line of experts. Minister of Foreign Affairs Franco Frattini spoke of “a new insidious form of anti-Semitism…based on apathy and uncritical acquiescence to claims asserting Jewish ‘control’ over politics, the media and the economy.” Renzo Gattegna, head of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, suggested that anti-Semitism “is being fuelled today by anti-Israeli arguments, encouraged by various media that are prejudiced against the Jewish State and hostile to it.” And Rabbi Benedetto Carucci of the Rome Jewish School expressed concern “that events focusing solely on remembrance of the Shoah might create the impression that Judaism was all about extermination.”
“Incidents of anti-Semitic intolerance are spreading in the Islamic communities in Europe, with murders and physical attacks on Jews….In Sweden, which has one of the largest Muslim communities in Europe, the Jewish communities spend 25 per cent of their funds on security measures.” Riccardo Pacifici, the president of the Rome Jewish Community, noted “the close connection which exists between certain Muslim organisations and neo-Nazi groups and which underpins attacks on Jewish communities, synagogues, schools and cemeteries and also underlies the boycotts of sports events.”
Professor Dina Porat, director of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, spoke to the sub-committee about the emergence in Europe in recent years of “an Islamist form of anti-Semitism” that is marked “by a tendency to attack Jewish communities outside Israel because of their association with that country.” And Professor Gert Weisskirchen of the Steering Committee of the Interparliamentary Coalition for Combating Anti-Semitism (ICCA) “emphasised the risks of an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency which might have dangerous repercussions for Jews.”
The document can be consulted online (in Italian) at:
Fiamma Nirenstein was born in Florence 18 December 1945. Her father was a very young Polish Zionist who lost half of his family in the Holocaust and had the other half saved in Israel, and who in 1945 came to Italy from Palestine with the Jewish brigade. He wanted to save Europe from Nazism, and in Florence he met a young Jewish partisan Wanda and they had a daughter they called Fiamma, "flame" in Italian, so that she would remember forever the value of resistance.”
She completed her university studies at the University of Florence in Modern History. In April 2008's national elections, she was elected a Member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies within the "People of Freedom" party (PDL) headed by Berlusconi, where she serves as Vice President of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. Nirenstein also chairs the Parliamentary Committee for the Inquiry on Anti-Semitism.
Nirenstein is also active on issues concerning the status of women. In 2009, she chaired the International Conference on Violence against Women held in Rome. The event, sponsored by the Italian government, focused largely on the status of women in Islamic countries and communities. She also teaches Middle East History at Luiss University in Rome. Nirenstein lives part of the year in Gilo, a neighborhood within the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem. She is married to Israeli news photographer Ofer Eshed and they have a son.
Her journalism career began in 1977. Until her election to parliament, she was a columnist and Israel correspondent for ‘Il Giornale,’ a daily newspaper she still contributes to as analyst and publishes a pro-Israel column titled "Fuoco e Fiamma," which means "fire and flame." From 1991 until December 2006, she worked as correspondent and columnist for ‘La Stampa’ daily. In '93 and '94, she also directed the Cultural Institute of the Italian Embassy in Tel Aviv.
She has been a columnist and a correspondent for many major magazines (Panorama; l'Espresso; Epoca). Nirenstein contributed and contributes to the New York Sun, Commentary Magazine, and the magazine Moment.
As a journalist and author the focus and underlying idea that runs through all Fiamma Nirenstein's work is the fight against totalitarianism and terrorism as connected to anti-Semitism and hate for Israel. She predominantly writes about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also about European history, the Holocaust, terrorism, the changes taking place within the Middle East democratization process, anti-Semitism and monotheism.
Fiamma Nirenstein has done a lot of documentaries for the Italian TV. She is daily interviewed by the Italian TV and radio. She is interviewed weekly on Radio Radicale, for a program named "Mediorientale". She has been official speaker in a variety of conferences on Anti-Semitism. She is frequently interviewed by the Italian media, and has a weekly radio program. In 2006, she conceived and conducted 'Ore diciotto/Mondo', a program about foreign affairs on the public channel RAI 2.
She wrote nine books. The latest, “Israel is us” was issued on March 2007 and has been translated into English ("Israel is us - a personal odissey to a journalist's understanding of the Middle East", JCPA ed., 2009). These books are best sellers and prizes winners. Prior to this, she gathered about 3,000 Italians, including senior intellectuals and politicians, to a pro-Israel rally, and its dozens of speeches were compiled in a book titled "For the Truth, For Israel." Nirenstein has been awarded 16 journalistic and literary prizes.
She is also one of the six members of the steering committee of the Interparliamentary Coalition on Combating Antisemitism (ICCA), inaugurated on February 2009 with the London Conference, and among the founder members of the “Friends of Israel Initiative”, established on 2010 by President José Maria Aznar. On December 16, 2009, Nirenstein, together with the other members of the ICCA steering committee, received an award by the Israeli Knesset for her commitment in the fight against anti-Semitism.
Nirenstein is a member of the Global Forum against Antisemitism instituted by Nathan Sharansky. She is a member of the board of the Italian Foundation Magna Carta and a fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and of the Hudson Institute, Washington. In addition, she is a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor[2]
As a member of Italy’s parliament she made a number of significant contributions to the defense of Israel. In her own words: “We voted against the Durban II conference, we were active against the Goldstone report. To achieve this we worked hard in the Italian parliament. It is true that I act in defense of Israel, but it is also for the benefit of Italy, since it is an honor for Italy to deal with this issue. Come tomorrow, Italy can always proudly say that it stood in defense of Israel, and this will forever serve as a badge of honor for this government.”
Nirenstein has said things about Islam that has earned her death threats. She has refused to be silenced. As a consequence, she is often accompanied by two armed bodyguards when she goes out, and they check out a restaurant before she goes in, and sit together at a strategically placed table with their eyes on the door. Witnessing her immense energy and charisma, her grit and eloquence, and her ever-present warmth and humor and charm, you would never know she was a marked woman.
The Wisdom of Fiamma Nirenstein – excerpts from her brilliantly written writings
The political transition Fiamma experienced in her worldview.
I, too, was a communist – the same as the rest of my generation. However, I sobered up by the end of the 1970s. In 1967, a few months before the outbreak of the Six Day War, bored by my rebellious behavior, my family sent me to a Kibbutz in the upper Galilee, Neot Mordechai. I was quite satisfied there, the kibbutz used to give some money every month to the Vietcong.
When the 1967 war broke out I got to see it through Israeli eyes. During the war I took children to shelters; I dug trenches, and learned some simple shooting and acts of self defense. We continued working in the orchards, but were quick to identify the incoming MiGs and the outgoing Mirages, chasing one another in the sky of the Golan Heights.
When I returned to Italy after the 1967 war, I was accused by all of being a criminal since I was in Israel at the time of the occupation of the "poor Palestinians" by the Israelis. Some of my fellow students stared at me as somebody new, an enemy, a wicked person who would soon become an imperialist. Yet I knew how events really developed. I witnessed the battle from Neot Mordechai and the Israelis going up to the Golan. We remained at the kibbutz, had missiles fired at us at night, and saw the MiGs in the sky above us. So to me the story of the poor Palestinians and Syrians … and that the Israelis were occupiers, was clearly wrong.
It was then I began my journey to the other side of the political map, from the leftist views I held at the time. It was not the kibbutz that changed me, but rather my return to Italy and being labeled an 'unconscious fascist.' From the time when others perceived me this way, as the 'other,' I too began to perceive myself this way. My life was about to change. I didn't yet know that, because I simply thought that Israel rightly won a war after having been assaulted with an incredible number of harassments.
I had not then changed sides completely, but became aware of the utmost importance to me of my Judaism and my connection with Israel. I soon noticed that I had lost the innocence of the good Jew, of the very special Jewish friend, their Jew: I was now connected with the Jews of the State of Israel, and slowly I was put out of the dodecaphonic, psychoanalytic, Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Freud shtetl, the coterie that sanctified my Judaism in left wing eyes.
I have tried for a long time to bring back that sanctification, and they tried to give it back to me, because we desperately needed each other, the left and the Jews. But today's anti-Semitism has overwhelmed any good intention. Throughout the years, even people that, like me, who had signed petitions asking the IDF to withdraw from Lebanon, became an "unconscious fascist" as a reader of mine wrote me in a letter filled with insults.
A very famous Israeli writer told me on the phone a couple of months ago: "You really have become a right-winger." What? Right winger? Me? An old feminist human rights activist, even a communist when I was young? Only because I described the Arab-Israeli conflict as accurately as I could and because sometimes I identified with a country continuously attacked by terror, I became a right-winger? In the contemporary world, the world of human rights, when you call a person a right-winger, this is the first step toward his or her delegitimization.
Growing Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitic incidents in the world in 2009 reached the highest number since World War II: in 2009 there were 1129 violent attacks compared to 78 in 1989; also, there is a genocidal anti-Semitism in the world now exactly like that enacted by Hitler: Ahmadinejad advocates destroying the Jewish State, and the Hamas declaration explains how it is essential to kill Jews everywhere in the world.
In civilized Paris, Young Ilan Halimi was killed after 24 days of torture to the rhythm of the Quran readings, merely because he was Jewish. Even there, it is not a good idea to wear a Star of David on a chain around one's neck. In Amsterdam one risks being stabbed; in Sweden, many Jewish families have already moved out of Malmo; and neo-Nazism is increasing in the Ukraine. It is right to feel nervous when seeing a swastika: too many people like it.
There so much anti-Semitism in Europe because it [Europe] is afraid and opportunist, oil-oriented, confused about values, doesn’t believe in itself, doesn’t know anymore what is good and what is bad. Anti-Semitism, very alive today, mixes in a lethal poison with a sense of guilt, because they are afraid of Iran.
The New Anti-Semitism
When I speak about anti-Semitism, I'm not speaking of legitimate criticism of the State of Israel. I am speaking of pure anti-Semitism: Criminalization, stereotypes, specific and generic lies which have fluctuated between lies about the Jews (conspiring, blood thirsty, dominating the world) to lies about Israel (conspiring, ruthlessly violent)….
The basic idea of anti-Semitism, today as always, is that Jews have a perverted soul that makes them unfit, as a morally inferior people, to be regular members of the human family. Today, this Untermensch ideology has shifted to the Jewish state: A separate, unequal, basically evil stranger whose national existence is slowly but surely emptied and deprived of justification. Israel, as the classic evil Jew, according to contemporary anti-Semitism, doesn't have a birthright, but exists with its "original sin" perpetrated against the Palestinians. Israel's heroic history has become a history of arrogance.
The caricature of the evil Jew is transformed to the caricature of the evil state. And now the traditional hook-nosed Jew bears a gun and kills Arab children with pleasure. This new anti-Semitism has materialized in unprecedented physical violence towards Jewish persons and symbols, coming from organizations officially devoted to human rights.
Jews, and the international community in general, have been caught unaware, and have failed to denounce the new trend of anti-Semitism. Nobody is scandalized when Israel is accused daily, without explanation, of excessive violence, of atrocities, of cruelty. Everybody is tormented about the necessity of painful attacks against terrorist nests, often located among families and children. Still, every country has the right to defend itself. Only the Jews in history have been denied the right of self-defense, and so it is today.
Is it not anti-Semitism, when you act as if Jews must die quietly? When sovereign states and organizations threaten death to Israel, why does nobody raise the question at the UN? And what is said when a large part of the world newspapers, TV, radio and school textbooks recommend kicking the Jews out of Israel and killing them all over the world using terrorist bombers? The international community doesn't consider this a problem. Israel is an "unterstate", denied the basic rights of every other state, to exist in honor and peace. The Jewish state is not equal.
Let's take a well known example: A famous Italian journalist, the former director of Corriere Della Sera, was named president of RAI [Italian Radio and Television]. RAI is an empire that shapes Italian public opinion and manages billions of dollars. The nominee's last name, Mieli, is Jewish.
When he was appointed, the same night, the walls of RAI headquarters were filled with graffiti. The graffiti authors wrote the word raus (get out!) over it. They drew a Star of David over the A of the word RAI, and transformed the acronym to "Radio Televisione Israeliana" - Israeli Radio and Television.
The phrase is a perfect cross-section of what we are talking about: Raus and the use of the star of David are the classic signs of traditional anti-Semitic contempt and hate, and the words Radio Televisione Israeliana, putting Israel in the center of the picture, is a clear indication of how Israel is the focus of the left winged anti-Semitic hate today.
Surprisingly, or perhaps predictably, such a blatant expression of anti-Semitism caused very little reaction from both the Italian authorities and the Italian Jewish community. The aggression and threat to such a famous intellectual, gave rise to weak exclamations in a subdued tone, and was treated like a minor issue. Such an absurd reaction is the clear proof of the failure, within the Jewish world, to understand this totally new type of anti-Semitism that focuses on the State of Israel.
Another document, this time a letter by a group of professors at the University of Bologna "to their Jewish friends", was published with a very large number of signatures.
Here is an excerpt: "We have always considered the Jewish people an intelligent and sensitive one because they have been selected (that's right, selected!) by the suffering of persecution and humiliation. We have school friends and some Jewish students whom we have helped and educated, taking them to high academic levels, and today many of them teach in Israeli universities. We are writing because we feel that our love and appreciation for you is being transformed into a burning rage we think that many people, also outside the university, feel the same. You have to realize that what was done to you in the past, you are now doing to the Palestinians if you continue on this path, hatred for you will grow throughout the world".
The letter is an excellent summary of all the characteristics of the new anti-Semitism. There is the pre-Zionist definition of the Jewish people as one that suffers, has to suffer by nature, a people bound to bear the worst persecutions without even lifting a finger, and is, therefore, worthy of compassion and solidarity.
And there is the well established, democratic, military powerful, and economically prospering state of Israel, which is the antithesis of this stereotype. The "new Jew" that tries not to suffer, and that, above all, can and wants to defend himself, immediately loses all his charm in the eyes of the Left.
Look at the passionate and paternalistic tone of the Bologna professors, as they seem to plead: "Come back, our dear Jews. Be ours again. Let us curse Israel together and than take a trip together to the Holocaust memorials".
The meaning of this statement, often repeated in other forms, is obliteration of the Holocaust through the overlapping of Israel and Nazism, namely racism, genocide, ruthless elimination of civilians, women and children, an utterly unwarranted eruption of cruelty and the most brutal instincts. It means pretending to believe blindly, without investigation, the Palestinian version of a highly disputed episode and of many, many others; it means taking for granted the "atrocities" that the Palestinian spokespersons always talk about, and ignoring every proof or fact that doesn't serve this position.
We must not be intimidated by the professors who tell us in their letter: "We have helped you poor Jews lacking everything, a non- existent nation, in the Diaspora and in Israel, to keep you alive. Without us you are nothing. And therefore be careful: if you continue with your treachery we'll annihilate you. You don't exist if you don't know your place, and your place is nowhere."
The Left and Anti-Semitism
Once upon a time the Left “blessed the Jews as the victim ‘par excellence,’ always a great partner in the struggle for the rights of the weak against the wicked.” In return for being coddled, published, filmed, considered artists, intellectuals and moral judges, Jews, even during the Soviet anti-Semitic persecutions, gave the Left moral support and invited it to cry with them at Holocaust memorials. But now “the game is clearly over. The left has proved itself the real cradle of contemporary anti-Semitism.”
All too many people on the Left are fond of Jews who suffer: they define Jews as a people who are “bound to bear the worst persecutions without even lifting a finger,” and who, by suffering helplessly, earn “compassion and solidarity.” But the Jew who rejects this role, who does not wish to suffer, and who “can and wants to defend himself, immediately loses all his charm in the eyes of the Left.” To be sure, the Left “wants to continue being considered the paladin of good Jews. It pretends to continue mourning the Jews killed in the Holocaust, crying together with the Jews shoulder to shoulder. And it does so because this gives it the moral authorization to go on a second later and speak of the ‘atrocities’ of Israel.”
The left’s new anti-Semitism can be partially explained through its relationship with the Soviet Union before its fall. The Left always thought in terms of a capitalist, imperialist power, incarnated predominantly by the U.S. and Israel, versus the poor of the world, which must be defended. And even in the case of Iran, where women are stoned, homosexuals are hanged, and any civil rights are opposed, nevertheless, Iran should be supported due to its belonging to the part of the world exploited by Colonialism and the West. Those prejudices are expressed here, positively discriminating the third world, including the Palestinians, in the face of the western world. This is the basic point.
Add to this the social situation of sitting at the table with your bourgeois friends, whether in Italy or France, where it is fashionable and acceptable to take up the side of the Palestinians – with all the many lies involved.
Instead of the culture of debate, the Left attacks ad hominem (the person) instead of ad factum (the facts) because it is perceived as a moralist choice. I am better than you because I am on the Left. It is not an issue of whether I am right or wrong, but that I am better than you, morally, intellectually, as a human being; my cultural life is better.
The leftists who see themselves as the defenders of worldwide human rights were never capable of putting it in the frame of the fight against terror. They don't even believe there is a war against terrorism; they don't care about it. They imagine the terrorists are a small phenomena that the USA and Israel have blown out of proportion for the sake of expanding their power and their aggressive inspirations.
These anachronistic Flower Children have adopted an extremely naive culture of nostalgia and ignorance in which Arafat and Che Guevara are widely represented in pictures held in demonstration against "the apartheid regime" of Israel. Hamas, Hezbollah, even the Taliban, are people you have to talk to, find an agreement with, without questioning from whence they take their money. They miss the point of fighting terrorism; they suffer from either a form of idiocy or of cynicism – or both.
Just as it curses Israel, the Left of human rights, of pacifism, of protest against death penalty or war or racial and gender discrimination, also praises suicide terrorists. And none of its people will ever sit as a human shield in an Israeli coffee house or in a Jerusalem bus.
A.B. Yehoshua [one of Israel's most renowned authors and a leading figure in the Israeli left] is a good friend. There is naďveté, not viciousness, in A.B. Yehoshua and his friends. They construct a world for themselves in which the Arabs fit into their rational theories. And each time this blows up in their faces. Like Thomas Friedman's [New York Times columnist] writing which is constantly wrong. He no longer has eyes to see.
Still, this new anti-Semitism has a peculiar characteristic: It allows conversion. This kind of anti-Semitism, unlike Nazi anti-Semitism, is more like the older theological anti-Semitism, for it gives the Jews the option to renounce the devil Israel. Whoever declares a sense of revulsion towards Israel's conduct, is allowed to set foot again in the civil society, the one of common sense, civilized conversation, groups of good people full of good will that fight for human rights.
Israel as the focal Point of the new Anti-Semitism
If Israel is, and it is indeed, the focal point of anti-Semitic attacks, our attention must be concentrated there. We must measure the moral character of the person we are speaking to on that basis: if you lie about Israel, if you cover it with bias, you are an anti-Semite. If you're prejudiced against Israel, then, you're against the Jews.
Israel has actually become the sum of all the evil, the proof that the protocols and the blood libels were right. The Palestinians are turned into Jesus, crucified; the war in Iraq or in Afghanistan waged by the US is part of the Jewish plan of domination. Jews all over the world are threatened, beaten, even killed to pay the price of Israel's existence.
The self-defined critics are not the pious interlocutors for the Jews that they pretend to be. So we must tell them: from now on you cannot use the human rights passport for free; you cannot use false stereotypes. You must demonstrate what you assert: that the army ruthlessly storms poor Arab villages that have nothing to do with terrorism; that it shoots children on purpose; that it kills journalists with pleasure. You cannot? Then you are an anti-Semite, just like the old anti-Semites you pretend to hate. You have to convince me that you are not an anti-Semite, now that we know that you do not condemn terrorism, that you have never said a word against the contemporary caricatures of hooked-nosed Jews with a bag of dollars in one hand and a machine gun in the other.
I wondered more and more how it is that the world can compare the immense love of the Jews for Jerusalem, and therefore for Israel, to the desire for possession that characterizes the Arab pretense. The Jews have kept the town opened to all the religions; Jordan never allowed the Jews and the Christians to pray everywhere, and in the Arab world that is not permitted. Jerusalem in their hands would become a prisoner.”
Israel is as the front line in a struggle between Western liberty and Islamic tyranny – a struggle in which many people on the Left have objectively taken the wrong side. “Israel matters because it is the little Hans with his finger in the hole in the dike against political Islam and terror….It matters because if we don’t understand how marvelous it is, we lose every sense of what is good and just, and we are lost.”
If we want to obtain something, if we decide that it is about time to fight, we must renounce "liberal" imposters. We have to know how to say that the free press is a failure when it lies, and that it does lie. We have to say that all human rights are violated when a people is denied the right of self defense, and that right is denied of Israel. Human rights are also violated when a nation is subjected to systematic defamation and made a legitimate target for terrorists. We have to stop what we have accepted since the day the State was born, namely, that Israel be viewed as a different state in the international community.
The Media and the New Anti-Semitism
As a journalist, I must mention the significant contribution of the mass media to this new anti-Semitism. Since the beginning of the Intifada, freedom fighter journalists, grown in the Guevara and Fedayeen campus, have given the Israeli-Palestinian conflict one of the most biased coverage in the history of journalism.
Look at the way the exchange of 1027 disgusting mass murderers and criminals with a young innocent soldier was treated as an equal trade by CNN and the BBC! Those prisoners with innocent blood on their hands were convicted legally, legally judged, had a very decent life in jail, were visited by the Red Cross, and by international organizations, while you know how Gilad was detained and who he is. Still the media kept calling the terrorists militants, criminals only in the judgment of Israel. In obliterating the differences between Israel and its enemies terrorism becomes a minor crime in our culture. The Palestinians that shoot at schools, streets, shops, homes, are the darling of the Europeans – what a perversion!”
When in August 2009, Sweden published in the Aftenbladet an article about Israeli soldiers harvesting organs from Palestinians, I participated in a meeting with the Swedish foreign minister. I stood up and asked what he meant to do about the anti-Semitism in Sweden. He denied that such a phenomenon even existed there and added that Sweden defended the freedom of the press. Would you believe it?! I am sure that had an Italian paper published such a lie, it would have caused a revolution. The honor of Italy would have exposed it as a blood libel. It is disgraceful that a continent which killed six million Jews and which was glad to lend a hand in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps could publish, in this day and age, that Israeli soldiers harvest organs of Palestinians.
Here are the main problems that lead to distorted reporting:
1) Lack of historic depth in attributing responsibility for Israel’s actions.
2) Failure to assign responsibility for the first deaths to the fact that the IDF faced armed fighters hiding in the midst of the unarmed crowd.
3) Failure to recognize the enormous influence of the cultural pressure on the Palestinians from the systematic education in Palestinian schools and mass media, vilifying Jews and Israelis and idealizing terrorist acts of murder and mayhem.
4) Describing the death of Palestinian children without identifying the circumstances in which they occurred.
5) Using Palestinian sources to certify events, as if Palestinian sources were the most reliable. In contrast, Israeli sources, which are very often reliable, are seen as subservient, prejudiced and unworthy of attention.
6) Manipulation of the order in which the news are given and of the news itself. The headlines give the number of Palestinians killed or wounded in most articles before describing the gunfights and their causes, and linger on the age and family stories of the terrorists. The purposes of the IDF actions, such as capturing terrorists, destroying arms factories or hiding places and bases for attacks against Israel, are rarely mentioned. On the contrary, Israel's operations are often described as completely uncalled for, bizarre, wicked and useless.
7) Manipulation of language, taking advantage of the great confusion about the definition of "terrorism" and "terrorist". This too is an old issue, connected to the concept of freedom fighter, so dear to my generation. Intentionally targeting civilians to cause fear and disrupt the morale of Israel is not a moral sin. It doesn't raise world indignation, and if it does, it hides in its folds some or much sympathy for the terrorist aggressor.
8) The media have promoted the extravagant concept that the settlers, including women and children are not real human beings. Their deaths are almost natural and logical events. In a way, they asked for it. On the other hand, when a Hamas commander is killed, an ethical, philosophical debate arises, on the perfidy of extra-judicial death sentences.
9) Not to go overlooked is that censorship and corruption within the PA and the physical elimination of its political enemies is hardly ever covered.
Neo-Nazism in Germany (November 29, 2010)
If we look at the web network in Germany, we can see that neo-Nazi websites have increased from 800 last year to 1872 in 2010, and it is not over yet. One fifteen-year-old out of every 20 belongs to a neo-Nazi group. The German neo-Nazi messages that are broadcast to children and young rock music fans, and that are based on hatred for the Jews have increased on the relevant websites from 750 to 6000.
One also has to pay close attention to what his children read on Facebook or hear on Youtube. In East Germany, neo-Nazis are even organizing ideological kindergartens under their own management. The neo-Nazi rap music that incites listeners to kill Jews and blacks is hugely popular, as are the messages that claim the Holocaust is a Jewish invention to justify their "crimes" and the illegal existence of the State of Israel, which has now become the focus of their attacks.
Thousands of anti-Semitic attacks are sweeping Europe, especially since immigration has brought into Europe a great influx of political Islamism, which is ready to join a common front with the neo-Nazis in their anti-Semitism, even when the far right is xenophobic. All the studies confirm, and the German police have made it a basic premise, that the neo-Nazi and Jihadist groups work together in the anti-Semitic field, with exponential results. One Jewish cemetery a week is vandalized, and graffiti and violence have increased from 36 to 183; synagogues are attacked; recently, in Hanover, at the international Fest in which everyone sang, from Afghans to Turks, a Jewish chorus barely escaped the mob's murderous rage.
The Arab Spring
I have no illusions about the “Arab Spring”: “I appreciate the courage of the people that defy death in the streets, I am with their fight against awful tyrants that dominated their life for decades, but I know that this doesn’t guarantee at all a democratic development.
These people have been educated to hate the West and the Jews, and also not to take responsibility and blame imperialism, capitalism, and fantastic ghosts for all of their problems. We must give them conditional help, connected to women, sexual and human rights, and to peace with Israel, and to stopping the politics of hate in schools and media.”
This makes me to think that the Arab Spring will never succeed. While I identify with the demands of the people, filling the streets against the tyrant who humiliated them, I also see the indoctrination of pure hatred toward Jews that these people underwent for many decades. One can only see what is published in the newspapers and what is broadcast on television, including Palestinian television, and how streets are named after suicide bombers and terrorists. More than the territorial problem, there is a basic objection – stemming from an Islamic perspective – that brought about tremendous anti-Semitism, and Muslim immigrants to Europe bring it with them.
There is a basic anti-Semitism that will never go away, and one of its expressions is the accusation that Israel is the new Nazi. Of course, only the most extreme express themselves this way. The most common accusation is that Israel is an occupier, a child killer. See for example the Turkish television series on Israeli soldiers who kill children, and similar series' in other Arab countries.
A Palestinian State
And yet, we can ask why it is that when facing a unilateral declaration, the world is prepared to support a Palestinian state? As this is lunacy. First, a Palestinian state cannot exist, divided as it would be between Hamas and the PLO. They have nothing in common, neither institutions nor an economy. So only violence can result from such an unrealizable expectation. Second, what could be the nature of a Palestinian state? On the basis of our knowledge until now – a state where women are inferior; extremist Islam prevails and perhaps wins the next elections; homosexuals are persecuted, as well as regime dissidents. In this case, why has it gained such widespread support around the world, particularly in the western world?
The Jews are the reason. The Palestinians' raison d'ętre is not a positive aspiration to establish a state, but a negative one, to destroy the Jewish state. This apparently suits the cultural and political agenda of the world's Left.
Jewish Pride
Jews don't want to call an anti-Semite by his name, fearing disruption of old alliances. Because the left has a precise idea of what a Jew must be, when Jews don't match its prescription, they ask: How do you dare being different from the Jew I ordered you to be? Fighting against terrorism? Are you crazy?
It is even more difficult because between the Jews and the Left there is a divorce that the latter does not want. The Left wants to continue being considered the paladin of good Jews. It pretends to continue mourning the Jews killed in the Holocaust, crying together with the Jews shoulder to shoulder. And it does so because this gives it the moral authorization to go a second later and speak of the "atrocities" of Israel. After writing about the "atrocities" of Israel, the good European leftist will talk to you with vivacity about the fascinating shtetl culture and the sweetness of Moroccan Jewish dishes.
We are still very shy, very concerned about the affection of he Left. So, instead of requesting that Israel become an equal nation and that Jews become equal citizens in the world, we prefer standing with the new anti-Semites shoulder to shoulder, even when you have come out with hundreds, thousands of anti-Semitic statements. We prefer to stand with you at Holocaust memorials cursing old anti-Semitism while you accuse Israel, and therefore the Jews, of being racist killers.
Until we break the silence, we, the Jews, give them the authorization to deny us the right to a nation of our own, and to defense of its people from unprecedented anti-Semitism.
But we, the Jews, must reserve our moral right to hold such people accountable: in our eyes, they will plainly be anti-Semites. We will have to say to them: when you lie or use prejudices and stereotypes about Israel and the Jews, you are an anti-Semite, and I'll fight you.
Since the state of Israel, and along with it Jews, have been made the objects of the worst kind of prejudice, Jews everywhere should consider their being identified with Israel a virtue and honor. They should assert that identification with pride.
Israel and the Jews have today only one certainty: now that Jews have their own means of defense, a new Holocaust is no longer possible. Still we have to pass from the idea of our possible physical elimination, to that of possible moral elimination. The only way to face this threat is to fight fearlessly, on our own terrain, using all the historic and ethical weapons that Israel possesses. No shame, no fear and no sense of guilt.
The watchword of the Jews should be "Jewish pride," in the sense of pride in our history and national identity, wherever we are. Jewish pride means that we have to claim the unique identity of the Jewish people and its right to exist. We must act as though it has never been acknowledged, because today, once again, it no longer is.
No left and no right. We won't give the Left the power to decide where we stand. We will decide our alliances by ourselves according to the actual position of our potential partners.
Further Reading:
Report on Italian Anti-Semitism released by the Italian Parliament.
