Related articles and links |  1 of 2

In four years, an unattractive anniversary will pass by—let us hope unnoticed—in Europe. It was in the year 1010 a.d. that a large number of French Jews were exiled or murdered. Many historians believe this event inaugurated hundreds of years of European anti-Semitism. Similarly, many observers thought the horror of Hitler's Holocaust of the Jews—the Shoah—would inoculate Europe for all time against one of Christendom's most malignant viruses: anti-Semitism. Sadly, they were wrong.

In the middle of the first decade of the third millennium, anti-Semitism in Europe has made a horrifying comeback. One of the most dramatic examples was the February murder in France of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jewish cell-phone salesman. This young man was kidnapped, ostensibly because it was thought he would fetch a good ransom (his kidnappers said they thought all Jews were "rich").

The chief rabbi of Great Britain, Sir Jonathan Sacks, has described a "tsunami-like" wave of anti-Semitism spreading across Europe and around the world. Many of his European rabbi-colleagues, he says, have been attacked in the street while wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap, the yarmulke. Jews have been singled out for insults, if not for assault, on streets of cities across the old continent. A British organization, the Community Security Trust, recently claimed that anti-Semitic incidents in Britain are at the highest level since it started keeping records in the 1980s. The World Jewish Congress goes further: Anti-Semitism in Europe, it says, is now worse than at any time since 1945.

Part of the explanation is a rising tide of both anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment in mainstream European politics. Of course, it is entirely legitimate for anyone, expert or otherwise, to criticize Israel, or for that matter France, America, or China. But much European criticism of Israel since the second intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israel that began in 2000) now takes the view that Israel's very existence is illegitimate.

A poll conducted in European Union nations a few years ago revealed that 60 percent of Europeans viewed Israel as the greatest threat to world peace. Not North Korea or Iran or even pre-2003 Iraq, but Israel. In effect, the basic premise of Zionism—Israel as the last point of refuge for the world's Jews—is now considered invalid in many European circles. Worse, there has been a conflation of different sources of anti-Semitism in European polity: the far Right's Nazi-style, racist anti-Semitism, the far Left's political and economic anti-Semitism, and the "theological" hatred of Jews among much of Europe's growing Muslim population.

European anti-Semites often allege that the White House is "controlled" by Jews, or at least by Zionist evangelicals and "neocons" who are said to surround President Bush. What American Christians ought to be mindful of is that many of Europe's most virulent Israel haters and anti-Semites are no less fervently anti-Christian.

In the parliamentary debate leading up to the decision by British Prime Minister Tony Blair to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the harshest criticism that Labor Party mp George Galloway could level against President Bush was that he was a "right-wing fundamentalist." Galloway is an unabashed admirer of the former Soviet Union, had huge business deals with Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and despises Israel.

A prominent British intellectual who has decided that Israel has "no right to exist" is A. N. Wilson, who has written several books virulently opposed not just to evangelical Christianity, but to a theistic worldview in general. In almost every country where anti-Semitism has a major presence, there is a hatred of America and in particular American Christianity.

next page... |  1 of 2

June 2006, Vol. 50, No. 6