An Ancient Enemy, Reconfigured

[Valin]

City Journal

On resurgent anti-Semitism, and its intellectual roots.

Fred Siegel

Autumn 2019

The Western world, at least since the Enlightenment, was built on evidence-based argument. But in the last quarter of the twentieth century, Enlightenment ideals were undermined by postmodernism, with its shift to “narrative” as the source of meaning—an invitation to fraud. What followed, eventually, was the era of fake news and out-and-out hoaxes, as in the case of the concocted “Russian collusion” narrative, which has produced one of the greatest political scandals in American history.

When it comes to fake news, Jews have heard it all for the past 2,000 years—from the charge of deicide to the poisoning of wells, from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s fervid speculations to more recent false narratives about the perfidies of the Zionist State. But twenty-first-century France has sadly added some new twists. In his pathbreaking article * “Revisiting Netzarim Junction and the Birth of Fake News,” Boston University professor Richard Landes unpacked the notorious al-Durra affair, which occurred in 2000 and involved the apparent murder of a nine-year-old boy by Israeli soldiers during a supposed gunfight in the Gaza Strip. Filmed with the contrivance of French public television, the scene depicting Israelis in an ugly light went viral. It helped produce an intifada in Israel; in France, it generated Arab and Islamic hostility toward French Jews, as Mark Weitzman chronicles in his fascinating book Hate: The Rising Tide of Anti-Semitism in France.

Weitzman’s book originally appeared as a series of articles in the American online magazine Tablet, to which he turned because of lack of interest in France, where elites feared that even discussing the topic would encourage Islamophobia. The modern use of the term “Islamophobia” was largely initiated by Iranians in the wake of their country’s disastrous 1979 revolution. As philosopher Pascal Bruckner has explained, this new thought crime was designed with a dual aim. First, it equated criticism of Islam with racism—an odd concept, since Islam includes whites of Bosnia, blacks of the Cameroons, and olive-skinned Arabs of North Africa, as well as their darker-skinned religious brethren. “The second, even more important aim,” notes Bruckner, “was to forge a weapon of enforcement against liberal Muslims, who dared to criticize their faith and who called for reform.”

Hate examines a number of Islamist murders of French Jews in considerable detail, including the 2005 kidnapping, torture, and murder of 23-year-old Ilan Halimi; the 2012 attack on a Jewish religious school in Toulouse; and the 2017 beating, torture, and killing of Jewish doctor Sarah Halimi (not related to Ilan Halimi). Mohammed Merah, the perpetrator of the Toulouse attacks, first murdered three French soldiers and then attacked a Jewish day school, where he murdered the rabbi, two of the rabbi’s young children, and an eight-year-old girl. Merah, who made no secret of his allegiance to al-Qaida, was shot by police after a long siege.

(Snip)

_______________________________________________________________________________

* Netzarim Junction and the Birth of Fake News

 

1500 BCE Kill the Jews! 2019 CE Kill The Jews! Some things never change.

[Valin]

Related

Dec 4 2019

The left is claiming Glenn's attacks on Soros are based in anti-Semitism, mainly for calling him "The Puppet Master." But is investigating Soros anti-Semitic? Absolutely not, and while his use of "The Puppet Master" was not based on ethnicity, only actions, Glenn is dropping the term due to his respect of history and nothing else. Watch this clip to hear the evidence against Soros and his influence in the world today.

[Valin]