The new European anti-Semitism — with an Arab twist

So far, Europe has had three major phases of anti-Semitism:  The first was the long-standing anti-Jewish sentiment that characterized the early Christian church.  The second was socialist-based anti-Semitism.  This reach its ugly apogee in Germany, when it got blended with ideas about racial purity that led to the gas chambers.  Europe is now in its third phase of anti-Semitism, one that is a mixture of old socialist antipathies and new (to Europe) Muslim hostility.  Andrew Bostom, who probably knows as much as anyone about Islamic attitudes towards non-Muslims, describes this new wave of Muslim-driven anti-Semitism sweeping through Europe.  Bostom first gives just the numbers:

Drs. Kaplan and Small examined the views of 5004 Europeans, roughly 500 individuals sampled from each of 10 European Union countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). The authors’ main publicized results confirmed their (rather commonsensical) a priori hypothesis: anti-Israel sentiments strongly and independently predicted the likelihood that an individual was anti-Semitic in a graded manner, i.e., the more anti-Israel (on a scale of zero to 4), the more a person was likely to be anti-Semitic.

But perhaps an even more striking finding in light of the burgeoning Jew hatred now evident in Europe’s Muslim communities, has until now received much less attention. In a controlled comparison to European Christians (as the “referent” group), European Muslims were nearly eightfold (i.e., 800%) more likely to be overtly anti-Semitic. Furthermore, in light of the Pew Global Attitudes Project data on Muslim attitudes toward Jews in Islamic countries, the Yale study likely underestimated the extent of anti-Semitism amongst Europe’s Muslim communities. Had more poorly educated, less acclimated European Muslims been sampled, the results would probably have been even worse.

His statistic about Paris alone is appalling:

Ten months ago, during a November 14, 2005 presentation at The Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., Stephen Steinlight, former director of education at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, and subsequently director of national affairs at the American Jewish Committee, cited data demonstrating that Muslim youths, or more appropriately, youthful Muslim thugs, engaged in an average of 12 attacks per day on Parisian Jews,

“putting the figures… close to [those] during the days of the Weimar Republic.”

Bostom, of course, doesn’t just present the numbers.  He takes the time to analyze the whys of this surge in anti-Semitism.  His conclusion is that all the old platitudes about decaying European attitudes and economic realities are inapplicable.  I won’t steal his thunder here, though, since it would cheapen the breadth and depth of his analysis and conclusions if I were simply to grab the ultimate paragraphs and stick them in here.  If you have the time, you really should read his article yourself.