by Ghali Hassan
Reprinted from: http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_19857.shtmlUr-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world.
- Umberto Eco, NY Review of Books, June, 1995.
To Israel’s friends and supporters of its colonial policy in Palestine, ‘anti-Semitism’ means; any criticism of Israel’s brutal policy against the Palestinians and any criticism of Zionism and its racism that continues to inflict great harm on Arabs and Muslims. The real victims of today’s Western anti-Semitism are Arabs and Muslims, not Jews.
The term ‘anti-Semitism’ has nothing to do with religion. It originated in 18th century Europe where philologists used the term ‘Semite’ to distinguish languages from each other by grouping them into ‘families’ originating from the so-called ‘mother’ tongue to which they are related. Despite the lack of a common ancestral language, Arabic, Aramaic, Amharic, Assyrian, Hebrew, etc. where grouped as ‘Semitic’ languages. For both Arabic and Hebrew, the classification was incorrect. In other words, neither Arabic nor Hebrew is Semitic.
With the rise of European racism against minorities in the 19th century, European Jews where targeted. Differences between Jews and other European citizens have to be manufactured. Since European Christians (the Protestant Reformists) adopted the Hebrew bible, religion was not an option for those differences. The Jews were identified as ‘Semites’ based on the incorrect assumption that their ancestors spoke Hebrew, which wasn’t the case. Ancient Hebrew tribes were Aramaic speakers.
Therefore, the Europeans who hated Jews were identified in philological taxonomy as ‘anti-Semites’. In a word, European Jews became the object of hatred by European anti-Semitism, at a time when Muslims, Arabs in particular, were not present in Europe. The term was first used in 1879 by the German, William Marr, who founded the ‘League for Anti-Semitism’. Marr’s racist views (Europe’s biological racism) were that Jews constituted a distinct racial group which was both physically and morally inferior. Hence, ‘anti-Semitism’ is a form of European racism specific to Europe, and not to be confused with any anti-Jews outside Europe. Since then Zionism, which is an anti-Semitic racist ideology, has used the term ‘Semite’ to racially identify Jews for political purposes.
Anti-Semitism was used by early Zionists to transfer large numbers of Jewish settlers to Palestine in the 1870s. Indeed, Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, believed “the anti-Semites will be our best allies”, and he sought backing from von Plehve, the anti-Semitic Interior Minister of Russia’s czar, after the Kishinev pogrom. Furthermore, collaboration between early Zionism and German Fascism was also well-developed during Hitler, who was happy to have the Jews removed from Europe. The Haavara agreements between Zionist organisations and the German Third Reich agreed on the evacuation of German Jews and German-Jewish property. (For detail, see Lenni Brenner, 1983; 2002).
Furthermore, in 1975, the UN enacted resolution 3379 condemning ‘Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination’, and condemned Zionist crimes against the Palestinian people. However, a 16-year long anti-UN campaign financed by Israel and Zionist organisations (with the support of Australia, Britain and the U.S.), used bullying and coercion to repeal that resolution in December 1991, paving the way for the deliberate blurring of the line between Judaism and the racist ideology of Zionism.
According to credible historical records, Jews and Arabs have co-existed peacefully in Palestine and other parts of the Middle East since biblical times. Both communities were well-integrated and many Jews have adopted Islam and fought alongside Muslims against the invading crusaders in Palestine. Muslims have often protected Jews, and Jews found protection and shelter among Muslims during the Ottoman rule. “Under Ottoman rule, for example, Jewish social and religious institutions, schools, and medical facilities flourished without interference, and Jews were prominent in government and business”, writes Naeim Giladi, a Baghdad-born Jew from New York. Compare this peaceful coexistence with that of European racism against Jews. The idea that Muslims and Arabs are anti-Jews is one of those untruths systematically propagated to serve a political purpose.
A study by the eminent Spanish genetics Professor Antonio Arnaiz-Villena of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Spain found that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites. In other words, Jews and Palestinians share a very similar gene pool and must be considered closely related. Thus, Jews are not genetically distinct from other people in the region. The study further refutes the claims that Jews are 'special' or 'chosen' people, and that Judaism can only be inherited. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all part of Arab culture.
Conflict between Arabs and European Jews began in the early 1870’s with the first arrival of European Jewish settlers in Palestine. Those settlers who distinguished themselves from the native Palestinian population by deliberate segregation and contempt for Islam, local customs and tradition, sowed the first seeds of the ‘cruel’ Zionism and its racism in Palestine. This superiority was embedded in the distinction between people and religion and has been a driving force behind the so-called innate superiority of Jews toward all non-Jews, or ‘gentiles’. Thus, hatred towards Arabs (Palestinians) was a product of European Zionist Jews brought to Palestine by earlier settlers. The so-called Jewish ‘historic right to Palestine’ was a myth and remains a falsehood. Palestine was inhabited by Palestinian Arabs and a small minority of Arab Jews. The Jewish holocaust perpetuated by Europeans was not the cause behind the creation of Israel; the creation of Israel was a Zionist-imperialist project. In fact, the reluctance of the U.S. and some European nations (e.g. Switzerland) to accept Jews throughout the 1930s was a Zionist, anti-Jews policy.
The creation of Israel by Western powers in 1948 at the expense of the Palestinian people was designed to remove European Jews from Europe and install a European imperialist outpost in order to consolidate the West’s control over the world's most vital energy-rich region. Although Jews (approx. 600,000) owned only 7 per cent of the land in1948, the U.N. plan allocated 56 per cent of Palestine to them and only 44 per cent to the 1.3 million Arab Palestinians. Overnight, Western powers led by the U.S., Britain and France ‘wiped off the map’ the nation of Palestine and planted Zionism in the Arab heartland. As a result of this imperialist conquest and violent Zionist provocation – terrorist acts against Jews to force them to leave their native lands and migrate to Israel – tension between Arabs and Jews developed slowly and led to Jewish migration from the Muslim World to Israel.
In 1948, more than 800,000 indigenous Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes – with Jews from Europe moving into them – by Jewish terrorist groups, such as the Stern Gang, the Irgun, and the Haganah, etc. By the end of 1948, the Zionists occupied more than 78 per cent of Palestine, including 95 per cent of the arable land. Countless massacres of Palestinian civilians were committed in order to instil fear in the Palestinian population and force them to leave. Palestinians refer to the atrocity of 1948 as Al-Nakbah, ‘the catastrophe’. Israel continues to expand by ethnic cleansing Palestinians and expropriating their land.
Those Palestinians who remain in today’s Occupied Palestine (Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank) are living in constant danger of their lives. They are arrested, imprisoned, tortured and their homes demolished on a daily basis. Palestinians, who live in today’s Israel, are living under an apartheid system reminiscent of Nazism. The Arabs' opposition to Zionism and Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land wasn't based on ‘a priori anti-Jews hatred’ (as propagated by Zionists), but rather on a totally reasonable fear of the dispossession of Palestine.
Since 1948, Israel’s Zionist policy of dispossession has not ceased, but continues in different forms. The Apartheid Wall – condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague – is estimated to annex more than 50 per cent of the West Bank to Israel, as well as cut off any viable Palestinian ‘state’ from East Jerusalem. It is Israel’s Apartheid policies and the occupation of Palestinian land that is the root cause.
After the end of World War II, European racism against Jews declined in many parts of Europe. However, there are neo-fascist groups and anti-Jew remnants of the past that target all ethnic groups including Arabs, Muslims, Africans, and African Americans. With the guilt of the Jewish holocaust still hovering in the memory of Europeans, anti-Semitism has changed target and its victims have became Arabs and Muslims.
Although Arabs and Muslims are newcomers to Europe (and the United States), racism against Arabs and Muslims has its roots in the writings of Western colonial scholars or ‘Orientalists’. In other words, Westerners have been prepared and softened for the arrival of the new victims of Western anti-Semitism. As the late Edward Said accurately wrote: “The transference of popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.”
Western scholars and intellectuals are never shy of their support for the Zionist State and its brutal policies against the Palestinians. Attacking the Palestinians and Arabs in general is becoming the best way to show loyalty to Israel and pretend to be against anti-Jews hatred. Some European intellectuals go as far as saying that ‘Jews are hated because they are Jews’, even if the Jews are the most law-abiding people. Anti-Semitism ‘precedes the facts that call it forth’. The description is flawed and incorrect, and designed to cover up Europe’s own anti-Jews, anti-Arabs, and anti-Muslims hatred.
As history has shown, Germans and Japanese were the most hated peoples on the planet after World War II. However, within a generation Germans in particular, were able to build a democratic, law-abiding and progressive society. Today, Germans are very respected and admired citizens of Europe. Had Israel not followed Germany’s old policy of racism and terror, Jews, and Israeli Jews in particular, would be respected and admired like Germans today. Will Israel follow Germany and ban the denial of Palestinian ethnic cleansing and genocide? Not likely. According to the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies’ annual national public opinion poll, a large majority of Israel’s Jewish citizens favour the expulsion of Palestinians out of Palestine. The study finds that Jewish public opinion in Israel has become more extreme, and Israel is on its way to a rightwing (exclusively) Jewish fundamentalist state.
Zionist Jews and supporters of Israel’s policies have exploited the Jewish holocaust and used the cliché of anti-Semitism as a tool of intimidation and bullying against any criticism of Israel’s terror policies against the Palestinians, both by Jews and non-Jews. With the emergence of the so-called ‘New’ anti-Semitism in the mid-1970s, any criticism of Israel has been labelled as anti-Semitism. Individual Jews, academics and Jewish intellectuals have been accused as ‘self-hating Jews’ or the usual cliché. A good example is the American Linguist Noam Chomsky who is constantly attacked by Zionists for his liberal views of advocating the rights of the Palestinian people. “Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control,” said Noam Chomsky. “That’s why anti-Semitism is becoming and issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at [Israel’s] policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East,” added Chomsky.
Nowadays, a large majority of the world’s population is against Israel’s brutal and racist policy. A European Commission opinion poll showed that 60 per cent of 7,500 polled Europeans rightly believed Israel to be the ‘greatest threat to world peace’, not because Israel is a Jewish state, but because of Israel’s brutal and racist policies of violating the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. The ‘New’ anti-Semitism is not hostility toward Jews as Jews, instead, criticism of Israel and its policies.
Whether it is anti-Jews or anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims hatred, Jews are not responsible for anti-Jews hatred. However, anti-Jewish sentiment around the world is produced by Israel’s policies, “because what Israel does, it does it openly in the name of the Jewish people,” wrote Edward Said. Far from it -- Israel knows its actions give an argument to the anti-Jews neo-fascists. True Jews are against Zionism and Israel’s crimes.
In Israel, Arab children as young as 10 years of age are being used as human shields to protect armed Jewish soldiers in occupied Palestine. The criminal practices have just been condemned as ‘barbaric’ and outlawed by Israel’s Supreme Court on October 6, 2005. Air raids, destruction of towns and cities, mass arrests of Palestinians and serious violations of international law are the norms of Western-Zionist anti-Semitism. Palestinians are being arrested, imprisoned, abused and tortured, on a systematic basis, by those same people who alleged to be the ‘victims’ of Western ‘anti-Semitism’.
In Europe, the Zionists are led by no other than Josef Joffe, the editor of Die Zeit, a conservative German weekly, and a research fellow at the U.S.-based right-wing think-tank, the Hover Institute. Joffe, the mirror image of Eliot Cohen, believes that any “criticism of the U.S. in Europe was a clock for anti-Semitism”. As we know now, the war on Iraq has nothing to do with the phantom of WMD or the 9/11 attack on the U.S. It was an illegal war of aggression. Its purpose is to enforce U.S. domination over the region’s oil resources and support Israel’s Zionist policy of ethnic cleansing and expansion. People who oppose the war on Iraq and U.S. foreign policy are neither anti-Americans nor anti-Jews.
In the U.S., Jewish-American Zionists, the so-called ‘Neocons’, and Christian evangelists with strong loyalties to Israel have gone as far as accusing European nations opposing the war on Iraq and the anti-war movement of anti-Semitism. One of these Zionist-Americans is Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University. Cohen argued that those European nations who opposed the war – led by France, Germany and Belgium – might be ascribed to “anti-Semitism of a type long thought dead in the West, a loathing that ascribes to Jews a malignant intent” (The Wall Street Journal, 06 February 2003). The charge is not only flawed, and encourages anti-Jews sentiment; it also proves that the war on Iraq was a Zionist project.
As a result of this war of aggression, which made many Zionists –- Jews and non-Jews – very happy, thousands of innocent Iraqis, mostly women and children, have been murdered by anti-Semites and Zionists. Iraqi’s basic human rights and freedom are violated on daily basis. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been arrested, imprisoned, abused and tortured without charges. In addition, the complicity of European and U.S. Zionists in the UN-sponsored genocidal sanctions on Iraq has killed more than 1.5 million Iraqis, a third of them children under the age of 5. Isn't this anti-Semitism?
Instead of allowing valid criticism of Israel’s criminal policies, Zionist Jews and their supporters will go to great length to ‘present Israel in a favourable light’, as a ‘civilised’ and ‘democratic’ society. They are blindly defending Israel’s brutal policies against any valid criticism. Why is criticism of Israel equated with anti-Jews, while criticism of Arab nations is not equated with anti-Semitism? Based on the above erroneous philological classification of Arabs and Jews, one can call people who attack Arabs, including hate speech, ‘anti-Semites’. Criticism of Israel’s terror against the Palestinians is not anti-Jews, and shouldn’t be. Criticism of any government that is committing crimes and violating international law and human rights is valid criticism.
Today, Israel’s racist policies and war crimes against the Palestinians are not only condoned in Western capitals but are also becoming standard policy against other Arabs and Muslims living in the West. Western anti-Semitism is well and alive today; its victims are Arabs and Muslims. Anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims hatred originated in anti-Semitism; it is not poor man prejudice. It isn’t by chance that people hate Arabs because of oil, and cultural differences. It is orchestrated and directed from above. People are conditioned to behave in certain ways against other people. The daily diet provided to the public by politicians and the mainstream media is anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims hatred fabricated in parliament rooms and behind closed doors.
When Western governments decided to raise the prices of fuel and other essential consumer goods, opportunist politicians blamed the Arabs to justify the rise. In Australia, political leaders accused Arabs (or ‘Middle Easterners’) of ‘holding Australians hostages’ by rising oil prices. There are important facts to learn from this anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims racist propaganda: first, crude oil and fuel prices are unrelated; second, Australia imports very small quantities of oil from the Middle East; third, fuel is a highly taxed commodity; and fourth, fuel prices are mostly speculative and designed to benefit Western corporations. In addition, the production of oil in all the Gulf States is controlled by giant Western corporations, not by Arabs. The fact that Norway, Russia, Venezuela, Canada etc. are large producers of crude oil and never subjected to the same hatred, the accusation is anti-Semitism directed at Arabs and Muslims.
In today’s Christian Europe, ‘the poisoners of the wells’ and ‘the enemy within’ are not Jews; they are the Arabs and Muslims. Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union have exposed Europe’s deep anti-Muslim hatred. The Helsinki Federation of Human Rights (HFHR) revealed that in eleven European countries there is widespread anti-Muslim bias. In France racism is encouraged by the government ban on the wearing of the head scarf (the hijab) by Muslim women in government schools and government buildings. In Britain, the mainstream media, led by the BBC – the mother of media deception– have made every Muslim a ‘terrorist’, as if the 10,000 armed British troops illegally occupying Iraq and slaughtering Iraqis are on a peaceful ‘mission’.
In the new age of imperialism and racism, Western governments saw a ‘golden opportunity’ to retail terrorism and began enacting draconian laws (‘anti-terror’ laws) specifically targeting Arabs and Muslims. In Australia, the new ‘anti-terror’ laws (Australia's Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005), are reminiscent of the Nazi’s ‘anti-Semitism’ laws enacted in Europe during fascism.
The laws are so draconian, they were kept secret until the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, posted them on his Website and publicly argued that the laws violate people’s human rights and deny them basic justice and freedom. “It is simply the belief these days that these measures will only ever be used against Muslims. All along, it’s always been about race,” writes David Marr of the Sydney Morning Herald. The South African born Nobel laureate author J.M. Coetzee has compared the laws to Apartheid abuses in South Africa.
In Britain, the situation is not much different. The Independent reported that: “A powerful coalition of judges, senior lawyers and politicians has warned that the Government is undermining freedoms citizens have taken for granted for centuries and that Britain risks drifting towards a police state.” One of the country's most eminent judges (Lord Ackner, a former law lord) has said that undermining the independence of the courts has frightening parallels with Nazi Germany’. (Independent, 16 October 2005).
The motives behind these “anti-terror” laws are not to “protect against the threat of terrorism”, but to instil fear among the population and engineer anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims hatred to fuel wars. The covert goal is to create elected dictatorship states, not unknown in previous elected governments. The best way to stop terrorism is for those countries such as Australia, Britain and the U.S. is to stop practising terrorism.
I conclude with the thought that the new anti-terror laws are anti-Semitic. The victims are no longer Jews, but Arabs and Muslims. Western anti-Semitism once led straight to National Socialism and Fascism, who knows what the current waves of anti-Arabs and anti-Muslims hatred will lead to.
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