Many Muslims living in the West remain under the influence of Islamist movements and the hatred of Israel and Jews that permeates their countries of origin. Hatred of Jews and Israel is therefore markedly present in Muslim communities in the West.
In the 1960s, when the Soviet Union wanted to gain more influence in the Arab Muslim world, its leaders decided to support what was at the time a sacred cause for Arab leaders: the attempt to destroy Israel. They... chose to invent a "national liberation struggle"....
The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was founded in 1964 with the task of "liberating Palestine," and the borders of "Palestine" on the maps used by the PLO showed that the goal was to erase Israel from the face of the earth.
Western leftists started vocally to express hatred of "imperialist Israel" and, ironically, the hard-won democratic freedoms they were at that moment enjoying to the fullest: freedom of speech, assembly, education, sexuality, and supposedly equal justice under the law.
The Oslo Accords only made everything worse. By signing them, Israel's then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized... that a terrorist organization was somehow the legitimate representative of a people invented fewer than three decades earlier, and that this invented "people" had "rights" and deserved to have territory and self-government.
In reality, it was Israel that decolonized the land from the grip of the British, who governed it from 1917 until Israel's war of independence in 1948.
The recent pro-Hamas demonstrations in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia show that hatred of Jews and Israel among Muslims living in the West has reached a degree where many of them openly support genocidal atrocities not only against Jews in Israel but against Jews anywhere.... These demonstrations also show that support for the "Palestinian cause" sometimes also leads Westerners to support genocidal atrocities so long as they are committed against Jews.
If nothing is done to respond to the forces seeking to overturn Western civilization, all in the name of "democracy" of course – and Western values such as equal justice under law, equality of opportunity rather than of result, education from facts rather than from propaganda, a media that actually challenges authority rather than allowing itself to be suborned by it, freedom of speech with which one disagrees, the sovereignty of the individual rather than of groups -- the worst is bound to come.
The recent pro-Hamas demonstrations in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia show that hatred of Jews and Israel among Muslims living in the West has reached a degree where many of them openly support genocidal atrocities not only against Jews in Israel but against Jews anywhere.
The atrocities committed by the terrorist group Hamas in Israel on October 7 aroused fear and horror throughout the West. As soon as the Israeli government decided to retaliate and announced that it seeks to destroy Hamas, "the new ISIS", fear and horror began to fade and rapidly gave way to a return of "the world's oldest hatred".
The mainstream media described the demonstrations that swept through Western Europe and the United States as "pro-Palestinian". They were, in reality, anti-Jew and brimming with hatred towards Israel. The slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" -- meaning that Israel must be wiped off the map -- was shouted out and emblazoned on banners.
In Sydney, Australia, men chanted "gas the Jews" and boasted that they, the demonstrators, were "on the hunt to kill Jews". In Berlin, demonstrators shouted "death to the Jews". In the US, anti-Semitic acts increased by 400%, Jewish students on university campuses were physically attacked and threatened.
During the last three weeks of October, anti-Semitic hate crimes in London, England were up 1,350%. In France, between October 8 and November 1, the Ministry of the Interior recorded 1,762 anti-Semitic acts -- far more than throughout the entire year of 2022.
French historian Georges Bensoussan, said:
"Hundreds of Jews were murdered in Israel and as a result, anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish hatred was unleashed throughout the Western world. It is urgent to ask ourselves what went wrong, otherwise we could be heading towards a nightmare."
Bensoussan had already diagnosed what went wrong in France, when he wrote The Lost Territories of the Republic, published in 2004. He noted at the time that Muslim students in French high schools denied that the Holocaust ever even existed and expressed such hatred of Jews that even talking about the Holocaust in a classroom led to immediate physical violence.
In Bensoussan 2017 book, A Submissive France, he stated that the situation had worsened, and that hatred of Jews was now pervasive in all Muslim neighborhoods of the country. He also noted that many Muslim butcher shops displayed posters supporting Hamas.
Books similar to Bensoussan's have not been written in most other Western European countries, but articles published in the British, Belgian and German press show that wherever in Europe large number of Muslims settled in recent decades, the same kinds of changes have taken place.
For the full article, please click here or click on the link below for a copy of the pdf file:
Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
© 2023 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.
Comments