(Times-UK)Julie Burchill - It didn't take a genius to see that the more Jews stood up for themselves, the less the world liked it, whereas other races were cheered on and drooled over as "freedom fighters," no matter how bloody their hands got. Could it be that anti-Semitism in England in particular was based on the fact that we had gone in the opposite direction to the Jews - from powerful to powerless - and felt great resentment about this fact? After all, they'd had a good deal more than loss of empire to deal with in the 20th century - the loss of one third of world Jewry. Israel is a country the size of Wales, which within the first 25 years of its re-establishment (remember, the Jews were in the countries of the Middle East some seven centuries before the Muslims even existed) single-handedly fought off murderous attacks from such neighboring dictatorships as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. What the Jews had done, unique of all the oppressed races of the world, was to come back better than ever. Anti-Semitism can be as in-your-face as smashing up synagogues. But it can also be sly, sneaky, subtle and sometimes surreal. It must, in my opinion, go some way to explaining why Israeli human rights issues are so obsessively concentrated on, while many Arab and African countries are allowed to treat their citizens with as much subhuman sadism as they wish. There is one human rights rule for democratic Israel - which can be summed up as "Be perfect or we'll come down on you like a ton of bricks" - and another for the dictatorships which surround it - "Do what you like to your people, it's your culture!" I loathe the EU as I believe it to be a massive threat to what remains of the world Jewry which its leader, Germany, did so much to destroy. I cannot trust an organization which has a belligerent Germany, aided and abetted by its vicious short sidekick, France, at its head - especially when that Germany is increasingly painting itself as the real "victim" of the Second World War. Israel is not without its problems - but they are problems which are a result of other countries' ignorant and destructive instincts and actions rather than its own.
2004-11-26 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive