September 17, 2007
Looking for a Scapegoat? The world again turns to Jews.
by Victor Davis Hanson
Tribune Media Services

Who recently said: “These Jews started 19 Crusades. The 19th was World War I. Why? Only to build Israel.”Some holdover Nazi?Hardly. It was former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as “bacteria” — controlled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States.

Who alleged: “The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 cooperated with the Zionists, actually. It was a cooperation. They gave them the perfect excuse to denounce all Arabs.”A conspiracy nut?Actually, it was former Democratic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned television station, adding: “I marveled at the Hezbollah resistance to Israel. . . . It was a marvel of organization, of courage and bravery.”

And finally, who claimed at a United Nations-sponsored conference that democratic Israel was “much worse” than the former apartheid South Africa, and that it “undermines the international community’s reaction to global warming”?A radical environmentalist wacko?Again, no. It was Clare Short, a member of the British parliament. She was a secretary for international development under Prime Minister Tony Blair.

A new virulent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spreading worldwide. This hate — of a magnitude not seen
in over 70 years — is not just espoused by Iran’s loony president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or radical jihadists.

Some Americans may find it makes more sense to damn a few million Israelis without oil than it does to offend Israel’s adversaries in the Middle East, who number in the hundreds of millions and control nearly half the world’s petroleum reserves.

Cowardice explains a lot. Libeling Israel won’t earn someone a fatwa or a death sentence in the manner comparable criticism of Islam might. There are no Jewish suicide bombers in London, Madrid or Bali.

This new face of anti-Semitism is so insidious because it is so well disguised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplomats and academics — and now embraced by the supposedly sophisticated left on university campuses.

for the reast of Hanson’s article http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson091707.html

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