In Europe’s experience, high levels of immigration from the Middle East and North Africa have caused anti-Semitism to spike.
Last week the Jerusalem Post and other news agencies reported that in a Paris suburb, two Jewish brothers wearing kippot (Jewish skullcaps) were attacked while driving their car — by Middle Easterners driving another car.
According to the report, “While the vehicle was in motion, the driver and a passenger shouted anti-Semitic slogans at the brothers that included ‘Dirty Jews, you’re going to die!’
“The vehicle forced the brothers to stop their car, and they were surrounded by several men [who] came out of a hookah café on to the side street. . . .
“The alleged attackers surrounded the brothers, then kicked and punched them repeatedly while threatening that they would be murdered if they moved. One of the alleged attackers then sawed off the finger of one of the brothers.”
Attacks on Jews in France and elsewhere in Europe by Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are so common that, for the first time since World War II, Jews in France fear to wear a kippah or a Star of David in public, and so many French Jews are leaving France that the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, gave an impassioned speech two years ago, pleading with French Jews to stay in France.
It has gotten so bad for Jews in Europe that The Atlantic, a liberal magazine, recently featured an article titled, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?”
In Sweden, attacks on Jews in Malmo, the country’s third-largest city, are so common that Jews are leaving both Malmo and Sweden.
Last year the Jerusalem Post published an article about a Jewish couple who had lived in Sweden since the middle of World War II. They were Danish Jews who, as children, were smuggled into Sweden. Their gratitude to Sweden has been immense.
But they have now left their homeland — the country that saved their lives — to live in Spain. The city in which they lived, Malmo, has become so saturated with Jew-hatred that they can no longer live there. It was caused by, in the words of the husband, “the adverse effects of accepting half-a-million immigrants from the Middle East, who plainly weren’t interesting [sic] in adopting Sweden’s values and Swedish culture.”
In the words of the husband, Dan, “The politicians, the media, the intellectuals . . . they all played their parts in pandering to this dangerous ideology and, sadly, it’s changing the fabric of Swedish society irreversibly.”
The Jerusalem Post continued: “Karla [the wife], who’d sat passively . . . then interrupted, saying, ‘If you disagree with the establishment, you’re immediately called a racist or fascist.’” (Sound familiar?)
“Jewish people in Malmo,” the British newspaper the Telegraph recently reported, “have long complained of growing harassment in the city, where 43 percent of the population have a non-Swedish background, with Iraqis, Lebanese, and stateless Palestinians some of the largest groups. The Jewish community centre in the city is heavily fortified, with security doors and bollards on the outside pavement to prevent car bombs.”
An article in the left-wing Huffington Post reaches a now-familiar conclusion:
Migrants streaming into Europe from the Middle East are bringing with them virulent anti-Semitism which is erupting from Scandinavia to France to Germany . . .
While all of the incoming refugees and migrants, fleeing Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other Muslim lands, may not hold anti-Jewish views, an extremely large number do — simply as a result of being raised in places where anti-Jewish vitriol is poured out in TV, newspapers, schools, and mosques . . .
“There is no future for Jews in Europe,” said the chief Rabbi of Brussels . . .
Yet, despite all this Muslim-immigrant Jew-hatred, more than a thousand rabbis signed a petition to bring large numbers of MENA Muslims into America, and virtually all Jewish organizations outside of Orthodoxy and the Zionist Organization of America have condemned the Trump administration for enacting even a temporary halt (and one due entirely to security concerns) in accepting travelers and refugees from seven (of the world’s more than 50) Muslim-majority countries.
How is one to explain the widespread American Jewish support for bringing in a massive number of people, many of whom will bring in values that are anti-Jew, anti-Israel, and anti-West?
First, they are staggeringly naïve, believing, for example, that marching with signs at airports that read “We love Muslims” will change those Muslims who hate Jews into Muslims who love Jews.
Second, never underestimate the power of feeling good about yourself on the left (the self-esteem movement originated on the left). And it feels very good for these Jews to say, “Look, world — you abandoned us in the 1930s, but we’re better than you.”
And third, when American Jews abandoned traditional liberal and traditional Jewish values for leftist values, they became less Jewish, less American, and more foolish.
Just ask the Jews of Europe.