Old Europe and American Jewry

[Classical_Liberal]

Old Europe and American Jewry
Adam Sutcliffe


Zionism was born in Europe. The vast majority of American Jews trace their ancestry there, and a vibrant Jewish diversity remains there today. However, in part due to the steady drip of influence from neoconservatives, a reflexive anti-Europeanism is deepening its inroads into American Jewry, not only on the Likudnik Right but across the political spectrum.



The political and cultural rift currently dividing Europe from the United States is historically unprecedented in its depth and shows no signs of healing. The terror attacks in Madrid on March 11—"Europe's September 11"—might have been expected to bring the continents closer together. In fact they did the opposite. The overwhelming and immediate public mobilization in Spain, which brought eleven million people onto the streets the day after the bombings, contrasted dramatically with the quiet and privatized fear that swept America two years earlier. Three days later the Spaniards elected a Socialist government, which immediately pledged to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq. This exasperated the Bush administration, was immediately criticized by John Kerry, and also provoked bafflement and resentment across a wide swathe of American public opinion. The Bush administration and its two remaining major European allies—Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi—are increasingly embattled in their home countries. It is only the support of a range of countries in Eastern Europe, where affiliation with America serves to offset fears of domination by Germany and Russia, that has saved the Atlantic alliance from plunging into a much deeper crisis.

Donald Rumsfeld's eagerness to dismiss the wimpy, self-satisfied freeloaders of "Old Europe" has received strident support from Likudnik neoconservatives in the United States. These partisans have been vocally promoting a view of Europe as an unreconstructed cesspool of murderous anti-Semitism. "The European Union, which finances Arafat, blew up another bus today in Jerusalem," we learned on February 23 of this year from Democracy for the Middle East (DFME), a web-based organization founded in March, 2002 as part of the mounting campaign to promote public approval for military intervention in Iraq. The shameless deployment of Holocaust rhetoric is routine for DFME: European critics of Israel, they announced last May, "are once again working overtime to spread the kerosene for a holocaust," their "endgame" being to "so effectively dehumanize the Israelis that no one will take exception to an Islamist WOMD attack on Tel Aviv."

This is fringe mania, of course, and it might seem sensible simply to ignore it. (Consider, in contrast, the response when exaggerated or unsubstantiated charges are directed at Israeli policy towards Palestinians.) However, such hyperbolic allegations are now circulating with increasing slickness and boldness, and are contributing to a gradual but profound shift in the parameters of American discourse on Europe, particularly in relation to anti-Semitism and Israel/Palestine. Pro-Sharon neoconservatives try to dismiss discussion of their own influence within the Beltway as anti-Semitic—though Bush's recent unceremonious abandonment of almost all key elements of his "Road Map" in acquiescence to the concessions demanded by Sharon as political sweeteners to his unilateral withdrawal plan from Gaza is very difficult to explain otherwise. The Bush administration will hopefully not be of this world for much longer—but it is beyond Washington that aggressive anti-Europeanism, doggedly promoted by the Right, will have its most lasting impact.

Democracy for the Middle East and its allies are engaged in a ferocious media war, relentlessly charging with anti-Semitism those journalists and news organizations that they deem insufficiently sensitive to Israel's plight. The New York Times, NPR, and CNN are favorite targets, but most reviled of all is the BBC. This news source, to which growing numbers of Americans, exasperated by the superficiality of domestic broadcast news, have turned since the Iraq war, is "fashionably neofascist" according to DFME . They demand that it be closed down—a.......

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