Antisemitism Today: How It Is the Same, How It Is Different and How to Fight It

by Kenneth S. Stern

Stern, Kenneth S.

216 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2006

About the author

Kenneth S. Stern is the director of the Bard Center for the Study of Hate. An attorney and award-winning author, he was the American Jewish Committee's expert on antisemitism for 25 years. He has argued before the United States Supreme Court, testified before Congress (as well as before committees of parliamentarians in Canada and the U.K.), was an invited presenter at the White House Conference on Hate Crimes, served as a member of the U.S. Delegation to the Stockholm Forum on Combating Intolerance, and was a part of the defense team supporting Dr. Deborah Lipstadt in her historic London Holocaust denial trial. Stern was also trial and appellate counsel for American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks. Mr. Stern's op-eds and book reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Guardian, the Forward and elsewhere. Mr. Stern has appeared on the CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Dateline, Nightline, Face the Nation, the History Channel, NPR, and many other television and radio programs. He was also the lead drafter of the "working definition" of antisemitism.

Reviews

[Gary]

In this fascinating and informative volume, Kenneth S Stern analyses and exposes the realities of AntiSemitism in the 21st century.
Stern provides a working definition of AntiSemitism: " AntiSemitism is hatred towards Jews and is directed towards the Jewish religion, Jews as a people, and more recently the Jewish state. Antisemitism frequently charges Jews with aspiring to harm non-Jews and is often used to give an explanation for why things go wrong. It is expressed in speech, writing, visual forms and actions, and regularly employs stereotypes".

He outlines the three major categories of AntiSemitism:
Religious AntiSemitism: Both Christian and Islamic.
Race-based antisemitism: Mainly originating from far-right White Supremacist and Neo-Nazi organizations, but also increasingly strengthening in the Moslem and Arab domain.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the author points out, is "...readily available and promoted among the Arab and Moslem countries in the Middle East and was even popularized in a TV series in Egypt. In the United States the Nation of Islam not only sells the book, it peddles it's own version, 'The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews' which is a functional rewrite designed to paint the history of slavery as a Jewish operation against Black people".
Political Anti-Semitism: Known as Anti-Zionism.
The author points out that "Zionism is the belief that Israel has the right to exist as a homeland for Jews. It says nothing about the policies or programs of the state, merely that it has a right to exist. There are left-wing Zionists and right-wing Zionists, and many in between. Some Zionists are harsh critics of Israeli policies; others are supportive. Anti-Zionists, on the other hand, treat Israel more harshly and by a different standard than they would treat any other state on the globe. They frequently demonize it, and essentially believe that Israel has no right to exist as a Jewish state, regardless of it's policies, its leaders, or how the society is run."
As Abba Eban put it: " Classical antisemitism denies the rights of Jews as citizens within society. Anti-Zionism denies the equal rights of the Jewish people to it's lawful sovereignty within the community of nations...All that has happened is that the discriminatory principle has been transferred from the realm of individual rights to the realm of collective identity".
Stern points out that holocaust denial is one form of anti-Semitism that is played out differently by different types of anti-Semites.
Left-wing political anti-Semites would not object , for example, if the Jews of present-day Israel were slaughtered, but will not do anything to minimize the perception of the crimes of the fascists during World War II.
Left-wing Israel haters however frequently compare Israelis to the Nazis and Israel's leaders to Adolph Hitler in a particularly grotesque equation aimed at using the Nazi Holocaust to justify the slaughter of Jews today, and prepare the world for genocide of Israel's Jews.
The author includes a revealing chapter on that revolting hate-fest against Israel and Jews that took place at Durban in August 2001, ironically entitled the 'World Conference Against Racism".
The entire conference consisted of demonizing Israel and effectively calling for it's destruction.
The NGO forum of the Conference referred to Israelis as Nazis, called on Israel to be expelled from all international forums and economically isolated.
A leaflet circulated had a picture of Hitler with the caption titled "What if I had won? The good things: There would be NO Israel and NO Palestinians' blood shed. The bad things: I wouldn't have allowed the making of the new Beetle".
The Conference also stated total support for all "means of liberating Palestine", including "armed struggle", a code word for terror, and refused to condemn violence against Israeli civilians, including Israeli children.
Jewish delegates and delegates who accepted Israel's right to exist, were intimidated, threatened, attacked and abused.

The author easily distinguishes between legitimate criticism of Israel and antiSemitism: "If the criticism is the same as that by which one would judge any other country- complaining about a policy
a program, a plan or a party- that is fine. but if the perceived deficiencies of a society are used to attack its basic legitimacy, then something else is going on."
After all what other country in the world has it's right to exist frequently challenged?
The author reminds us that there is an inordinate amount of attention given to condemning Jews and Israel. After all if the Left were really so concerned about the occupation of Arab land, why have they been so silent about the 30 year occupation of Lebanon by Syria. Or if they are so concerned about human rights, why do they say nothing about the brutal Chinese occupation of Tibet, or the enslavement and now genocide of people in Sudan.
Moslem rage against Israel is fueled by the shedding of the Jews of the millenia long Dhimni status suffered under Islam, and the demand of the Jews for equality and self-determination.
Leftist anti-Semitism is based on a variety of criteria including the perception that the Jews are a Western people, and the 'Palestinians' a Third World people, regardless of the fact that the majority of Jewish Israelis are dark-skinned Jews, who are descended from refugees from Arab lands.
The author states that whether the standard left-wing stance of caring for Palestinian lives but not Israeli lives is based on anti-Semitism or racism , it is pure bigotry.
The book is filled with revelations and quotes which are bone-chilling about the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in it's different manifestations.
Hezbollah is lauded by many on the hard left (including Noam Chomsky) as a "liberation movement".
Hezbollah (a proxy of Iran and Syria is in fact an extreme racist and anti-Semitic organization whose rhetoric and aims are close to that of the Nazi Germans.
In 1992 a Hezbollah statement proclaimed that "It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth. Ten years later, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, encouraged Jews to move to Israel. "If they all gather in Israel" he stated "It will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide".
Iran and it's supporters make no secret of their plans to destroy Israel's entire population through chemical or nuclear warfare.
This book includes a chapter on the violent and venomous anti-Israel culture on American university campuses including both genocidal propaganda in the so-called humanities departments and physical attacks and threats against Jewish and pro-Israel students.
The author quotes noted human rights lawyer David Matas about the inherent anti-Semitism of anti-Zionism: "One form of anti-Semitism denies access of Jews to goods and services because they are Jewish. Another form of anti-Semitism denies the right of the Jewish people to exist as a people because they are Jewish. Anti-Zionists distinguish between the two, claiming that the first is anti-Semitism but the second is not. To the anti-Zionist the Jew can exist as an individual as long as Jews do not exist as a people".

[shanamadele]

Note to self - shelved physically in office on religion shelf, for lack of better designation.