Mark Silverberg
Mark Silverberg is a former member of the Canadian Justice Department and a
past Director of the Canadian Jewish Congress (Western Office) based in
Vancouver. He served as a Consultant to the Secretary General of the Jewish
Agency in Jerusalem during the first Palestinian intifada. A foreign policy
analyst with the Ariel Center for Policy Research (Israel) and the
International Analyst Network (Australia), Mark is the author of "The
Quartermasters of Terror: Saudi Arabia and the Global Islamic Jihad"
(Wyndham Hall Press, 2005). His articles and book have been archived at www.
marksilverberg. com.
Recent by Author:
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The Banality of Evil by Mark Silverberg
A resurgence of the oldest of ancient hatreds.
Anti-Semitism never really died after the Holocaust, it simply went
underground for a while. In the wake of the
According to British police, Jews are four times more likely to be attacked
because of their religion than are Muslims.
Gaza War, a disturbing series of events are occurring in Britain - events
that should give us all cause for concern. Zionism has not only become a
dirty word; it has become a cover for a resurgence of the oldest of ancient
hatreds.
According to the *Observer*, there is an average of seven anti-Semitic
attacks every single day in the United Kingdom - attacks that have come in
the form of graffiti, vandalism, arson, violent assaults on Jews in the
streets, and hate e-mails. Jewish schools have been granted extra protection
and the Community Security Trust, which monitors anti-Jewish racism in
British society, issues frequent advice and warnings. According to British
police, Jews are four times more likely to be attacked because of their
religion than are Muslims. Every synagogue service and virtually every
Jewish communal event now requires guards on the lookout for violence from
both neo-Nazis and Muslim extremists. Orthodox Jews have become particular
targets; some have begun wearing baseball caps instead of skullcaps and
concealing their Star of David jewelry for fear of being physically
assaulted.
The war in Gaza has revealed a darker side to British society, as
demonstrated by the extent to which the British media, intelligentsia and
political class have simply buckled in the face of the global Islamic jihad.
Melanie Phillips, writing in the *Wall Street Journal* (Europe) put it this
way: "Years of demonizing Israel and appeasing Islamist extremism within
Britain have now coalesced, as a result of the media misrepresentation of
the Gaza War as an atrocity against civilians, in an unprecedented wave of
hatred against Israel, and a sharp rise in attacks on British Jews" - and
the authorities have done little or nothing to stop such incitement to
hatred. In one case, the police even told pro-Israel demonstrators to put
away their Israel flags because they were "inflammatory,
anti-Israel demonstrators to scream support for Hamas, and even to dress up
as hook-nosed Jews "drinking" the blood of Palestinian babies.
These events are part of a growing body of evidence suggesting that Britain
is slowly succumbing to Islamic "dhimmitude" - whether out of fear,
ignorance or Arab financial interests in Britain. As in the French *
banlieues* (inner city ghettos), Britain also has self-governing "no-go
areas" where Muslims dominate certain locales to the exclusion of
non-Muslims. The result is that there are increasing reports of Muslim
attacks on Jews in Britain, and it is becoming clearer with each passing day
that Londonistan (the title of Melanie Phillips' book) is not a safe place
for Jews. This is true for many places on the continent, as detailed in Bat
Ye'or's book *Eurabia*.
In a recent comment in *The Spectator*, one reader opined: "I for one resent
the fact that I can no longer congregate outside my synagogue. I resent the
fact that my children attend Jewish school protected by security fences,
concrete blocks and guard posts. I resent the fact that my eldest
daughter... should feel intimidated on campus and questioned in a hostile,
finger pointing manner how she feels as a Jewess on the question of Gaza,
and if she supports the Israeli actions." Worse, a Birmingham school is
investigating reports that twenty children chased a 12-year-old girl (its
only Jewish pupil) chanting "Kill all Jews" and "Death to Jews"; and in
another incident a Jewish schoolgirl reported being bullied at a non-Jewish
school because of the Gaza conflict.
One would think that it was the Jews who orchestrated the 9/11 attacks,
rioted across Europe and burned down Danish embassies two years ago over the
Mohammed cartoon caricatures, planned and executed the suicide attacks on
the London tube and Madrid railway stations, decapitated Daniel Pearl, Nick
Berg and other "infidels", trained their children to become "martyrs",
strapped twenty pounds of explosives to their bodies and detonated
themselves in restaurants, subways, pizza parlors, buses, shopping malls,
coffee shops, marketplaces, tourist resorts and Passover Seders in France,
London, Bali, Kenya, Algeria, Istanbul, Dar es Salaam, Mumbai and Israel,
and are waging a global religious war against "non-believers.
I suspect that if the British students who attended the seventeen sit-ins
and demonstrations held at British universities to protest Israeli
"massacres" in Gaza had chanted "Death to all Muslims", as they screamed
"Death to all Jews" during the Gaza War, the British Left and civil rights
organizations would have been all over them demanding staff resignations,
academic boycotts of their schools and colleges, the arrest of the
demonstrators, and compensation to British Muslim victims. But it appears
that the more socially acceptable and fashionable it becomes to "blame the
Jews", the more the Jew-haters seem to come out of the woodwork.
And in terms of "the Israeli massacre (that never was) of Palestinians in
Gaza" (and Melanie Phillips points this out in a recent editorial), neither
the British media nor British society seem to care that the government of
Sri Lanka is attempting to eradicate terrorism by a military campaign in
which, according to the United Nations, "many civilians are being killed",
thousands made homeless, hundreds of thousands trapped, and to which, as
food shortages grow, the government refuses to allow access to journalists.
Despite all this, there are no sit-ins on British campuses against the Sri
Lankans, no violent protests outside its High Commission, and no calls to
boycott Orange Pekoe tea. In fact, there have been no protests of any kind
attacking Hamas for firing missiles for years at Israeli cities, towns and
villages, not to mention terrorizing over 250,000 men, women and children
whose idea of a restful night was and is one spent in a bomb shelter.
Somehow, the deaths of 1,300 Gazans (more than half of whom were Islamic
terrorists being sheltered by
There are no sit-ins on British campuses against the Sri Lankans, no violent
protests.
civilians) have evoked more outrage than the estimated two million dead in
Congo, the tens of thousands of Iraqis slaughtered by Sunni and Shia
terrorists in Iraq, or the massacres of civilians killed by their own
governments in Zimbabwe, Uzbekistan, Burundi, Chad, Afghanistan, Colombia,
Guatemala, Haiti, Guinea, Rwanda, West Bengal and, most notably, by Hamas in
Gaza. The point is, if you are willing to acquiesce in terrorist attacks on
Jews in southern Israel, where a tiny democracy seeks to protect its people
against terrorism, why wouldn't it be okay to beat them up in the streets of
London or Birmingham?
Jews are the barometers of the societies in which they live. Any student of
history understands that as it goes with the Jews, so it will go with
democracy; and as it goes with democracy, so it will go with the Jews. It
was, after all, the Jewish people who first gave the world the moral and
ethical codes that underpin Western civilization; the tragedy is that today,
it is these very values that are under attack. If the events surrounding the
recent Gaza War foreshadow the future of British Jewry (as do similar events
in France and Venezuela), then thank G-d there's an Israel - for there is
nothing that proves the need for a Jewish State more than the persecution of
Jews outside of it.
Shevat 24, 5769 / 18 February 09
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