The war against the Jews has two fronts, one in the Middle East which is the scene of terrorism and the other in the media where a battle for minds takes place. Israel is well capable of defending itself physically but has not done so well in the other war as Stephanie Gutmann wrote some years ago. Openly antisemitic hostility towards Israel is common throughout the Arab world; spread through mosques, madrassas and the internet. This propaganda has infected the entire Islamic world, including Europe where Muslim numbers and influence are increasing. This demographic factor is expertly dissected by Rafael Israeli in his book on Elemental and Residual Anti-Semitism.
Here, Robin Shepherd examines the crucial battle of ideas between non-Muslim westerners that Israel is losing. He documents and analyses in meticulous detail the expanding scope and influence of the enmity towards Israel among European opinion-formers. During the past decades this animosity has spread from the far left to the mainstream liberal-left as Bernard Harrison reveals in The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism and Manfred Gerstenfeld in Behind The Humanitarian Mask with reference to Scandinavia. Major UK media like The Guardian, Independent and BBC are at the forefront while on the continent recent examples were provided by the Swedish paper Aftonbladet and the Spanish El Mundo.
Shepherd identifies the cause as Europe's civilizational exhaustion and its symptoms like the post-Holocaust guilt complex, embrace of pacifism, appeasement and relativism. The World Wars and the continent's murderous salvationist ideologies have made the intelligentsia reject all frameworks like nationalism or religion. As Chantal Delsol observes, a morality of complacency has deprived Europe of a system of ethics whilst promoting self-interest and subjectivity. The far left and to a lesser degree the liberal-left hate many things but don't have any rational vision.
Shepherd's examples of the crude demonization of Israel correspond exactly with the analyses of Delsol and Harrison. Emotion & indignation have become the preferred channels for a morality which is usually negatively defined. Artists and intellectuals in particular, express an odd form of piety in hysterical fits of morality of which the relativism, rage and selectivity betray it as fatuous posturing. It is demonstrably contradictory in the manner it clings to moral absolutes whilst affirming the universality of relativism. Delsol considers it an empty morality of despair and withdrawal.
Caroline Glick, Bruce Bawer & Claire Berlinski share the opinion that European elites have rejected the lessons of the Holocaust. The simplistic fallacies that nationalism is the ultimate evil and that war is never justified are distortions of reality. Nationalism is a neutral concept that must be judged by the way it is expressed. Pacifism permits evil to flourish; it is neither pious nor benevolent as it denies justice and holds it in contempt. The collapse of the USSR pushed the Left over the edge and was the main reason that it embraced postmodernism & multiculturalism.
These evil philosophies are behind Europe's refusal to defend the rule of law and other Western values. European elites deny the reality of Islamist terrorism whereas Israel has no choice but to confront it. The fad of Moral Relativism is not applied to both sides; it is used for justifying suicide/homicide bombings but never to the measures taken by Israel to defend itself. The far left's hatred of Israel and the USA has made it an ally of radical Islamism despite the ideological chasm between them. Jamie Glazov explains this alliance with great insight in his book United in Hate.
In the war of ideas, academia is the source & the mass media the disseminator of anti-Western pieties du jour of which the seeming benevolence masks a profound self-loathing. The double standards of "human rights" organizations and trade unions are breathtaking. Shepherd does not think that Western anti-Zionism is rooted in the old antisemitism but that the vitriolic hatred of Israel signify a new strain of the mental disease. In his taxonomy of antisemitism, he divides it into 'subjective' and 'objective' forms. Subjective antisemites hate Israel and everything Jewish whilst the objective types centre on the "object of attack" where perpetrators do not hate Jews but adopt the same insane ideas as genuine antisemites.
The last chapter, Contagion: Is America Next? investigates why the quality of Middle Eastern discourse in the USA has not deteriorated to the same low level as in Europe. He warns however, with reference to Wart and Smearsheimer, that it could happen. In this regard it's important to consider Andre Glucksmann's theory that a contagion of hatred must be taken literally as a mental disorder that invades minds, bodies and society. Immune to reason, such an outbreak inoculates itself against opposing thoughts.
Shepherd's valuable book ought to be read with Denis MacShane's Globalising Hatred that highlights the spread of the plague as a factor in international politics with important geostrategic implications. MacShane also points out how little attention is paid in the West to the Islamic sphere's open antisemitism which is promoted by state media and forms part of the charters of Hamas & Hezbollah. Authors like Nonie Darwish, Brigitte Gabriel and Phyllis Chesler have been trying to raise awareness of the phenomenon for years. Now it's becoming acceptable in parts of the West.
It is incumbent upon friends of Israel to counteract this descent into madness. Shepherd's is not the first warning; in the 1990s Alan Dershowitz, William F Buckley and William Nicholls amongst others, saw it coming, while more recently Oriana Fallaci, Bat Ye'or, David Horowitz, Melanie Phillips, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Abraham Foxman, Dennis Prager, Nick Cohen, Walter Laqueur and David Solway have sounded the alarm. This time the Jewish people must not be abandoned to fight the battle on their own. As for the how of it, the best book by far is The Dawn: Political Teachings of the Book of Esther by Yoram Hazony.
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