Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

6 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 4:5
The professor did not really care to hear any opposing arguments
based on these statistics, and the next panel was walking in to set up. But
what I had just experienced—the one-sided statements attacking Israel with
no real rebuttal—was occurring daily across the planet. This is David
Matas’s point in his article for this issue, “Palestinian Rights and Israeli
Wrongs.”
The anti-Israeli invective today fills the room whether anyone
addresses it or not. It is often spread by well-meaning Jewish professors
advancing what Haifa University Steven Plaut calls the unique “psychosis
of Jewish antisemitism.” The professor at the conference was trying to correct
what he thought was a social wrong. The problem is that he did not
understand that his thinking had changed in the past decade due to onesided
information intentionally sent out by the sender—in genocide studies,
the term is propaganda.
There was a time when less than polite discourse would be shunned in
academic settings. Not any more. To the well-meaning professor who
thinks that antisemitism is not a concern, we offer the Antisemitic Incidents
listing in each issue of the JSA as well as other sources like Il Foglio journalist
Guilio Meotti’s report of June 12, 2012:
Security guards were patrolling the streets near Rome’s Jewish school
with metal detectors, searching for possible explosive devices. Rome’s
largest synagogue, one of the oldest in the world, today looks like a military
outpost, with private guards and policemen at every corner. The Jewish
school is also a “sterilized area,” protected by bodyguards and
cameras, the windows plumbed with iron grates. (http://frontpagemag
.com/2012/06/12/the-last-days-of-jews-in-the-islamicized-europe/).
Meotti then makes a case that Europe’s Jews are ready to leave their
homes of hundreds of years for safer grounds. Sixty percent of Dutch Jews
are ready to pack up and leave the country, he says, and cites the predictions
of British journalist and author Melanie Phillips that the UK Jewish
population will decline to 240,000 in 2020, 180,000 in 2050, and 140,000 in
2080.
It isn’t hard to imagine why. I was watching a Middle East weather
report a few weeks ago on BBCAmerica evening news. A map of the Middle
East was presented with temperatures reported from all Middle East
nations. As with Palestinian textbooks, Israel was missing.
In her essay in this issue, Phillips explains, in part, how this happens
and documents the dismaying success of scoundrels like George Galloway
in pandering to his local Arab constituency with inciting anti-Israeli
rhetoric.