December 18, 2008

This week’s sobering must-read is a piece in Newsweek by British Labor MP Denis MacShane.

In the same week that the European Union announced plans to upgrade relations with Israel, MacShane, Britain’s Europe minister and author of a new book on the “new anti-Semitism,” notes a worrisome trend toward demagoguery in Europe, on both the Right and the Left. The new populism invariably turns to an old pathology, he writes: anti-Semitism. In Germany, France, and Spain, unfavorable views of Jews are on the rise. In Britain, students in a Jewish school in North London are frightened to go home on public buses.

The neofascist British National Party is the fastest-growing political party in Britain; its leader, Nick Griffin, has written a book that repeats canards of Jewish control of the media and denies the facts of the Holocaust.

It’s not just the nationalism of the disgruntled that feeds this new anti-Semitism. In Spain, MacShane suggests, “the massive influx of immigrant workers from North Africa, combined with the anti-Israel language of Spain’s liberal-left intellectual and media elites, may explain the puzzle of anti-Semitism in a nation with few Jews.” Combine those elements with Spain’s “indulgence of Islamism,” and you have a recipe for hatred.

McShane worries that the grim economy will only fuel what he calls the “politics of blaming.” The nationalists are skeptical or hostile toward the EU and by extension the tolerance and openness the multinational body represents. That’s one reason the EU’s overture to Israel was so welcome, and so necessary. For too long Europe’s leaders have tilted against Israel in an attempt to appease extremists on the Left, hooligans on the Right, and Islamists on the rise. But indulging extremists only encourages them, solving neither the “Palestinian problem” nor these nations’ home-grown crises.

The Jewish world looks forward to an EU-Israel summit next year, and regular meetings between EU and Israeli foreign ministers.

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