Candles burn by a memorial plaque at the Birkenau Nazi death camp in Oswiecim, Poland, Tuesday, Jan. 27, 2015, after the official remembrance ceremony. (Alik Keplicz/AP)
By Charles Krauthammer
Amid
the ritual expressions of regret and the pledges of “never again” on Tuesday’s 70th anniversary of the
liberation of Auschwitz, a bitter irony was noted: Anti-Semitism has returned
to Europe. With a vengeance.
It has
become routine. If the kosher-grocery massacre in Paris
hadn’t happened in conjunction with Charlie Hebdo, how much worldwide notice
would it have received? As little as did the murder of a rabbi and three children at a Jewish
school in Toulouse. As little as did the terror attack that killed four at the
Jewish Museum in Brussels.
The
rise of European anti-Semitism is, in reality, just a return to the norm. For a
millennium, virulent Jew-hatred — persecution, expulsions, massacres — was the
norm in Europe until the shame of the Holocaust created a temporary anomaly
wherein anti-Semitism became socially unacceptable.
The
hiatus is over. Jew-hatred is back, recapitulating the past with impressive
zeal. Italians protesting Gaza handed out leaflets calling for a boycott
of Jewish merchants. As in the 1930s. A widely popular French comedian has
introduced a variant of the Nazi salute. In Berlin, Gaza brought out a mob chanting, “Jew, Jew, cowardly pig, come
out and fight alone!” Berlin, mind you.
European
anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, however. It’s a European problem, a stain,
a disease of which Europe is congenitally unable to rid itself.
From
the Jewish point of view, European anti-Semitism is a sideshow. The story of
European Jewry is over. It died at Auschwitz. Europe’s place as the center and
fulcrum of the Jewish world has been inherited by Israel. Not only is it the
first independent Jewish commonwealth in 2,000 years. It is, also for the first
time in 2,000 years, the largest Jewish community on the planet.
The
threat to the Jewish future lies not in Europe but in the Muslim Middle East,
today the heart of global anti-Semitism, a veritable
factory of anti-Jewish literature, films, blood libels and
calls for violence, indeed for another genocide.
The founding charter of Hamas calls not
just for the eradication of Israel but for the killing of Jews everywhere.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah welcomes Jewish emigration to Israel — because
it makes the killing easier: “If Jews all gather in Israel, it will save us the
trouble of going after them worldwide.’’ And, of course, Iran openly declares
as its sacred mission the annihilation of Israel.
For
America, Europe and the moderate Arabs, there are powerful reasons having nothing
to do with Israel for trying to prevent an apocalyptic, fanatically
anti-Western clerical regime in Tehran from getting the bomb: Iranian hegemony,
nuclear proliferation (including to terror groups) and elemental national
security.
For Israel, however, the threat is of a
different order. Direct, immediate and mortal.
The sophisticates cozily assure us not to
worry. Deterrence will work. Didn’t it work against the Soviets? Well, just 17
years into the atomic age,we came harrowingly close to deterrence failure and all-out
nuclear war. Moreover, godless communists anticipate no reward in heaven.
Atheists calculate differently from jihadists with their cult of death. Name
one Soviet suicide bomber.
Former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, known as a moderate, once characterized tiny Israel as a one-bomb
country. He acknowledged Israel’s deterrent capacity but noted the asymmetry:
“Application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same
thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.” Result? Israel
eradicated, Islam vindicated. So much for deterrence.
And even if deterrence worked with Tehran,
that’s not where the story ends. Iran’s very acquisition of nukes would set off a nuclear arms racewith
half a dozen Muslim countries from Turkey to Egypt to the Gulf states — in the
most unstable part of the world. A place where you wake up in the morning to
find a pro-American Yemeni government overthrown by rebels whose slogan is “God
is Great. Death to America. Death to Israel. Damn the Jews. Power to Islam.”
The idea that some kind of six-sided
deterrence would work in this roiling cauldron of instability the way it did in
the frozen bipolarity of the Cold War is simply ridiculous.
The Iranian bomb is a national security issue,
an alliance issue and a regional Middle East issue. But it is also a uniquely
Jewish issue because of Israel’s situation as the only state on earth overtly
threatened with extinction, facing a potential nuclear power overtly
threatening that extinction.
