Michael Ejercito
2024-11-14 12:17:50 UTC
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PermalinkThe ‘Jew hunt’ in Amsterdam was no anomaly
Antisemitism, the great evil that Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned of, has
spread across the globe.
By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist,Updated November 13, 2024, 3:00 a.m.
Three days after a "Jew hunting" attack in Amsterdam, protesters in the
city clashed with police during a pro-Palestinian demonstration on Nov. 10.
Three days after a "Jew hunting" attack in Amsterdam, protesters in the
city clashed with police during a pro-Palestinian demonstration on Nov.
10.WAHAJ BANI MOUFLEH/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
The first recorded pogrom in history occurred in first-century Egypt,
when lethal mobs in Alexandria, encouraged by the Roman prefect Aulus
Avilius Flaccus, savagely attacked the city’s Jews. In the words of an
eyewitness, the renowned philosopher Philo, the mobs were merciless,
“sparing neither age nor youth, nor the innocent helplessness of infants.”
In Amsterdam Thursday, hundreds of attackers, carrying out a “Jew hunt”
planned hours earlier on social media, targeted Israeli tourists who had
traveled to the Netherlands for a soccer match. In violence that was
“terribly reminiscent of a classic pogrom,” according to Deborah
Lipstadt, the historian, diplomat, and current US envoy on antisemitism,
the assailants shouted pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel slogans while
they ambushed, beat, and chased the visiting Israelis. Much of the
violence was recorded on video and posted online. One witness told
Israel’s Channel 12 TV that the attackers were organized “like a terror
group” and waited for the Jewish tourists “with clubs and knives. … They
didn’t distinguish between women, children, men, or the elderly.”
In the 20 centuries between Alexandria and Amsterdam, Jews have faced
bloody assaults almost everywhere they have settled. There were pogroms
in Spain and in Syria, in the Rhineland and in Russia, in Turkey and in
Tunisia. The antisemitic violence in Amsterdam occurred one day before
the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-organized pogrom against the
Jews of Germany and Austria that foreshadowed the coming Holocaust. It
was also the anniversary of the United Nations’ poisonous 1975
resolution falsely labeling Zionism — the movement for Jewish
sovereignty in the Jewish homeland — “a form of racism and racial
discrimination.”
Unlike most of history’s antisemitic rampages, no one was killed by
Amsterdam’s Jew-hunting mobs, and government officials expressed
revulsion and shame. “We failed the Jewish community of the Netherlands
during World War II,” said King Willem-Alexander, “and last night we
failed again.” The king was referring to the hundreds of thousands of
Dutch citizens who collaborated with Nazi Germany, when more than 75
percent of the country’s Jews — by far the highest percentage in Western
Europe — were murdered in the Holocaust. Today, unlike then, there is a
state of Israel with the ability to assist endangered Jews. Within a day
of Thursday’s brutality, six El Al planes were being dispatched to
evacuate the Israeli tourists. Observed The Wall Street Journal: “Jews
are again fleeing the city where Anne Frank hid from the Nazis.”
The mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, acknowledged that the anti-Jewish
riot brought back “memories of pogroms” and called it “an outburst of
antisemitism that I hope to never see again.” She will not be so
fortunate. Since Oct. 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents have skyrocketed in
the Netherlands. Thousands of chanting protesters disrupted the opening
of a Holocaust museum in March, throwing eggs, igniting fireworks, and
waving Palestinian flags. The Anne Frank monument in Amsterdam has
repeatedly been defaced. “It is now normal for Jews to be screamed at on
the street,” the country’s chief rabbi told a reporter in April. “It’s
more and more antisemitic.”
Everywhere is more and more antisemitic.
What happened in Amsterdam is just the latest reminder that for Jews,
safety and tolerance are never permanent. Sooner or later the
antisemitic derangement revives, usually with fearful results. It is as
close to an immutable law of history as anything can be. For some
decades after the Holocaust, when the open expression of Jew-hatred
became taboo in the civilized world, it was possible to imagine that
that “law” had been repealed. But the idyll is over. Hostility toward
Jews and the Jewish state has become fashionable — especially among the
young. On the far left and the far right, on university campuses and the
internet, in Europe and the Middle East and North America, antisemitism
has again become mainstream.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan saw it coming. Addressing the UN General
Assembly after its notorious Zionism-is-racism vote 49 years ago this
week, the US ambassador declared that the United States “does not
acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this
infamous act.” The UN, he said, had done something shameful and obscene.
It had given “the appearance of international sanction” to the
“abomination of antisemitism.” Moynihan foresaw that “the terrible lie
that has been told here today will have terrible consequences.”
It was with prophetic accuracy that he warned: “A great evil has been
loosed upon the world.” Nearly half a century later, the effects of that
evil are ubiquitous. Around the world Jews are again the object of
savagery and hate, threatened and demonized and attacked as they haven’t
been since the 1930s, hunted in the streets of cities that take pride in
being enlightened. What happened in Amsterdam was no anomaly. Pogroms
are coming back.
To subscribe to Arguable, Jeff Jacoby’s weekly newsletter, visit
globe.com/arguable.
