Europe's Anti-Semitism, Anti-Americanism

Via Photon Courier comes this amazing article by Per Ahlmark, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Sweden. Money quote:

The images many Europeans hold of America and Israel create the political climate for some very ugly bias. You have the Great Satan and the Small Satan. America wants to dominate the world—exactly the allegations made in traditional anti-Semitic rhetoric about the Jews. Indeed, modern anti-Zionist rhetoric portrays Israel's goal as domination of the whole Middle East. Such ideas are reflected in opinions polls in which Europeans claim that Israel and the US are the true dangers to world peace.

Ian Buruma, the British writer, claims that this European rage against America and Israel has to do with guilt and fear. The two world wars led to such catastrophic carnage that "never again" was interpreted as "welfare at home, non-intervention abroad." The problem with this concept is that it could only survive under the protection of American might.

Extreme anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are actually merging. The so-called peace poster "Hitler Had Two Sons: Bush and Sharon," displayed in European anti-war rallies, combines trivialization of Nazism with demonization of both the victims of Nazism and those who defeated Nazism.

Much of this grows from a subconscious European guilt related to the Holocaust. Now the Holocaust's victims—and their children and grandchildren—are supposedly doing to others what was done to them. By equating the murderer and the victim, we wash our hands.

This pattern of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism returns again and again. "The ugly Israeli" and "the ugly American" seem to be of the same family. "The ugly Jew" becomes the instrumental part of this defamation when so-called neoconservatives are blamed both for American militarism and Israeli brutalities and then selectively named: Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Kristol, etc. This is a new version of the old myth that Jews rule the US.

Earlier this year, the editor of Die Zeit, Josef Joffe, put his finger on the issue: like Jews, Americans are said to be selfish and arrogant. Like Jews, they are in thrall to a fundamentalist religion that renders them self-righteous and dangerous. Like Jews, Americans are money-grabbing capitalists, for whom the highest value is the cash nexus. "America and Israel are the outsiders—just as Jews have been all the way into the 21st century," Joffe says.

The links between anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Americanism are all too real. Unless Europe's leaders roundly condemn this unholy triple alliance, it will poison Middle East politics and transatlantic relations alike.

That was amazing. I was beginning to wonder if any Europeans really got it—at least, outside the UK.

RTWT.