Analysis: Making sense of modern anti-Semitism

[Donald Ian Rankin]

Analysis: Making sense of modern anti-Semitism
By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1260894118240&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Can Israel's No. 1 priority to fight modern anti-Semitism - hatred of the Jewish state - influence a change in behavior of the international community? The Foreign Ministry, which opens its third annual Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism (GFCA) on Wednesday in Jerusalem, is slated to tackle the growing dangers of Islamic anti-Semitism and international campaigns to strip Israel of its legitimacy as a country.

....

According to the Bielefeld report, 41.2 percent of Europeans agreed with the anti-Semitic statement that Jews are exploiting the Holocaust to advance their own interests. When asked if "Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians," 45.7% of the European respondents supported the contention.

....

On the other side of the Atlantic, there has been disappointment with the Obama administration's new anti-Semitism czar. The growing tendency to blame Israel for problems affecting Diaspora Jews has plagued Hannah Rosenthal, the newly appointed US special envoy to monitor and combat global anti-Semitism, who is slated to speak at the GFCA on "Dealing with Old and New Forms of Antisemitism."

"It's a scary time, with people losing the ability to differentiate between a Jew, any Jew, and what's going on in Israel," Rosenthal has said.

Michael Goldfarb, writing in his Weekly Standard blog, sharply criticized Rosenthal for suggesting that "the Israelis have it coming" and "the rest of the world needs to distinguish between the good progressive Jews who are not living on Palestinian land and the Israeli Jews who are committing daily atrocities in the name of colonialism and occupation."

...

For the international community to shift its energies to combat modern anti-Semitism - the intense loathing and disparate treatment of Israel - will require wholesale revisions in their anti-anti-Semitism strategies on the ground.

I've picked the four most telling paragraphs from Weinthal's article, but the whole thing is at the link.

I think this spells it out in black and white: when people trying to silence criticism of "Israel" say "anti-semitic", what they almost always mean is "anti-Israel".