Anti-Semitic -- or anti-Sharon?

[Quetzal]

Anti-Semitic -- or anti-Sharon?
When Western leaders met in Berlin this week to confront an ugly upsurge in European anti-Semitism, they pointed fingers not just at neo-Nazis and militant Muslims -- but at the European left.

April 30, 2004 | BERLIN -- Two springs ago, the streets and Web sites of Europe erupted in a paroxysm of anti-Israeli rage summed up by one word: "Jenin." Across the continent, leftists organized to protest the deadly Israeli raid on the Palestinian refugee camp. One leaflet showed Uncle Sam with a hooked Jewish nose dangling the globe on a string. Another urged a trade boycott on Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. There were dark mutterings of an "East Coast" Jewish lobby and tracts describing suicide bombings as the "independence movements of oppressed minorities" on the Net. Demonstrations contained banners equating the Star of David with a swastika.

By the following spring, when America invaded Iraq, the European left had mobilized the largest antiwar protests in memory. In Paris, Berlin, London and elsewhere, millions marched in a massive rejection of the Bush administration's policy. There were unionists and socialists, communists and peaceniks and greens -- and in their ranks, like little unexploded mines, neo-Nazis in Palestinian kaffiyehs and radical Muslims who chanted "Death to Jews" and decked their kids out as suicide bombers. Some marches ended in fisticuffs: In Strasbourg, France, extremists trying to attack a synagogue were forcibly restrained. But at others, demonstrators reacted to the blatantly anti-Semitic rhetoric belatedly, if at all.

It is spring once again, and the European left is being called to account. When ministers from the 55 members of the Organization for Co-operation and Security in Europe met in Berlin this week to craft a response to an ugly outbreak of anti-Semitic violence, they did not just ask for a better monitoring of, and harsher sanctions against, expressions of neo-Nazi and radical Islamic hate. They also demanded that the loose and ungainly coalition of anti-globalization, pro-Palestinian and antiwar activists, chief among them the international group ATTAC, look long and hard in the mirror.

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/30/bigotry/index.html