In this opinion piece Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt,  President of the Conference of European Rabbis, expresses his views on developments over the last year in European policies towards religious and ethnic minorities, what went wrong and how things can be made right and brought into balance.

AN ATMOSPHERE OF INTOLERANCE
President of the Conference of European Rabbis

The Jewish world is now emerging from the 'Aseret Y'mei Teshuvah'  (literally - The Ten Days of Repentance) a period between the Jewish New  Year and the Day of Atonement when one is required to take stock of  their moral and ethical position in the world and ask themselves whether  they could have behaved just a little bit more responsibly, been just a  little bit more tolerant of others and to consider how we might improve  ourselves in the coming year. I expect that this year, thoughts of  tolerance, equality and freedom will have been felt more sharply than  ever.

Before the end of the calendar year, the upper house of the Dutch  Parliament will vote to outlaw religious slaughter on the grounds that  it is inhumane - this despite not one reliable scientific study of the  process, no mention of the huge numbers of mis-stunned animals, who, all  are agreed, live the last moments of their lives in great distress, and  no attempt to allow religious communities to demonstrate the humaneness  of their methods. The Dutch Parliament has instead put the onus on  their Jewish community, who will suffer at the hands of the ban, to  'prove' that its methods are humane, knowing full well that to provide  genuine proof of either position is virtually impossible. The Dutch have  defaulted to taking the attitude that religious communities are  agitating against the will of the majority and should be stopped  wherever possible.

The dust is only now beginning to settle over the mass-murder  perpetrated in Norway by the bigoted Anders Brevik, who subscribed to a  similar ideology and if we go back further, we must ask ourselves,  should we have heeded the warning of laws banning the building of  minarets in Switzerland and of women wearing Islamic head coverings in  France and in Belgium?

It should be clear that each of these things did not happen in a  vacuum. Each one feeds off a fear that the continent is somehow being  hijacked by religious communities who are attempting to radically change  the host society and force a once Christian but now largely secular  Europe to regress into some sort of medieval Middle Eastern society with  a pre-Enlightenment Zeitgeist.

This latest move by the Dutch government is indicative of alarming  levels of intolerance in some parts of Europe towards the modes of  worship and of dress codes of 'unfamiliar' communities. The world once  feared and therefore persecuted men like Galileo who espoused the  virtues of science as opposed to religion for no other reason than they  feared it would upset the status quo. Now that same fear runs in the  opposite direction.

. . .

Europe's Jews were jarred but sadly not surprised when the Mayor of  the Swedish city Malmo turned a blind eye to the shocking antisemitic  violence that took place in his city last year. This indifference  destroys the model of tolerance upon which European values are founded.  There are countless similar examples from other faith communities and  yet European institutions apparently remain oblivious to what it feels  like to be a minority.

It is my deepest wish that those who have demonstrated a propensity  for attacking difference, join in the Jewish practice of self-reflection  at this time of year and consider what is truly driving the bans on  wearing an Islamic veil or religious slaughter. Pastor Martin Niemoller  chillingly recorded that it was only when the Nazis came to take him  away that he realised the gravity of his failure to speak out for the  other victims of the Holocaust. There is already a feeling that  religious communities in Europe are singled out for criticism. Now is  the time to protest against that injustice.

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rabbi-pinchas-g...

But Christians never do anything bad to anyone except in the distant past....

Rocket--hey go ahead and attack Europe--won't pay me no nevermind.... ;)

Oct 12, 2011 -- 6:06PM, solfeggio wrote:

 

In other words, anti-Semitism is finger-pointing, with the accuser trying to draw attention away from his own sins and singling out the Jews for negative attention.  You find anti-Semitism wherever there is political scapegoating.

There are three types of anti-Semitism: Christian anti-Semitism; economic anti-Semitism; and racial anti-Semitism.

Christian anti-Semitism dates back centuries and continues to this day.  There were the pogroms of the First Crusade, the Spanish Inquisition, Russian pogroms, and of course the Holocaust.

 

Good analysis, except that the Nazis were "economic" and "racial" anti-Semites, not Christian anti-Semites.  

l

Oct 12, 2011 -- 6:06PM, solfeggio wrote:

Antisemitism has been around for centuries, but the actual doctrine of anti-Semitism came about in the 19th century not because society wanted to address the realities of the Jewish situation, but to meet the political needs of others and satisfy their political ends.

In other words, anti-Semitism is finger-pointing, with the accuser trying to draw attention away from his own sins and singling out the Jews for negative attention.  You find anti-Semitism wherever there is political scapegoating.

There are three types of anti-Semitism: Christian anti-Semitism; economic anti-Semitism; and racial anti-Semitism.

Christian anti-Semitism dates back centuries and continues to this day.  There were the pogroms of the First Crusade, the Spanish Inquisition, Russian pogroms, and of course the Holocaust.

Economic anti-Semitism teachest hat all Jews are not only wealthy, but greedy, powerful cheaters.

And racial anti-Semitism is the belief that Jews are somehow an inferior race.

In the 1930s and 1940s anti-Semitism was such a powerful force in America, that the Congress refused to pass legislation allowing Jewish refugees to come to America, which meant that thousands of people who could have been saved ended up in the concentration camps.

And, evidently, anti-Semitism is on the rise in America today:

www.adl.org/presrele/asus_12/4109_12.htm

www.theblaze.com/stories/antisemitic-inc...

www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic/...

www.history.ucsb.edu/faculty/marcuse/cla...

 

Solf

Your history is off, no many citations you present. It won't fly. Do you really think anti-Judaism was a product of the nineteenth century? That is ludicrous. I despise anti-semitism, a misnomer to begin with. But then I was raised in the Capital city of Albany, NY, where the population was 45% Catholic and 35% Jewish--very little anti-seminism there.

J.