I was going to put this long Atlantic piece on whether Jews should leave Europe or not into the Friday LinkSwarm, but I think it deserves it’s own post.
A few excerpts:
France’s 475,000 Jews represent less than 1 percent of the country’s population. Yet last year, according to the French Interior Ministry, 51 percent of all racist attacks targeted Jews. The statistics in other countries, including Great Britain, are similarly dismal. In 2014, Jews in Europe were murdered, raped, beaten, stalked, chased, harassed, spat on, and insulted for being Jewish. Sale Juif—“dirty Jew”—rang in the streets, as did “Death to the Jews,” and “Jews to the gas.”
In Greece, a recent survey found that 69 percent of adults hold anti-Semitic views, and the fascists of the country’s Golden Dawn party are open in their Jew-hatred.
Yes, I think we all remember the perfidy when Jews marched on Athens and held guns to the heads of elected officials until they agreed to take loans from Germany.
Anne Frank has become an obsession of modern anti-Semites. Her story—universally known, and deeply affecting—is a threat to the mission of the Holocaust-denial movement, and her youth and innocence challenge those who argue that Jews are innately perfidious. In Rome last summer, the slogan “Anne Frank is a liar” was spray-painted on walls in the former Jewish ghetto.
Read the whole thing.
Between this and that long Grahame Wood piece on the Islamic state, it appears as though readers of the Atlantic are finally being brought up to a level of awareness of the rise of Islamic radicalism that readers of The Weekly Standard achieved some 15 years ago. Progress.
Tags: Anne Frank, anti-semitism, Europe, Foreign Policy, Jews, Jihad, The Atlantic