The inescapable anti-Semitism of Western nationalists: Ishaan Tharoor

A good overview of a worrisome trend:

Readers of Today’s WorldView are well aware of how the far right has gone mainstream over the past year. They were brought there by a confluence of events: President Trump’s rise to the White House on an ultranationalist platform, the electoral gains made by once-fringe parties in Western Europe and the deepening illiberalism of parties in power farther east. As a result, we’ve seen a rise in Islamophobia as well as widespread demonization of immigrants in various countries.

But this resurgent nativism also encompasses an old and dark tradition: a virulent hatred of Jews.

You could see it in last year’s infamous white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, where hundreds — inspired in part by Trump’s politics — chanted “Jews will not replace us.” (The president decries anti-Semitism, but had a notoriously tough time denouncing the neo-Nazi marchers.) You could see it in the sly game played by Poland’s ruling party, which has moved to criminalize discussion of Poland’s role in the Holocaust while looking the other way during a nationalist demonstration in November where supporters chanted “Pure Poland, Jew-Free Poland.” And you could even see it in the hideous slaughter of 17 high school students in Florida this month — the shooter’s magazines were reportedly etched with swastikas.

A new study by the Anti-Defamation League, a U.S.-based organization that tracks anti-Semitism and other bigotry, found an alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents in 2017. “The ADL’s 2017 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents identified 1,986 examples of anti-Semitic harassment, vandalism and assault in 2017, the largest single-year increase and the second-highest number since it started tracking the data in the 1970s,” my colleague Tara Bahrampour reported. “Vandalism was up by 86 percent, and incidents targeting Jewish schools, community centers, museums and synagogues had surged by 101 percent since 2016, the report found. The number of anti-Semitic incidents in K-12 schools has roughly doubled each year for the past two years, the report said.”

“This is close to an all-time high,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the organization’s CEO, said to The Washington Post, adding that the last time the number of incidents was so high was nearly 25 years ago. He blamed the shift on “the divisive state of our national discourse” in the Trump era. “We’re living in a time where extremists feel emboldened and they’re increasingly taking action,” he said. “They feel empowered. They almost feel like they’ve been mainstreamed.”

Another report that the organization published in late January pointed to a surge in white-supremacist propaganda on American college campuses. And while countless politicians and talking heads moan about leftist political correctness at America’s universities, far fewer seem concerned about this troubling uptick.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the trend lines are perhaps all the more worrying. In Germany, the far-right AfD party has become the largest opposition bloc in Parliament. It carries a toxic legacy of anti-Semitism and includes a host of politicians who are tired of apologizing for Germany’s Nazi past. Xenophobic far-right parties across the continent — from France to Austria to Slovakia — have all risen to prominence (and, in some instances, to power) while engaging in what could arguably be seen as anti-Semitic demagoguery. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s relentless campaign against Jewish American financier George Soros offers a striking case in point.

A common theme in their messaging is populist contempt for “globalism” — for well-heeled intellectuals, aloof bureaucrats and jet-setting business executives whose interests and beliefs somehow betray the nation. This distaste for “cosmopolitanism” is hardly new for Europe and, of course, is intertwined with a long history of anti-Semitic tropes.

Perhaps nowhere has the problem resurfaced more than in Poland, where critics believe the governing Law and Justice Party is steering the country toward a majoritarian autocracy. That government passed a controversial new law this month on how the Holocaust is remembered, making it illegal to speak of Polish complicity in the genocide. The law chilled discussion of Poland’s past at home and stirred outrage abroad, but Polish leaders have staunchly defended it.

At the high-profile Munich Security Conference this month, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki drew the ire of onlookers when he seemed to put equal blame on Jewish collaborators for the Nazi-sponsored genocide that wiped out millions of European Jews.

“You’re not going to be seen as criminal [if you] say that there were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators as well as Ukrainian perpetrators — not only German perpetrators,” Morawiecki said when asked to defend the new legislation.

The “Holocaust law” has sparked a diplomatic battle with Israel and created new fears among the country’s Jews. Although Poland once had Europe’s largest Jewish community, fewer than 10,000 now live there. Anna Chipczyńska, the president of the Warsaw Jewish community, told my colleague James McAuley that the resurgent nationalist mood has led to Jewish organizations being flooded with hate mail. She suggested that some Polish Jews may consider hiding their cultural identity.

“They might see a stigma,” Chipczyńska said. “And therefore there is a legitimate risk that people will hide and cover their identities, their backgrounds. It’s extremely concerning.”

Such a scenario is, of course, not something American Jews have to worry about. But the mobilization and growing visibility of the American far right is a major concern. “They’ve dropped the boots in favor of suits; they’ve dropped the camos in favor of khakis; they talk about white culture and supporting policies like ending immigration,” Goldblatt of the ADL told The Post.

And that’s just what’s visible to the outside world. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks right-wing hate groups in the United States, recently released its own report on the surge in neo-Nazi mobilization in the country. Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, told Bahrampour that the organization’s research barely scratches the surface of what may be happening.

“We’re in an ugly time,” she said. “We’re not even close to capturing even one-tenth.”

via Today’s WorldView from The Washington Post

How Christianity and Islam took over the world, in 90 seconds – The Washington Post

The video is better than the historical accuracy but nevertheless worth watching:

The video above depicts the growth and spread of the world’s two largest religions over a span of 2,000 years. Represented in white and green, respectively, Christianity and Islam spring up from obscurity in the Middle East to morph into globe-spanning juggernauts.

It was produced last year by the Western Conservatory of the Arts and Sciences, a rather grandiosely named Christian ministry based in Tennessee, as an accompaniment to a supposedly historically accurate map that depicts the “Spread of the Gospel.” A note on the ministry’s website cites biblical scripture, pitching the map as a “beautiful visual reminder that ‘the word of the truth, the gospel, which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world … is bearing fruit and increasing.’ ”

Real historians will doubtless find plenty to quibble about with the broad sweep of the canvas that this video represents. And, to be sure, this ministry doesn’t exactly have an objective approach to the history of Islam — in another post on its website, it looks forward to Syrian refugees being disabused of their “Muhammedan way of life.”

The video begins with the Roman empire and shows Christianity sprouting up on its margins, then spreading elsewhere. Islam follows suit a bit later, moving rapidly through the crumbling Byzantine and Sassanian empires, through North Africa and into parts of Europe. They both inexorably expand thereafter.

Over the course of time, this green-white tableau gets interrupted by ruptures in the form of other hues — the purple rampages of the Mongols and the red splotch of Communism — but the video for the most part keeps it very simple.

But elsewhere, particularly when gazing at centuries of supposed Christian expansion in Asia, it seems a gross exaggeration. Christianity was never the major religion farther east, but rather present through small communities of traders and missionaries. The same is also somewhat true for Islam’s role across vast swaths of Africa and Southeast Asia in the centuries after its birth.

India, which represents almost a sixth of humanity, is hardly a Christian nation (as it appears in the last frame of the map). Rather it is majority-Hindu and has a far greater number of Muslims than Christians within its borders.

Source: How Christianity and Islam took over the world, in 90 seconds – The Washington Post

Belgium’s big problem with radical Islam – The Washington Post

One of the better pieces I have seen, although over-mechanically emphasizes some of the causes of radicalization:

Of all the countries in the West, Belgium has produced the greatest number of foreign jihadists per capita who are fighting in Syria. The actual figure, according to researchers, is variously estimated at 470 to 553. Roughly a third of those who left to fight in Iraq and Syria have returned; many have not faced prosecution, with authorities struggling to prove that the fighters joined violent organizations such as the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL.

According to an analysis by the Royal Institute for International Relations, or Egmont, a Brussels-based think tank, the majority of Belgian jihadists are young (ages 20 to 24), have lower-than-average education levels and are mostly of Moroccan heritage.

The prevalence of Islamist extremism in Belgium predates the incidents of the past year, as well as the advent of the Islamic State. And this is not the first time an Islamic State proxy has struck on Belgian soil: In May 2014, a gun-wielding French national who had spent time in Syria killed four people in the Jewish Museum of Brussels.

The root causes of radicalization are largely familiar: high unemployment, marginalization, discrimination and a sense of alienation from the wider society.

BuzzFeed’s Joshua Hersh spent time in Molenbeek and came away with this picture of a downtrodden, disgruntled community:

“Unlike the infamous banlieues of Paris — the rundown high-rise suburbs that symbolize France’s failure to integrate its own Muslim immigrant residents — Molenbeek is practically in the middle of Brussels; it’s just two metro stops west of the central train station. Still, Molenbeek can feel deeply isolated. The immigrants of Brussels, most of them Muslim and of North African descent, are highly concentrated there — the schools they attend, shunned by white Belgian families, are disparagingly referred to as “concentration schools,” after the high percentage of immigrants enrolled, and the poor conditions. “I didn’t believe it was this bad when I first started,” said a teacher who works at a mostly immigrant school near Molenbeek. “The schools, all they do is accentuate the problems the students face in their daily lives.””

Moreover, as my colleague Michael Birnbaum reported, Belgium’s pronounced linguistic divisions between Dutch-speaking Flanders, the largely French-speaking city of Brussels and the region of Wallonia to the south have made it difficult for some immigrant groups to assimilate. This is particularly true of those living in Flanders, where far-right Flemish nationalist parties hold real sway and inveigh against the dangers of Islam.

“The Islamic State is giving them what the Belgian government can’t give them — identity, structure,” Montasser AlDe’emeh of the University of Antwerp told Birnbaum. “They don’t feel Moroccan or Belgian. They don’t feel part of either society.”

According to the Egmont report, the current crop of Belgian extremists are significantly younger than earlier generations, which went off to join the ranks of al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist groups. That radicalization is driven less by religious fervor than by more local factors, and it is shaped also by ties to gangs and other criminal activity:

“Their acquaintance with religious thought is undoubtedly more shallow and superficial than their predecessors’, as is their acquaintance with international politics. Geopolitics is less important to them than it once was to their predecessors, who felt motivated by the struggle against the superpowers. Injustice was often a starting point with their predecessors’ journey towards extremism and terrorism. This has now largely been overshadowed by personal estrangement and motives as the primary engines of their journey.”

Source: Belgium’s big problem with radical Islam – The Washington Post

Europe’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930s anti-Semitism – The Washington Post

A useful historical reminder by Ishaan Tharoor:

Over the past year, many in Europe have bristled at the influx — from far-right political movements and fear-mongering tabloids to established politicians and leaders. The resentment has to do, in part, with the burden of coping with the refugees. But it’s also activated a good amount of latent xenophobia–leading to anti-Islam protests, attacks on asylum centers and a good deal of bigoted bluster.

Some governments in Eastern Europe have even specifically indicated they don’t want to accommodate non-Christian refugees, out of supposed fear over the ability of Muslims to integrate into Western society.

“Refugees are fleeing fear,” urged a spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency last week. “Refugees are not to be feared.”

It’s important to recognize that this is hardly the first time the West has warily eyed masses of refugees. And while some characterize Muslim arrivals as a supposedly unique threat, the xenophobia of the present carries direct echoes of a very different moment: The years before World War II, when tens of thousands of German Jews were compelled to flee Nazi Germany.

Consider this 1938 article in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid still known for its bouts of right-wing populism. Its headline warned of “German Jews Pouring Into This Country.” And it began as follows:

”  “The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest.”

In these words, Mr Herbert Metcalde, the Old Street Magistrate yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering this country through the ‘back door’ — a problem to which The Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.

The number of aliens entering this country can be seen by the number of prosecutions in recent months. It is very difficult for the alien to escape the increasing vigilance of the police and port authorities.

Even if aliens manage to break through the defences, it is not long before they are caught and deported.”

No matter the alarming rhetoric of Hitler’s fascist state — and the growing acts of violence against Jews and others — popular sentiment in Western Europe and the United States was largely indifferent to the plight of German Jews.

“Of all the groups in the 20th century,” write the authors of the 1999 book, “Refugees in the Age of Genocide,” “refugees from Nazism are now widely and popularly perceived as ‘genuine’, but at the time German, Austrian and Czechoslovakian Jews were treated with ambivalence and outright hostility as well as sympathy.”

Source: Europe’s fear of Muslim refugees echoes rhetoric of 1930s anti-Semitism – The Washington Post