By Giulio Meotti, Israel National News—
Hate for Israel is the Western hate for itself.
What makes Israel’s treatment unique today is that every Israeli action is subjected to an unprecedented level of control in slow motion. But Israel’s story and the reasons for what occurs are overthrown by lies. Israel is a victim not only of Islamist terrorism but also of a fallacious and mendacious narrative now widely accepted as an incontrovertible truth.
Jews in Europe are also being abandoned. Toulouse, the Southern French city where Islamists massacred three Jewish children, is home to an anti-Semithic imam who preaches for Israel’s destruction in its mosques and nobody seems to care.
In many parts of the West, certainly in Western Europe, the Judeo-Christian values have been been eroded, manipulated, isolated and evaporated. Cultural betrayal flourishes everywhere. An insidious campaign of political correctness and moral relativism has conquered our intellectuals, our media, our academia, our politics and our society.
Israel has become a colonial, “settler” outpost in a Middle East that by birth and vocation must remain Arab-Islamic. That is why the same Europe that is becoming anti-Israel is not moved by the anti-Christian persecution in Syria, Iraq and Egypt. Christians too must leave the region, as if these Christians remind the West of part of its identity.
This is the origin of a frightening wave of anti-Jewish actions and feelings we witness not only in newspapers, in parliaments, in books, on television, but also on Europe’s streets. In Berlin, Jews are now under attack by Syrian migrants if they spot a kippah or Star of David. And the German public opinion is mute and silent in front of this anti-Semitic monster raising its head once again.
Western culture, identified with oppression and xenophobia and imperialism, is damned as racist. The only legitimate values are the universal post-Western ones. Israel has been turned, de facto, into an exclusivist, racist and supremacist entity.. “Elected people”, oppressing people, occupying people.
This is how Europe has become the epicenter of a new political war against Israel. Instead of considering the borders of Israel from Gaza to the Golan like those of the 500 million European citizens, Europe fights the Jewish State in its squares, in its corridors of power as at the United Nations. Only Australia and the US now vote against the anti-Israel resolutions. All the European states now vote in favour (like Belgium) or abstain (like Germany).
Progressive and liberal circles in the West are now conducting a campaign of instigation and homicide against Israel. “Crimes against humanity” and “intentional murder of children and civilians”: these are now the most anti-Semithic slogans. Israel has become the eternal culprit in Europe. The media only show without respite a repertoire of images of bombings and shootings from Gaza. Images of Israeli children crouching in a anti-aircraft shelter do not get an audience.
But the West cannot delude itself. It cannot save itself by sacrifying Israel. The global assault against Israel is in fact part of a broader attack on the moral and cultural tradition that made the West unique. For this reason, Israel is today the single most important issue that defines the moral and political landscape of our time.
Anti-Semitism is self-destruction.
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter and of “J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel” published by Mantua Books.. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary.