Vandals knocked over and damaged at least 100 headstones at Mount Carmel Jewish cemetery in Philadelphia on February 27. The Chesed Shel Emeth Cemetery in St. Louis suffered major damage when more than 200 headstones were toppled and damaged by vandals also in February.
After numerous headstones were desecrated at the Waad Hakolel Cemetery in Rochester, the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester New York stated on its Facebook post, “In the past month alone, there have been more than 180 anti-Semitic incidents nationwide. We are deeply disturbed by rising acts of anti-Semitism across the country, including bomb threats made to Jewish community centers, Jewish day schools, and synagogues.”
As of February 28 this year more than 100 threats have been called in to 77 Jewish Community Centers, eight Jewish schools and several advocacy offices like the Anti-Defamation League, around the country.
In his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday of last week, President Trump said: “Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries...remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms.”
Things have certainly changed as far as media attention goes since former President Obama seemed to dismiss the seriousness of these incidents when he said that the attack on a Jewish grocery in Paris by Islamist terrorists in 2015 was just a “random attack on a bunch of folks.”
When burial services were conducted for those who were killed in Paris, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin commented thusly: “This is sheer hatred of Jews; abhorrent, dark and premeditated, which seeks to strike wherever there is Jewish life.”
Anti-semitism is certainly not new here in the U.S. and indeed throughout the world, especially in Europe. But what is behind the most recent incidents? I found some interesting research this week as I attempted to determine some of the factors involved.
In May 2015, Eugene Veklerov wrote an article entitled “The Return of Academic Anti-Semitism” in which he linked the rise of anti-Semitism to what students picked up from their professors in our institutions of higher learning, especially with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He states that many professors show their bias in this regard and do it with impunity.
He cites the call for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions made by the American Studies Association (ASA) in 2013. When a reporter asked why Israel was singled out when other countries have much worse human rights records, the then ASA president Curtis Marez replied, “One has to start somewhere.”
Veklerov wrote that two years later the ASA had not issued any calls for additional boycotts of other countries. Marez, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at San Diego, further said that the U.S. has a “particular responsibility to answer the call for boycott bcause it is the largest supplier of military aid to the state of Israel.”
Other Jewish observers have noted that there has been a corresponding increase in negative attitudes toward Jews on the Internet and Internet companies have been unwilling to take material off their sites that encourages racism, incitement and lies.
C. Hart writes in an article for The American Thinker in March 2015 that cyber demonization of Jews could be poisoning the minds of fanatics and fueling the fire for more attacks. Israeli Ambassador Gideon Behar said “Every new development in the cyber world is being used to integrate this kind of hate.”
Behar says the Internet is an important platform, especially for vulnerable school children who are given tasks by their teacher to find out information. The child may pose a question on an Internet search engine and have no way of knowing that an anti-Semite might be answering their question.
He says that now most European countries have regulations against hate speech and Holocaust denial but “a proliferation of materials that denigrate Jews remains in cyberspace.”
Behar sees anti-Semitism as not only a Jewish problem but a global threat. “History shows us it starts with the Jews and continues to other minorities, and it never ends with the Jews.”
Even the sports arena is not immune to ugly expressions of anti-Semitism. This is especially true in English football where there has been an upsurge of anti-Semitic demonstrations by British neo-Nazis. Soccer games, too, have become infected with the display of hatred toward Jews. In December 2013 the French player, Nicolas Anelka used the infamous “quenelle” anti-Semitic gesture after scoring a goal for his team. The gesture invokes memories of the neo-Nazi salute and is particularly offensive to Jews.
©Joan Rowden Hart 2017
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