THE MUSLIM REFUGEES AND IMMIGRANTS AND THE RISE OF ANTI-ZIONISM IN EUROPE, Part II
The new Anti-Semitism “projects traditional conceptions of the Jew onto Israel as the collective Jew.” Anti-Zionists replace the word Jews or Jewish with the word Israel. Therefore, “the ideology of the new antisemitism would include stereotyped negative opinion describing the Jewish state and its members, supporters, and coreligionists as threatening, immoral, and categorically different from other peoples, and of hostile attitudes urging various forms of restriction, exclusion, and suppression as a means of solving the Israel problem.”
In a time when people like Enzo Traverso declare “there is no new antisemitism” in France (a prominent country within Europe and EU), one sees an increase in anti-Zionism in the entire Europe and especially in the European Union. Organizations like CRA have tried relentlessly for many years to sound an alarm about the Muslim people’s anti-Zionist and anti-Semitism within the countries of EU.
It is interesting to observe the connection between anti-Semitic incidents reported by the Centre for Research on Anti-Semitism (CRA) in 2002, and the aggressive anti-Zionism of the perpetrators who were “radical Islamists or young Muslims of Arab descent” within the EU. The European Union Monitoring Centre (EUMC) immediately denounced CRA’s assessment as “methodologically unsound” and EUMC even tried to put pressure on CRA to alter their findings in order to present a more positive view of the Muslim immigrants and refugees within the EU. Moreover, EUMC tried to hide the results from the public until several members of the European Parliament asked for the release of the report. Finally, the report was released, and it confirmed CRA’s assessment was genuine and true by pointing to an increase of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic incidents within the EU coming from Muslim refugees and immigrants—the report proves the noteworthy Muslim immigrants’s involvement in Europe’s antisemitism.
The European Muslim people’s anti-Semitism is often seen in their anti-Israel demonstrations, like the one in Oslo, 2009, that led to intense antisemitic riots. People like Matti Bunzl believe the European Muslim’s violence towards the Jewish people are legitimate because of the sufferings of the palestinians in Israel—he sees “Muslim violence against Europe’s Jews as the extension of an anti-colonial struggle.” In opposition to Bunzl, Pierre-Andre Tanguieff believe anti-Zionism is pervasive among the Muslim immigrants of Europe who are looking at Israel as “the absolute evil.”
I tried to point out concisely that in spite of what people such as Enzo Traverso, Matti Bunzl or European organizations like EUMC say, anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism exist in Europe and within the EU. And that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism can be linked with the influx of Muslim immigrants and refugees coming to Europe from countries in the Middle East or from countries in Africa with predominantly Muslim populations. The Muslim organizations in EU like UOIF or IGMG decontextualize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and use the palestinian people as a vehicle in order to demonize Israel.