Seven Jewish Children: An Anti-Semitic Play Debuts in London
I read that sad excuse for a “play.” More to the point:
The Quandary of Anti-Semitism
There’s been a notable and noticeable spike in anti-Semitism worldwide but when that spike actually began spiking seems in dispute. What’s also disputable is its significance and its value as news.
During and following Israel’s invasion of Gaza late last year, which happened to coincide with revelations of the Bernie Madoff multi-billion dollar scam and the worldwide economic turmoil, anti-Semitic activity seemed to peak and hasn’t dissipated since. It was attributed to Israel’s disproportionate killing of thousands of Gazans and the fact that Madoff was Jewish and had defrauded thousands, with few references to the fiscal upheavals.
What wasn’t emphasized in much of the media was that Israel had been provoked beyond measure before retaliating and conceded the disproportionate killing and casualties and that a similar disproportionate number of Madoff’s victims were Jews and Jewish institutions. Israel’s actions were brutal but defensible in light of ceaseless Hamas’ missile attacks on Israel. And when someone who is Jewish rips off his own people, can that reasonably be described as anti-Semitic?
Also, those events may have caused an irrational increase in anti-Semitic sentiment but were they the cause of that sentiment’s existence in such disparate locales as Venezuela and in much of Europe? Did they reflect an overall increase in such venom?
I think not, mainly because that venom never really went away in many areas of the globe and in other areas it has always been relatively inconsequential.
In Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela, for example, the irrepressible president for life–at least that was his aim before the collapse of oil prices–condemned a January 30th attack on a Caracas synagogue which was followed by “a small grenade” hurled at a Jewish center a month later: http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/world/5356087/small-grenade-lobbed-at-jewish-centre-in-venezuela/.
Those attacks, rather than igniting a general Venezuelan version of kristalnacht, . . .
(Read the rest of this article at http://genelalor.com/.)
