The European Pathology of Jew-Hatred

Anti-Semitism is virtually unknown in the East, it is a Western disease. Before and during the Second World War official Japan laid out a plan to rescue European Jews from Hitler's extermination plan although Japan was officially aligned with Fascist Germany's Axis alliance. Even so, Japanese society was not infected by suspicion and hatred of Jews; it found them of interest because of the reputation Jews had for business acumen and scientific success.

Not only did the country take in tens of thousands of Jewish refugees desperate to escape the oppressive threats that Nazism meant for their future, but a Japanese consul in Lithuania and his wife managed to rescue another ten thousand Jews from death. The Japanese saw a similarity between Shinto Buddhism and Judaism. Fleeing the Third Reich, European Jewish families travelled to Shanghai, then under Japanese control, where they were able to survive the war.

Asian countries had no tradition of Jew-suspicion and hatred. China and India, members of the Conference of Non-Aligned States led by Nehru, Chou En Lai, Nasser and Tito, saw fit to regard Israel at one time with disfavour, because it was in their economic interests to befriend the Arab states. Once it became clearer to them that much could be gained for their countries' futures by aligning with Israel to further research and business opportunities, that changed; business propelled them, not antipathy toward Jews.

South Korea was fascinated by the unusually high number of Israeli and Jewish scientific Nobel Prize-winners and puzzled over the cause. Their own thinkers concluded that the mental agility required of minds exposed at a young age to Talmud study might be one of the reasons for Jewish ability to think, to imagine creatively, to excel at research and discovery. With this conclusion they thought to introduce Talmudic studies in their schools.

Contrast that to the reception that Jews receive in the countries of the West, where they have historically been barely tolerated, distrusted, blamed and held in contempt. There is a correlation between antipathy toward Jews by Western nations and their respective religions. Judaism was the original monotheistic path to an omniscient, omnipotent being. From Judaism sprang Christianity.

Christians believed that their religion, built from and upon the scaffold of Judaism, perfected monotheism, making Judaism obsolete and redundant. Offense was taken that Jews hadn't the perspicacity to acknowledge this, abandon Judaism and embrace Christianity. Seven hundred years later a middle-aged Arab merchant thought he could perfect Christianity, and inspired by its origins, plucked what he thought useful from both to present to Middle Eastern Bedouins their new religion of Islam.

When Jews refused the Prophet Mohammad's invitation to forsake an outdated Judaism and embrace its updated version of Islam, their tribes were ordered out of Medina and those who refused to leave were slaughtered. Muslims have ever since, while acknowledging both Judaism and Christianity as Abrahamic religions alongside Islam, held both Christianity and Judaism in contempt, exacting a special tax on Jews and Christians to enable them to live in peace alongside Muslims, never as equals.

Western anti-Semitism has a long and dishonourable tradition. The West seems obsessed with Judaism, intolerant of Jewish 'otherness', the Jewish faith and its peoples' inexorable clutching of their authentic monotheism through the millennia, despite the oppressive intolerance that has always characterized Christian-Judaic relations. In the modern era, the State of Israel has appeared as the leading brunt of Western hatred for Jews.

While Israel and Jews are held to a high standard of morals and behaviours, those who oppress them exhibit a paucity of both. Israel is admired for its vitality and resilience, its economic success -- despite having to allocate so much of its resources to defence -- its research and development successes, which other countries clamour to have part of in signing joint ventures that will further their own economies.

Yet while the European Union countries line up to take advantage of Israeli inventions and research successes forging the way into the future of high technology, it also debases itself by regarding Israel as an oppressor of innocent Palestinian refugees as though Palestinian terrorism and violence against Jews have no bearing on the relations between Jews and Arabs.

Israel is invited into membership of the OECD, to become a partner in CERN, as the only non-European member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, since the obvious adeptness of Jews in both those spheres represents a bonus for Europe. Yet special labelling identifying Israeli products manufactured in the West Bank is righteously imposed, even while products from Tibet in Chinese trade are exempt from any such treatment, along with products emanating from Turkey's occupation of half of Cyprus.

Boycott and Divestment of Israeli academics and products is hugely popular with trade unions and universities in the West; with the migration of Arab and Muslim academics and other economic immigrants to Western countries, a new and incendiary form of anti-Semitism has surfaced, one where the West can make common cause in support of 'Palestinian refugees', holding Israel and Jews to blame for a complex and simmering vendetta against Israel's existence in her historical homeland.

The West insists that Jerusalem, Judaism's capital and the location of Judaism's most sacred site before the existence of either Christianity or Islam, be decreed a capital for a nascent Palestinian state. Taking from the original Palestinians, who were Jews, their Biblical-era heritage and handing it to those denying that there were ever ancient Israelites whose geography Arabs have latterly 'inherited'.

While Christians of ancient heritage are being systematically cleansed through violence and vile discrimination throughout the Middle East, the Vatican looks past the massacres and the torching of churches to sign a treaty placing its own churches in Jerusalem under the care of the Palestinian Authority in a tender acknowledgement of its brotherhood with Islam, and its abandonment of Judaism.