by Pilar Rahola
When Hermann Broch, in the bloody madness of the Hitler era, launched this terrible assertion: "The indifference of Europe is the worst of the crimes", he was building something else than just a historical statement. In fact, he was trying to throw a dart to the core of the European conscience, obliging it to look in the mirror in order to meet itself.
The result of this introspective look, if it had been taken place, would have had the same effect as the picture of Dorian Gray: monstrosity was not only far away from the European conscience, but it was born in itself. Europe was indifferent on the surface because it felt guilty within, in that inner abyss where for centuries it had looked after and fed the egg of the snake. Judeophobia was not a historical contingency limited in time and space, but a background culture that could explain the entire history of Europe. Somehow, Europe was founded by the hate of the Jews: they were its most remarkable co-founder. That is why Broch was wrong when he launched this desperate cry: Europe was not indifferent, Europe was the problem. Precisely for that same reason it never did a truly introspection, for historically it had managed to minimize its own guilt. Hitler? Hitler was just the last link of a growing destructive process of the Jewish soul that built the European soul; a destructive process that, in turn, was necessarily a self-destructive process. As Benjamin Netanyahu said, seriously affected, during one of his last official visits to the USA representing Israel, "Europeans wanted to exterminate us once in the past". That is to say, it was Europe that intended to exterminate the Jewish - and in fact it succeeded in exterminating many layers of their hard skin - and it is Europe again which, somehow, pleads for its extermination.
Is this true? Unfortunately I am convinced of it, and it is this belief that makes me write these lines. The conviction of taking part of a European entity that has committed the worst crime against humankind, the industrialized extermination of an entire culture, and despite of it, it has never gotten vaccinated to fight its hate. Europe had gotten rid of the Jewish, but it has not gotten rid of its Judeophobia.
This explains its uncritical Pro-Palestinian hysteria, its ferociously anti-Jewish left, its macabre trivialization of the Shoah - that "death of the human soul" that Lanzmann has turned into a close combat against oneself -, and its pseudo-intellectuals so fond of liberty that they have periodically been fond of all the dictators throughout history: Mao-Tse-Tung, Stalin, Pol Pot, and now Arafat. This explains the new ideological construction of anti-Semitism, adapted as anti-Zionism - and which Bernard Henry Levi considers as the most purified modern version of racism, although its origin had been a classic within the Soviet way of thinking...-, and it also explains the fascination that gets to inflict, among certain European intellectuals, any form of fascism that includes anti-Americanism as one of its totalitarian phobias. Saramago1 would be the best example of what August Bebel typified in 1884 as "the socialism of fools". For one person can be a wonderful writer and still think as an idiot...
Europe is Kafka. And Heine (considered as too Jewish in Europe and too "European" among Jews), and Freud, and Marx, and even Einstein. Nevertheless, as Kafka himself, Europe not only ignores its identity, but it also denies and destroys it, so exiled from itself that has made self-hate a type of reaffirmation. Europe's relationship with the Jewish, natural and weird at the same time, has always been the chronicle of a planned hara-kiri, up to the point of reaching a historical nonsense: Europe cannot be explained without the Jewish, and, at the same time, it has always been explained against the Jews; that is, against itself. Its collective conscience is formed via the different ways that Judeophobia invents, and there it is the origin of it. Just as its pathological anti-Americanism, so disloyal to the thousands of American men who lost their lives trying to rescue it from its deepest miseries, its anti-Semitism is pathological as well. Finally, after over five thousand years of attempts, it has succeeded in destroying its Jewish soul. By doing so, it has degraded so much that, somehow, has died. For this reason, the remains of Europe after the Holocaust are so similar to the esperpentos of Valle-Inclán2: the splendid epic hero is reflected in the concave mirror. Distorted. Stupefied. Lacking all kind of greatness.
I write in favor of Israel because, first of all, I am European and cannot forget the direct responsibility of Europe in everything that affects the Jewish society. Europe is responsible for the creation of the State of Israel. Europe creates the conscience, the need of state as the last hope for survival. Europe writes "Der Jüdenstaat" in 1896 through Theodor Herzl; In 1906 Europe sends Yafo, a young man from the Russian Poland, legendary David Grin, later named Ben Gurion in Hebrew. As sons of the Progrom, the regular dispersion and the destruction of its people, Europe sends thousands of young men to that "land without people to provide it with people without land". Young men who at the beginning wanted to be French, German, Polish, Russian, Hispanic, but who were obliged to be only Jews; Europe created the Jewish nation, making their people the only people in the world intended for total extermination; Europe builds the Ausschwitz terminus; Europe turns the creation of Israel into the very last solution... Can Europe provide itself with an ethical role in the conflict of the Middle East without bearing in mind its radical, monstrous, huge historical immorality? Perhaps that is the key to understanding the attitude of its official way of thinking: with its Manichaeanism and its uncritical fondness for the Palestinian victims, Europe redeems its guilt, it denies it and makes it vanish. It is not about being indifferent, as Broch denounced. Now it is about being the accuser, a nice way to stop being guilty ...
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http://jerusalem.indymedia.org/print.php?id=118228Pilar Rahola, Former Member of Parliament of the Spanish Republican Left : "Judeophobia Explains the Pro-Palestinian Hysteria of the European Left"
A Catalan from Barcelona, Pilar Rahola is a highly colorful figure on the Spanish scene. She is known for her feminism, as well as for her frank and direct manner. A former parliamentarian, Pilar Rahola sat in the national legislature in Madrid for eight years, first as part of the republican left, then as the founder of the Independence Party. However, she decided to leave political life just over a year ago to devote more time to her other passions. She has just published "The History of Ada," a metaphor for abandoned children, those child-slaves or children-soldiers one finds all over the world, that is, when they are not turned into human bombs.
She has also decided to step forward to denounce the flagrant imbalance in the handling of information from the Middle East. Her most recent piece, "In Favor of Israel," is to be published in a book in which fifteen Spanish intellectuals, including Jon Juaristi, president of the Cervantes Institute and Gabriel Alviac, a well-known journalist with El Mundo , seek to re-establish the facts.
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http://www.proche-orient.info/en_xjournal_racism_int.php3?id_article=5283
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