Human rights and the new anti-Jewishness
by Irwin Cotler - Jerusalem Post
Thursday, February 5, 2004 What we are witnessing today - which has been developing incrementally, almost imperceptibly, and sometimes indulgently, for some thirty years now - is a new, virulent, globalizing and even lethal anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the atmospherics of the 1930s, and without parallel or precedent since the end of the Second World War. This new anti-Jewishness overlaps with classical antisemitism, but is distinguishable from it. Anchored in the "Zionism is Racism" resolution, but going beyond it, the new anti-Jewishness almost requires a new vocabulary to define it. It can best be defined as the discrimination against, denial of, or assault upon, national particularity and peoplehood anywhere, whenever that national particularity and peoplehood happens to be Jewish. In its more benign form (if it can be called benign), it finds particular expression in the singling out of Israel and the Jewish people for differential and discriminatory treatment in the international arena - where United Nations human rights bodies are used as the mask or protective cover for this anti-Jewishness (e.g. The 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban). In its most lethal form, it refers to the singling out of Israel and the Jewish people for existential or genocidal assault, as evidenced by the suicide-bombers - or what I prefer to call genocide-bombers - since their own acknowledged and asserted intent is the destruction of Israel and the killing of Jews wherever they may be - the convergence of both politicide and genocide.
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The denial of international due process to Israel and the Jewish people in the international arena refers to the disenfranchisement of Israel in the international arena, where, for example, Israel emerges as the only country denied "standing" in any regional grouping in the United Nations, which resulted in Israel (and Jewish NGOs) being excluded from the Regional Conference in Iran, where the regional Asian position for the World Conference Against Racism was prepared.
"Legalized" anti-Semitism refers to the international "legal" character of this anti-Semitism, in which, in a kind of Orwellian inversion of law and language, United Nations human rights bodies become the mask under which this "teaching of contempt" is carried out. If anti-Semitism is no longer respectable, and anti-Zionism in the form of the "Zionism is Racism" resolution has been exposed as a cover for anti-Semitism, what better mask than human rights - and the UN as repository of human rights - to carry out this process of distortion and defamation.
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State-sanctioned anti-Semitism
This refers to the state-sanctioned "culture of hate" - integrating both old and new forms of anti-Jewishness - that finds increasing expression in the incitement to hatred in state-controlled mosques, media, schools, and other institutions, including such recent examples as the broadcasting of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the blood-libel, and the appropriation of symbols and motifs from classical anti-Semitism to demonize Israel and the Jewish people today.
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But the problem is not that Israel as the "Jew among Nations" seeks to be above the law, but that it has been systematically denied equality before the law; not that Israel must respect human rights - which it should - but that the human rights of Israel have not been respected; not that human rights standards should be applied to Israel -- which they must - but that these standards have not been applied equally to anyone else.
Israel and the Jewish people have been singled out for differential and discriminatory treatment in the international arena - and worst of all -- singled out for destruction.
The time has come to sound the alarm - not only for Israel and the Jewish people whose safety and security is under existential threat and attack - but for the world community and the human condition as a whole. For as history has taught us only too well, while the persecution and discrimination may begin with Jews, it doesn't end with Jews.
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