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It is common knowledge that anti-Semitism in Western Europe has been on the rise for the last five years. Its frequency and intensity have coincided for the most part with the curve of violence in the Middle East, and with the incendiary and openly slanted way that this violence has been covered in the European media. But expressions of anti-Semitism have also taken on a life, and a momentum, of their own. Of course, Jews in Europe have not been deprived of property, expelled, or deported; but they have been subjected to physical violence, insults, libelous attacks in the press and in intellectual circles, accusations of disloyalty, and much else besides.

All of this has been thoroughly documented. Known, too, are the factors that have contributed to the astonishing recrudescence of a hatred thought to have been long uprooted from pluralist, tolerant Europe. Those factors include the open hostility of some European governments to the state of Israel and their active sympathy with the Arab and Palestinian “cause,” even to the point of justifying Arab terrorism against civilian Israeli Jews; the felt need on the part of European elites to accommodate the often murderous anti-Semitism within the immigrant Muslim community; and the alignment of European leftist and “progressive” opinion behind the idea of Israel as the new Nazi Germany, according to which those European Jews who support Israel are relegated to the category of racists until proved otherwise.

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