It was not a pogrom. It was not a counter-attack to the vile racist remarks of Israeli supporters – as low of the forehead as all the other supporters in the world – nor was it retaliation against Israelis, suddenly all of them becoming guilty representatives of the government by Benjamin Netanyahu. It was a hunt for Jews.
A hunt for Jews organized ahead of the match between Maccabi Tel-Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam – according to a serious investigation carried out by Dutch journalists which proves premeditation.
Nor was it a hunt for Jews reminiscent of “the darkest hours of European history” – according to the formula devoted and repeated so often by so many politicians to whatever deluge of anti-Semitism it loses. to its historical consistency. It was a hunt for the Jews of today, of now, which expresses a two-millennial anti-Semitism renewed thanks to the Israel-Hamas war, but not only that.
Yesterday’s anti-Semitic clichés
Today’s anti-Semitism carries with it all the anti-Semitic clichés of yesterday, from the Jew enemy of humanity who poisons wells and drinks the blood of children – just as he kills Gazan and Lebanese children with genocidal purposes and is motivated only by the total destruction of Gaza and Lebanon – right down to the super-powerful Jew, a genius puppeteer who pulls all the strings, from the pharmaceutical industry to high technology, from Western elections to control of the media.
But this anti-Semitism is dressed in a morality of today, which transforms the Jew into a Nazi, which places itself on the side of a humanism which claims – hides itself – to be anti-Zionist so as not to express its anti-Semitic hatred and fall under the blow of the law.
This odious hunt for Jews in Amsterdam is reminiscent of that of Dagestan (a Russian republic with a Muslim majority of 3 million inhabitants) where, on October 29, 2023, an excited crowd stormed Makhachkala airport, responding to anti-Semitic calls. on social networks which asked the population to block Jewish and Israeli passengers. More than 20 people were injured. But even before this event, impressive in its scale, anti-Semitic demonstrations were regularly organized, a hotel supposed to shelter “Israeli refugees” attacked, a community center burned. Derbent, the historic capital, is still home to more than a thousand Mountain Jews, an age-old community whose number numbered 30,000 during the Soviet era and who speak a language derived from Persian. It is funny to see signs in the streets prohibiting renting apartments to “Jewish refugees” who do not exist.
These are not reminders of a dark past, but of today’s reality, of a world which, from Western universities to the confines of Dagestan, from the streets of London to those of Jakarta, is rediscovering in the enthuses a historical and common enemy – and 6 million Jews murdered will not change anything, militant historical erasure is eating away at the memory – of a world where we read, astounded, in forums bringing together intellectuals and academics, that the debt of guilt for the Shoah has just been paid by the “genocide” underway in Gaza. I don’t know if all these anti-Zionists realize that they are not campaigning for peace but against the very existence of the State of Israel, that they are not defending the Gazans and the Lebanese but abandoning them to the clutches totalitarian and bloody attacks of Hamas and Hezbollah, that they use the freedom so dearly acquired in liberal democracies to sell them off to those who tomorrow will attack their universities, their newspapers, their schools, their sexualities, their daily lives.
What saddens me is the blindness of those who confuse the Israeli government with all the Jews in the world, of those who do not want to understand that fighting racism without fighting anti-Semitism amounts to giving a blank- hand in hand with the racists, those who think that the Jews have nothing to do in the Middle East and that thus they trample on the historical richness which outlines our common humanity.
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