opinion

The disease of anti-Semitism infects everyone

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It was a gray and drizzly day in Pittsburgh, usually a beautiful place, green and fresh, when a synagogue was hit at 9:45 am on Saturday, yet another target of that inexhaustible strain that is homicidal anti-Semitism — one of history’s most flourishing plants.

As the gunman opened fire on Jews who were participating in Shabbat-morning services, he screamed, “All Jews must die.”

The anti-Semitic hydra has many heads, and they are showing up everywhere, all over the world. It’s awful to see TV images of police armed to the teeth, occupying a quiet neighborhood, but it is neither the first nor the last episode of this kind — whether it comes from the right or the left.

This war must be fought from the north to the south, from the east to the west and upside down, in advanced and Third World countries, in wealthy neighborhoods in the United States, in the Parisian banlieues, in heavily populated areas where immigrants reside in Brussels and London, and in bourgeois buildings where far-right movements are based, or in the rooms of extreme left, which now paints Jews as monsters with missiles.

“All Jews must die” is anti-Semitism’s universal slogan. It is found in the hundreds of thousands of posts on social media, it rips kippahs and Stars of David from the heads and necks of Jews on the street and beats them, it has been the driving force behind 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents in 2017 in the United States — a nearly 60 percent increase over the year before, according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League.

And it’s happening across the globe.

The gunman who committed the massacre at the synagogue in Pittsburgh couldn’t have used a better banner for the growth of hatred against Jews, who from the right infects the left with Nazi dogma, and from the left to the right with hate for Israel, which pulsates among white supremacists and the bourgeoisie alike. It passes from the history of Nazism to the Arab world, which spreads lies about Israel, echoed inside the United Nations.

Schoolbooks in the Arab world are full of defamation of the Jews. Nations like Iran and Syria, and terror organizations such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO and Islamic Jihad all have as their explicit aim the genocide of the Jews.

Neo-Nazis are just a part of contemporary anti-Semitism, and not the larger. During this time of urgency, attributing the fever to the “radicalization” of the Trump era is just an attempt to put make the game so small, so narrow compared to this hydra with so many heads.

Fiamma Nirenstein is a former member of the Italian Parliament and a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Translated by Amy Rosenthal.