Suzanne Field’s column "A Courtship for Bibi and Obama" in today’s Townhall.com deals with the White House meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. In her column, Field describes the new wave of anti-Semitism that has been spawned by the existence of Israel. Here is that part of her Townhall.com column:
………. the deadly poison of anti-Semitism pervades the atmosphere of the region. When the Nazi extermination camps and the extent of Hitler's atrocities were exposed at the end of World War II, a wave of sympathy for Jews enabled the revival of a Jewish state where survivors of the Holocaust could re-establish themselves.
But the success of the Jewish state gave way to the envy and malice of Israel's neighbors, and ancient canards emerged again, first from the Arab street and then from intellectual and academic circles of the left in the West. The new anti-Semitism has especially prospered in European countries with large Muslim populations.
Traditional anti-Semitism has been appropriated to fit new conditions. The textbooks in several Middle Eastern nations repeat the anti-Semitic stereotypes and lies of the textbooks in Nazi Germany. Children's fairy tales have been rewritten to demonize Jews as the villains.
Intellectuals in debates both here and abroad, notoriously in the United Nations, couch their attacks in careful rhetoric, characterizing Israel as "racist" and "colonialist," but at root these are the same old slurs of "the money-grubbing Jews who want to run everything." Such stereotyping was once dismissed as harmless rhetoric, but no longer.
Calls for boycotts and sanctions against Israel have become a gathering force to delegitimize Israel, writes Michael B. Oren, the new Israeli ambassador to the United States, in Commentary magazine. This is a force, he writes, "that could destroy Israel economically and deny it the ability to defend itself against the existential threats powered by terrorism and Iran."
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