Decoys are no answer

Police in the Netherlands may begin dressing up as observant Jews in order to entrap Jew-bashers. The idea arose after police apparently acknowledged that being Jewish is no longer safe in that country.

Antisemitic incidents have been rising across Europe, but the Netherlands seems to have a particular problem. There are a million Muslims in the Netherlands, most of them immigrants or children of immigrants, and this is the demographic from which most attacks are coming.

Synagogues are being desecrated and identifiable Jews – including a class of Jewish elementary students on a field trip – are having epithets yelled at them in the streets. Online, the antisemitism includes overt incitements to genocide. A study says such incidents rose by 64 percent last year and a poll found that 91 percent of Dutch citizens believe antisemitism has spiked dramatically.

Police are considering going undercover as Jews and as gay people to combat the growing – and increasingly public – antisemitism and homophobia. This is a good police response, but a simplistic societal response. By the time a hate crime takes place, whether the victim is a decoy or the real thing, the problem has gone too far, a fact recognized by the Dutch chief rabbi.

“All new police initiatives are welcome,” Chief Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs said. “However, there needs to be far more investment in education of values and against hate crimes likes antisemitism.... The main problem relating to antisemitism is the lack of education.... Today, there are many schools which simply skip the lessons relating to World War Two and the Holocaust. This is because many teachers and principals fear a negative reaction from pupils who are from Muslim backgrounds, but it is too easy to blame the Muslim community, when I witness that also Dutch non-Muslim youngsters are shouting at me when I am in the street.”

If teachers are not teaching history out of fear, the imported antisemitism is destined to grow domestic roots. Leaving that hatred unchecked is a concern across the continent and has led a top Jewish leader to urge politicians not to mistake the seriousness of the problem.

The startling level of antisemitism has been downplayed somewhat by a popular view that such acts are a logical, if perhaps unfortunate, result of the continuing conflict in the Middle East. The president of the European Jewish Congress is calling on politicians and the public to reject this thinking.

“Unfortunately, there are those who make the false claim that antisemitic attacks are a natural reaction to events in the Middle East,” Dr. Moshe Kantor said. “This line of reasoning is illegitimate as well as dishonest. There are tens of conflicts raging in the world, where hundreds of thousands of people are losing their lives. Has anyone heard of a single other act of violence in Europe that is justified because of a foreign conflict?... I would like European politicians to state loud and clear that there is no justification or understanding whatsoever for the attacks on Jews or Jewish institutions in Europe.”

To downplay the seriousness of antisemitic attacks by assuming all will be well when peace comes to the Middle East is failed logic on three counts.

First, if we refuse to recognize the root of a problem, the chance of resolving it is unlikely. Second, the probability of peace in our time is a faint hope and, therefore, a weak position from which to address the problem. And, finally and most importantly, the attacks, which reports say are overwhelmingly carried out by young Muslims, are a result of something more than anti-Zionism. The antisemitism seen among some immigrants to Europe (and North America) is a hatred deliberately inculcated by leaders of many countries, whose strategy for decades has been to demonize not just Israel but Jews, in order to deflect attention from their own repressive dictatorships and domestic problems. To suggest that there is anything “race-based” in this observation is to miss the point exactly. The people perpetrating these attacks – and those who have made Dutch classrooms such an ideological war zone that teachers are afraid to educate the young about any aspect of history that could evoke sympathy for Jews – do not hate because of their race or religion. They hate because the governments and the education systems in their countries of origin have deliberately taught them to detest Jews – a people the vast majority of people in Arab and Muslim countries will never encounter until they move abroad, Jews having been effectively ethnically cleansed from all Arab and Muslim-majority states.

This is a deep and growing problem, certain to go unresolved if the public and their leaders refuse to acknowledge the nature and root of the issue. While police “decoy Jews” may be a good step, it will not address the deeper source of the problem.

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