Tolerance amid crisis

Editorial

Economic upheaval is never good for anyone, especially minorities. Hard times breed hard hearts, people seek scapegoats for problems they cannot understand and outsiders are almost always found to blame for the challenges faced by the majority.

This is especially true for Jews, whose history has been particularly rocky during times of economic downturn, due to the broader tendency to place blame for ill fortune on those who are different, but also from the particular ebbing and flowing of a distinctive prejudice that blames Jews for everything from natural disaster and plagues to 9/11. The Internet has done wonders for making conspiracies accessible to the ordinary reader and a simple Google search will turn up a wealth of theories that pin the current economic crisis, among other things, on Jews.

Right-wing extremism is seeing a revival, as Austria's parliamentary elections showed this week, and across Europe, xenophobia has been visibly growing in electoral outcomes and in grassroots uprisings since the end of the Cold War changed the binary nature of European politics. In western Europe, the end of the Cold War and the opening of European borders, among other developments, has brought latent prejudices to the surface. Some immigrants from countries with entrenched anti-Semitism are acting out against the tiny Jewish populations in France and elsewhere. And in eastern Europe, the advance of political pluralism has given long-suppressed ethnic hostilities the freedom to express themselves.

In Canada, several federal candidates have been recused for offering up variations of anti-Semitic canards, from the B.C. Green candidate dumped for calling the World Trade Centre the "shoddily built Jewish world bank headquarters" to the Manitoba Liberal who said 9/11 was an inside job.

Incredibly, racist extremism has emerged even among fringe Israelis, after a West Bank settler rampaged through the Palestinian village of Asira al-Kabaliya last month in retaliation for the stabbing of a Jewish boy from a settlement nearby. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert invoked the fraught imagery of the pogroms in condemning the act.

This is the state of affairs before the full effects of the financial meltdown have been felt.

A bailout by the American government may yet stanch some of the worst impacts of the financial crisis, but society should be vigilant about the rising indicators of prejudice and people of goodwill should be rededicating themselves to standing up to intolerance.

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