Abraham Foxman of the ADL has released his Global 100 poll of world-wide anti-Semitism.
The poll assessed the reaction of people to the following statements. Agreeing with 6 or more of the following makes one an anti-Semite.
ANTI -SEMITIC STEREOTYPES:
1) Jews are more loyal to Israel than to [this country/the countries they live in].
2) Jews have too much power in the business world.
3) Jews have too much power in international
financial markets.
4) Jews
don’t care about what happens to anyone but their own kind.
5) Jews have too much control over global affairs.
6) People hate Jews because of the way Jews behave.
7) Jews think they are better than other people.
8) Jews have too much control over the United States government.
9) Jews have too much control over the global media.
10) Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.
11) Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars.
According to the results, 1.09 billion people in the world, about 26%percent of its entire population, harbor anti-Semitic beliefs.
The highest scores were in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), which registered 74%.
This was followed by Eastern Europe 34%.
Then comes Western Europe at 24%.
Sub-Saharan Africa is at 23%.
Asia is at 22%.
The Americas are at 19%.
Oceania is at 14%.
The highest non-MENA score was found in Greece – 69%
Iran held the highest MENA score – 56%.
I don’t know what conclusions Mr. Foxman draws from all this, but here are my thoughts:
The areas with the highest levels of anti-Semitism – Greece, MENA, Eastern Europe, are also ones where either the communists or the global financial industry, has had a significant negative impact.
This is not intended as hate speech. I’m just looking for logical causes for the existence of such a wide-spread feeling, since I don’t really believe in a spontaneous eruption of irrational hatred toward one group of people for no other cause but their religion or ethnicity.
To believe in such “motiveless malignance” would require me to ascribe a mysterious and non-human quality to Jewishness, which sounds a lot like real anti-Semitism to me.
Besides, if motiveless malignance is everywhere, why is so little of it in the US?
But so it is. America has less anti-Semitic feeling than anywhere else.
It follows that humanitarian anti-anti-Semitic libertarians should be aiming their sermons about anti-Semitism at some other region of the world than the USA – perhaps at the Ukraine?
But they aren’t, are they?
Instead, it seems that the Humanitarian libertarians are making common cause with the anti-Semites in the Ukraine.
Now why is that, I wonder. Could it be that “anti-anti-Semitism” is not about anti-Semitism at all?
If so, what is it really about?
