Paris, July 7 – Israeli police arrested six suspects in the murder last week of an Arab teenager, leading to the highest levels of smugness in the European atmosphere in decades. At least fifty people were reported hospitalized across Scandinavia and Austria with breathing difficulties stemming from the smug.

Sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir was abducted from his Jerusalem neighborhood last Wednesday, and his charred body, apparently burned alive, was discovered a short while later in a forest. Over the weekend police arrested six Israeli Jews, who allegedly committed the murder as retaliation for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens two weeks earlier; the Israeli teenagers’ funerals had taken place the day before, a day after their bodies were finally found in a West Bank field. The arrests caused a spike in the smugness of European politicians, intellectuals, and other public figures, who seized on the story as proof that Jews in general, and Israel in particular, are no better, and quite possibly worse, than the enemies they face.

The smug reached 39 out of 40 on the SCHADENFREUDE (Smugness, Chauvinism, Hypocrisy, Arrogance, Disdain, Ethnocentrism, Narcissism, Fascism, Racism, Elitism, Uppitiness, Dilettantism, Exploitation) scale, a figure not seen since the suppression of colonial uprisings in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It reached 33 repeatedly over the last several years as shooting attacks in the gun-happy US made the news, but otherwise the SCHADENFREUDE level has hovered at a disturbing, but otherwise harmless, 28 since the dissolution of European empires following the Second World War and the migration of the center of world culture across the Atlantic. It was further eroded by the emergence of American wines as comparable, if not superior, to those of France and Italy in the 1970’s.

However, the brutal murder of Abu Khdeir has revived among Europeans the urge to portray Jews as evil, whereas since the Holocaust that urge had been tempered, and Europeans were content to see them merely as undesirable and a reminder of their own moral complicity in the greatest crime in history. The story of Jews engaging in brutality caused the old urges to burst forth, as the news could be used to assuage Europeans’ guilt by reassuring them that the Jews probably deserved whatever they got during the Holocaust.

The sudden increase in smug caught many unprepared, as the smugness primarily affects the people surrounding those who exude the smug. The academics and politicians producing the emissions remained unharmed, while bystanders experienced nausea and difficulty breathing. In none of the cases has the smugness exposure proved fatal. In fact exposure tends to produce immunity, which is why no cases of hospitalization have been reported in France.