Among other anti-Semitic manifestations, the Tel Aviv University report ticks off “Russia still does not recognize the uniqueness of the Holocaust”; the leader of a right-wing party in the Ukraine “claimed that the Jews automatically dismiss anyone they do not like as an antisemite”; a Brazilian caricaturist “published a series of cartoons claiming that antisemitism is manipulated by the Israeli lobby for political gain”; it is still “no crime to sell” anti-Semitic books in Chile; the president of Venezuela “maintained that to criticize the State of Israel is not antisemitism, and accused the ‘repressive State of Israel’ of sequestering the ‘noble’ Jewish people”; a Madrid public school “held a market where they sold, among other objects, banners with swastikas and patches with the emblem of the SS”; a Norwegian professor “said to a student paper that he boycotted the university’s Kristallnacht commemoration because it ‘served Israeli propaganda’”; photographs of a far-right party leader’s “swastika tattoo [were] published in…Greece’s largest selling newspaper”; a German newspaper “published a caricature…of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, showing him poisoning the ‘dove of the Middle East peace’”; Australian “far left elements” promoted “Shlomo Sand’s denial of Jewish peoplehood” and “the slur that Israel practices Apartheid.” To quote Gloria Gaynor’s inspirational refrain, Jews “will survive” this onslaught of nonexistent, pseudo and contrived anti-Semitism. It might also be noted that only the rare public figure has been spared the epithet “anti-Semite.” Neither former US president Jimmy Carter nor current US President Barack Obama,neither Pope Francis nor Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth, neither actress Penélope Cruz nor actor Javier Bardem, managed to evade it. This writer is classified in standard compendia of global anti-Semitism as “a leading and damaging source of antisemitism” (Daniel Jonah Goldhagen) and “the go-to Jewish icon for Islamists, neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and deluded leftists” (Robert S. Wistrich)—which, if nothing else, accurately captures the virulence of this strain of anti-Semitism.

References

Curiously, the same political milieus that decried such caricatures lent support to Charlie Hebdo’s pornographic caricatures of Mohammed.

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The Devil That Never Dies: The rise and threat of global antisemitism (New York: 2013), p. 24; Robert S. Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from antiquity to the global jihad (New York: 2010), p. 533.