ANTI-SEMITISM AND TERRORISM

HOW THE WEST MUST FIGHT BOTH

Last week, Londoners elected Sadiq Khan, a human rights lawyer and a former member of Parliament
for the Labour Party, as their first Muslim mayor. Khan was predicted to win, but in the last minute
an ugly row over anti-Semitism in the party ranks threatened to derail his election and forced Khan to
denounce Ken Livingstone, a former London mayor who is stalwart of the Left.
Livingstone had floated the myth of a pact between Adolf Hitler and Zionist leaders, a trope often
used by Holocaust deniers. The former mayor later went on to justify himself and others in the party
who have now been accused of anti-Semitism by explaining on the BBC that real anti-Semites hate
their Jewish neighbors in Golders Green, a North London neighborhood, apparently condoning
hatred of Jews living in Israel.
Calling for the expulsion of Livingstone, Khan promised to be mayor for all Londoners and chided
the party leadership for its failure to act against anti-Semitism in the party. But the party leader,
Jeremy Corbyn, has found it difficult to acknowledge the well-documented presence of Holocaust
deniers within his party. It has now emerged that 50 members have already been suspended for antiSemitic remarks.
The row over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party has significance far beyond the immediate leadership
battles. Combating the new threat of anti-Semitism in Europe is inextricably linked to the fight
against terrorist extremism. Khan may unexpectedly be the person to bring change. Some years ago,
Khan described British Muslims who worked with the governments anti-extremism initiatives as
Uncle Toms. He has now apologized for this slur and is poised to take the lead in combating antiSemitism and latent Holocaust denial in the party.
REASONED RHETORIC, MUDDLED REALITY
Accusations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party were set off by the election of Malia Bouattia as
president of the National Union of Students. Bouattia had refused to support a resolution
condemning the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) and was recorded describing Birmingham

University as something of a Zionist outpost. When challenged, Bouattia defended herself by

repeating a frequent claim by the British left: For me to take issue with Zionist politics is not me
taking issue with being Jewish. One of her defenders, Raza Nadim, from the Muslim Public Affairs
Council, attributed the criticisms of her to the power of the Zio lobby. Alex Chalmers, a former chair
of the Oxford University Labour Club, complained to the BBC that members of the student group
regularly used the word Zio when speaking of Jews.

BENOIT TESSIER / REUTERS

French author Marek Halter cleans the word "quenelle" off of "The Wall For Peace" in Paris, January 6, 2014. The
expression is a reference to Hitler's salute.

It is a common argument that decrying Zionism is categorically different from anti-Semitism because
Zionismsupport of a Jewish stateis a political belief system, and Jews need not be Zionists. True,
but as the row within the Labour Party shows, in practice, the terms usage is muddled. On Twitter,
Khadim Hussain, a Labour councilor from the central city of Bradford, complained that an excessive
focus on Anne Frank and the six million Zionists that were killed by Hitler had caused people to
overlook the deaths of millions of Africans. The councilor not only substituted Zionists for Jews
but also, presumably, intended to suggest that the Holocaust was a lesser crime than slavery. Slavery
is a great crime against humanity, but it cannot be used to belittle the gravity of genocide against the
Jews. By 1945, most European Jewstwo out of every threehad been killed. In the span of four
years, six million people, a third of all Jews in world, had been exterminated.

Naz Shah, a member of Parliament from Bradford, was initially forgiven when she apologized for
saying that the relocation of all Israelis to the United States was the cheapest solution to the
Palestinian problem, but she has now also been suspended from the Labour Party.
Bigotry often involves such word games. An experimental study by Paul Sniderman and Louk
Hagendoorn found that Dutch people who held prejudiced views about Muslims used the terms
Turks and Muslims interchangeably. Therefore, we should not be surprised to discover that
Zionist is for some people synonymous with Jewish and that the ugly new term Zio has been
used as a synonym for Jew."
This could be dismissed as mere Twitter babble, but the consequences of such language are grave.
Jihadist street preachers have used anti-Semitism to recruit followers. In Europe, religion does not
drive young Muslims and converts to Islam to the flame of jihad. Hatred does. And terrorists and their
supporters have exploited anti-Semitism to justify their violence.

REGIS DUVIGNAU / REUTERS

Politicians from left and right as well as religious leaders protest against racism and anti-Semitism following the torture
and killing of a young Jewish victim, February 26, 2006.

WHEN ANTI-SEMITISM LEADS TO TERRORISM

In September 2011, a television crew filmed members of Forsane Alizza, a French extremist group,
chanting for the death of Jews. A commentator on French news remarked that it had been a while
since that call was last heard in Paris. A list of intended Jewish targets was found in the possession of
the leader of Forsane Alizza when he was arrested. The group was banned in 2012, but the type of
Islamist extremism it represented has only grown. Not to be outdone, right-wing demonstrators

marched through the streets of Paris in January 2014, singing the French national anthem and
chanting, Juif, la France nest pas a toiJew, France is not yours. Fouad Belkacem, the leader of
Sharia4Belgium, a knockoff of a British group that has been accused of recruiting fighters for Syria,
was initially jailed on hate speech charges related to gays and Jews. Now he is serving a 12-year
sentence for enlisting young men to fight in Syria.
The Netherlands and Denmark have historically been deeply committed to the Jewish cause because
of their experiences during World War II. They, too, are struggling to contain anti-Semitism. A report
published in early 2016 by the Dutch Ministry of Education cites a number of alarming cases. In one,
a teacher tried to discuss 9/11 with her class, and a young student of Moroccan origin responded by
calling the destruction of the Twin Towers a Zionist Jewish plot. In another case, a high school
teacher in Amsterdam recounted an anti-Semitic incident during a class discussion in the wake of the
January 2015 shootings in Paris at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, and at a kosher
market, in which one of the gunmen methodically executed customers after asking them if they were
Jewish. A female student, also of Moroccan origin, said, If I had a Kalashnikov, Id gun down all the
Jews. The teacher tried to reason with the student. I asked her to imagine a five-year-old Jewish girl
who lives here, she said, according to the report. What would she have to do with Israels policies?
The student had only one message: The Jews should die. Further, the teacher, the journalist who
wrote the report, and the government minister who published it failed to note that the killing of a
Jewish girl living in Israel constitutes a crime.
In Denmark, growing anti-Semitism and homegrown terrorist extremism are also conjoined
problems. In February 2015, Omar el-Hussein, a former gang member who had declared his
allegiance to ISIS, attacked a free speech event in the center of Copenhagen as well as a synagogue,
shooting and killing a member of the congregation. Afterward, teachers and classmates alike
described the gunman as a sweet boy and very nice. But they also agreed that on the topic of Jews
and Israel, there was no stopping the hatred flowing from Husseins mouth.

A video released by ISIS in January 2016 titled Kill Them Whereever You Find Them using stock
footage of Jews praying.
The members of the Franco-Belgian network responsible for a terrorist campaign against Europe
were all at some point influenced by street preachers peddling anti-Semitism. Terrorists sent back to
Europe by ISIS have increasingly targeted Jews. Mohamed Merah killed three children and a teacher
at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012 after killing three French soldiers in separate attacks. Mehdi
Nemmouche shot dead four people outside the Jewish Museum in Brussels in 2014. Jews were
targeted again in January 2015 in Paris, a few weeks later in Copenhagen, and then again in the
November 2015 attacks in Paris.
"KILL THEM WHEREVER YOU FIND THEM"
References

to

the

Zionist

crusaders war

on

Islam

permeate

jihadist

narratives

and

headlined Osama bin Ladens famous fatwa from 1996. But bin Laden showed little interest in
attacking Israel or Jews per se. This has changed in recent years. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula
(AQAP) and ISIS, the two jihadist organizations that recruit large numbers of Europeans, now
increasingly focus on treating Israel and Jews as the enemy. Allah has made it clear to us in the
Quran that our worst enemies are the Jews and the polytheists, said Shaykh Abu Sufyan, the vice
emir of AQAP, in the second issue of Inspire, the groups online English-language magazine. A thumb
drive belonging to an al Shabab leader who was killed in 2013 contained a document listing, among
others, Golders Green, a heavily Jewish North London neighborhood, as a suitable target.
The document is assumed to have been written by a British jihadist in 2011. The shift in rhetoric
matches up with ground truths. In a video released by ISIS in January featuring the Paris attackers,
the central message was to go out and kill Jews and other enemies wherever you find them.

I have found in my own research a sharp uptick in the targeting of Jews in recent years. As part of
the Western Jihadism Project, my team identified 46 instances of Jews being targeted by jihadist
terrorists since 2001. Half of these occurred between 2010 and 2015. Most of the attacks were foiled
through arrests, but 22 were carried out. These include attacks on Israeli consulates and embassies,
rabbis and synagogues, kosher markets and restaurants, Jewish bookstores, elder care centers,
schools, and insults and attacks on Jewish teachers. The Bataclan, the Paris concert hall where 90
concertgoers were killed by suicide attackers on November 13, may have been targeted because the
owners were Jewish. Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the ringleader who walked away on the night of the
attacks, had plans for a second strike that may have involved attacking a Jewish school. Last month,
Turkish government sources warned that plans by ISIS were gearing up to kill Jewish children at
schools and youth centers in Istanbul.
Europe has been stunningly ineffectual in curbing growing anti-Semitism in recent years. Between
terrorism and rising anti-Semitism, European Jews are asking themselves how safe they are. As for
the British Labour Party, if it does not let go of the fiction that rabid anti-Zionism has nothing to do
with the dehumanization of Jews, the party risks becoming a Trojan horse and undermining Europes
postwar promise to guarantee security for its Jews.