Category: Europe

People are gushing this morning over French President Emmanuel Macron’s offer to Britain of a loan of the Bayeux Tapestry. Since this is the first time in 950 years that France will have allowed it to leave its shores, this is being talked up as a sensational gift and further proof of Macron’s fabled charm. Gift? Charm? This is a propaganda coup to humiliate and weaken the enemy. Macron is no friend of Britain and an implacable foe of Brexit. He is a fanatical proponent of further and deeper EU…

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A Jewish restaurant in Amsterdam has been repeatedly attacked by Muslim Arabs. Christians United for Israel (CUFI) reports: “Last month, many were stunned to see the video of Syrian asylum seeker Saleh Ali carrying out his attack on the Jewish restaurant. Two police officers were present as Ali smashed the windows of the store, entered the shop and took an Israeli flag. The officers wrestled him to the ground and arrested him after he exited the store moments later. “While the incident itself was alarming, what may have shocked the…

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Angela Merkel has won a fourth term as Chancellor of Germany. The emergence as the third largest party of the nationalist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has never before won any seats but won almost 13 per cent of the vote in this week’s election, is being presented as a setback for her. This is wrong. The rise of AfD is not a setback for Angela Merkel. She made it happen. It was her decision in 2015 to invite into Germany more than a million mainly male Muslim migrants, and…

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Tuvia Tenenbom, that most acute and incendiary observer of what’s festering beneath the surface of polite society, has turned his attention to Germany’s “refugees”. To his surprise and no little dismay, what he has found out is not so much about these migrants but about Germany itself, and it isn’t pretty at all. In his new book Hello Refugees, he adopts his now familiar but no less devastating tactic of trading on his blond hair, Falstaffian girth and indeterminate accent to conceal the fact that he was born and brought…

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A new study of antisemitism in Europe has found that the country with the lowest rate of antisemitism, despite having a relatively large Jewish population, is… Russia. The study, by the Oslo-based Center for Studies of the Holocaust and the University of Oslo, looked at France, Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Russia. The author, Johannes Due Enstad, observed that Russia does not treat Muslims’ transgressions with near impunity as Western Europe does. The relatively few antisemitic acts that do occur in Russia are committed mainly by the far right.…

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One of the most assiduously cultivated myths of modern times is that antisemitism is a pathology of the political right. The truth is that today, while antisemitism certainly persists in right-wing circles, the main driver of contemporary Jew-hatred – centred upon the demonised figure of the collective Jew in the state of Israel – is the left, acting in concert with the Muslim and Arab world. A TV documentary commissioned by the Franco-German culture channel ARTE, with the support of one of Europe’s biggest medias companies, the Westdeutsche Rundfunk (WDR)…

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In Budapest this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had an unintentionally revealing moment. On an open microphone, he was overheard condemning as “crazy” the EU’s insistence on resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a precondition for closer trade ties. European links with Israel, he said, would determine whether the EU would “live and thrive or shrivel and disappear.” The situation is surely even broader and starker than that. European leaders don’t realize their fate is wrapped up not only with Israel but with Judaism itself. They don’t grasp that prejudice against…

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When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Paris last weekend for the ceremony marking the 75th anniversary of the deportation of 13,000 Jews to the Nazi slaughter, French President Emanuel Macron made a pointed declaration. Those responsible for deporting the Jews, he said, were not the Germans, as so many in France claim, but the French themselves. Furthermore, he went on, anti-Zionism was a new type of antisemitism. These robust statements were welcome. But what about the old type of antisemitism? Last April, Sarah Halimi, a 67-year-old teacher, was murdered…

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