Albert Camus on anti-Semitism (1947)

"In your daily life, you can be sure you will invariably come across a Frenchman who, incidentally, is likely to be intelligent and who will tell you that Jews exaggerate. Naturally, he has a Jewish friend, who at least … He does not, in the least, approve of the torture and burning of millions of Jews. Nevertheless, he thinks that Jews exaggerate and that they are wrong to stick together, even though their solidarity is the result of their concentration camp experience."

A. Camus (1913-1960), French writer and philosopher

"La Contagion", Combat, 10.5.1947. Quoted in La France et les Juifs : De 1789 à nos jours, by Michel Winock, Seuil, 2004

Translated by Philosemite

Christian Aid's pro-Palestinian stance and hostility against Israel

NGO Monitor report Christian Aid´s Myopic Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Continues discusses Christian Aid’s pro-Palestinian bias and hostility against Israel. The report analyses and denounces : moral equivalence, omission of the context of terror, manipulative use of international legal terminology, reliance on anecdotal accounts, and silence on Hamas and corruption.

"Christian Aid, heavily subsidized by the Irish and UK governments, has been criticized for promoting a sharp pro-Palestinian position in its "charitable" activities, and abetting the conflict. In two June 2007 reports, it repeats this pattern. Christian Aid relies on the claims of highly politicized NGOs lacking credibility such as Al-Haq, Palestinian NGO Network, the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. The organization minimizes terrorism and Palestinian responsibility for violence and corruption. As in the past, this NGO selectively applies international legal terminology such as "war crimes" and "collective punishment" and reinforces these accusations with highly emotive, yet unverifiable anecdotal accounts. These practices constitute a violation of Christian Aid's stated position of being an "impartial" group working toward peace and the alleviation of poverty. This one-sided political agenda is entirely inconsistent with the status of a registered charity and raises questions regarding substantial increased funding for the organization by Irish Aid."

Full report :
http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article.php?id=1595
NGO Monitor 2003 report on Christian Aid (UK) can be read here :
http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/christian_aid_uk_

Nissim Ezekiel (1924-2004), an Indian poet

There is a way
Emerging from the heart of things,
A man may follow it
Through works to poetry,
From works to poetry
Or from poetry to something else.
The end does not matter,
The way is everything,
And guidance comes.

In Something to Pursue
Nissim Ezekiel, poet and scholar (1924-2004), belonged to the Mumbai Bene Israel Jewish community.

On his death, Lawrence Joffe, in The Guardian, paid tribute to the poet:

"Ezekiel's poetry described love, loneliness, lust, creativity and political pomposity, human foibles and the "kindred clamour" of urban dissonance. He echoed England's postwar Movement (Philip Larkin, DJ Enright and Ted Hughes) but honed a distinct, ironic voice, moving from strict metre to free verse.

Over the course of his career, his attitude changed, too. The young man, "who shopped around for dreams", demanded truth and lambasted corruption. By the 1970s, he accepted "the ordinariness of most events"; laughed at "lofty expectations totally deflated"; and acknowledged that "The darkness has its secrets/ Which light does not know.""

"He acted as a mentor to younger poets, such as Dom Moraes, Adil Jussawalla and Gieve Patel. Many of his poems, such as The Night Of The Scorpion, and that supreme antidote to jingoism, The Patriot, are set-works in Indian and British schools."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,12559,1165150,00.html

Magdi Allam - Muslim, Italian and Zionist

In this day and age, it takes immense courage to stand up publicly for Israel, especially if you are a Muslim. As Haaretz reports, this is precisely what Magdi Allam, deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera, one of Italy's leading newspapers, has done.

"It's not every day that a Muslim intellectual puts his own head on the line to defend Israel's right to exist. But that is exactly what Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born Italian writer and journalist, has been doing for years. He recently published a book whose name alone is enough to endanger his life: "Long Live Israel - From the Ideology of Death to the Civilization of Life: My Story."
…
In "Long Live Israel" ("Viva Israele" in Italian), Allam directly links the denial of Israel's right to exist to the death cult being nurtured in fundamentalist Islamic circles, and refers to "the ethical erosion that has led to even the denial of the supreme value of the sanctity of life." Allam sees Israel as "an ethical parameter that separates between lovers of civilization and those who preach the ideology of death." The sanctity of life, he writes, "applies to everyone, or to no one."
…
Allam was not always a defender of the Jewish state. "'Zionism' was a dirty word for me," he admits in his book. For years he considered Israel an aggressive, racist, colonialist, immoral entity, and he accepted the methods of the Palestinian struggle and its leader Yasser Arafat, "without criticizing the fact that Fatah adopted the path of terror extensively inside and outside Israel." ... "My passion for the Palestinian cause was strong, as was my enthusiasm for Arafat's personality."

In his new book he describes his long road from profound admiration for Arafat and "the prophet of pan-Arabism," Gamal Abdel Nasser, and strong support for the Palestinian cause, to his unreserved support for Israel. "I want to tell you about my slow and tortured path from the ideology of lies, tyranny, hatred, violence and death, to the culture of truth, freedom, love, peace and life, until it ripened into absolute certainly that defending the sanctity of life is more than ever in keeping with defending Israel's right to exist," he writes. At the end of this "slow and tortured path" he reached the conclusion that the Arab countries' refusal to recognize Israel during the 1950s and 1960s hurt the Palestinians, and that Arafat was a tyrant, a megalomaniac, corrupt and corrupting, and the worst disaster to befall them.”
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/877090.html

“I believe in peace and this is the message I take", Maulana Jameel Ahmed Ilyasi

Ynetnews interviewed the secretary-general of the All-India Association of Imams and Mosques during his unprecedented visit to Israel:

"The time for violence has come to an end, and the era of peace and dialogue between Muslims and Jews has begun - that was the message delivered by Maulana Jameel Ahmed Ilyasi, secretary-general of the All-India Association of Imams and Mosques, during an interview with Ynetnews. Ilaysi’s organization represents half a million imams, who are the main religious leaders of India’s 200 million Muslims.

In an extraordinary visit to Israel, organized by the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) India office, Ilaysi arrived as part of a delegation of Indian Muslim leaders and journalists.

Asked to address Hamas’s call for jihad to destroy Israel, Ilaysi said, “I believe in peace and this is the message I take. I don’t believe in anything that destroys another country.”

The religious leader also said the time had come for Pakistan to establish official relations with Israel. “This is the right thing to do,” he added.
…
“My impression was initially that the Israelis are certainly dominating Muslims out here. Once I came here, that impression completely changed,” Ilaysi said. “I saw the reality on the ground, the mutual respect Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews have for each other. Constant conflict is not the reality here,” Ilaysi said, describing his visit to the Israeli-Arab village of Abu Gosh, frequented by Israeli Jews.

A visit to Jerusalem’s holy sites only served to reinforce what Ilaysi described as his “pleasant surprise.” “I saw that Muslims, Christians and Jews lived side by side happily, not at each other’s throat,” he said.

Ilaysi added that the Indian government has lessons to learn from Israel on how to deal with Muslim minorities. “I was pleasantly surprised to know that Sharia (Islamic law) code is being supported by the Israeli government, whereas in India only local Muslims implement it. That is unique,” he said.

“The Jews I have met here say that we are all children of Abraham, part of the same family. This is something I didn’t hear in India. The Muslims in India should come and see things for themselves,” Ilaysi said.
…
In a meeting with President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem on Sunday, Ilyasi said that “Islam does not give permission to kill, murder, or harm, and we want to sit together and talk.”
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3439462,00.html

Anti-Semitism is a political phenomenon

In an interview with Nextbook, Ruth Wisse, professor of comparative literature at Harvard, discusses her new book, Jews and Power. She makes the point that anti-Semitism is not merely a form of discrimination (the moral argument) but is also a political phenomenom that should be taken much more seriously by political scientists. She warns that “a society that resorts to anti-Semitism will destroy itself”. "… The Zionist movement attributed the problem of anti-Semitism to the fact that Jews did not have a land. The idea was that you would make the Jews unexceptional by reclaiming the land, a reasonable hypothesis at a time of emerging nation-states. No one understood that by then anti-Semitism had become such a potent political instrument that it could be used whether or not Jews had a land. In fact, no sooner had Hitler been defeated than the Arab League formed around opposition to Israel. Arabs began to use the politics of blame much more vigorously than Europeans ever did. Anti-Semitism is even more important to Arab societies and to some Muslim societies than it was for European societies, because they feel they are starting from so much farther behind the West in the process of modernization. They feel so much more threatened by modernity and the concept of equal rights. Anti-Semitism is treated as merely a form of discrimination. It gets a cluck-cluck of the tongue and then everyone says, "Oh, isn't that horrible. They hate the Jews. They shouldn't hate the Jews." There is no sustained analysis of why these countries need it so profoundly—of what role it is playing in their political culture and in their political institutions and actions. … The time has really come when political science has to take much more seriously that anti-Semitism is a political phenomenon, the most successful ideology of modern times. It is the only ideology that made its way from Europe to the Middle East, and played a central role among so many different peoples. Jews have to become much more comfortable with analyzing the political aspects of their existence. Yes, they are a religious civilization. Yes, they have a rich culture. But their political existence is what has become most problematic. The politics of blame ultimately kills more people than AIDS, for example, because it foments aggression which, ultimately, the Jews are too small to contain. So, anti-Semitism is not just a Jewish problem? It is not. Politics organizes against the Jews because they are a convenient target. It's safer to foment aggression against the tiny Jewish people than against Britain or America. But as we see in retrospect, Hitler's war against the Jews was a generative force for the war against all that the Jews represented, and the same now holds true for the Arab war against Israel. Bush and Blair have come in on the side of the Jews against terror for the same reason that Roosevelt and Churchill had to come in on the side of the Jews of Europe, because the enmity against the Jews is directed, ultimately, against them." http://www.nextbook.org/cultural/feature.html?id=635&page=1

India’s Jews - A proud and continuing heritage, free of anti-Semitism

There is a fine piece in Forbes by Gary Weiss on India's Jews: “India may be the only country in the world that has been free of anti-Semitic prejudice throughout its history. As the Jewish genealogical journal Avotaynu recently observed in an article on one Indian Jewish group, “The Bene Israel flourished for 2,400 years in a tolerant land that has never known anti-Semitism, and were successful in all aspects of the socio-economic and cultural life of the people of the region.” Comparing India with Europe, Weiss writes: “But in 'backward' India, from the beginning, the Jewish communities have not only been free of discrimination but have dominated the commercial life of every place where they have settled - something that has fed traditional European anti-Semitism.” Indian Jews were not free of persecution : “Kochi's Jews were indeed persecuted--not by Indians but by the Portuguese, following in the glorious traditions of the Inquisition. With the help of the Hindu maharaja and the Dutch, Kochi's Jewish community rebuilt its synagogue, burned by the Portuguese, in its current location near his maharajah's palace. It has remained there, unmolested, ever since.” Weiss concludes: “I've always had difficulty with Indians when we've discussed anti-Semitism. They don't understand it, and to tell you the truth, I've had difficulty explaining it myself.” It's worth reading in full:

http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/05/india-jews-antisemitism-oped-cx_gw_0813jews.html