"These Jews Are A Danger To The Jewish People": Steyn on those who avoid 'the "M" word'

London calling!

Nominations for the annual "Islamophobia" Awards are in, and include predictable  and not so predictable names.

Among the predictable nominees are Geert Wilders, Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Daniel Greenfield, Douglas Murray, and Daniel Pipes.

Among the less unpredictable are Barack Obama, Aussie Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and Aussie Senator Cory Bernardi, the latter "for claiming that Christianity is under siege from both the political Greens party and the religion of Islam"; (streuth! wherever did the senator get that idea?).

And again ...

The Awards event has received some warm and fuzzy messages of support from, among others, a non-Muslim female professor (how heart-warming it is that a high-powered woman can overlook the horrendous amount of sexual grooming by Muslim gangs preying on underage non-Muslim girls that's been occurring in Britain lately; if only the pesky tabloid press which insists on reporting the grooming would do the same!), from the former Archbishop of Canterbury, that druidic-looking bloke who once described as inevitable the adoption of aspects of sharia law by Britain (does Rowan Williams not realise that  his fellow-Christians are suffering persecution and death at the hands of Islamists in the Middle East?), and from an academic of Jewish birth who's been one of the official denouncers of Israel on "Al Quds Day" in Londonistan.

In New York City

The UK-based nominees include "Raheem Kasaam (Student Rights), for demonising Muslims on issue of gender segregation" (yep, don't let the rights of those uppity members of the inferior sex who demand the right to sit where they please in the public space of the secular academy get in the way of a good whinge) and MEP "Gerard Batten, for saying British muslims should sign charter rejecting violence" (bit rich that, eh?; I mean, doesn't Batten realise that Islam is a religion of peace?)

One man missing from the list of nominees is  Canadian columnist Mark Steyn, whose insightful articles on the danger posed by militant Islam to Jews, Israel, and to western democracy used to grace the London Daily Telegraph and, as I have remarked before, are much missed.

Mr Steyn may have made the list had his no-holds-barred attack on soon-to-retire long-serving ADL chief Abe Foxman not narrowly missed Friday's deadline for nominations (results will be announced from London on the 21st of this month).

California dreaming

What's infuriated Mr Steyn is Mr Foxman's Islam-free contention that  "nationalists, anti-government people, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis of anti-immigration and anti-government" are driving present-day antisemitism.

Writes Steyn, inter alia, of  Foxman and Jewish communal leaders like him, who fail to give Muslim judeophobes their due share of the blame:

"These Jews are a danger to the Jewish people.

Their denial is so thick and so amoral that it is difficult sometimes to find the words to express my utter disgust and contempt.

By fighting the last war against the German Nazis over and over in their heads, they endanger living Jews. But they will never learn...."

He continues:

'I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse, a city the size of Jacksonville, Florida, where in recent years one synagogue has been firebombed, another set alight when two burning cars were driven into it, a third burgled and "Dirty Jews" scrawled on the ark housing the Torah, where a kosher butcher's was strafed with gunfire, and a Jewish sports association attacked with Molotov cocktails, and three Jewish children murdered outside their grade school, I would like Foxman to go to Toulouse and tell any Jew he finds there (they are advised by their rabbis not to wear identifying marks of their faith) that it's all the work of "anti-government people".

I would like him to go to Malmö - once the first Christian city in Norway and soon to be the first Muslim city in Sweden - and tell such Jews as he can find (they are abandoning the city) that the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and the ugly reinforced steel doors at the Jewish kindergarten and the rocket-proof glass in the windows of the synagogue are all the fault of "neo-Nazis". Sweden is renowned for its neo-Nazis, isn't it? Doubtless they were the reason why a year or two back at the Davis Cup the Israeli tennis players had to play their match behind closed doors, in a Baltiska Hallen stadium without a single spectator. For had they opened the doors, the seats would have filled up with Swedish "nationalists" and Swedish "neo-fascists" and all hell would have broken loose.

I would like Abe Foxman to go to Tower Hamlets in London's East End, where on Holocaust Memorial Day a couple of years ago a visiting New Yorker had to be taken to the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel after a Jewish tour group was pelted with stones by a group jeering "If you go any further, you'll die." I would like Foxman to tell those Jews that their attackers were an "anti-immigration" group.

I would like him to go to Villiers-le-Bel, where a Jewish girl was brutally attacked by a gang shouting "Jews must die!", or to Odense, where the headmaster says his school can no longer take Jewish pupils for security reasons, and tell them it's the fault of Danish "nationalists" and French "neo-Nazis".

But I don't suppose Abe Foxman will go anywhere outside his bubble, will he? Is it really too much to expect him somewhere in that long laundry list of antiquated irrelevances to utter the "M" word? ...'

 Read Mark Steyn's entire screed here