Free Terror Tunnels The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas by Alan Dershowitz Page A

Standard Against Israel
    March 12, 2014
    As so many Western European academics, artists, and activists try to isolate Israel by imposing boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) only against the nation-state of the Jewish people, the time has come to point an accusing finger at these accusers and to ask some hard questions about their underlying biases.
    Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators, who brought us the Holocaust, once again declaring war on the Jews? Why have we seen such an increase in anti-Semitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in Western Europe? To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other Western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators. False. The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans—by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians, and other Europeans, both western and eastern.
    If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis; the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.
    In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout Western Europe should surprise no one.
    “Oh no,” we hear from European apologists. “This is different. We don’t hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We’re left-wing, so we can’t be anti-Semites.”
    Nonsense. The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire, to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurison, to today’s hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.
    The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red—victims of extremism whether it be the ultranationalism of Khmelnitsky or the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.
    “But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can’t be anti-Semites.”
    Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo.
    Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite. He denies that the Holocaust is historically proven but believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzo. And he thinks it’s “rational” to burn down synagogues.
    Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber! Some of the Soviet Union’s leading anti-Semitic propagandists were Jews.
    “But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians,” the European apologists insist, “and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog.”
    No you’re not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks or the Assad regime? Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups. Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on