Can the decline be stopped? Yes, but that would require a great
unlearning of the political mythologies on which modern Europe was
built.
Among those mythologies: that the European Union is the
result of a postwar moral commitment to peace; that Christianity is of
merely historical importance to European identity; that there’s no such
thing as a military solution; that one’s country isn’t worth fighting
for; that honor is atavistic and tolerance is the supreme value. People
who believe in nothing, including themselves, will ultimately submit to
anything.
The alternative is a recognition that Europe’s long
peace depended on the presence of American military power, and that the
retreat of that power will require Europeans to defend themselves.
Europe will also have to figure out how to apply power not symbolically,
as it now does, but strategically, in pursuit of difficult objectives.
That could start with the destruction of ISIS in Libya.
More
important, Europeans will have to learn that powerlessness can be as
corrupting as power—and much more dangerous. The storm of terror that is
descending on Europe will not end in some new politics of inclusion,
community outreach, more foreign aid or one of Mrs. Merkel’s diplomatic Rube Goldbergs. It will end in rivers of blood. Theirs or yours?
In
all this, the best guide to how Europe can find its way to safety is
the country it has spent the best part of the last 50 years lecturing
and vilifying: Israel. For now, it’s the only country in the West that
refuses to risk the safety of its citizens on someone else’s notion of
human rights or altar of peace.
Europeans will no doubt look to
Israel for tactical tips in the battle against terrorism—crowd
management techniques and so on—but what they really need to learn from
the Jewish state is the moral lesson. Namely, that identity can be a
great preserver of liberty, and that free societies cannot survive
through progressive accommodations to barbarians.
Of course for Europe to learn anything from Israel it will first have to overcome its longstanding and visceral hatred of Jews. Is it capable of doing so? If the past is any guide, we may have a Muslim-controlled Europe in the next 50 years.
Here's a video of Maariv reporter Zvika Klein walking the streets of Paris wearing a yarmulka (skullcap) and tzitzith (fringes) worn by religious Jews.
Introducing the video, Klein writes,
"Welcome to Paris 2015, where soldiers are walking every street that
houses a Jewish institution, and where keffiyeh-wearing men and veiled
women speak Arabic on every street corner."
Klein tells of being yelled at, intimidated, and spat upon. Adults
shouted, "Viva Palestine," and "I'm joking, the dog will not eat you."
Klein recalled a teenage girl saying: "Look at that – it's the first
time I've ever seen such a thing." A child asked his mother, "What is he
doing here Mommy? Doesn’t he know he will be killed?"
Spending the day in Paris with a bodyguard and a photographer with a
hidden camera, Klein walked in the cold through Jewish neighborhoods,
around the Eiffel Tower, and then through mostly Muslim neighborhoods.
While the tourist areas were mostly calm, Klein said in other areas he
experienced "hateful stares," "belligerent remarks," and "hostile body
language."
"Is this what life is like for Paris' Jews?" Klein asked. He then
explains that Jewish leaders in France have told their community to wear
hats or nothing on their heads while walking the streets. Klein said
most Jews prefer staying indoors at night because it is safer at home.
Prime Minister Manuel Valls' sincere empathy notwithstanding, French Jews are leaving. Here's one whose family has lived in France for nearly 300 years who has decided this week that enough is enough (Hat Tip: Instapundit).
In January 1992, I took my Uncle René to the Bastille. It was our
last opportunity to go to the opera. René was about to join his daughter
in Israel, ending three centuries of our family's existence as French
Jews - Jews who were as proud of their republican heritage as they were
meticulous in their religious devotions.
Our family lived in the ninth arrondissement and normally went to
the opera at the old Palais Garnier, a chandeliered relic of French
pomp. René did not think much of the concrete Opéra Bastille. Nor of the
country's direction. When I asked why he was leaving France, he said:
"C'est terminé."
...
In the wake of last week's Islamist attacks on cherished freedoms
- and on innocent families out shopping for the Sabbath - there has been
much talk of renewed unity. Yesterday's march through Paris was a
stirring symbol of that.
But the rift between the Republic and its Jewish citizens did not begin last week. It has a longer history.
My family were hugely proud of being French. We can trace our
lineage back to the dawn of citizenship records, to 1727, in a village
on the outskirts of Strasbourg. Our patriarch was Grand Rabbin of the
Lower Rhine, the first Jewish preacher to deliver sermons in French.
When the Germans occupied Alsace-Lorraine in 1870, we moved to Paris. My
ancestors were never going to live under any flag but the Tricolore.
We founded an orthodox synagogue at the back of the Folies-Bergère.
My Aunt Fifi would giggle as we passed display cases of half-naked
entertainers, whispering to me about what went on in there. On the day
she was born - Aug. 1, 1914 - my grandfather went off to the Front,
serving for the full four years, never omitting to wrap a Jewish talit
around his French uniform at morning prayers. A wooden board in the rue
Cadet synagogue lists more than 20 members of our family who gave their
lives for France in that war and others - who "fell on the field of
honour," in the official phrase.
Oh my.... Two of the three times I have been to Paris, I have stayed in the 9th arrondissement. I remember that street well, although usually I prayed in the nearby Rashi Synagogue (link in French).
We were part of France - until France ceased to be France. The problem
was not the waves of North African immigration from the Sixties onwards.
Those waves actually contained many Jews: Uncle René, annoyed by a
young Israeli rabbi, stormed out of rue Cadet to form a new community
with Moroccans and Tunisians.
...
But the alienated populace in the outer suburbs, ignored by the
Republic and exploited by radical preachers, contributed to Jewish
unease. Some streets were no longer safe to walk in a skullcap.
Anti-Semitic rhetoric was heard on the Right, on the Left, and from the
banlieues. Murderous attacks on Jewish schools aroused no national
outrage on the scale seen in the past week.
So Jews fled in their thousands - many to London, where two new
communities have sprung up in my own neighbourhood. Some 3,300 left for
Israel in 2013, rising to 5,000 last year. Many more French Jews
acquired homes abroad.
France awoke too late to the exodus. Last September, prime minister
Manuel Valls, whose violinist wife is Jewish, put on a skullcap at a
central synagogue and announced to the world that "a France without Jews
is no longer France." This weekend, for the first time since the Nazi
era, that same synagogue had to shut for the Sabbath because the state
was unable to protect its worshippers.
France is in a state of moral confusion. Yesterday a million marched
in Paris and the impressive Mr. Valls declared: "We are all Charlie, we
are all police, we are all Jews of France."
How I long to believe that. My Jewish friends were out on the
streets of Paris this weekend, hoping that, after this tragic moment,
the tide will turn. For myself, I am unable to pretend that life will go
on as before. My history, as a Jew of France, is over.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls blasts anti-Semitism
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls made a blistering speech to his country's national assembly on Tuesday, in which he blasted his countrymen's lack of response to anti-Semitism, vowed to fight jihad, and even took on France's anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne.
Here's one English translation video I managed to find.
In his speech, Valls was explicit that the “first question that has
to be dealt with clearly is the struggle against antisemitism.”
“History has taught us that the awakening of antisemitism is the
symptom of a crisis for democracy and of a crisis for the Republic. That
is why we must respond with force,” Valls said. Recalling a series of
antisemitic outrages in France in recent years, such as the abduction,
torture and murder of the young Parisian Jew Ilan Halimi in 2006, the
murder of three small children and a rabbi by an Islamist gunman at a
Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, and the rape of a young Jewish woman
during an antisemitic assault on a Jewish home in the Paris suburb of
Creteil in December 2014, Valls asserted that these and other incidents
“did not not produce the national outrage that our Jewish compatriots
expected.”
“How can we accept that in France, where the Jews were emancipated
two centuries ago, but which was also where they were martyred [during
the Nazi Holocaust] 70 years ago, that cries of ‘death to the Jews’ can
be heard on the streets?” Valls asked, the indignation in his voice
steadily rising. “How can we accept that French people can be murdered
for being Jews? How can we accept that compatriots, or a Tunisian
citizen whose father sent him to France so that he would be safe, is
killed when he goes out to buy his bread for Shabbat?”
Valls observed that there “is a historical antisemitism that goes
back centuries.” But, he added, “there is also a new antisemitism that
is born in our neighborhoods, coming through the internet, satellite
dishes, against the backdrop of loathing of the State of Israel, which
advocates hatred of the Jews and all the Jews.”
Implored the French Prime Minister: “It has to be spelled out – the
right words must be used to fight this unacceptable antisemitism.”
Valls emphasized an additional point that he has made repeatedly over
the last few days: that a France shorn of its Jewish community would no
longer be France. “This is the message we have to communicate loud and
clear,” he said. “How can we accept that in certain schools and colleges
the Holocaust can’t be taught? How can we accept that when a child is
asked, ‘who is your enemy,’ the response is ‘the Jew?’ When the Jews of
France are attacked, France is attacked, the conscience of humanity is
attacked. Let us never forget that.”
The speech was also an opportunity for Valls to directly confront
Dieudonné M’Bala M’bala, the anti-Semitic French provocateur infamous
for devising the “quenelle,” an inverted Nazi salute, as well as for his
frequent mocking of the Holocaust. Yesterday, the French authorities
confirmed that Dieudonné, along with 53 other defendants, had been
arrested for offenses including hate speech, antisemitism, and
glorifying terrorism.
Refusing to mention the self-styled comedian by name, Valls spoke of
“the indignity of a serial hater having a full house on Saturday night,
when the country was mourning for what happened [at the HyperCacher
market] in Porte de Vincennes.” As the National Assembly rose in a
standing ovation for the Prime Minister, Valls thundered, “Let us never
pass over these matters in silence, and let justice be implacable with
those who preach hate. And I say that emphatically here at the National
Assembly.”
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
