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Recently, a new book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld , sent shock waves across Europe by revealing the frightening levels of anti-Semitism and vicious condemnation of Israel taking place in the European Union. Not since 1938 has Europe witnessed such a virulent outbreak of open hatred for the Jewish people.
Jews are leaving Europe in record numbers, and in city after city, where Jewish communities once thrived, people have packed their bags and fled to Israel, Canada or the United States. From Paris to Malmo, old Jewish homes are standing empty, as family after family leaves the land of their birth to escape the memories of 1800 years of persecution and death.
For those who remain behind, daily life is constant burden and an awful reminder of a time, only 85 years ago, when Jews were forced to wear yellow stars and herded into cattle cars by the millions to be gassed and burned.
Now, in the year 2013, Jews are once again spat on and kicked for daring to wear a Kippah on a European street, “Dirty Jew, Hitler should have finished the job” echoes in their ears as they run for cover. Ancient Jewish gravestones are covered with Swastikas and Israeli flags are torn to shreds by ravening crowds of protesters screaming their hatred for the Jewish state.
Rather than dwell in despair on the horrors of Jewish life in Modern Europe, we invited Dr. Gerstenfeld here today to explain how and why this is happening and to gain an understanding of what can be done about it. Does hope still remain for the Jews of Europe or are we on the verge of a second Holocaust? Is Israel facing nuclear annihilation or can the Jewish state finally take its place as an equal partner among the nations of the world.
After all the horrors of World War Two and the extermination of half of the world’s Jews, we are witnessing a re-birth of the same ugly hatred. What does this tell us about the human soul and the future of our species?
Wolff Bachner: Dr. Gerstenfeld, welcome to The Inquisitr once again. Today, we are here to discuss one of the most disturbing and least discussed phenomenons of the 21st century, the re-birth of virulent Jew hate and anti-Israelism that has become prevalent throughout Europe.
In your new book, Demonizing Israel and the Jews, you make the astonishing and frightening claim that 150 million adults out of 400 million in the European Union believe that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians. They accuse the Jewish state of apartheid and ethnic cleansing while referring to Jews as the new Nazis.
How did you arrive at this alarming statistic and what proof do you have?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: The calculation is simple. I used the findings from a 2011 report by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, of the German Socialist Party. The study was carried out for them by the University of Bielefeld, which has done much research on discrimination. The document contained inter alia results of a poll taken in 7 countries of the European Union, among 1,000 people each of 16 years and older. They were asked whether they agreed with the statement that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.
In Italy, 38% of those interviewed agreed. In the Netherlands, the figure was close to 39%, in Hungary 41%, and in the U.K., 42%. The figure in Germany was 48%, Portugal 49%, while Poland was at 63%. These 7 countries account for about half of the E.U.’s population.
There are 500 million citizens within the European Union. About 400 million of them are 16 years or older. I multiplied that figure with the lowest percentage of those who agreed – that of Italy. The resulting number of 150 million Europeans with these extremely evil ideas, may even be on the low side.
Wolff Bachner: What actually inspired the researchers to conduct their studies in the first place?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: The researchers had probably realized from their social environment that this perverse belief about Israel is widespread. The University of Bielefeld had already carried out a similar survey in Germany at the beginning of the previous decade. The question asked then was even clearer: Do you agree with the statement that Israel behaves toward the Palestinians like the Nazis behaved toward the Jews? The results then were even worse. Fifty-one percent replied in the affirmative. Earlier this month, an Israeli volunteer who came to help in Germany was interviewed by the daily Die Welt. He casually mentioned that what irked him about some Germans was that they considered the alleged crimes of Israeli military operations similar to the crimes of the Nazis.
Wolff Bachner: You mention two German studies. What other research has been conducted to further back your claims?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: There are two other studies on European countries outside the E.U. The first comprehensive study of Norwegians’ attitudes toward minorities was published in 2012 by the Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities. It was carried out at the request of the Norwegian government. The study found that 38% of Norwegians agree with the statement that Israel behaves toward the Palestinians in the same way that the Nazis acted toward the Jews. A study published in Switzerland by GFS Bern in 2007 found that 50% of the Swiss population views Israel as the “Goliath” in an extermination war against the Palestinians.
Wolff Bachner: How is it possible that less than 70 years after the Holocaust and the end of World War Two, Jew hate and hatred of the Jewish state of Israel has become so predominant in Europe? Did they learn nothing from the death of six million Jews and 55 million other human beings?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: The massive anecdotal material about European anti-Semitism and in particular anti-Israeli incitement over the years has gradually convinced me that there is no limit to the malice which can come out of contemporary Europe. The public reemergence of anti-Semitism, after Germans, Austrians and their multiple other European allies murdered 6 million Jews is one major aspect of this. Blaming contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe primarily on Muslim immigrants and their descendants is an easy, convenient, yet false explanation.
If Muslims were the dominant percentage of people who had answered the questions about Israel in the affirmative, one could have never arrived at such high figures. Yet there is no doubt and the few studies available show it also, that the major non-selective immigration from Muslim countries has brought with it a percentage-wise higher number of anti-Semites and also more extreme ones.
The 150 million Europeans who believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians are predominantly native ones. This claim is not only absurd to the extreme, but also highly slanderous. During the two years from the end of 1941 until the end of 1943 in the extermination camps Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor alone, 2 million people – mainly Jews – were murdered by the Germans. The technology of genocide has ‘advanced’ greatly since Germany’s mass murders. If these genocidal accusations against Israel were true, the last of Palestinian adults and children would have been murdered long ago.
In reality, the number of Palestinians has continued to increase greatly in the last decades. Palestinian children are born in Israeli hospitals and sick ones are treated by Israeli doctors. In 2007, Gunnar Heinsohn and Daniel Pipes compared all global conflicts since 1950 that had more than ten thousand casualties. There were 67 of them. The Arab-Israeli conflict came in 49th place. The number of deaths in some of these other conflicts is several tens of times as much. Yet, the many anti-Semites of the Israel-hating type in Europe have succeeded in demonizing Israel.
Wolff Bachner: Who is behind the hate-mongering and how are they able to so effectively promote their message of contempt for Jews and Israel?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: It is far easier to vilify people than to undo the demonization. Israel has been delegitimized by many. There are so many aspects of this that I would need at least ten interviews to deal only with the various perpetrator categories of far-going hate-mongering against Israel. I have identified 16 such groupings. A major one is part of the media. In particular but not exclusively, many very liberal ones have played a major role in this. They continue to broadcast and publish primarily negative news about Israel.
This creates a climate in which people draw their own nefarious conclusions. With it comes the fact that the media under-reports the enormous criminality coming out of Arab and Muslim countries. There is no difference here as far as the Palestinians are concerned. Hamas, which received most of the votes in the only democratic Palestinian parliamentary elections, is an Islamo-Nazi movement. The Palestinian Authority greatly glorifies and honors homicide murderers of Israeli women and children. The main difference concerning Palestinian violence and that in Arab countries, is that Israel has managed to overcome to a large extent the Palestinian murder attempts. This is due to the security barrier, good intelligence and so on. Those who demand that Israel take the security barrier down are thus indirect supporters of terrorist murders.
There are other reasons as well for the creation of an anti-Israeli climate. One has to undertake case studies on many issues concerning this and it is primarily the responsibility of the Israeli government, which has failed her almost completely. Presently, it is occasionally done by private organizations. As an example: a document by media watch organization CAMERA, exposes many news distortions and other manipulations concerning Israel by the New York Times. One should also realize that many journalists in the Middle East have also contributed to frequent news manipulation concerning Israel. A significant part of them are not unbiased reporters, but can better be called “news manipulators.”
My book Demonizing Israel and the Jews, has an introductory essay, and contains 57 interviews of about 800 words each with experts from many mainly European countries. One of those interviewed is Trevor Asserson, a litigation lawyer. He published several detailed analyses of how the BBC operates regarding Israel and wrote: “Its news reports concerning Israel are distorted by omission, by inclusion, by only giving partial facts, by who is interviewed, and by the background information provided, or lack of it. I also found that there is a systemic problem with the BBC complaints system.”
Another book of mine has recently been republished with a large new introductory essay, under the title Israel’s New Future Revisited. After the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed, I interviewed 16 prominent Israelis and asked them what their expectations for the future were. One of those interviewed was David Bar-Illan, then-Editor of the Jerusalem Post. He said: “The BBC is by far the worst offender when it comes to Israel.” He gave as an example of its professional misconduct, the case of a coffee house which collapsed in Arab East Jerusalem due to structural problems. Jews and Arabs worked together to save lives, which stunned PLO activists. The BBC did not say one word about this collaboration. All they reported was that Arabs had suffered, and repeated the libel that a bomb had been placed there. Bar-Illan added that there were hundreds of examples of BBC malevolence in the political sphere.
Wolff Bachner: You spoke about the extreme bias of the media, especially when they report on anything concerning the Jewish state. Who else is involved in the attempt to demonize Israel and the Jewish people?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: By far the worst of the huge hate-mongering against Israel comes out of large parts of the Muslim-controlled world. This hatred has no limits in its sickness. If one desires to analyze the propaganda war against Israel, one has to start in a number of Muslim countries. The most negative outcome of the Oslo agreements is probably that it has enabled Palestinians to incite the Muslim world far more effectively against Israel than before they had territorial bases on the West Bank and Gaza. In the long run, this negative impact of Palestinian incitement may well greatly overshadow whatever benefits Israel has drawn from the Oslo Accords.
There are no manipulations of the truth, false arguments, and types of incitement which Muslim hate-mongers do not repeat frequently. One of the many lies is that there was never a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Muslim inciters make Israel the scapegoat for their own countries’ huge failures. They have greatly promoted the accusation that Israel is a Nazi state, which is now seen by Muslims as something negative. Before Germany’s defeat, it was still fashionable in many Muslim circles to be pro-Nazi. A major Palestinian pre-war leader, Haj Amin Al Husseini defined what Nazism and Islam have in common in detail. Journalist Nadav Shragai has published that this Hitler admirer also wanted to build an Auschwitz-style crematorium in what was then Palestine, to have Jews from Palestine and Arab countries gassed there. Husseini was instrumental as well in creating Muslim SS units in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Westerners are reluctant to speak about Islamo-Nazism. Yet if one tries to identify contemporary movements whose essence bears resemblance to that of Nazism, one should not only look for neo-Nazi and extreme right wing ones. There are several quite sizable ones in the world of Islam.
Anti-Semitism historian Robert Wistrich has written that hard-core anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany. He states that Muslim hatred for Israel and Jews is “an eliminatory anti-Semitism with a genocidal dimension.” Regarding common elements between Muslim and Nazi anti-Semitism, Wistrich lists fanaticism, a cult of death, nihilistic wishes for destruction and the mad lust for world hegemony. Richard Prasquier, while head of the French umbrella organization of Jewish organizations CRIF, compared radical Islam to Nazism. He noted two important common features. The first is that Jews are the prime enemy for both movements and that anti-Semitism is an essential component of their ideology. The other is that both Nazism and radical Islam dehumanize Jews.
One should add that yet another category of hate-mongers can be found among Muslims in Western countries. In many European countries, data indicates that percentage-wise, the number of physical anti-Semitic incidents caused by Muslims is substantially higher than among non-Muslims. Additionally, the most extreme anti-Semitic crimes are often committed by Muslim immigrants or their descendants. There have been several Jews who were murdered by Muslims in France in the past decade.
Wolff Bachner: We have read the words of the founder of Islam, Mohammad, who said: “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him.”
Islamic Jews hate may be open and obvious, but there are also many prominent professionals, politicians, and organizations in Europe who portray Israel as the ultimate evil and indulge in vile rhetoric. In 2001, the French Ambassador to Great Britain had this to say about Israel: “All the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.”
Who are some of the other people and organizations who share the attitudes of the Muslims and the French Ambassador?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: Many international lawyers for instance. A recent letter initiated by Israeli international law expert Alan Baker to the European Union was signed by over 1,000 jurists. It shows in detail how the E.U. is falsifying international law concerning the status of the West Bank and the settlements there in many ways. Other categories include trade unions, NGOs, academics, the U.N. and so on. This has as a by-product, that Israel has become a sensor of many aspects of what is wrong, distorted, hypocritical and evil in the Western world.
Wolff Bachner: Are we talking about a phenomenon that began with the Nazis and Hitler or does Europe also have a history of Jew hate that dates back hundreds of years?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: Historically speaking, Jews have functioned for many centuries as a sensor of societies. For a long time, they were the only non-Christians in Europe. One could thus see from the Christian attitude toward them, how (un)civilized Christian societies were. When during the Middle Ages, Jews were falsely accused of bringing the black plague to Europe, it meant that this and the resulting pogroms were indicators of the barbaric Christian world. This role played by the Jews came to the fore again during the Holocaust. Nazi Germany and Austria were criminal societies. If one looks for a single uncontestable indicator of the extent of Nazi barbarity, the Holocaust is the most adequate one.
This role of sensor of many aspects of the Western world has now also been assumed by Israel. The earlier-mentioned studies which found that 150 million adults in the E.U. have criminal mindsets are typical examples of how a question asked about Israel has brought this fact to the public. It proves that the 150 million ugly Europeans out of 400 million possess a very irrational mindset, as their medieval ancestors did.
Wolff Bachner: How involved are the United Nations and academic institutions in promoting a web of bigotry and lies about Israel and in spreading a false narrative about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: I mentioned earlier how the European Union manipulates and distorts international law regarding the status of the West Bank and Jewish settlements there. This illustrates how corrupt both international law and the E.U. have become. The same goes for the United Nations, which is a morally dishonest organization also. One of the most mendacious UN bodies is the UN Human Rights Commission which sits in Geneva. In this case one can see it best by looking at its frequent condemnations targeting Israel, often more times than all of the other countries of the world combined.
It is well known that in the humanities area in particular, the academic world is highly distorted. Academic freedom is abused so extensively, that it requires a new definition. The concept in the past was that academic freedom fosters knowledge and that through this science advances. Nowadays, one can investigate a number of universities where the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is taught. One can check the literature list given to the students and observe what is said in the classes. One can start with some campuses at the University of California, which have particularly bad reputations due to the anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism there.
One often realizes that the so-called knowledge taught includes much propaganda, sometimes even mixed with hatred. This has a much wider implication. One then understands that academia cannot be self-governing, though it will fight tooth and nail to keep its privileges. The academic Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaigns against Israel are another widespread sensor of what is rotten in the university world.
Israel’s function as a sensor is also valid in many other fields. They include the moral corruption of a variety of trade unions, NGOs, intellectuals and so on.
Wolff Bachner: Dr. Gerstenfeld, we are starting to hear about a bizarre new prejudice called “Humanitarian Racism.” This twisted form of guilt places all the blame on developed nations like the United States and Israel and absolves the Palestinians of any responsibility for their actions and behavior.
How is “Humanitarian Racism” influencing opinions and attitudes towards Israel and the Middle East Peace Process?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: Yet another corrupt environment is that of parts of the anti-racist movement. One finds many of what I have termed “humanitarian racists” in it. They are people who believe that only white people and some other powerful people should be responsible for their deeds. They frequently turn away from crimes committed by weak people, or people of color. This goes against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which stresses an individual’s responsibility for his deeds. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is an excellent place to expose many of these racists in the anti-racism camp. One only has to observe many of those who criticize Israel, but remain silent about the Islamofascist character of Hamas and the glorification of murderers by the Palestinian Authority. There are also many humanitarian racists who will fight against Islamophobia in the Western world, yet remain silent about the relatively high anti-Semitism among Western Muslims.
Wolff Bachner: Israel has the most effective, battle hardened and well trained military on the planet, yet the state of Israel seems to be incapable of dealing with the propaganda war that is being waged against the Jewish state.
How do you explain Israel’s seeming incompetence in dealing with those who seek to undermine her legitimacy?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: The easiest way out would be to say that it is incomprehensible, or alternatively, that only a psychiatrist could explain it. It brings many Israelis who are well aware of this failure to despair. A number of factors may contribute somewhat to an explanation. However, it is necessary to have a research project which would investigate this issue profoundly.
A first partial explanation is that the propaganda war conducted against Israel is a post-modern war. In Hitler’s days, hate-mongering against Israel was open and transparent. The infrastructure for the hatred had been laid for centuries by the Catholic Church and some other Christian denominations, such as Lutherans. After the fall of Berlin’s wall, I was invited to give a lecture at the Martin Luther University in Halle in East Germany. I had a conversation with two Lutheran theology professors there. One confessed, “Before the Second World War, I would have thought that you had horns.”
Hitler, the Nazi Party and many of their associates all over the world stated what they thought about the Jews very clearly. They were extreme anti-Semites, 24/7. Nowadays, most native anti-Semites in Europe are part-time anti-Semites. You find politicians who frequently incite against Israel, yet on other occasions, they may visit a synagogue if the Jewish community is threatened, or give a Holocaust Memorial lecture. Very often, these part-time anti-Semites may even say that they are friends of Israel, while in reality the opposite is the case.
I often gather my first examples to prove what I say from Norway, where the Israel-hatred is so explicit. In its Labor Party-dominated government – recently defeated in the parliamentary elections – one could find quite a few anti-Israel hate-mongers. Jonas Gahr Stoere, until 2012 Foreign Minister, is a typical example of the modern part-time anti-Semite, who frequently incited against Israel. He even wrote a back cover comment for a book by two Norwegian Hamas supporters who accused Israel of a modern version of the blood libel. They claimed that Israel had entered the Gaza Strip in order to kill Palestinian women and children. Yet he also visited the Oslo synagogue and gave a Holocaust memorial lecture. That does not undo his anti-Semitic acts.
Attacks on Israel are so massive and multi-faceted, that there is a feeling of hopelessness among many Israeli government officials. I recognize such feelings because I had seen similar ones earlier in my lengthy professional career as a strategy consultant to the boards of leading multinational corporations. I advised some major European industrial corporations on environmental policies. Oftentimes their top-level managers had a similar feeling that they were up against forces they couldn’t understand nor fight. In the end, I always managed to show them that attacks by the Greens against them were a problem like any other. It could be analyzed and could be mitigated. Similar rules apply concerning the delegitimization of Israel.
There are other Israeli government officials who are mentally too lazy to deal with this problem. They believe that it will go away if Israel only makes further concessions to the Palestinians. This masks their unwillingness or inability to make an intellectual effort. Data on these horrible views about Israel from the University of Bielefeld have been public for two years. The Israeli government should have confronted the E.U. with these statistics immediately and asked them how they planned to deal with them.
These findings lead to a clear conclusion: These data pull the mask off the new humanitarian post-war Europe. If 150 million adult E.U. citizens have totally unjustified opinions about Israel which are evil to the extreme that means that they have a criminal mindset. The E.U. should investigate how they arrived at these beliefs. Who has encouraged them? Which media politicians, leading figures in civil society and so on are responsible for this?’ The next question is, then what is the E.U going to do about it? This becomes a Pandora’s Box. Europe doesn’t want to open it and Israeli officialdom doesn’t want to challenge them and thus it harms Israel’s interests.
Another factor probably comes into play. If one is confronted with such a threatening and complex issue, one also becomes afraid of doing something wrong, because one doesn’t understand it. One thinks: ‘Who knows what negative things could happen to us if we challenge the European Union?’
The situation is complicated further by self-hating and part-time anti-Semitic Israeli journalists, NGO employees and politicians. One has to add another little-known factor as well. There is a lengthy, historical Jewish masochistic tradition which has its origins in the Bible and in religion. It traverses large parts of Jewish history. In classic sources, we find some rabbis who think that it is better to be persecuted than to persecute. Many self-deprecating Jewish jokes are other examples of Jewish masochism. Nowadays, one finds a political variant of this masochism among parts of the so-called “progressive” Jewish and Israeli constituencies. There you find people who think that Israel owes the Palestinians something, instead of they owe Israel for the many crimes committed against it since 1948.
Wolff Bachner: What can Israel do overcome the propaganda war being waged against her and restore the nation’s legitimacy in the eyes of the nations of the world?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: Conceptually, the answer is simple. Israel is confronted with a total propaganda war. Thus, it needs a very competent body of professionals to develop first strategies and then turn these into an operational approach. The current propaganda war is a huge battle with many new characteristics. It is post-modern, which means inter alia that its origins, messages and transmittal modes are very fragmented. As Israel is the first major target of such a propaganda war, it has to develop the mode of operation of such a defensive body itself.
If one is attacked in war, one develops weapons which can deal with the attackers. That is how armies expanded and progressed. Israel has developed a very sophisticated military instrument – the Israeli Defense Forces. If terrorism, revolution, subversion and the like are threats, countries develop intelligence services. Israel has, over the decades, been quite successful in this field and many try to copy its achievements. In the new cyber war, Israel has put together a defense unit which seems on its way to becoming a leader in the field. However, regarding the propaganda war, nothing of the like has been developed. Evidently, such a body will require substantial financial and human resources. We are not speaking here of a few tens of millions of dollars, but multiples of that.
Wolff Bachner: You seem to be saying that Israel should treat the propaganda war like any other conflict by studying her opponents and developing an effective strategy and organizations to win the hearts and minds of the world?
What can Israel do to stem the tide and restore her standing in the world community?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: The first one is that the proposed Propganda Defense Organization should, as quickly as possible, collect whatever information it can on the propaganda war by its enemies. It should investigate studies and data that are already available. Then its research unit should develop the additional information needed. That unit should follow new developments, analyze them and propose actions to be taken.
Another important activity is to take initial stock of the pro-Israel organizations which are already active in the propaganda war and study what they are doing. As each one of them is too small to fight this war alone, they have picked each a segment of the enemy front. Some fight anti-Semitism in their own country, others media distortion, yet others lawfare – the legal war against Israel – and so on. Some are active in confronting academic and other boycotters, others expose the evil activities behind the false humanitarian masks of many NGOs and so on.
The new body will also have to network with many of these organizations. Today there is no coordination between them. One can also do much about identifying the best modes of working in certain areas and try to transfer them to other organizations where possible.
Once these two types of activities have been started, the next thing is to develop operations. How can one cause as much damage as possible to one’s enemies with as little investment of time, human resources and money as possible? These factors are important due to the huge number of enemies and potential enemies, while Israel is so small and has only 8 million people. Efficiency is thus crucial. To survive, Israel has got to be smarter than its enemies in the propaganda war.
It is also quite important to mobilize non-Jewish allies. At present however, we may even be losing allies. There is much worrisome information about pro-Palestinian activities among Evangelical Christians.
Wolff Bachner: If Israel does as you suggest, will it make any difference or have the seeds of Jew hate been planted so deep that they can never be uprooted?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: First of all, we have to stop the rot. This in itself would already be very important. We have to be aware that if Israel started with this project now, it would be very late in dealing properly with the propaganda war, yet the situation is not hopeless. We don’t have to necessarily win the propaganda war soon, we have to contain it first of all. Anti-Semitism will not go away, nor will anti-Israelism – which is a new mutation of it. There are many problems in the world which are not solved, but they have been contained. Prostitution has been around for thousands of years, but has been contained and it does not dominate societies. Yet it hasn’t been eliminated either.
Wolff Bachner: When we began, you told us that 150 million adult citizens of the European Union are convinced that Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians. Many of these same people also harbor hateful feelings towards Jews or advocate the destruction of the state of Israel. Violent attacks on Jews in Europe have increased to levels we have not seen since 1938 and many European Jews are afraid to even admit they are Jewish when they are out in public.
Do you believe that the level of Jew hate and agitation against Israel will continue to increase until Jews are no longer able to live in Europe and is there even a possibility of a second holocaust?
Dr. Gerstenfeld: We also see in Europe the reemergence of neo-Nazi or similar ideologies. Extreme right wing parties such as Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece, are very negative developments. As far as criminal Europeans are concerned, we should not focus only on the extreme right. There may well be more people with criminal mindsets about Israel among socialists and other so-called “progressive parties.” Until a study is done on this however, it remains a guess.
If we discuss the possibility of a second Holocaust, we should focus mainly on parts of the Muslim world. There we find organizations such as Al Qaeda, the Iranian leadership, Hamas, Hezbollah and many individuals who have explicitly stated that they want to commit genocide against Israel or the Jews. Many Europeans may assist with their multiple manipulations to prepare the groundwork for a new Holocaust, but they will at most be accessories to the potential Muslim perpetrators.
Biography of Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld:
Dr Manfred Gerstenfeld was born in Vienna, grew up in Amsterdam and moved to Israel in 1968. He has a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies from the University of Amsterdam. Gerstenfeld was a board member of the Israel Corporation and other Israeli companies. He was an editor of The Jewish Political Studies Review, co-publisher of the Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints, Post-Holocaust and Anti-Semitism and Changing Jewish Communities and a member of the council of the Foundation for Research of Dutch Jewry, of which he was formerly the vice-chairman. He is a member of the Board of Fellows at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a respected Jerusalem based think tank. He was chairman of the Board of Fellows from 2000 until 2012.
Special notice: If you would like to learn more about the rise of Jew hate in Europe and the demonization of Israel, you may wish to read Dr. Gerstenfeld’s new book:
Demonizing Israel and the Jews, (RVPP Press, 2013) by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
http://www.amazon.com/Demonizing-Israel-Jews-Manfred-Gerstenfeld-ebook/dp/B00CTPZV3U
Introduction by Wolff Bachner and interview conducted by Wolff Bachner for The Inquisitr
