Belgian MP Michael Freilich Joins EJA as ‘Special Diplomatic Envoy’

The ‘toleration’ of antisemitism today

Albert Einstein was forced to leave Germany in 1933 after the Nazi’s took over universities. He ended up pursuing his remarkable work at Princeton University.

One wonders what he would have made of the rampant antisemitism and antizionism on American campuses masquerading as free speech, and the enthusiastic if not sycophantic support for a terrorist organisation whose charter openly calls for the murder of Jews.

It is of course a bitter irony, that these bastions of free-thinking, of liberalism and of tolerance have been hijacked by a fundamentally anti-liberal, anti-democratic ideology. An ideology that abhors freedom of expression or dissent, that has summarily executed gay people, that murders Jews and that advocates rape, child and octogenarian murder as ‘resistance’. Hamas.

The chants today calling for intifada, and the steady refrain of “from the river to the sea echo a similar ideology – the very one that forced Professor Einstein to cross the Atlantic.

The similarities do not end there sadly.

At around the time Einstein was packing up, Peter Drucker, an Austrian economist, was then a lecturer at Frankfurt University. He had this to say at the time.

“Frankfurt was the first university the Nazis tackled, precisely because it was the most self-confidently liberal of major German universities, with a faculty that prided itself on its allegiance to scholarship, freedom of conscience, and democracy. The Nazis knew that control of Frankfurt University would mean control of German academia. And so did everyone at the university.”

What was the tipping point for Nazi success? Toleration. You push, you meet no resistance. You push a bit more, still none. You push and push, and you get away with it. And before you know it, the tolerance of dehumanisation reaches its peak.

That is why Jews are looking on in horror at events at Columbia and other US universities and watching the spread to European Universities with dread. Because we know where this story ends. We have been here before.

For voicing our concerns, we are accused of hyperbole, sensationalism, and of trying to stymie free speech.

I ask, since when did advocating for the complete destruction of a UN member state become free-speech? When did active and open support for the actions of a proscribed terrorist organisation become tolerated?

You would have to be exceedingly naive not to see what is happening here. And the vast majority of people – especially our intellectual and academic classes – are anything but naive.

The answer is that a calculus has been made. The war in Gaza and ensuing antizionism, in the vast majority of cases a flimsy fig leaf covering antisemitism – including old tropes of child killing and the blood libel – is being tolerated because academia has chosen to tolerate it.

One wonders what these universities would have done after 9/11 if protesters had taken over Universities calling for more plane hijackings and crashings? Or if the KKK organised a rally that called on ‘all niggers to go home to Africa’? Or if protesters were calling for the murder of gays, lesbians and transgender people?

I simply cannot believe that such actions would be tolerated.

Let me be clear, tolerance and respect for a plurality of opinion is the mark of healthy society.

But toleration can also spell its disaster. If hate speech and support for terrorism is tolerated and given free rein to fester it is utterly poisonous to our society.

If we allow those whose values that are so completely at odds with ours free rein to operate and spread their ideology in our places of learning, in the bastions of our democracy, we forfeit the very values that we hold so dear to their immediate benefit.

We cannot and must not ‘tolerate’ antisemitism, no matter how difficult the repercussions are.

Einstein, that most academic of academics, the man to whom the word genius is most attributed to, knew then what was at stake: “the world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it,” he said.

The protests are starting to mushroom in Europe now. In Ghent here in Belgium, there will be one. Doubtless chants effectively calling for the death of Jews will be heard. Will they be tolerated? We hope not. But we are not hopeful.

Rabbi Menachem Margolin is the Chairman of the European Jewish Association, that represents hundreds of Jewish communities across the continent

London Metropolitan Police police said Tuesday that as many as four unprovoked attacks against Jews were perpetrated within a matter of hours by the same suspect, who remains at large.
In the first incident reported to police, a 64-year-old Orthodox Jewish victim was on his way to synagogue before being struck by the unidentified man at around 8:30 pm on August 18. The victim was knocked to the ground, and was hospitalized with facial injuries and a broken foot.
Police said Tuesday they are linking at least two other incidents to the same man, who was dressed in traditional Muslim garb.
 
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The European Jewish Association is proud and delighted to welcome another organisation to our growing roster of partners and communities.
We have just concluded and signed a memorandum of understanding with The Kiev Jewish Community and Association of Jewish Communities in Ukraine.
We are sure that this cooperation will bring with it beautiful and important accomplishments. We look forward to working for the betterment of Dutch and European Jewry together.

If the European Union wants to welcome Jews and Muslims, it needs to make their legitimate religious practices welcome as well.
Last week, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU’s highest court, dealt a serious blow to ritual Jewish and Muslim methods of animal slaughter. The court upheld a Belgian law that requires that animals must be stunned before they are killed. Neither Jewish nor Muslim law allows for stunning in the slaughter process.
Proponents of the CJEU ruling and supporters of the Belgian law assert that the stun-first approach is more humane. Critics argue that properly executed slaughter is less painful and less traumatic for the animals. Either way, the ruling is a serious setback for religious freedom in Europe. And it isn’t clear whether the ruling would also prohibit the importation of slaughtered meat that has not observed the stun-first requirement.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, president of the Conference of European Rabbis, urged reconsideration. “Europe needs to reflect on the type of continent it wants to be. If values like freedom of religion and true diversity are integral, then the current system of law does not reflect that and needs to be urgently reviewed,” he said.
According to the CJEU, its ruling actually protects religious practices and doesn’t prohibit any religious observance. It argued that the ruling permitted religious practices since it “allow[s] a fair balance to be struck between the importance attached to animal welfare and the freedom of Jewish and Muslim believers to manifest their religion.”
That superficial analysis by the CJEU is remarkably naive and misinformed, since it improperly assumes that religious slaughter can be performed on a stunned animal. It cannot. And, besides, Jews and Muslims don’t want to “manifest” their religion — they want the freedom to practice their religions.
Two distinct elements in European society are promoting the ban on ritual slaughter. Opponents on the left are concerned about animal welfare, and see ritual slaughter as inhumane. Opponents on the far right are ultranationalists, who see Jewish and Muslim practices as alien imports to Christian Europe. Strange bedfellows, indeed. But through their issue alliance, opposition to ritual slaughter has taken on a life of its own, without regard to the sensibilities of Jews and Muslims.
According to Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the Brussels-based European Jewish Association, had Belgium’s parliament “engaged properly with Jewish community officials before banning the practice, some satisfactory solutions could have been found, as has been the case in the Netherlands and elsewhere, because the method of slaughter is not crueler or [more] painful to animals than other methods.” But no such effort was made.
Not every Jew in Europe eats kosher meat. But the availability of kosher food is one of the markers of a thriving Jewish life. In a pluralistic society, every effort must be made to enable such religious observances. If the European Union wants to welcome Jews and Muslims, it needs to make their legitimate religious practices welcome as well.
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