Dreams and delusions

Ari sends us some photos, and a Caroline Glick JPost piece which raises the question of why Israelis want to join the increasingly antisemitic European Union. Is it because Israel has Arabia on its other flank? Or do we have to look for answers in the kind of story recounted by David Goldman, two posts below?

Israelis are wild about Europe. A poll carried out by the Konrad Adenauer Foundation last month showed that a whopping 69 percent of Israelis, and 76% of Israeli Jews, would like for Israel to join the European Union. Sixty percent of Israelis have a favorable view of the EU.

This poll's most obvious message is that as far as Europe is concerned, Israelis suffer from unrequited love. A 2003 Pew survey of 15 EU countries showed that 59% of Europeans consider Israel the greatest threat to world peace. A poll taken in Germany the following year showed that 68% of Germans believe that Israel is pursuing a war of extermination against the Palestinians and 51% said that there is no difference in principle between Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and German treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.

And it isn't simply Israel that they hate. They don't like Jews very much either. In an empirical study published in 2006, Professors Edward Kaplan and Charles Small of Yale University demonstrated a direct link between hatred for Jews and extreme anti-Israel positions. A recent poll bears out the fact that levels of hostility toward Israel rise with levels of anti-Semitism.

[...]
According to a 2008 Pew survey, anti-Semitic feelings in five EU countries - Spain, Britain, France, Germany and Poland - rose nearly 50% between 2005 and 2008. Whereas in 2005, some 21% of people polled acknowledged they harbor negative feelings toward Jews, by last year the proportion of self-proclaimed anti-Semites in these countries had risen to 30%. In Spain levels of anti-Semitism more than doubled, from 21% in 2005 to 46% in 2008.

Not surprisingly, increased hatred of Jews has been accompanied by increased violence against Jews. Just last week, for instance, three men assaulted Israel's ambassador in Spain Rafi Shotz as he and his wife walked home from a soccer game. They followed after him and called out, "dirty Jew," "Jew bastard," and "Jew murderer." A crowd witnessed the assault, but no one rose to their defense.

Shotz was lucky. As Israel's ambassador he had two policemen escorting him and so he was not physically threatened. The same was not the fate of Holocaust survivors who assembled at Mauthausen death camp in Austria last week to commemorate the 64th anniversary of the camp's liberation by American forces.

As Jewish survivors of the camp where 340,000 people were murdered mourned the dead, a gang of Austrian teenagers wearing masks taunted them, screaming "Heil Hitler," and "This way for the gas!" They opened fire with plastic rifles at French Jewish survivors, wounding one in the head and another in the neck.

And Austria is not alone. From Germany to France, Belgium, Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and beyond, Jewish kindergartens and day schools, restaurants and groceries have been firebombed and vandalized. The desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues has become an almost routine occurrence. Jewish leaders from Norway to Germany to Britain to France have warned community members not to wear kippot or Stars of David in public. Rabbis have been beaten all over the continent.
[...]

There is no all-encompassing explanation for the EU's popularity in Israel. It is a function of a number of complementary causes. The most important among them is the abject failure of the Israeli media to examine European anti-Semitism and its implications for European policy toward Israel in any coherent fashion.

Rather than recognize that European anti-Semitism and its concomitant hostility toward Israel is the consequence of internal European dynamics, the Israeli media tend to cast both as a function of Israel's actions. Doing so certainly makes for neat, easily digestible news stories, but it also trivializes the situation. Moreover, by acting as though Israel's actual behavior is at all relevant to European treatment of Jews and the Jewish state, the local media effectively buy into cynical European moves to belittle the significance of anti-Jewish violence. They give credence to false European claims that the firebombing of synagogues is simply the regrettable consequence of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Then there is the issue of Israel's constant quest to end its international isolation. For many Israelis, it is tantalizing to think that we can end our international isolation by joining the EU. The EU is seen as a club of rich and cultured countries with which Israel would benefit from merging. This view again is nurtured by the media, which have failed to report on the failure of the European welfare state model.
[...]
Finally, there is the nostalgia that many Israelis feel toward the old pre-war Europe from their grandparents' stories. That long gone Europe, where young women and men would walk along the promenades in Berlin, Paris, Antwerp and Prague holding hands and eating ice cream, breathing in the air of Heinrich Heine and Franz Kafka, has been kept alive in the imaginations of generations of Israelis. Many of them work today as leading journalists, movie directors and actors. For many Israelis, then, the myth of Europe is more familiar than the real Europe.

Column One: The Europe of our dreams | Columnists | Jerusalem Post
Howard Rotberg welcomes this Glick piece, noting that

just as I have started a new series on the myth that Europe is a positive force in world history, the Jerusalem Post's great columnist Caroline Glick writes a superb column on Europe's anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, and why Europhiles in Israel must re-assess their attitudes

Belgians under siege

Tenants are under siege in their apartments near Brussels, unable to leave after nightfall, without risking violence and robbery. This news according to an investigation by French news site dhnet, reveals the extent to which post-Christian Western Europe starts to decay, and rot. How to turn things around, when...

The inhabitants of 216 apartments of a Saint-Gilles complex are taken hostage by a gang of 41 youths who vandalize everything! (with thanks to BafWeb for their highlighting this story; my humble translation of the original french article)

For several weeks, a neighborhood in Saint-Gilles has been considered a no-go zone. A hell on earth. A place where people no longer dare to leave their homes after a certain hour. An area where assaults, insults, incivilities or other degradations occur daily. This is Jacques Franck square, in Saint-Gilles.
...

"15 years ago, we didn't have any problems. Everything has happened very gradually. And then, since last June, horror. In fact, it's tied into the shifting of the [crime scene?]. Since the police have secured Bethlehem place, the juvenile delinquents have come all this way to the two Towers" [says the assistant director of the apartment complex.] "All this because of a gang of youths who squat in the entryways of the two buildings." They squat, vandalize and act in such a way that the residents no longer dare leave without being accompanied by security agents. The youngest [in the gang] is 10 years old, the oldest barely 15.
...

An accompanying article offers an eye-witness account from "Anne", long-time resident in the apartment building:

..."But I want to assure you that I am scared. I can no longer go out. They [the youths] consider me a racist. If I leave the building alone, they follow me into the street. They have thrown stones at me!" Stephane, the assistant director, confirms [the story]. He adds also that since then, he has taken away all the stones that used to be found at the base of the two towers!

In watching the French crime news videos that are all over dailymotion and youtube, one quickly gets the impression that an entire generation of teenagers living in certain regions belong behind bars. Arrests of dozens of kids at one time are not that rare. This post concerns a story out of Belgium, not France, to be sure; yet are the conditions really all that different..? These articles that I've translated above go on to mention that all forty of this particular gang of kids have been painstakingly identified, one by one, and that the whole rotten bunch of them will soon be arrested, and charged. These kids, however, are only one gang. Are there other gangs of forty other kids occupying the vestibules of other nearby buildings in the neighborhood? Is there anyone below the age of 20 in that community who goes against the tide, and does not belong in prison?

You could arrest them, all of them, every single teenage thug; but then what? At some point you have to let them go; what happens then... a change of heart as they become an adult thug?

What could possibly reduce the militant nihilism of these young kids, I ask myself as I read these stories... A hard slap to the head? That's probably what they get at home already. Or what they serve to each other as tokens of friendship. How to change their behavior, without first changing their heart? How to steer these kids away from their savage state, converting them into productive (or at least less destructive) contributors to their community?

Unfortunately, post-Christian Europe won't be receptive to my hope of reducing recidivism through religious conversion, convinced as the continent's ruling class are that their society's worship of the secular will somehow, in some way, inspire the current generation of belgian "youths" to live as people, and not animals.

Maybe it's time that the atheistic left currently directing the european enterprise swallow some pride, and accept what for them, surely, must be the lesser of evils. There was a time when being poor was not an automatic trigger for being violent, rapacious, and sadistic. There was a time, not so long ago, when poor people struggled to live self-disciplined lives worth living, guided as they were by the teachings of their church. People can live with the inevitable disappointments that are part of the human experience, and remain humane, if they have an effective model to follow.

Europe, let some committed Christian missionaries work with the youth, turn prisons into penitentiaries, so that youthful prisoners can become penitent, that is, repentant of their past sins.

Would it make things any worse...? What have you got to lose...?

Who's being naive here: me, or you?

UPDATE: More on Belgian urban violence here.