Nicht nur das iranische Fernsehen verbreitet das Gerücht, dass die Juden hinter dem Mord von Alexandria stecken. In ganz alltäglichen Facebook-Debatten trifft man auf Menschen, die eben noch völlig normal schienen und plötzlich anfangen, herzumzuspekulieren, „wem denn bitte schön dieser Anschlag nützt“. Antwort, für diese Sorte Leute offensichtlich: Israel! (Ich habe erstmals jemanden auf Facebook entfreundet, weil er mit solchem Irrsinn kam…)
Aus diesem Anlass empfehle ich eine Rede des britischen Oberrabiners Lord Jonathan Sacks vom letzten Sommer, in der Rabbi Sacks über die vier Mutationen des Judenhasses spricht. Wenn manche Leute von einer Debatte über ein mutmassliches Al-Kaida-Attentat in Alexandria in zwei, drei Schritten schnurstracks bei Israel landen, dann ist offensichtlich, wie aktuelle die Überlegungen zur neuen Mutation des antiisraelisch/antizionistisch drapierten Antisemitismus sind:
We are living through the fourth mutation. It differs from the others in various respects. Number one: the new antisemitism, unlike the old, is not directed against Jews as individuals. It is directed at Jews as a nation with their own state. It is directed primarily against the state of Israel, but it gets all Jews as presumptively Zionist, hence imperialistic, and usurpers and all the rest of it. And all the medieval myths have been recycled; it was Jews who were responsible for 9/11, it was Israel who was responsible for the tsunami, with nuclear underwater testing by Israel. What, you didn’t know this? I always wonder, have they blamed us for the oil spill yet? Just wait, be patient; they’re working on it. So that is the first characteristic which didn’t exist before, because Jews, as a nation state in their own land, didn’t exist before. In other words we have at least 82 Christian nations as part of the United Nations, there are 56 Islamic states, there is only one Jewish state but that, for many people, is one too many. It is far too big – what do the Jews need all that land for? There’s a lovely park in South Africa, with all the lions and giraffes, called Kruger National Park, it’s a really lovely park. The state of Israel is smaller than the Kruger National Park, but it’s too big. So we now have this new form of anti-Zionism about which I think the sharpest comment was made by Amos Oz; he said that in the 1930s, antisemites stood up and sent Jews to Palestine. Today they stand up and say ‘Jews out of Palestine’. They don’t want us to be here, they don’t want us to be there, they don’t want us to be. That is the first difference.
Jonathan Sacks
The second difference is that whereas other forms of antisemitism, especially racial anti-semitism, were carried by national cultures so that you could ask at the time of the Dreyfus trial, is France an antisemitic country? You could ask, is Germany, is Austria, is Italy, is Britain an antisemitic country? In those days, antisemitism was carried by national cultures and so there were some antisemitic nations and there were nations that were distinctly not. But today there is no such thing as a national culture. Today antisemitism, hate and paranoia in general, but antisemitism specifically is carried by the new global media which are extremely focused and extremely targeted so that you can get major incidents of antisemitism in a country that is not antisemitic at all. If we take a slightly different look at it, the suicide bombers of 7/7 were, after all, born in Britain; they lived in Britain, they were educated in Britain, their own friends and neighbours thought that they were perfectly nice people. They didn’t know until after 7/7 and after those video testimonies were shown what deep hatred they had conceived of Britain. So it is very hard to identify and it’s very easy to become very paranoid. America thinks this about Britain: that Britain is an antisemitic country. They don’t realise that there is no such thing any more as antisemitism as a phenomenon of national cultures unless politician decides to make that part of the public discourse of politics. When that happens, as has happened very recently in the case of Turkey, we’re in a very dangerous situation. But the new antisemitism, by and large, is not conveyed like the old.
And finally the legitimisation of it. We often fail to realise that it is not easy to justify hating people, it really isn’t. It is very easy to move people to hate but it is very hard to make them feel that they are justified in hating. And therefore antisemitism has always had to be legitimated by the supreme source of moral authority in a culture at any given time. And what was the supreme source of moral authority in Europe in the Middle Ages? The church, religion. And therefore antisemitism in the Middle Ages was religious. You could not justify hatred on religious grounds in the post-Enlightenment emancipated Europe of the 19th century.
What was the highest authority in Europe in the 19th century? The answer was science. Science was the new glittering paradigm and therefore you will find that 19th century and early 20th century antisemitism was legitimated by two, what we now know to be, pseudo-sciences. Number one: the so-called scientific study of race and number two: the so-called science known as social Darwinism. The idea that, just as in nature, so in society, the strong survive by eliminating the weak.
Today science is no longer the highest authority because, although it has given us unprecedented powers, among those powers is the power to destroy life on earth. So what is the supreme moral authority today? The supreme moral authority since the Holocaust, since the United Nations Universal Declaration in 1948, is human rights. Therefore, if you are going to justify antisemitism, it will have to be by reference to human rights. And that is why in 2001 at Durban, Israel was accused by the human rights NGOs of the five cardinal sins against human rights: racism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, attempted genocide and crimes against humanity. And those are the three things that make the new antisemitism different from the old.
