Reality Check

Mark Steyn:

The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without an ability to adapt. Jews are hated for what they are – so, at any moment in history, whatever they are is what they’re hated for. For centuries in Europe, they were hated for being rootless cosmopolitan types. Now there are no rootless European Jews to hate, so they’re hated for being an illegitimate Middle Eastern nation-state. If the Zionist Entity were destroyed and the survivors forced to become perpetual cruise-line stewards plying the Caribbean, they’d be hated for that, too. The only difference now is that Jew-hatred is resurgent despite the full knowledge of where it ended up 60 years ago. Today, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad openly urge the destruction of the Jews, and moderate Muslim leaders sit silently alongside them, and European media commentators take the side of the genocide-inciters, and UN bigwigs insist we negotiate with them. In the 1930s, the willingness of Europe not to see the implied end-point in those German citizenship laws left a moral stain on that continent. Seventy years on, it’s not implied, and the moral stain on us will be worse.