With Middle East policies heating up, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that Israel is becoming increasingly isolated among its neighbors.
While this may be the case, it's not so much foreign policy that drives these tensions. Anti Semitism, yes the pure anti Jewish kind, is alive and well across the Arab World. As Jews we know anti Semitism goes back hundreds of years. It's laced into the story of the Jewish people across generations.
But today, anti Semtism hides behind anti Zionisim, denying the Jewish people their right to their own state. The revolutions and changes in the Middle East, make a fertile ground for such anti semitic notions to thrive on.
6 months ago Giyus.org interviewed Dr. Webman on the simmering anti Semitism in the Arab world. Too often we forget that nearly 850,000 Jews from regions as far from Palestine as Morocco, Yemen, and Iran fled or were expelled—often brutally and without property—from their historical lands following Israel’s creation in 1948. For those countries neighboring Israel in particular, hatred of Israel earned the legitimacy of the state, and anti-Semitism became an accepted, government-sanctioned ideology in a sea of ideologies barred by oppressive states.
Or as writes today, Eric T. Justin in the Harvard Crimson, the exaggerated attention given to Israel, particularly in the form of conspiracy theories, remains the clearest evidence of anti-Semitism.
If you want to fight hate you first must acknowledge it exist. Anti Semitism in the Arab world is alive and well - we might as well put it out in the open so we can deal with it.
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