Not only is antisemitism in Europe nothing new, it tends to stand out as constant in European history. Blaming Muslim immigrants for antisemitism, as if Europe was clean of this sin, is nonsensical.
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On June 21st, 1995, a European Parliament member by the name of Jean-Marie Le Pen (if that name sounds familiar, don’t worry we’ll get back to that) was arrested for attacking the Algerian Jewish singer Patrick Bruel. This one event describes the career of Le Pen quite well, going from one controversy to another usually involving his hatred of other races or especially the Jews.
According to Unherd author Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, Le Pen was actually a Middle Easterner this entire time. Somebody call Dinesh D’Souza.
Let’s get the obvious fact out of the way: despite her recent article, Moutet endorsed Jean’s daughter Marie for President of France in 2017.
In fact, here’s how she wrote about Le Pen in the pages of The New York Post (of which Sohrab Ahmari is the op-ed editor of) back in 2018:
“Safe in gentrified neighborhoods, [the left] welcome ‘diversity’ and see themselves as morally superior. They welcomed a president in their own image, especially as he faced the National Front’s Marine Le Pen, the perfect foil, in last year’s election.”
Here is what Moutet writes in 2020:
“Since the 1990s, as satellite Arab channels, and later the internet, started spreading the anti-Semitic propaganda that’s the norm in the Middle East, the French state was slow in acknowledging the existence of a problem, and even slower in responding. (One rare exception was the 2004 banning of the Hezbollah-financed Lebanese Al-Manar channel, where, among many comparable offerings, one 12-episode series followed a complicated plot culminating in Jews slaughtering the gentile children they’d kidnapped to make Matzo bread for Passover).”
I should note, this story ran by Al-Manar is no worse than some of the comments made by commentator David Icke. (The man who once said Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton was turned on by genital mutilation). David Icke, by the way, was born in Leicester, England and has lived there his entire life. He is also not a Muslim.
Quite possibly the most famous Holocaust Denier world-wide is the fake historian David Irving. (Who once said he wanted the remove the “slime” from the name of Adolf Hitler) Irving has also lived in England his entire life and is in no way a Muslim.
Irving began his Holocaust denial in 1988 when he read the Leuchter Report. That same year Irving published Churchill’s War, which many say started his career as a pro-Nazi commentator. The Leuchter Report was written up by an American named Fred Leuchter and was commissioned by a German named Ernst Zundel. Once again, neither of them are Muslim or from the Middle East.
I think you guys get my point. The truth is, the worst antisemitic crimes in Europe did not come from out of nowhere. They are part of a large trend of Jewish hatred in Europe that has existed for many thousand years. The 1290 Edict Of Expulsion was not because of Islamic control over England, it’s because Europe has spent its history hating the Jews.
To put it simply, what Moutet calls Islamic rule is more or less just business as usual. Should this be addressed? Of course, as President Macron has done through making Anti-Zionism legally the same as all other forms of antisemitism.
Blaming Muslims for antisemitism in Europe is not only historically nonsensical, it is another form of bigotry. A handful of studies out of Europe have found that antisemitism is on the rise among Christians. Mind you, as long as nobody is wearing a turban people like her will never notice.
To put it simply, the solution of people like her is to use one form of bigotry to stop another. Even if it did work, it would be morally questionable. Considering it won’t, I can only consider it evil.
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