Is Labor Party Election Platform Only Anti-Israeli or Also Anti-Semitic? (Bad News From the Netherlands blog)
The Dutch Parliamentary elections will take place on Wednesday 9 June. The platform of the Dutch Labor party (PVDA) is called “Everybody Counts”. The section on international affairs is entitled “The Netherlands in a Better World”. In it is a section on areas of instability in the world. It mentions in one line two areas of Africa.
The only other issue named is the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, which gets 25 lines. It makes strong demands almost exclusively on Israel, recommending EU pressure on it to conform with these demands, with a few minor ones on the Palestinians. No mention is made of the promotion of genocide of Jews in the Charter of the largest Palestinian party, Hamas nor of the glorification of murderers of civilians by the Palestinian Authority.
No mention is made in the program of the war in Afghanistan, in which the Labor party was the main proponent of withdrawal of all Dutch involvement before the NATO mission was completed. The Labor party leader is Job Cohen the former mayor of Amsterdam, whose grandparents on his father’s side were murdered in the Holocaust.
Click here for the (in Dutch) PVDA party platform.
From the comment box:
Today there seems to be quite a lot of academical debate on the issue of so-called New Antisemitism. The main questions asked revolve around1) is new antisemitism actually ‘new’ and distinct from traditionalantisemitism?2)can Antizionism and Antisemitism really be considered as two seperate issues ?In my mind, the answer to both questions is de facto ‘No’. Which I already addressed earlier on, on the ‘Ingrid from Norway’ debate.Not only am I convinced of this myself, there are actually Jews who independently came to the same conclusion well before I ‘arrived’ there.Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, considers the concept “new antisemitism” to be false, since it is in fact old antisemitism that remains latent and recurs whenever it is triggered. In his view, the current trigger is the Israeli situation, and if a compromise were achieved there antisemitism would decline but not disappear.Dina Porat, professor at Tel Aviv University says that, while in principle there is no new antisemitism, we can speak of antisemitism in a new envelope. Otherwise Porat speaks of a new and violent form of antisemitism in Western Europe starting from after the Second Intifada.Howard Jacobson, a British novelist and journalist, calls this phenomenon “Jew-hating pure and simple, the Jew-hating which many of us have always suspected was the only explanation for the disgust that contorts and disfigures faces when the mere word Israel crops up in conversation”Which in my mind is quite simply put, “more than accurate”.
