I’ve long said that the importing of Muslim Jew haters into Europe is supercharging the domestic variety into a steady toxic stew. Here in Finland, I see that happening in the Finnish blogosphere and in social media. Also, with the increase of Muslims, the Finnish Left is going to become more emboldened than ever before in mounting more in your face anti-Israel projects.
Malia and the brown shirts
The recent election of Malia Bouttaia as the president of the National Union of Students (NUS) in the UK is another example of the ascendancy of the strange-bedfellows Leftist-Muslim axis in academia. In February Alex Chalmers, the Oxford University Labour club chairman, resigned after the Labour club endorsed the campus Apartheid Week anti-Israel propaganda protests. Citing prejudiced anti-Jewish expression rampant among Labour club members, Chalmers preferred to quit rather than continue to lead a group of bigots.
It is all about bigotry and not much else. There is a tidy convergence of British prejudice against Jews and Muslim prejudice against Jews. There is a long history of antisemitism in Britain, including the medieval invention of the blood libel and the first expulsion of Jews in Europe. Much more recently, the admiration of British royals for the Nazis was a demonstration of ingrained British bigotry. The English homegrown fascists in that era were led by aristocrat Oswald Moseley. His marriage to Diana Mitford took place at the home of Joseph Goebbels and was attended by Hitler. This was a movement not of the rabble but of the Oxbridge-attending upper classes.
Today the tradition continues. According to a Guardian article published in January of last year:
“Nearly half of the British population agreed with one of four antisemitic statements presented to them according to a new poll, which found that one in eight of those surveyed believe that Jewish people use the Holocaust as a means of gaining sympathy.”
Being a Leftist does not mean you hold liberal views about Jews and Israel. In fact the contrary is true. If you are a leftist, you can blame the ills of the Palestinians on the Jews. Not only that, but you can openly call for terror and violence to be used against Israelis as legitimate “resistance”. That is exactly what Malia Bouttaia has done and refuses to retract.
In her own words Bouttaia stated that in “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets…resistance is presented as an act of terrorism”. In other words, acts of violence against innocent civilians are legitimate, Jews/Israelis are not. When Bouttaia advocates violence against Israelis, she is defending and advocating the use of children in a bloody and cynical propaganda ploy. These acts, while real and with real consequences, do nothing to advance peace or even Palestinian independence. They are used instead to portray Israelis as inhumane for defending citizens against attackers wielding guns, knives, and bombs.
It is no wonder that Bouttaia holds these opinions. The indigenous Brits are bested in bigotry by the immigrant Muslim population. According to a 2015 Anti-Defamation League survey, 54% of Muslims in the UK hold anti-Semitic views.
As a source of Muslim prejudice, Koranic antisemitism is well documented, but there is also a key point of convergence in the blood libel accusations now popular in the Muslim world. The blood libel, although Christian in origin, has become a staple of anti-Israel propaganda and Muslim bigotry, whether as a defamation of Judaism or as a political metaphor. The Egyptians even ran a “documentary” series of the bogus Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with a gory enactment of a boy slaughtered by “Jews”. The fact that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority encourage their own children to martyr themselves is disregarded by those who cry crocodile tears over knife-wielding teens killed by their would-be victims.
What is ironic, though, is that Bouttaia, who is an Algerian immigrant, classes herself as “black”. It is a handy way of both recruiting blacks to the Islamic anti-Zionist cause, while making critics who disagree with her “racist”. Back home in North Africa, however, she would be classed as an Arab, not a black. In fact, in a number of conflicts in Africa, northerly Arabs and Muslims are busy oppressing Christian and native animist cultures. However, the delight of anti-Semitic leftist bigots in having someone who is female, Muslim and “black” advocating against Jews precludes anyone pointing out that Bouttaia actually owns only one out of three downtrodden labels—if you look historically at Islamic eradication of local cultures. Since she obviously opts out of the burqa, the downtrodden female aspect is also diminished. All in all, hypocrisy trumps reality.
Dr. Simcha Epstein of SICSA, noted how French liberals—originally Philosemites who opposed the French nationalist prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus—ended up siding with and abetting the Nazis in Vichy France. As pacifists, they preferred to join the Nazis rather than fight them. That is what is happening in the UK today. Alleged “liberals” are engaged in extreme verbal aggression against Israel and the Jews. At the same time British leftists are supporting those who openly advocate violence. In the end, the failure to eradicate Islamic imperialism now will bring a larger conflict in the future as we are already seeing. Israel and the Jews are the litmus test for how Western civilization will handle the biggest threat to its existence, and the UK left is failing that test badly.
