Take a look at the state of play from the vantage points as far apart as Scandinavia, the USA, and inside the Middle East itself.
A Finnish blogger, KGS of Tundra Tabloids, brings this story of how Church organizations in Finland and Sweden routinely engage in spine-chillingly anti-Semitic trips that are funded partly by the Church and partly by the State. It is a synthesis of religion and state apparatus pursuing an overtly anti-Israel agenda that gives considerable pause for thought.
In the USA, New York Post columnist Ralph Peters writes about how the US under Barack Hussein Obama is openly undermining the Jewish state in favour of radical Islamist regimes spanning the entire Middle East. Obama’s chronic inability to recognise Israeli anxieties is matched only by his overwhelming desire to anticipate whatever the Arab states want – and to pressure the Jewish state into feeding Arab rejectionist intransigence. Obama’s approach marks a social disparity with a worrying religious echo and unpleasant racist undertones.
On the subject of racism, in Egypt, an Israeli reporter was arrested by the military as he tried to cross the border into Israel together with Muslim African refugees who often make the hazardous journey across several Muslim countries to seek asylum in the world’s only Jewish nation. The reporter, Yotam Feldman, wanted to record the plight of the African asylum-seekers from their on-the-spot perspective. He recounts that he was treated reasonably well by the Egyptian authorities but testified to the far worse fate of the black Africans who he says are routinely mistreated in the Muslim state of Egypt, noting that the Egyptians make a distinction in their treatment of white people and their treatment of Africans.
It is remarkable that in a world characterised by economic tailspin, major environmental concerns, massive social inequalities, substantial political corruption and other crises of enormous weight, there is such corrosive preoccupation with the Jewish state in countries as far apart as the US and Finland, at the same time as these very same countries turn a blind eye to the vicious injustices perpetrated by Muslims on other Muslims, as testified by a journalist in Egypt.
How does one explain this imbalance without using the words “anti” and “Semitism”?
But it’s not all gloom, doom and anti-Semitism. For light comic relief, there’s always that stalwart of manic humour, the United Nations. As Barry Rubin reports with regard to the UN-Habitat organisation, “granting an award to the close friend of those who murdered the man it’s named after, a backer of those who he fought against, and who is aiding those seeking to take over his country definitely qualifies for being granted our own award for ironic and disgraceful behavior”.
Read it and weep.