Since the turn of the twenty-first century, remembering the Holocaust and fighting against anti-Semitism have emerged as the connected centerpieces of European identity. In 2000, European leaders signed the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust and pledged to “remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity's common aspiration to mutual understanding and justice.”Footnote 1 Members also promised to “uphold the terrible truth of the Holocaust against those who deny it.”Footnote 2 Three years later, the same European leaders committed to “intensify efforts to combat antisemitism in all its manifestations.” They declared that anti-Semitism “has assumed new forms and expressions, which … pose a threat to democracy, the values of civilization and therefore, to overall security in the OSCE region and beyond” (Berlin Declaration Reference Declaration2004).
German historian Aledia Assmann's words attest to the deservedly celebratory nature with which this development was received in Germany: “Fifty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz, there was agreement that the murder of six million European Jews should become a common memory, and, in turn, that this memory should inform the values of a European society and serve as a reminder of the obligation to protect the rights of minorities” (Reference Assmann2007: 13). In this article I focus on the flip side of this otherwise deeply meaningful development. Despite Assmann's assessment that embracing Holocaust memory serves as a “reminder of the obligation to protect the rights of minorities,” I show how, in practice, the interconnected commitments of European leaders to remember the Holocaust and fight anti-Semitism became one of the grounds for legitimizing racialization of immigrants, and specifically Muslims, by singling them out as the main contemporary anti-Semites.
In Germany, researchers consistently find that 25–27 percent of the population hold anti-Semitic prejudicesFootnote 3 (and 50 percent anti-Muslim ones). According to annual police reports, right-wing Germans commit more than 90 percent of the hundreds of anti-Semitic crimes there, most of them directed against Jewish cemeteries and buildings. Since the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000, and every time the conflict between Israel and Palestinians has intensified, many Muslim Europeans, along with non-Muslim activists, have taken part in anti-Zionist demonstrations and many have crossed the line toward anti-Semitism. To date, however, no study has proven that Muslim-background Germans are significantly more anti-Semitic than non-Muslim Germans. The most comprehensive study to date shows that 29 percent of Muslims in Western Europe hold anti-Semitic prejudices. Although not a figure to be dismissed by any standards, it is important to note that it is only 2 points higher than the German average (27 percent) and much lower than the countries of origin in the Middle East and North Africa (74 percent) (Anti-Defamation League 2014). In other words, the prejudices European Muslims hold show that in terms of their values they are part and parcel of the European society in which they live, even when they are not recognized as such. While reports produced by the German government recognize the lack of evidence for higher rates of anti-Semitism among Muslims, the new wave of the fight against anti-Semitism is mostly focused on Muslims. Government-issued reports, including “Anti-Semitism in Germany,” and millions of Euros allocated to combat anti-Semitism almost exclusively target Muslims.
I begin this article with a discussion of a decade-and-a-half-long effort dedicated to defining the uniqueness of anti-Semitism and especially its difference from anti-Muslim racism. I show how this effort went hand in hand with singling out Muslims as the main carriers of anti-Semitism in Germany and throughout Europe. I examine government-issued reports and education programs to demonstrate how this campaign depicts Muslims as outsiders to German society, evaluates their anti-Semitism as more dangerous than that of right-wing German nationals, and attributes to them culturally transmitted psychopathologies that make different Muslim nations prone to anti-Semitism. Through such mechanisms, the new wave of the struggle against anti-Semitism depicts a new Europe, and in particular a new Germany, that has fully liberated itself from any anti-democratic tendencies that survived from its Nazi past; locates anti-Semitism as a problem located outside Europe; and obscures connections between anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim racism, both of which are active forces in mainstream German society.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF “MUSLIM ANTI-SEMITISM”
After 2000, the concept of Muslim anti-Semitism became a public concern not only in Germany, but throughout Europe and for that matter in the United States. The failure of the Oslo Peace Accords led to the Second Intifada in Palestinian territories and mobilized sympathizers throughout Europe in protests against Israel that had anti-Semitic overtones, and at times were outright anti-Semitic. One reaction was an alarmist discourse that accused Muslims of a new anti-Semitism (Taguieff Reference Taguieff and Camiller2004).Footnote 4 European leaders, who a couple of years before had signed the Stockholm Declaration, met in Vienna in 2003 for a first Europe-wide meeting committed to fighting anti-Semitism and focusing on its uniqueness. More than 450 representatives from fifty-five OSCE member states participated, to address that “anti-Semitism is surging in the world to an extent unprecedented since the end of World War II.”Footnote 5 Participants also stressed that this anti-Semitism was new—“Anti-Semitism in Europe today is not a history lesson, but a current event”—and that it had a different source: “At the root of [today's] anti-Jewish efforts is the same kind of extremist [i.e., Islamist] thinking that lies behind the international terrorism that is threatening our civilization.”Footnote 6 Stated more obviously, their concern was “anti-Semitism coming out of the Arab and Islamic world.”Footnote 7 The Vienna meeting was followed up with one in Berlin in 2004 at which participants declared that the meeting represented “an end to European denial of anti-Semitism.” There, European governments agreed to allocate funds to combat this “new” form of anti-Semitism, which they believed was being brought to Europe “in the suitcases” (to use a popular metaphor) of newcomers, namely immigrants from Muslim-majority countries.
Two major developments split political actors regarding what stance to take regarding the Second Intifada, as well as rising anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, and these formed the background of the 2003 and 2004 meetings. The first was the unfortunate failure of the 2001 United Nations “World Conference against Racism” in Durban, South Africa, due mainly to disagreement as to how to react to the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During that conference, Arab countries drafted a resolution criticizing Israel and likening Zionism to racism. It accused Israel of being a “racist apartheid state” and committing “crimes against humanity” including “genocide and ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians.Footnote 8 In response, Israeli and U.S. representatives walked out of the meetings and European leaders refused to sign the resolution.Footnote 9 Another controversy at the UN conference surrounded the issue of slavery. A group of African countries asked for an apology and reparations from all countries that had been involved in slavery, based on the same model by which payments were given to Jewish survivors and offspring of victims of the Holocaust. The United States from the start showed its reluctance to engage this topic by minimizing its representation at the conference and its contributions to it (Maran Reference Maran2002). The European countries agreed to increase aid to Africa, but refused to consider reparations. Both events led to a split between the affluent, white global North and the poor, brown and black South in the ways in which they approach issues of racism and discrimination.
The recent European commitment to intensify the fight against anti-Semitism, and the split at the UN meeting between Western countries and Middle Eastern and African countries, led the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to organize the aforementioned Vienna conference specifically focused on anti-Semitism. The OSCE is a product of the 1975 Helsinki process, which aimed to promote human rights and democracy in Cold War Europe. In a unified Europe, the OSCE played the leading role in fighting anti-Semitism, first in the Baltic counties and Central Europe and then in Western Europe. The fifty-five participating nations include European countries, the successor states of the Soviet Union, the United States, and Canada. The 2003 Vienna Conference is significant for being the first international attempt to focus uniquely on anti-Semitism. Jewish delegates to a 2003 Warsaw meeting of the OSCE held in preparation for the Vienna Conference argued that European states had only recently grasped that anti-Semitism was a “mutating virus that comes from different and new directions.” They said that some Jewish communities felt threatened less by the racist far right than by the “spillover of tensions from the Middle East” (Whine Reference Whine2004). Conference participants defined the distinguishable qualities of anti-Semitism as conspiracy theories, Holocaust denial, anti-Zionism, and belief in the imagined power of the Jews (Germany Reference Germany2011: 137).
Press releases from the Vienna meeting show how fighting anti-Semitism was defined as a central value of the recently enlarged Europe. In his opening speech, the Bulgarian foreign minister and future chairman of the OSCE Solomon Isaac Passy said, “We understand that ‘zero tolerance’ to any form of intolerance, including anti-Semitism is a key part of our role in international relations and of our share in the [European] integration processes.” He added that it was through international institutions such as the OSCE that the “strong common will of mankind [worked to] bring an end, once and for all, to the tragic and powerful legacy of World War II and the Cold War. The common commitment is the basis of integration in the Euro-Atlantic area and its only possible future. Anti-Semitism is not part of this future” (20 June 2003 press release).
A following year, the German government organized a follow-up conference in Berlin that also focused on anti-Semitism. Opening speakers pointed the finger at Muslim immigrants. For example, the Anti-Defamation League's Director Abraham Foxman said, “Islamist campaigns within the Muslim world and Europe have moved the anti-Jewish beliefs within Islam from the fringes, where they historically resided, closer to the center” (Anti-Defamation League 2004). The Berlin Conference was preceded by a workshop organized by the American Jewish Committee that focused on education to combat anti-Semitism. Workshop participants asserted that Holocaust education is not fit for the purpose and that teaching must focus on different events; educators had to confront anti-Semitism among Muslim communities and anti-Semitic forms of Israel critique (Whine Reference Whine2004). The Berlin declaration called the new version of anti-Semitism a threat to democracy, civilized values, and security in the OSCE region (Germany Reference Germany2011: 136–37). By the way it defines new anti-Semitism as antithetical to democracy, civilized values, and interests of the OSCE region, this declaration reveals that the issue in question is seen as exterior to the Western civilization to which the majority of OSCE countries belong. It is noteworthy that in Vienna and in Berlin, birthplace of the worst modern form of anti-Semitism, immigrants were accused of bringing anti-Semitism to a Europe imagined to be otherwise free of it. Anti-Semitism was now seen as the mindset of an external enemy that threatened European civilization and security. This “new” mindset attributed to immigrants was distinguished from all other forms of xenophobia, racism, and discrimination common in contemporary Europe and made these seem insignificant as threats to democracy, civilization, or security.
Simultaneously with the Berlin declaration, a plea to combat the new/Muslim anti-Semitic wave was launched. Already in 2002 and 2003, the German Ministry of the Family had funded the Center for Democratic Culture in Berlin to write a report about anti-Semitism, homophobia, and gender discrimination among Muslim immigrants. In 2002, the Taskforce Education on Anti-Semitism was formed as a network of experts, “due to the insight that previous educational approaches regarding topics like racism, and methods—in the tradition of general Human Rights education—did not do justice to the specific challenges in the field of anti-Semitism and the development of possible educational actions against it.”Footnote 10 In 2004, the Anti-Semitism Research Center in Berlin wrote a report pointing to residents with Muslim backgrounds as responsible for current expressions of anti-Semitism in Germany (Bunzl Reference Bunzl2005). Between 2002 and 2005, an organization called Bildungs Bausteine gegen anti-Semitismus developed material to combat anti-Semitism among Muslims with funding from the German federal government's Entimon program. In 2003, the Kreuzberger Initiative gegen Anti-Semitismus (KIgA), a civil society initiative, was established, and then in 2004 Amira—Anti-Semitismus im Kontext von Migration und Rassismus—was initiated specifically to combat anti-Semitism in Muslim communities. KIgA identifies its agenda as “pedagogical work with Arabic, Turkish, and Moslem youth” and more particularly to develop models for curricular and extracurricular education, such as for afterschool programs.Footnote 11 Amira similarly defines its focus as “the anti-Semitism of youth migrants whose families come from Muslim countries” and developing projects that engage youth outside the school.Footnote 12 Other existing organizations such as Antonio Amadeus Foundation, the American Jewish Committee, and many smaller groups began implementing programs to combat anti-Semitism among Muslims and received money from international, federal, and local sources newly earmarked for the issue. Based on his analysis of public funding for programs against anti-Semitism, Frank Gruel (Reference Greuel, Greuel and Glaser2012) states that in the 2000s anti-Semitism training for mainstream German youth was reduced dramatically and replaced by projects for Muslims. For example, the organization that established Amira, the Association for Democratic Culture in Berlin, established in 2003, originally aimed to combat right-wing extremism among East German youth, but by 2007 it had narrowed this to only Muslim youth. Representatives of many other, smaller, youth-based social work organizations told me that they had similarly changed from targeting East Germans in the 1990s to Muslims in the 2000s, following shifting funding sources.
In 2006, the German Ministry of the Family established an organization called Vielfalt tut gut: Jugend for Vielfalt, Toleranz und Demokratie (Diversity does good: youth for diversity, tolerance and democracy) with an annual budget of 19 million euros.Footnote 13 The organization calls for applications that will develop educational projects among “children and youth in danger of right-extremism” and “migrants” in order to strengthen democracy and examine “historical” and “contemporary” forms of anti-Semitism.Footnote 14 The official language itself makes it clear that “children and youth in danger of right extremism,” meaning East German youth, are seen as prone to “historical” anti-Semitism, while “migrants,” meaning Muslims, are predisposed to “contemporary” anti-Semitism.Footnote 15 By distinguishing between anti-Semitisms of locals and immigrants in temporal terms, the ministry gestures toward hierarchizing them in terms of the urgency of the threat they pose to society. Calling anti-Semitism committed by right-wing and hence non-immigrant residents of Germany “historical” indicates that the 90 percent of the anti-Semitic crimes this group commits are to be perceived as anachronistic, outmoded historical errors. Calling anti-Semitism among immigrants (most always meaning only Muslims) “contemporary” points to an urgent danger it poses for the present and the future, and the need to find new ways to deal with it.
The new focus on the uniqueness of anti-Semitism and its independence from all other racisms has had ramifications in scholarship as well. It is significant that the greatest effort was directed at separating anti-Semitism, not from all other forms of discrimination, but specifically from anti-Muslim hatred, or Islamophobia. Two German scholars based at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies in Potsdam state that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are incomparable, because “anti-Semitism has motivated mass movements, declared Jews to be the ‘enemies of mankind,’ and in the past and present forms, attributes to Jews global conspiracies, including hidden power, control over media and politics, the subterranean global destructions of societies … none of which [exist] even in the most radical forms of public anti-Muslim resentments” (Rensmann and Schoeps Reference Rensmann, Schoeps, Rensmann and Schoeps2011: 52). Such a view promoting the idea that anti-Semitism sees Jews as more powerful than other humans, while all other racisms regard the racialized subjects as lower forms, is widespread among anti-Semitism experts in Germany.
Jochen Müller, recognized as a leading expert on anti-Semitism among Muslims, has been active in promoting a total distinction between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, going so far as to contend that no one organization can fight against the two. In a piece he wrote entitled “Islamophobie und Anti-Semitismus—Kritische Anmerkenungen zu einem fragwürdigen Vergleich” (Islamophobia and anti-Semitism: critical comments on a questionable comparison), he argues that it is wrong to assume that “the two forms of discrimination are just different because they focus on different forms of victims, one Jews and the other Muslims” (Reference Müller and Dantschke2009: 24). According to Müller, “Islamophobia is based on culturalistic ascriptions that are typical of the new forms of racism…. Muslims and their religion are discriminated against in a colonialistic and racist manner as unenlightened, terrorist, and backward,” but are not under the threat of being exterminated (ibid.). The problem with this view is that it does not recognize that anti-Semitism was not originally a policy of extermination, and that it is an ideology that took on different degrees and shades of meaning over the centuries and has done so even in modern times. This view approaches all manifestations of anti-Semitism as equivalent to Nazism and hence makes any comparison between anti-Semitism and any other racism that is not genocidal untenable. Still more problematic, and typical of anti-Semitism experts in Germany, is that Müller stresses that anti-Semitism is based on fantasy whereas Islamophobia is based on reality:
Modern anti-Semitism is a worldview that works even without Jews. Independently of what Jews really do, anti-Semitism is based on the fiction of the Jew as conspirer…. In contrast, in Islamophobia, single cases of terrorist Islamists are projected onto the entire Muslim community as the militancy of Islam…. Islamophobia is based on distinct problems of this society, like integration, or images of integration, terrorism, and other questions. And these are related to Islam and the existence of Muslim minorities…. Islamophobia is not a simple projection of an experience of crisis on just any group. That is why we have to talk differently about real existing problems that are the basis of Islamophobia and how to deal with them. And that is the real difference with anti-Semitism (ibid.: 27).
In other words, while recognizing that anti-Semitic prejudices are fictional, Müller insists that anti-Muslim ideas are based on real problems. In doing so, he reaffirms the Islamophobic arguments about what is believed to be wrong with Muslims and blames the victims of racism for discrimination against them.
Comparing anti-Semitism and Islamophobia became such a contentious issue that when the then-chair of the Center for Anti-Semitism Research in Berlin, Wolfgang Benz, organized a conference in 2008 with the title “Enemy Image of Muslim, Enemy Image of Jew” (Feindbild Muslim, feindbild Jude) it was considered scandalous. The conference call and an article Benz wrote in 2010 after he retired from his position compared the exclusionary mechanisms of nineteenth-century anti-Semitism with those of today's anti-Muslim sentiment, and this was attacked as equating anti-Semitism with Islamophobia and hence as dismissing anti-Semitism and even relativizing the Holocaust.Footnote 16 In this heated debate the scholarship of Benz and the conference participants was attacked,Footnote 17 and Benz was even indirectly accused of being a Nazi by people who brought up that his PhD advisor had belonged to the Nazi party (Heni Reference Heni2010).
It is important to note that as late as the 1990s—a particularly bad decade for immigrants in Germany—it was not so impolitic to think about anti-Semitism and discrimination against Muslims together. Especially following the fire bombings of Turkish houses in 1992 in Mölln and in 1993 in Solingen, which killed several Turks including one family of three generations, Turkish German activists began to attract public attention by likening their situation to that of the Jews. After these bombings protestors carried banners that read, “We do not want to be the Jews of tomorrow” (Bodemann and Yurdakul Reference Bodemann and Yurdakul2006). After the 1992 bombings, the then-leader of the West German Jewish community, Ignatz Bubis, said that there was no great difference between xenophobia and anti-Semitism (cited in Peck Reference Peck2006: 91). Turkish German friends who attended school in Germany in the 1980s and 1990s have told me that it was then common in classes to hear the experiences of immigrants likened to those of Jews.Footnote 18 Michal Bodemann and Gökçe Yurdakul (Reference Yurdakul and Bodemann2006) show that it was acceptable for Turkish German activists to draw such analogies into the year 2002, the tenth anniversary of the bombings, and their message was sympathetically heard by members of the Jewish community as well as indigenous German politicians.Footnote 19
But as the 2000s progressed in a newly enlarged Europe that had awakened to anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic protests, and when people were reaching out to the memory of the Holocaust as the common identity that would unite all EU members, it ceased to be acceptable for Turks or other Muslims to identify with murdered Jews. In 2008, Professor Faruk Şen, then director of the Center for Turkish Studies in Essen, had to resign from his post after he likened the experience of European Turks to that of European Jews a century ago. Ironically, Şen had written this article in a Turkish newspaper in order to criticize increasing anti-Semitism in Turkey as it was identified in Turkey by Ishak Alaton, a Turkish Jewish businessman. In the article Şen directed his words to Alaton: “As European Turks we understand your importance for Turkey well. We, five million two hundred thousand [Euro Turks] with a similar destiny in Europe, the new Jews of Europe, can understand you the best. Do not feel sad because of anti-Semitic prejudice some groups in Turkey hold on to. As Turkish people and as new Jews of Europe we are on your side” (Reference Şen2008). This statement was considered outrageous in the German media, and numerous letters to the editor accused Şen of “defaming the German state” (Margalit Reference Margalit, Brunner and Lavi2009: 223).Footnote 20 Though he apologized and tried to distance himself from what he had said, he lost his position. By then it had been established that anti-Semitism was a unique form of hatred that could not be compared to any other, and especially to anti-Muslim racism.
THE EXPORT-IMPORT THEORY OF ANTI-SEMITISM
Surprisingly, after a decade of talk about a new anti-Semitism exclusive to Muslims, German specialists in the subject have more recently concluded that there is no anti-Semitism distinctive to Muslims. Nonetheless they continue to identify Muslim immigrants as the main disseminators of anti-Semitism. The German Ministry of the Interior's 2011 report titled Anti-Semitismus in Deutschland differentiates seven forms of anti-Semitism: religious (Christian), social (which defines Jews as usurers), political (which attributes to Jews a special power and a desire to rule the world), nationalist (which does not recognize the Jewish minority as part of the nation, but sees it as a disloyal enemy), racist (which believes that Jews belong to another group by reason of their racial characteristics and not of belief), secondary (which involves seeing Jews as guilty of what happened to them during the Shoah and confusing the victims with the perpetrators), and anti-Zionist (whose classic anti-Semitic stereotypes are concealed behind criticism of Israel). The authors concluded, however, that there was no separate “new” Islamic anti-Semitism: “What were previously seen as new elements [in Muslim anti-Semitism] were actually already known” (Germany Reference Germany2011: 12).
Such a conclusion about the lack of a distinctive “Muslim anti-Semitism” is the product of what I call the “export-import theory of anti-Semitism,” which is widely embraced among anti-Semitism specialists in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Another trend, which seeks roots of distinct Muslim anti-Semitism in Islamic texts, is widespread in places like the United States, embraced mostly by right-wing popular voices. They argue, “Jihad and Jew-hatred belong together” (Künzel Reference Künzel2007), or talk about “an almost innate enmity the Prophet of Islam taught and practiced towards the Jews he encountered” (Israili Reference Israili2009: ix). Promoters of this view typically ignore the historical context in which such statements in the Qur'an and Hadith were made, the fact that contrary statements can be easily found in the same sources, and more importantly that anti-Judaism never became an official policy and that Jews had relatively better prospects in Muslim empires for hundreds of years (Barkey Reference Barkey2008; Cohen Reference Cohen2008). Over a dozen experts who wrote the Anti-Semitismus in Deutschland, and in fact many German scholars, argue instead that anti-Semitism originated in Europe and was then exported to the Middle East, either through Christians in the case of the Ottoman Empire or, particularly in the Palestinian case, through Nazis seeking collaboration with Muslim Arabs. Then, it is argued, this European- and especially German-branded anti-Semitism was preserved completely intact in the Middle East from 1930s to 1970s while Europeans were coming to terms with and recovering from their own anti-Semitism. This exported anti-Semitism was then imported back to an otherwise anti-Semitism-free Europe by post-World War II immigrants.
The export-import theory is clearly expressed by Klaus Holz and Michael Kiefer in one of their frequently quoted articles: “Anti-Semitism in the Arab world, and in the Muslim world in general, is a European import in all its essential aspects. Modern European anti-Semitism was simply adapted to Islamic semantics and required no fundamental change. As Muslim populations were partially re-Islamized, with the associated worsening of religious fundamentalism in Europe, this variant of modern anti-Semitism was imported back to Europe” (Reference Holz, Kiefer, Stender, Follert and Özdoğan2010: 109). The influential journalist and Islam expert Claudia Dantschke makes a parallel statement and claims that it was European Christian missionaries who originally infected Muslims with anti-Semitism, and that their ideas were brought back to Europe after being incorporated by Islamists into their ideology: “The classic Islamist view sees the Jew as denying God and wanting to separate humans from God [so as] to rule them. Such stereotypes, formed by nineteenth-century anti-modern European clerical anti-Judaism, were transported by Christian communities to the Ottoman Empire, where they entered Muslim and Islamist discourse. [In this Muslim view,] having disempowered Christianity, Jews are [now] ready to do the same to Islam” (Reference Dantschke and Dantschke2009: 16).
The export-import theory of anti-Semitism burdens Europeans, particularly Germans, with the invention of anti-Semitic ideas that now circulate the world. At the same time, it implies that in the period between anti-Semitism's exportation to the Middle East and its re-importation Europeans had eradicated it in Europe. This is how anti-Semitism can be seen or portrayed as a “new” and “foreign” phenomenon in contemporary Europe and Germany. The belief in the lack of anti-Semitic sources in Europe and especially in Germany is so strong in this narrative that any report on anti-Semitism in Germany includes anti-Semitic writings in Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, whether they are available in Germany or not. It is argued that Germans with Muslim backgrounds who are not recent immigrants, but were born and raised in Germany, contract anti-Semitism from print media and satellite television broadcasting from the Middle East. The underlying assumption is that it is otherwise impossible to be socialized into anti-Semitic thinking in Germany. That is why more than half of Anti-Semitismus in Deutschland's two hundred pages are devoted to anti-Semitism in the Turkish, Arabic (especially al-Manar, the official television channels of Hezbollah and Hamas, both banned in Germany), and Iranian media. It is noteworthy that the report does not discuss immigration to Germany from other countries with high levels of anti-Semitic prejudice, including Greece (69 percent), Poland (45 percent), Bulgaria (44 percent), Serbia (42 percent), and Ukraine (38 percent).Footnote 21 More important, Anti-Semitismus in Deutschland does not address the most significant source of anti-Semitism in Germany, namely extreme right-wing, ethnically German political organizations and formations (Germany Reference Germany2011).
The report, which contradicts itself multiple times, repeatedly emphasizes that the children of Muslim-background immigrants do not actually follow the Turkish- or Arabic-language media of their parents’ homelands. Rather, they follow German media and watch the same entertainment programs non-immigrant youths do. There is even a discussion of how Turkish media are no longer relevant to German Turks. It is admitted that the sales of Turkish-language newspapers in Germany have decreased over the past few decades and currently total no more than sixty thousand copies. This is probably because “the readers have no direct connection to Turkey. Furthermore, the younger generations do not know the Turkish language well enough to read the newspapers, which in any case lack a connection to the reality of migrants in Europe” (Germany Reference Germany2011: 110). Nonetheless, the report argues, the parents and grandparents of these young people do follow the media from their homelands and then pass on the anti-Semitic ideas they acquire in this way to their children and grandchildren (ibid.), a proposition supported by no evidence. This statement also seems counterintuitive since anti-Semitism among Muslims was never an issue of public concern in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or even the 1990s, when, according to this line of thinking, anti-Semitic tendencies should have been strongest among immigrants newly arrived from the Middle East.
This argument, which denies that a distinct Muslim anti-Semitism exists, but nonetheless holds Muslims responsible for anti-Semitism in Europe in general and in Germany in particular, equates anti-Zionism with classic modern anti-Semitism, which was originally constructed partly on the idea that Jews lacked a nation-state of their own. In an influential essay discussing anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, Matti Bunzl stresses a crucial difference between the old anti-Semitism and the new, anti-Zionist version: “When young, disenfranchised Muslims attack French Jews, they do not do so in the interest of creating an ethnically pure France. Nor are they asserting that French Jews do not belong in Europe. On the contrary, they are attacking Jews precisely because they see them as part of a European hegemony that not only marginalizes Muslims in France but from their point of view, also accounts for the suffering of Palestinians” (2005: 504). Bunzl points to the irony that the success of the Zionist ideal of Israel as a place where European Jews could have a safe haven is what puts European Jews under attack now. By doing so, he points out that the contemporary anti-Semitism which Muslims are accused of holding on to is not a hermetically sealed Nazi ideology that Arabs inherited and dutifully take with them wherever they go. Rather, anti-Semitic prejudices and anti-Zionist stances of European Muslims are closely related to today's political developments in the Middle East and are part of European social life.
PRODUCING NATIONALITY-SPECIFIC ANTI-SEMITISMS
Even though anti-Semitism experts in Germany often discuss Arabs and Turks together as carriers of the new wave of anti-Semitism, a careful analysis of reports and projects shows that different sources of the problem and cures for it are assigned to each of these national groups. Most of the anti-Semitism-prevention training I observed in Berlin was aimed at Arabs, and more specifically at Palestinian refugees, although without always naming them as such. As the largest group of Muslims in Germany, Turkish immigrants also receive considerable attention. Discourses and prevention methods regarding each group as well as the attitudes of trainers differed significantly for each ethnic group. Trainers I talked with mentioned that the groups were so different that it did not always make sense to keep them together.
In nationality-specific anti-Semitism-prevention trainings, Turks are assumed to be suffering from a false “myth of tolerance”—a collective false sense that Turks have a history of good relations with Jews. Arabs are assumed to be suffering from a collective pathology of “self-victimization” and “desire for pride.” Both groups are believed to have brought these hereditary ethno-pathologies from their homelands and to pass them from generation to generation without interruption. German social workers and educators try to break these pathologies by showing young people of Turkish background that Ottomans and Turks have been intolerant toward Turkish Jews, and they try to convince those of Arab and specifically Palestinian background that they are not victims in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Anti-Semitism specialists and educators regard Kurds as not anti-Semitic, and even pro-Zionist. Some of them recommend that Kurds be included in the anti-Semitism-prevention programs to serve as positive role models and have a constructive influence on Arabs (Klose and Verein für Demokratische Kultur Reference Klose2008: 6).
FIGHTING TURKISH ANTI-SEMITISM: DEMOLISHING UNKNOWN MYTHS
Amira was one of the first organizations dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism among Muslim immigrants in Germany. In line with the notion that immigrants bring their anti-Semitism with them, the Amira team started off, not by talking to young Germans with immigrant backgrounds, but instead by sending a team of researchers to Turkey. Their aim was to study Turkish anti-Semitism at its roots. The team's report was published as a slick booklet entitled Anti-Semitismus in der Türkei (Anti-Semitism in Turkey), which begins with the following statement: “This brochure is prepared for all educators who during their work confront Turkish-background youth or adults who make anti-Semitic statements. It gives a perspective on the background and context of anti-Semitism in Turkey.” It is distributed free of charge at many events organized for trainers and educators who deal with anti-Semitism among young people in Germany with Muslim backgrounds (Amira 2009: 1).
Because they assume the transmission of Turkish anti-Semitism to be strictly genealogical, the Amira team argues that it is crucial for educators who work with Turkish-background youth in Germany to know about the historical and contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism in Turkey. They suggest that Turkish Germans are not only infected by Turkish anti-Semitism that their grandparents have passed on to them, but are also under the influence of contemporary anti-Semitic trends in Turkey through social contacts. “The hypothesis [behind the research] is that contemporary anti-Semitism in Turkey influences the Turkish migrant community in Germany through mass media, the Internet, and transnational social contacts” (ibid.). Typically of reports on Turkish anti-Semitism in Germany, the document never discusses the social worlds in which Turkish Germans live in Germany. Clearly, they are assumed to be uninfluenced by any social and ideological forces operative in German society. In other words, they are not seen to be part of German society.
Among other observers who write about an essentialized “Turkish anti-Semitism” is journalist and Islam expert Claudia Dantschke (Reference Dantschke, Stender, Follert and Ozdogan2010), who also makes no distinction between anti-Semitism in Turkey and among Germans of Turkish background. In her work she argues that Turkish anti-Semitism is influenced by Islam, the nationalist Turkish-Islamic synthesis, and leftist discourses among secularists, all carried from Turkey to Germany. The only evidence that she offers to substantiate this seamless connection between Turkey and Germany is that some Turkish-language anti-Semitic publications were sold in a traveling Turkish book exhibit that visited a Turkish-German mosque, and in a small Turkish-language bookstore in Kreuzberg in Berlin. Anti-Semitic publications are abundant in Turkey, but it is hard to imagine that a traveling Turkish book exhibit and the small Kreuzberg bookstore are influential enough to dominate the ideas of the three million Germans of Turkish background.Footnote 22
Much of the recent wave of anti-Semitism-prevention trainings in Germany is built on the assumption of such seamless connections between anti-Semitism in Turkey and Turkish Germans in Germany. In 2006, KIgA developed a workshop for German educators who work with young people with Turkish backgrounds. The brochure prepared for the teachers states: “Paranoia, anti-Western resentments that hold the Western world and especially Americans and Jews responsible are very influential in the Turkish community. Conspiracy theories are not just part of the very radical currents such as extreme nationalists or Islamists but they are very popular in general” (KIgA 2006: 57). The report of the project written by the KIgA staff then confesses, “Just a very small percentage of teenagers follow this debate.” Yet it argues that despite this, “These ideas [which they do not follow] are still very important to them. Their parents and the officials of the nationalistic and Islamist organizations of immigrants receive their political arguments from their homeland … and pass them on to younger generations” (ibid.).
Hence, KIgA proposes that even if Turkish-origin anti-Semitic ideas are not followed by Turkish German teenagers it is nevertheless very important to relay them to German national teachers who teach Turkish background students. The brochure suggests that if the teachers know the arguments of “Turks” they can deconstruct these beliefs and produce rational ways of thinking. KIgA especially encourages the teachers to learn about and then shatter the myth of Turkish tolerance toward Jews: “What is of utmost importance when dealing with [anti-Semitism among Turks] is questioning the myth that Jews were fully accepted and lived without discrimination under Islamic rule and especially under the Ottoman rulers. Such a perception of history challenges taking contemporary anti-Semitism seriously and fighting against it” (ibid.: 57–58). Following this reasoning, teachers are given the most horrific examples of statements that can be found in Turkey, irrespective of the fact that German Turks are not typically exposed to such statements.
The workshop begins by giving the participants a chance to discuss their experiences with their Turkish students and friends, hence already singling Turkish Germans out as different from other Germans, regardless of how long they have lived in Germany. I attended a KIgA workshop for teachers who worked with students with Turkish and Arab backgrounds to fight against Islamism. When the workshop began with a question asking teachers about their experiences of Islam and Muslims, the teachers, mostly of ethnic German background, spent a long time enthusiastically telling stories that clearly were fueled either by their imaginations or their lack of understanding of the lives of their students. One teacher claimed that many of the Muslim girls in her school were traditionally married off at the age of eight, and that boys commonly went to Syria to fight for al-Qaeda—both things that in fact occur very rarely. When the workshop leader, who was of Turkish background, offered to tell them about Islamism, saying that it was important to know that only a small minority of Muslims in Germany can be considered as falling into this category, one teacher said, “Then we do not care about Islamism. It is Islam that we do not want in our classrooms.” Other teachers nodded, and another teacher said with a stern face, “You know, brothers telling sisters what to do, wearing headscarves, and that kind of stuff. That is what we do not want. Tell us about how we can do that.” When the trainer told them that there is actually religious freedom in Germany and that they were forbidden to say they did not want Islam in their schools, the teachers became tense and told the trainer that they were not getting what they had come for. During a later conversation, the trainer told me that it was very common for teachers to come to anti-Semitism-prevention training courses offered by KIgA with very clear opinions as to how ill-suited their Turkish and Arab students were to the values of German society, and that participating teachers were quite unwilling to question their own suppositions and prejudices.
The second part of the anti-Semitism-prevention workshop is devoted to discrimination against Turkish Jews. The workshop discusses three events: the pogrom in Eastern Thrace in 1934, the sinking of the Jewish refugee ship Struma by a Soviet submarine off the Black Sea coast of Turkey in 1942 after the Turkish government refused to allow the passengers to land, and the forced labor camps for Christians and Jews who could not pay exorbitant taxation targeted at them in Turkey in 1942–1944. The report of the workshop states, “These events are not well known in Turkey, but it is useful to know the historical developments [in Turkey],” because “these events do not fit the picture that shows Jews always had a happy life in Turkey. Everybody thinks since the arrival of the Sephardic Jews in Ottoman times five hundred years ago, all Jews always experienced tolerance. But the material shown to participants reveals different experiences—those of exclusion” (ibid.: 59). The workshop's third part deals with anti-Semitism in contemporary Turkish society and covers themes that relate to theories about crypto-Jews—the Dönme—ruling Turkey, Holocaust denial in Turkey, and comparing Israel to National Socialism.
This very workshop was also taught to teenagers of Turkish background without success. It quickly became clear that the workshop materials, which consisted of texts from Turkish-language newspapers, had to be translated into German. But even then, having grown up in Germany and not in Turkey, the teenagers found it difficult to follow the conspiracy theories involved. Trainers told me that young people of Turkish background in Germany are not well educated enough to understand newspaper articles, which was why they had stopped doing this workshop with them. I disagree, because the articles used in the workshop are all written in simple language and geared toward poorly educated readers in Turkey; what young Turkish Germans actually lack is familiarity with the convoluted logic of Turkish conspiratorial thinking, to which they are not exposed growing up in democratic Germany.
Needless to say, anti-Semitism does exist in Turkey and did in the past. A recent Anti-Defamation League survey shows 69 percent of Turks hold anti-Semitic prejudices, which puts it far ahead of Iran with its index of 56 percent (Anti-Defamation League, 2014). Especially since a race-based nationalism was embraced following the foundation of the Turkish Republic, Turkish Jews and the descendants of Jewish converts to Islam have been subjected to severe forms of discrimination (Baer Reference Baer2013b; Bali Reference Bali1999; Brink-Danan Reference Brink-Danan2012; Guttstadt Reference Guttstadt2013). It is also true that a myth of tolerance with regard to Jews has been promoted by the Turkish government, especially during the 1990s, to counter the accusations regarding the Armenian Genocide (Baer Reference Baer2013a). That said, these facts do not justify the essentialized understanding of Turkishness, or Turkish anti-Semitism, that the training programs in Germany suffer from. Holding training sessions to sensitize Turkish German youth and their teachers to Turkish anti-Semitism by challenging commonly shared historical knowledge and public discussions in Turkey is, at best, ignorant of the lives of Turkish German youth, and at worst racist. Further, it misses the opportunity to address the contemporary problem of anti-Semitism in Germany.
In 2010, I interviewed participants in a Turkish-only Holocaust education project presented by the Wannsee Conference House. The group, consisting of twelfth-grade high school students, studied Turkish-German history and was taken to Turkey at the end of the program. The first site visited was the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul, one of the two synagogues bombed in 2003 by Turkish Islamic terrorists with connections to al-Qaida, leaving fifty-seven dead and seven hundred wounded. Students told me that they were quite surprised to learn that Jews live in Turkey today, or for that matter had ever lived there. Unaware of the long Jewish presence, they were completely ignorant of the myth of Ottoman tolerance of Jews, the myth blamed for anti-Semitism among this population. The trainer who worked with them for about a year for this project told me that she encountered no anti-Semitic tendencies in the group. These fifteen students might not be fully representative, but as bright students at an academic-track high school, it is safe to assume that most Turkish Germans are no more informed than they were about the realities and myths that relate to the Jews of Turkey. Ironically, it seems that the anti-Semitic writings and ideas so common in Turkish-language media in Turkey would be far less available to Turkish German youth than the experts assume them to be, were organizations that seek to combat anti-Semitism not providing translations and teaching about them.
PERSUADING YOUNG PALESTINIANS THEY ARE NOT VICTIMS
If the “myth of tolerance” is the target of anti-Semitism-prevention programs for Turks, the myth these programs aim to break for Arabs and especially Palestinians is “self-victimization.” Reports that explain Arab anti-Semitism frequently mention how they wrongly perceive themselves to be victims of Israel and the Western world. This perception, presented as pathological, is assessed as more dangerous than the Turkish one because, experts warn, other Arabs and Muslims will becoming infected with this allegedly mistaken sense of victimhood. This feeling, which is attributed to all Arabs, was discussed in detail in a five-day conference in Berlin in 2006. “Strategies and Effective Practices for Fighting Anti-Semitism among People with a Muslim/Arab Background in Europe,” was organized by an independent organization called the International Institute for Education and Research on Anti-Semitism. The conference was promoted by most of the significant groups supporting work against anti-Semitism, many of which receive German government funding, including the Remembrance, Responsibility, and the Future Foundation, the American Jewish Committee, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the OSCE on Combating Anti-Semitism, and the Community Security Trust.
The main organizer was Gunther Jikeli, who later served as an advisor to the OSCE on combating anti-Semitism, in 2011–2012. He argues that it is first and foremost Palestinians who see themselves as a “community of victims” in relation to the policies of Israel. According to him, this is a false psychology that when combined with their “Arab culture characterized by desire for pride leads to anti-Semitism” (Reference Jikeli, Jikeli, Stoller and Thoma2007: 10). This kind of “self-victimization,” Jikeli posits, is accompanied by a feeling that the Western world is conspiring against the Arab and/or Muslim world. Such unjustified feelings, he argues, are then used by Islamists and Arab nationalists to spread their propaganda (ibid.: 8). He and other conference participants find this feeling especially dangerous because, they contend, it has the ability to spread like a virus to other groups: first Palestinians, then other Arabs, and then other Muslims, but not non-immigrant or non-Muslim Germans.
According to another participant, Jochen Müller, the independent researcher who wrote the Amira report on Turkish anti-Semitism, this feeling of “self-victimization” and “the desire for pride and power” is not an effect of living in Europe as a marginalized subject, but rather “was and is imported to Europe by many [Arab] migrants from the region.” Furthermore “self-victimization” is a crucial part of an ideology of collective identity and is passed on from generation to generation” (Reference Müller, Jikeli, Stoller and Thoma2007: 36). This approach not only attributes pathological feelings to all Arabs worldwide but also sees ethnic groups and their feelings as unconnected with the social and political context in which they live. In this framework, that Palestinian refugees lost their homes, live in precarious conditions, and are subjected to discrimination appear irrelevant to feelings attributed to them. Experts suggest that Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general victimize themselves for no good reason. Worse, they are said to carry along their pathological feelings and desires wherever they travel and even pass them on to other Muslims.
Parallel with this perspective, training programs designed for Arabs and especially for Palestinians work to show them that they are not victims in the Middle East conflict, but rather equal partners in it. Palestinian-background Germans are provided with narratives that show them the “Israeli perspective”: that Israelis did not simply take their land, and that Palestinians collaborated with the Nazis and were thus on the side of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
Before discussing this training, it is important to identify the Palestinians who are the targets of the lion's share of programs in the fight against the new anti-Semitism. Palestinians in Germany and especially in Berlin are a particular group, which has significantly different characteristics from other groups of Muslim background such as Turks and other Arabs. Owing to their complicated legal status as refugees without a state, the actual number of Palestinians living in Germany is unknown. Nikola Tietze reports that estimates vary wildly between eight thousand and thirty-five thousand (Reference Tietze and Fehler2006). Most of them came to Germany fleeing from the violence they experienced in refugee camps in Lebanon in the 1970s. A considerable number of them first went to East Berlin, since East Germany did not require them to have visas, and then moved to West Berlin. Thus many of them are refugees three or four times over. Since 1985, Palestinian refugees have been registered as people with “unclear state belonging.” This complication in their registration not only makes them difficult to count but has also hindered their obtaining many basic rights enjoyed by other residents of the city. Palestinian refugees in Berlin cannot work or use social services. Most depend on social aid from the state, have very low levels of education, and live in a precarious socioeconomic condition. To top it all, many who experienced violence suffer from post-traumatic stress disorders. As a result, Palestinians in Berlin are a unique group who live in a distinctly insecure and marginal position, and directly suffered from the Israel-Palestine conflict. The extent to which they may feel like victims is less due to a theorized psycho-cultural inheritance than it is a direct outcome of their refugee status and the difficult position they have endured for many years, first in Lebanon and then in Berlin.
Over the past few years, KIgA has developed a project titled “Beyond Black and White: Timeline about the History and Images of History in the Middle East Conflict until 1949.” The project's brochure states that its aim is to discuss the history that preceded the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. They claim this is important because they want to “fight against problematic interpretations and views” that use images of history in order to make territorial claims. The common image they want to fight against is the idea that “Jews stole the land of Palestine from Arabs.” This training shows participants the history of the region with an emphasis on the fact that “over centuries different territories in the region were settled by Jews, Muslims, and other groups and that there has never been a Palestinian state that one can base their claims on” (KIgA 2013: 71).
According to the brochure, the exercise seeks “to sensitize teenagers for change in society and to question historical narratives that are used to legitimize territorial claims.” To achieve this goal, the training program focuses on how the region was ruled by different groups, and how its population changed frequently with different migrations and rulers—there were different populations, cultures, and religions, Jews and Muslims have been living there for a long time, and there was never a single state on its own. “In other words, by showing the diversity of rulers and populations in the region and by emphasizing that there was never a historical Palestinian state, the training aims to deliver the idea that Israelis took land that belonged to Palestinians is not a legitimate one.” But by the same token, the trainers do not question Israeli claims to legitimacy based on historical territorial claims.
This historical narrative is followed by a time-line exercise that establishes that there are two sides to all events. The students are given a list of events that led to the establishment of Israel in 1948. They are asked first to put them in chronological order and then to mark if this event was good from an Israeli perspective or from a Palestinian perspective. The goal of this exercise, the brochure explains, is to show that there are different Israeli and Palestinian perspectives on the events and make participants aware of the conflict's complexity. Palestinian students will see that there is no need to perceive themselves as victims and feel hostile toward Israel.
CONCLUSION
In a continent laden with anti-Semitic history, public intellectuals and policy makers scrutinize the suitcases of immigrants in search of the source of contemporary anti-Semitism. There is no question that immigrants arrive with their own memories, attitudes, and ideologies in general (Rothberg and Yildiz Reference Rothberg and Yildiz2011) and about Jews in particular. But it is equally obvious that the European wardrobes into which immigrants place these beliefs and dispositions have never been completely cleansed of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, Muslim youth who are the main suspects in the imported anti-Semitism narrative actually never migrated to Europe. The anti-Semitism they might hold is part and parcel of life in the major European cities in which they grew up. So, how do we explain the popularity of the suitcase metaphor or the export-import theory for explaining contemporary anti-Semitism in Europe?
First and foremost, the recent discovery of what is termed “Muslim anti-Semitism” keeps the fight against anti-Semitism alive in Europe. Seventy years after the Holocaust that annihilated two-thirds of the continent's Jews and after a decades-long struggle to de-Nazify and democratize German society, research consistently shows that one of every four Germans and one of every three European Union nationals still harbors anti-Semitic prejudice.Footnote 23 In a democratic Germany that bases its principles on the negation of National Socialism, fighting anti-Semitism is central to German identity. The new campaign brings anti-Semitism to the center of attention, renews an EU-wide consensus about the malevolence of anti-Jewish hatred, and defines combating it as a European value. It displays to the world that Europe generally and most of all Germany are still very sensitive to and intolerant of anti-Semitism.
At the same time, putting the focus of the anti-Semitism-prevention campaign on Muslims shifts the blame to relative newcomers to European society, people who are still commonly called “foreigners” (auslander) in Germany. Accusing immigrants, or rather the grandchildren of immigrants, of having imported anti-Semitism to the continent effectively hides non-immigrant European and German anti-Semitism. Despite the heightened attention paid to anti-Semitism and Holocaust memory in Germany, observers concur that increasing numbers of Germans report being weary of hearing about the Holocaust and no longer want to feel guilty (Margalit Reference Margalit2010; Markovits Reference Markovits2006). Indeed, a 2012 study shows that more than 65 percent of Germans agreed with the statement that Germans have no special responsibility to other nations because of the history and more than half said there should be an end to discussions about the Nazi past (dpa Reference von dpa2012). These findings suggest that shifting the blame for anti-Semitism onto Muslims relieves mainstream Germans of guilt, makes them feel vindicated as honorable opponents of anti-Semitism, and depicts Muslim Europeans as dishonorable and undeserving residents.
It is important to acknowledge that the export-import theory of anti-Semitism accuses Muslims of being carriers of anti-Semitism, but attributes its origin to Europeans and especially to Germans. The theory blames Muslims for holding onto an anti-Semitism that European missionaries and German Nazis taught them in the first place. Turkish and Arab cultures are depicted as quick to learn anti-Semitism but not equipped with the moral fiber necessary to resist it. Anti-Semitism-prevention reports fault Turks for holding onto a myth of tolerance toward Jews that makes them wrongly feel superior to Europeans. The same reports criticize Arabs for clinging to a mistaken sense of victimhood and an ill-founded desire for power and pride. The anti-Semitism-prevention programs designed for Muslims work to break down these self-perceptions. Turkish-background Germans are told that their forefathers were not really virtuous toward Jews, and Arab-background Germans, specifically Palestinians, are taught that their Arab grandfathers collaborated with the Nazis and then sold their land to Jewish settlers. The export-import theory attributes anti-Semitism's origins to Europeans, but stresses the inadequacies of Turkish and Arab cultures and poses them as obstacles to a proper, or properly European, repentance.
Understanding anti-Semitism as a malignant ideology brought back to Europe by Muslims produces perpetrators out of marginalized, racialized, and disadvantaged people. When it is established that Muslims are anti-Semitic—and worse, do not atone for it—it becomes difficult to recognize their position as victims in relation to European racism. Critical race theorists of Europe have already pointed out that European variants of racism are built on an ideology of a racial blindness that persistently ignores contemporary racial differences and, as a result, is oblivious to ongoing racist practices in Europe. They also agree that the memory of the extreme manifestation of racism that led to the Holocaust is partly responsible for this racial blindness, and hence blindness to racism (Goldberg Reference Goldberg2006; El-Tayeb Reference El-Tayeb2008; Partridge Reference Partridge2010). In that respect, the discourse of Muslim anti-Semitism works in a similar fashion to its sister discourses about Muslim sexism (Ewing Reference Ewing2008) and Muslim homophobia (Puar Reference Puar2008), each of which characterizes Muslims as immoral perpetrators and excludes them from the fold of the ethically normative European/German community. Complex processes that have recently moved the fight against anti-Semitism to the center of European identity have distinguished this form of racism from all others, but especially from anti-Muslim racism. Depicting Muslims as past and present offenders against Jews, and doing so officially and as part of a consistent educational policy, serves to conceal the subtle and not so subtle ways in which Muslims are victims of racism in today's Europe.
