Last update - 10:37 28/11/2007

Poll: 50% in U.K. think Jews more loyal to Israel than home nation By Haaretz Service Tags: Jews, Tony Blair, U.K.

Half of the British public believes that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country, an Anti-Defamation League poll released in Tuesday showed.

The survey of six European countries showed a rise in anti-Semitic attitudes. But it also indicated that positive views of Israel were also on the rise.

Asked to respond to the statement "Jews are more loyal to Israel than their own country," the survey found that 50 percent of U.K. respondents replied "probably true," up from 39 percent two years ago.
AdvertisementQuestioned as to boycotts against Israel by U.K.-based organizations, 43 percent of British respondents said they opposed them, while 37 percent expressed support for them.

The research showed that anti-Semitic attitudes were particularly marked in Hungary, where 61 percent of respondents said that it was probably true that Jesws have too much power in international financial markets, up from 55 percent in 2005, and that 60 percent believed that Jews have too much power in the business world.

"Millions of Europeans continue to accept a wide range of traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories, including the charge that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their home country," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director.

"Despite the fact that individual governments and the EU have condemned anti-Semitism and sought ways to counteract it, these attitudes die hard and help incite and legitimize anti-Semitic acts, including violence against Jews," he said in a statement.

Some 3,000 adults from six countries -Austria, Belgium, Hungary, The Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom- participated in the poll commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and were asked questions on topics ranging from the Holocaust, to whether they believe Jews killed Christ.

The poll results revealed an increase in anti-Jewish biases among respondents from a poll taken in 2005.

Overall, half of those surveyed said they believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country, with a majority of respondents in Austria, Belgium, Hungary and the United Kingdom saying they believe that this statement is probably true.

In four of the six countries, Belgium, the Netherlands, Swizerland and the United Kingdom, respondents said they viewed Israel more favorably than in 2005. The favorability rating for israel dropped, meanwhile, in Austria and Hungary.

In addition, the poll revealed a small decrease in respondents' identification with Palestinians in the wake of internecine struggles in Gaza, though support for Palestinians as a whole remained strong.

Foxman said he was "especially concerned that the survey found a large percentage of all respondents, and a majority in Austria, Hungary and Switzerland, believe that American Jews control U.S. policy on the Middle East, an old canard that has been resurrected in mainstream America and bolsters existing European attitudes.

__________________

They are Paranoid.............

__________________
99 Gurkha with OM616 IDI turbo

2015 Gurkha with OM616 DI turbo

2014 Rexton W with OM612 VGT

MEM RI Special Dispatch Series #900

BTW, those are the folks who deliver Farsi and Arabic translations into English to the US (and UK) media.

__________________

Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?



Published: January 14, 2007

(Page 2 of 5)

I found that I could twist Foxman’s dial of outrage without even trying. He said, apropos of the dispute over Tony Judt, that while he would never try to prevent speech, he did believe that it was wrong to give really evil figures, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran and at present the world’s most famously anti-Semitic head of state, the legitimacy of a meeting, as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Council on Foreign Relations recently had. I asked if Annan also shouldn’t have met with Saddam Hussein. “There is a difference between Ahmadinejad and even a Saddam Hussein,” Foxman rejoined. “Here is a man who says time and again, ‘I will wipe this nation’ ” — Israel — “ ‘off the face of the earth,’ and says afterward that the Holocaust never happened. This is not ‘Israel as victim’; this is the destruction of Jewish identity.”
Foxman made a beseeching gesture, his fingertips cupped before his mouth. “Plus, it has happened before,” he went on. “It’s not an abstraction. By a man, by a government, who aids, abets, fuels suicide bombers, makes them martyrs, celebrates them, who asks for volunteers from his country, and I don’t know what they have, 40,000 now, who have volunteered in future to go kill Jews!” Foxman was now shouting at me across the table. “And you arm yourself to take out as many Jews as possible!” Foxman’s hands were wheeling in circles before him; this possible Holocaust, so remote to many of us, seemed to rise up before him with a terrible clarity. “Oh, my God!” he cried, as if reeling in horror before the vision he had himself conjured.
Foxman really does dwell imaginatively in the Holocaust. He spends a month or so each winter in Palm Beach, moving in the company of elderly folk, many of them Holocaust survivors, who revere him. He seems to understand the survivor mentality far better than he does the lighthearted and lightheaded culture of disposable, custom-made ethnic identity. All that, so far as Foxman is concerned, is a pleasing delusion, like the soigné Berlin of 1925. In his most recent book — “Never Again?” — he makes the stupefyingly counterintuitive claim that high rates of Jewish assimilation are a reaction to discriminatory treatment, rather than a proof of the opposite. “One out of three people in these United States believes that the Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the U.S.,” he growled. “That’s a classic anti-Semitic canard.” And yet a Pew Global Attitudes Poll in 2004 found that anti-Semitism had declined in much of the West and was lowest in the United States. A Pew poll last year found American support for Israel as strong now as at any time in the last 13 years.
Foxman’s genius lies not so much in the realm of oratory as in the realm of dramaturgy; he stages public rituals of accusation and often of reconciliation and redemption. In mid-November he held an event, a cross between a news conference and a roof-raising abolitionist meeting, to honor Ruth Halimi, a Parisian Jew whose son, Ilan, had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by a gang in February. He had invited prominent members of the French Jewish community, A.D.L. lay leaders, prospective donors and the press. Foxman spoke first, and he addressed Halimi, a small, modest woman, with great gentleness and compassion. Within minutes, though, Foxman had begun to advance up his scale of spleen. He was shouting about Auschwitz and six million and then ticking off the litany of Jews who had been killed in recent years only because they were Jews: congregants in Buenos Aires, the journalist Daniel Pearl, a volunteer at a Jewish charity in Seattle — “and now Ilan,” whose kidnappers assumed that all Jews are rich. “I still hear the good people” — Foxman uses the word good in this context to mean “saps” — “coming to us in the A.D.L., saying: ‘What are you worried about stereotypes? They’re words! Big deal.’ We sat with the minister of education in Spain not long ago, and she said to us, ‘When we say Jews are rich, when we say Jews are successful, it’s a compliment.’ ” Foxman was now full-out screaming. “And I looked at her and I said: ‘Your Excellency, no thanks. Those are words that helped pave the way to Auschwitz.’ ”
Foxman was followed by Ruth Halimi, and she in turn by François Delattre, the French consul general. Delattre was a man of very different temperament than his host, and he spoke quietly and feelingly of anti-Semitism as “an existential threat to all of us.” Of France, he said, “The Jewish tradition and culture is deeply part of our DNA.” At the same time, because of the collaboration of the wartime French government at Vichy, “we have forever a special responsibility in the fight against anti-Semitism.” At times, Delattre had to struggle to compose himself. It was extraordinarily moving to hear such words, and see such depth of feeling, from a French-government official; perhaps it also proved that Foxman’s hectoring really has raised consciousness about anti-Semitism in places where anti-Jewish feeling represents a real threat. “You have,” one of Foxman’s aides said to me afterward, “experienced an A.D.L. moment.”
The A.D.L. moment wasn’t quite over. Foxman called the press — two reporters for Jewish media outlets and me — to a small conference room to meet Halimi. She spoke of her disappointment and anger at the conduct of the French police. Foxman, sitting next to her, fiddled with his coffee mug in increasing agitation. So many people in the neighborhood knew what was going on, he interjected. There should be an investigation, he said, but of course it would look bad if the A.D.L., in New York, called for it: “We need the support of the community.” He asked us to keep this part off the record. We filed out, but a moment later an aide came to fetch us back. Foxman was still sitting at the conference table with Halimi. “There’s a need for an investigation,” he declared. A reporter asked when and where the announcement would be made. He didn’t get it. “I’m announcing it right now,” Foxman said.

__________________