Europe's Latest Export; Antisemitism

For years, Americans have consumed fashions, expensive cars, and fancy foods from Europe. But the latest export from the old continent won't be nearly as tasty. It's left-wing anti-Semitism.

Over the past decade, Americans have noticed the rise of harsh new anti-Jewish statements and actions in Europe. Once largely the province of proto-fascists, these views are now boiling out of Europe's left-wing establishment. The editor of the major French paper Le Monde recently described Jews as "a contemptuous people taking satisfaction in humiliating others." Similar sentiments are commonplace in left-wing dailies like Madrid's El Pais. The left-leaning British Guardian ran a cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian child, and the drawing was awarded first prize in the annual contest of the U.K.'s Political Cartoon Society. London, suggests professor Robert Wistrich, a prominent scholar of the Holocaust, has become the center for "the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism."

Now, according to a survey by pollster Frank Luntz, these views are migrating from Europe's Left to America's. Luntz's research shows the key point of penetration into the U.S. to be elite college campuses, the base camps of American liberalism. There is, for instance, now a growing drive on elite campuses (and among left-leaning churches) to force U.S. "disinvestment" in Israel, just as earlier campaigns demanded disinvestment in South Africa.

Luntz interviewed 150 randomly chosen graduate students from elite colleges in five cities. A majority espoused the point of view now common among the European Left: that Israel "is an aggressor against the helpless, victimized Arab masses of Palestine." Luntz suggests this shift in views of Israel is "also having a negative impact on attitudes to Jews right here in America." Most of the U.S. graduate students surveyed now consider Jews to be too politically influential. As one student put it: "Palestinians are poor, thus they have less value to American politicians."

Few of the grad students surveyed by Luntz knew anything about pre-1948 Palestine, the original U.N. plan for a two-state solution, the repeated Arab threats to destroy Israel, or the fact that Israel has been the lone functioning democracy in its region, with considerable safeguards for human liberties. "Liberalism is increasingly the politics of ignorance--it's amazing what these kids don't know," worries Fred Siegel, who teaches history at Cooper Union in New York City. Luntz traces student views to the information they are getting from the professoriate, which is increasingly anti-Israel and tolerant of anti-Semitism. The establishment media--particularly the BBC, CNN, and The New York Times--were also identified as sources of misinformation.

This swing in the American Left could pose problems for the Democratic Party. The party's left wing already includes many strongly anti-Israel figures, like Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney and Washington state's James McDermott. The Democratic party organization in McDermott's King County (Seattle) has endorsed a proposal to withhold all U.S. tax dollars from Israel.

The Luntz study indicates that many young liberals who will become future leaders in the Democratic Party share these views. The graduate students who were pro-Kerry, for example, overwhelmingly leaned against the Jewish state, while the pro-Bush minority firmly supported Israel. Over the next generation, this transformation could threaten the century-long love affair between Jews and Democrats.