Issue No. 591
Opinion
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20 - 26 June 2002 Issue No. 591 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Forbidden to speak
When Gretta Duisenberg, wife of the president of the European Central Bank, hung a Palestinian flag out of her window in Amsterdam to protest against the killing of Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp, her husband became the target of a wide-ranging campaign organised by the Union of Dutch Jews and intended to smear him as an anti- Semite, as someone unfit to hold the post he occupies.
This is just one of many stories circulating in the international press. Another concerns the deputy head of the Liberal Party in Germany. Following criticism of Israeli policies in the occupied territories the head of the Jewish Council in Germany accused him of "continuing to harbour a dangerous tradition of anti- Semitism in the country of the killers.". When he made bold to announce that such a denunciation was aggressive, arrogant and intolerant, the head of the council replied that he had subjected Jews to their worst humiliation since the Holocaust and must apologise. Concerned about his political future, an apology was issued, though a cloud still remains over his prospects.
There are many such stories, evidence of the pressures and pains suffered by politicians, writers and journalists in Europe as soon as they express even the most remotely negative opinion about what is happening in Palestinian lands. Neither are television networks allowed to present unbiased news programmes depicting acts -- 8,000 young men evacuated on the pretext of being terrorists, daily attacks in the West Bank which has been divided into more than 220 military zones under Israeli control, a new "Berlin wall" being built with the object of isolating Palestinian areas -- committed against Palestinians. Yet all the time we receive reports that, according to President Bush, Yasser Arafat is not doing enough to contain terrorists, and this despite his being besieged in Ramallah, surrounded by Israeli tanks.
Europeans refuse to admit that the rise of the extreme right in Europe is connected with the continuous exercise of Jewish pressure: extremist Jews certainly supported Le Pen in France and Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands, largely because of the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric that characterised their campaigns. In an opinion poll published in a German magazine, 54 per cent of those polled said they felt they were forbidden to voice opinions on certain issues, including the Middle East conflict and Israel's role in it; 41 per cent said they could not express opinions about the Second World War and the role of the German army; 65 per cent said they were not allowed to speak about Jews; and 21 per cent felt they could not discuss the role of the Soviet Union in East Germany. And in a cover story -- the magazine was emblazoned with the Star of David -- Time magazine pondered whether anti-Semitism was resurging, though with the coda that ordinary political discussions had been rendered difficult by the tendency to conceive of any criticism of Israel or comment on its practices as a form of anti-Semitism. Criticise Israel and the response is inevitable: you will be branded a Nazi.
That political debate across a range of issues is subject to strict limits in European countries should come as no surprise. There are taboos governing political discussions in the media and in public life and few European politicians feel free to express an honest opinion on contentious issues such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, a fact that explains Europe's extremely cautious attitude towards the conflict. It also explains why the European Union has blacklisted Palestinian resistance factions while failing to effectively condemn Israel's inhuman practices in the occupied territories, relying on the fact that public opinion is either ignorant or misinformed. It is in this light that Europe's role in the Middle East conflict should be understood.
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