Anti-Semitism

An Ugly Phoenix Reborn [Excerpts]
European anti-Semitism is more widespread than has been let on.
    
In the middle of the first decade of the third millennium, anti-Semitism in Europe has made a horrifying comeback. One of the most dramatic examples was the February murder in France of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jewish cell-phone salesman. This young man was kidnapped, ostensibly because it was thought he would fetch a good ransom (his kidnappers said they thought all Jews were "rich").
 
The chief rabbi of Great Britain, Sir Jonathan Sacks, has described a "tsunami-like" wave of anti-Semitism spreading across Europe and around the world. Many of his European rabbi-colleagues, he says, have been attacked in the street while wearing the traditional Jewish skullcap, the yarmulke. Jews have been singled out for insults, if not for assault, on streets of cities across the old continent. A British organization, the Community Security Trust, recently claimed that anti-Semitic incidents in Britain are at the highest level since it started keeping records in the 1980s. The World Jewish Congress goes further: Anti-Semitism in Europe, it says, is now worse than at any time since 1945 . . . . But much European criticism of Israel since the second intifada (the Palestinian uprising against Israel that began in 2000) now takes the view that Israel's very existence is illegitimate.
 
A prominent British intellectual who has decided that Israel has "no right to exist" is A. N. Wilson, who has written several books virulently opposed not just to evangelical Christianity, but to a theistic worldview in general. In almost every country where anti-Semitism has a major presence, there is a hatred of America and in particular American Christianity ("Christianity Today," June 2006, Vol. 50, No. 6, Page 54).