by Harold Brackman

 

The year is 2012, but the echoes are of 1933 to 1945:

 

Not far from the Holocaust Memorial in Toulouse with an inscription reading,

 

“Where is Your Brother?” – Yonathan Sandler, a teacher from Jerusalem, together

 

with his two children Aryeh, age 6, and Gavriel, age 3, and 8-year-old Miriam

 

Monstango, the daughter of the principal of Ozar Hatorah school, are dead, victims of

 

a moped-driving, masked, black-helmeted assassin, trained by the Taliban and

 

claiming to belong to Al Qaeda, later identified as Muhammad Merah, who used a

 

cell phone to film the attack. Merah previously employed the same weapon to gun

 

down four French soldiers, killing three of North African origin. European Union

 

High Representative for Foreign Affairs Catherine Ashton linked the murder of

 

French Jews in Toulouse to “what is happening in Gaza” before repudiating her

 

remark.

 

An incommensurate event, yet not insignificant, occurred weeks before, in

 

Kaiserslautern, Germany, as soccer teams trained for June EURO 2012 in Poland and

 

Ukraine, the Simon Wiesenthal Center protested to the Union of European Football

 

Associations (UEFA) the anti-Semitic outburst—including “Seig Heil” salutes, “Heil

 

Hitler” and chants of “Join the 6 million”—directed at Itay Schechter, the son of

 

Holocaust Survivors from Romania.

 

Just days before the Kaiserslautern incident, an exposé by the Jerusalem Post and

 

protest by the Wiesenthal Center caused the Dutch VPRO media corporation to

 

remove an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic board game—“Settlers of Catan”—that reflected

 

the resurgence of classic anti-Semitic stereotypes, shunned in polite society since the

 

Shoah, back into mainstream vogue.

 

And at the same time, a Swedish Christian Art exhibition depicted Israelis as guntoting

 

rats devouring the “Holey [sic] Land.” In its protest, the Wiesenthal Center

 

commented: “Depicting Jews as animals was perfected by the Nazi propaganda

 

machine was an effective way to dehumanize Jewish citizens in the eyes of their

 

German neighbors. The propaganda of the 1930s set the stage for the murder of 6

 

million Jews in the 1940s. Since then, Soviet and Arab and Muslim anti-Jewish

 

propaganda used the very same method. Now it has surfaced in 2012 Sweden. It

 

should come as no surprise that far right extremists should celebrate this art exhibit by

 

Swedish painters depicting Jews as violent noxious animals, but the real question is

 

what do Swedes who are not racists think?”

 

Europe—the historic civilization from which the Jews emerged into modern world through

 

the crucible of triumph and tragedy—seems to be again approaching, as many prefer to avert

 

their eyes, the same paroxysm of Jew hatred that plunged the continent into its twentycentury

 

abyss. Is the twenty-first century doomed to repeat with variations the tragedies of

 

the twentieth? The answer may depend whether Europe, this time, repeats the cycle of

 

indifference or instead stands up against evil before it is too late.