Digital Repository Of Antisemitic Narratives

The Middle East conflict is sometimes used as a political tool for regional political, nationalistic and ethnic disputes in the former Yugoslavia. This might also instigate Israel-related antisemitism. From time to time, there are pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli rallies and events in many places around Europe, particularly when the Israel-Palestine conflict escalates. In parts of Serbia with a Muslim majority such as Kosovo and Metohija or the Sandzak region, and other countries in the Western Balkan region such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, the pro and contra Israel-Palestine rallies can be used as a political tool in regional political, nationalistic, and ethnic disputes.

Since the 12th century, religious myths (Jews as deicides) have been complemented with economic stereotypes. Jews were described as rich and rampant as well as “money-lenders”, “bargainers” and “usurers” – a view still commonplace today. Excluded from land ownership, agriculture, and the Christian merchants’ and handicrafts guilds, Jews were increasingly limited to the small trade, peddler and junk trade. The money trading with interest played a special role, which according to church dogmatics violated divine doctrine and remained forbidden to Christians.

The Turkish Islamist Necmettin Erbakan (1926 – 2011) claims that the Jews (in his words, “Zionists”) started creating a world order more than 5,000 years ago with the help of the Kabbalah to control all money and labor. The Jews organized the crusades, and because the Catholic church was against money lending, the Jews created Protestantism so as to be able to make everybody work for them by introducing capitalism. That’s how the Jews control the world, apart from Islam, and that’s the fight between good and evil, the struggle between them and Islam.

The narrative that “Nothing fuels modern antisemitism more than the state of Israel. If the latter were to change its policy, antisemitism in its many contemporary facets would also decrease or even vanish” is a perfidious perpetrator-victim reversal. Suddenly, anti-Semites are no longer to blame for antisemitism, but the Jews − or the Jewish state of Israel. The non-Jewish world only reacts, so to speak, whether it is Palestinian terrorists who are allegedly waging a “fight for freedom” against the “Zionist oppressors” or their supporters in Europe and elsewhere who do not want to be denied their “criticism of Israel”, no matter how antisemitic they may be. Adorno called this ‘projection’ − the victim is accused of what one is doing or intending to do.