Antisemitism is growing and making itself felt again. The latest survey by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights on antisemitism revealed that 89% of respondents consider antisemitism on the Internet a problem in their country.
But as we know, the Internet is one dimension of the reality of our time. The expressions of hatred that occur online also occur throughout social life.
Unifesp professor Daniel Feldmann emphasizes that this kind of expression targets “those who appear strange, threatening, outside the norm, or relatively immune to prevailing social compulsions.”
Cases of antisemitism are multiplying.
In France, antisemitic attacks rose by 74% last year… In Germany, by 60%.
Although antisemitism is prominent among far-right groups, numerous left-wing groups also adopt typically antisemitic rhetoric.
Antisemitism on the right and the left
The complicity of Latin American dictatorships with Nazi criminals is well known and left roots that need to be unearthed. Last week, Folha de S. Paulo reported how, in 1978, Henrique Araújo, father of our current foreign minister and then attorney general, denied the extradition of a Nazi held responsible for 250,000 deaths at the Sobibor concentration camp in Poland, using typically antisemitic devices such as treating the deaths as crimes whose statute of limitations had expired.
But we are not talking about homicide; we are talking about genocide. A crime against humanity, therefore, to which no statute of limitations applies under international standards.
Unfortunately, as I was saying, antisemitism is not exclusive to the right. One need only recall the Brumadinho tragedy and the series of thoroughly prejudiced posts made under the pretext of criticizing the presence of the 136 Israeli rescue soldiers who came here. The Jewish surname of Vale’s president was used to label him “genetically Israeli,” a description with an obvious racist connotation.
A veritable fever of theories about a worldwide Jewish-Zionist conspiracy took hold, and stereotyped caricatures of the soldiers circulated, like those the Nazis made of Jews in Hitler’s Europe.
The alliance between the right-wing governments of Benjamin Netanyahu and Jair Bolsonaro cannot be used to legitimize antisemitic expressions. I have no affinity with these leaders, but even less with discriminatory, prejudiced, and racist rhetoric and practices. I end this column with a statement of total repudiation of antisemitism and all forms of racism.
Image: A Bagelstein shop in Paris defaced with “Juden” (German for “Jews”), February 9, 2019. A direct reference to Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany (1938).
Access the playlist featuring all audio recordings of the column Ouvir Imagens broadcast on Rádio USP since March 2018 | Read all transcripts and posts.
Since September 2018, this column has also had a playlist on YouTube!
Listen and share.