Last Thursday, Manfred Gerstenfeld, a leading scholar of anti-Semitism in contemporary Europe, died at the age of eighty-four. When what became known as the “new anti-Semitism” emerged two decades ago, notes Ben Cohen, Gerstenfeld was among the first to realize that it was merely the old hatred in a new guise. Cohen describes Gerstenfeld’s prescience in enumerating three mistakes made by Western Europe that would come back to haunt both the continent and its Jews:
The first error, he said—anticipating a similar complaint among American conservatives more than a decade later—was Europe’s “reluctance to take responsibility for its own defense against totalitarian Communism.” This had resulted in a “low-resistance mindset” that held that the protection of the continent from threats like Communism, and later on, Islamist terrorism, was the responsibility of others, primarily the United States.
The second error, according to Gerstenfeld, was that Europe’s dependency on Arab and Iranian oil shattered what remaining moral spine its political leaders had. A long-forgotten example of this was the French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s 1977 decision to grant political asylum to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who went on to lead the Islamist takeover in Iran two years later. In looking out for its energy interests, said Gerstenfeld, France played a key role in legitimizing a regime that continues to be an existential threat more than 40 years on.
Europe’s third error, according to Gerstenfeld, was its “excessive dependence” on immigration to advance its economic well-being. . . . Taken together, these three “errors” had profoundly negative consequences for Jewish communities in Europe, as well as European relations with the state of Israel. They also played a critical role in helping Europeans to rebrand themselves as the conscience of the world—fighting racism, standing up to American and Israeli intimidation in the Middle East, and so forth—after four centuries of imperial expansion.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/remembering-manfred-gerstenfeld-and-truth-against-myth/