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Netanyahu: Israel Is the Focus of Modern Anti-Semitism


(Prime Minister's Office) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the 5th Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism on Tuesday: Seventy years ago, with the end of World War II and the revelation of the horrors of the Holocaust, some believed that humanity would discard one of history's oldest hatreds - anti-Semitism. Yet today there is no doubt that we are living in an age of resurgent anti-Semitism. Now, contemporary anti-Semitism doesn't just slander, vilify and target the Jewish people. It first and foremost today targets the Jewish state. The big lie of anti-Semitism is propagated most enthusiastically by those who trample on the human rights of their own people. Iran will lecture us on human rights, on the rule of law, on safeguarding human decency? They string up innocent people on cranes in the squares of Tehran and Iran's other cities. They send their goons to Lebanon, to Syria, to Yemen, slaughtering people by the thousands. They slaughter Muslims who do not share their violent creed. The Hamas Charter repeats the ancient libels against the Jews. It openly calls for the murder of Jews wherever they are and for the destruction of their state. The same can be said of Hizbullah and for their common patron, Iran. The classic anti-Semite portrayed the Jews as the embodiment of all evil in the world. Modern anti-Semites portray the Jewish state as the embodiment of all evil in the world. When Hamas and Hizbullah rocketed our cities - a war crime - tens of thousands demonstrated in the streets of European capitals, not against Hamas, not against Hizbullah, but against Israel. The demonstrations, the boycotts, the resolutions are all reserved for the Middle East's one true democracy - Israel. There is something fundamentally wrong that this slander is reserved for the one country in the region where the death penalty is not even used against the most gruesome terrorist murderers, the one country that holds human rights sacrosanct, where equality is protected under the law - for women, for Christians, for minorities, for all. I don't know if we'll be able to eradicate the scourge of anti-Semitism. I know we have to fight it. If you don't fight it, these fires of anti-Semitism eventually spread and they consume everyone. So for the sake of decency, for the sake of our common humanity, for the sake of our common future, we must all continue to stand up and fight anti-Semitism.
2015-05-13 00:00:00
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