The anti-Semitic disease

After an extended standoff, Mohamed Merah, the 24-year-old French-Algerian terrorist who murdered three Jewish children and a teacher in front of their school in Toulouse, is dead. Unfortunately, that inexplicable disease called anti-Semitism is very much alive.

The deadliest form of anti-Semitism today is the sort that inspired Merah, who, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), was indoctrinated in jihadi camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan and had ties to Fursan al-Izza (Knights of Glory), the French branch of al- Qaida.

Only the warped, anti-Semitic mind of a member of al- Qaida could justify the murder of Jews living in France, including a three-year-old child, to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children – as Merah did.

Unfortunately, however, Merah was not the only one to link the massacre in Toulouse with Israel’s war on terror in the Gaza Strip. European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton also claimed that the murder of French Jews in Toulouse was somehow connected to “what is happening in Gaza.” She later repudiated her remark.

“When we think of what happened in Toulouse today.

When we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and Sderot and in different parts of the world – we remember young people and children who lose their lives,” she said.

Though it would be an exaggeration to call Ashton’s remarks, made in Brussels before a crowd of “Palestinian refugee representatives,” blatantly anti-Semitic, her failure to draw distinctions – a crucial fault shared by many on the progressive Left – helps to set the stage for men such as Merah to be seen not as cold-blooded murderers motivated by irrational anti-Semitism, but as militants engaged in warfare. Ashton and many other critics of Israeli policies of self-defense conveniently ignore the fact that Gaza is controlled by the rabidly anti-Semitic Hamas, which includes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in its official charter. And that under Hamas’s rule, Gaza is regularly used, either by Hamas terrorists or by even more extremist bodies loosely aligned with Hamas, as a base for firing mortar shells and Kassam and Grad rockets at Israeli civilians – men, women and children – living in the vicinity.

By comparing “what happened in Toulouse” to “what is happening in Gaza,” Ashton ignores the fact that Israel, in a painful move that sparked bitter clashes among Israelis, dismantled settlements in Gaza that were home to 8,000 peaceful, productive Israelis in order to reduce conflict with the Palestinians living there. Ashton also ignores the fact that since Hamas took control of Gaza Strip, it has devoted much of its limited resources not to improving the health, education and well-being of Gaza’s residents, but to building up a stockpile of arms to launch attacks against the “Zionist entity.”

Hamas and other terrorist groups operating in Gaza also regularly use children as human shields by purposely positioning mortars and rocket launchers near residential areas. When these children are accidentally killed it is because Israeli pilots, faced with the horrible dilemma of killing a Palestinian child or allowing an innocent Israeli – man, woman or child – to be killed by a mortar shell or a rocket, choose to defend Israelis.

And Ashton’s negative opinions about Israel are shared by too many Europeans. According to a survey published this week by the Anti-Defamation League, 28 percent of Europeans from 10 countries said that their opinion of Jews was influenced by the actions taken by the State of Israel.

Two-thirds of those influenced by Israeli actions said they were influenced for the worse. Over half of Europeans surveyed said that they believed European Jews were more loyal to Israel than to their own country.

The Islamist version of anti-Semitism has proven to be the most virulent and lethal. But unfortunately, irrational hatred of Jews still runs rampant all over Europe. This makes the job of stopping men like Mohamed Merah that much harder.