From a speech by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks at “The Future of the Jewish Communities in Europe” Conference at The European Parliament:
The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. That is what I want us to understand today. It was not Jews alone who suffered under Hitler. It was not Jews alone who suffered under Stalin. It is not Jews alone who suffer under ISIS or Al Qaeda or Islamic Jihad. We make a great mistake if we think antisemitism is a threat only to Jews. It is a threat, first and foremost, to Europe and to the freedoms it took centuries to achieve.
Antisemitism is not about Jews. It is about anti-Semites. It is about people who cannot accept responsibility for their own failures and have instead to blame someone else. Historically, if you were a Christian at the time of the Crusades, or a German after the First World War, and saw that the world had not turned out the way you believed it would, you blamed the Jews. That is what is happening today. And I cannot begin to say how dangerous it is. Not just to Jews but to everyone who values freedom, compassion and humanity.
You are the leaders of Europe. Its future is in your hands. If you do nothing, Jews will leave, European liberty will die, and there will be a moral stain on Europe’s name that all eternity will not erase.
Stop it now while there is still time.----------------------
So the European government is urged to stop the European anti-Semitism. That is the government, which is hostile to the traditional Christian moral values. That is the government, which supports – instead of those values – “social justice” and “human rights” values. That is the government, which supports Islamic immigration to Europe – the immigration of people with a morality foreign to the Judeo-Christian morality and anti-Semitic in nature.
Thus, an anti-Judeo-Christian government is asked to defend the Jews whose spiritual ideas are at the foundation of a Judeo-Christian civilization.
Let us assume, just for the sake of argument, that we the Jews are so powerful indeed that we can force any government to do something in defense of the Jews.
How the European government can do it? The government has only one tool for fighting something – to label this something a crime and make this crime punishable by the law. However, the anti-Semitism is a crime only in a politically correct universe where the law is used to punish or restrict political adversaries. In the mind of a typical anti-Semite, the anti-Semitism is a belief in Jewish immorality that destroys the “normal morality” of the majority and robs this majority economically. If the law punishes a typical anti-Semite, this punishment will strengthen his/her belief in the Jewish evilness – those “evil Jews” are so powerful that they are able to do “evil things” even through the government.
There is no way to change a collective belief by punishing the people with this belief. There is only one way to change a belief and this way is to convince the believers that the facts on which their belief is based are wrong. It is obvious, the Jews themselves cannot do it – morally decent Christians – religiously observant or not - can do it.
So, what to do? It looks like a better way for the Jews led by their spiritual leaders may be to work on creating an EU Judeo-Christian spiritual (a sort of priestly) council, which would discuss in open forums the following:
· What is the difference between the Judeo-Christian moral values and the human-rights/social-justice values.
· Why the Western civilization is spiritually and economically better off following the Judeo-Christian morals.
· How the Jews and the Christians can strengthen the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western civilization in their own Jewish and Christian unique ways.
· How to make the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian morality the foundation of any legislative work of a democratically elected government.
· Why anti-Semitism is a spiritual and economic enemy of the Western Judeo-Christian civilization and the people with anti-Semitic beliefs.
It might be an effective way to fight the anti-Semitism – by helping the Christians to restore the Judeo-Christian morality of our government.