Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book “A New Shoah”, that researched the personal stories of Israel’s terror victims, published by Encounter and of “J’Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel” published by Mantua Books.

Yes, we have Scarlett Johansson and J.K. Rowling, the brave actor and writer who refused to join the boycott movement of the State of Israel. But the anti-Semites have dozens of luminaries and professors.

The Guardian, the leading British leftist newspaper, just published an appeal to sever any ties with Israeli universities. The appeal has been signed by 350 professors working in UK academia.

These BDS supporters are the grandchildren of those Max Weinreich called “Hitler’s Professors”.

If Italy’s Fascism had writers and philosophers such as Gabriel D’Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, Giovanni Gentile and Tommaso Marinetti, Hitler’s Nazism had an even greater list of talents: Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Gottfried Benn, Ernst Jünger, Mircea Eliade, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Ernst von Karajan, Knut Hamsun, Emile Cioran and Louis Ferdinand Celine.

The best of European culture embraced Nazism just as today it is embracing new anti-Semitism. The cowardice of the intellectuals, academics and men of letters on the “Jewish question” is repeated today on the issue of Israel.

Henry Rousso called it “Le Syndrome de Vichy”. The reference is to France under Nazi occupation, when the cream of Paris’ writers continued their work, pleasing the Germans, getting favors, condemning the Jews to death by their indifference and hypocrisy.

Consider the words and images associated with Israel in recent years by these new anti-Semitic intellectuals in their newspapers, in their books, in their university classrooms: “s**t”, “Nazi”, “racist”, “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing”, “settler”, “war criminal”, “illegal”.

These BDS supporters hope to nail an entire people, the Jewish people, to a dark destiny: being exterminated or being the exterminator, perpetuating the myth of a “race” inevitably involved in bloody tragedies, forcing 7 million Israeli Jews, a minority in the the immense Arab world, to the choice between national suicide or a desperate war. Europe and the Arab world are sinking into a deadly mentality, planning once again to inflict horrors on the Jewish people.

In their cumulative effect, the consequences of this new defamatory language against the reputation of Israel have been devastating. Neither Syria’s Assad, nor Iran’s mullahs or North Korea, not the worst African satrapies, enjoy this special treatment.

Only Israel. Only the Jews.

It is ironic to see how the University of Jerusalem is now being targeted by boycotters of the Jewish State from Paris to London. It was founded 23 years before the establishment of Israel. The opening ceremony on Mt. Scopus, overlooking the city of Jerusalem, took place on April 11 1925: there were almost no buildings, the few members could not guarantee the continuity of courses and the very act of foundation seemed more an act of faith that the realization of a comprehensive plan.

The opening ceremony was held by Lord Arthur Hames Balfour, the British statesman, who in 1917 had signed the famous declaration in which the Government of His Majesty promoted “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine”.

In the ‘30s the Hebrew University, the same one that is being boycotted today in many Western universities, received a lifeline with the influx of young Jewish scientists and researchers who could not pursue their studies in Europe due to anti-Semitic laws.

Remember Dagens Nyheter, the most intellectual and sophisticated Swedish newspaper, which published one of the most violent anti-Semitic editorials ever written, entitled “Muslim hatred of Jews is justified”. The author, historian of religion Jan Samuelson, declared that as long as Israel remains an “occupier”, the Arab-Islamic rejection is understandable.

Remember Johann Hari, who in the world of British journalism, known for reliability, precision, elegance and fair comment, was prized as “Journalist of the Year” by Amnesty International. Hari wrote a column for the leftist daily The Independent: “Whenever I try to mouth these words (of reassurance for Israel), a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of s**t.”

No other country in the world is compared so often to “s**t” as the State of Israel by these well educated, bohemian and despicable anti-Semites

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/17791