In the early 20th century, Jewish quotas at American universities were seen by some as a way to deter anti-Semitism. Were Jews to fill a disproportionate number of university spots, the idea went, they would inspire resentment. Plus, the Jews of Eastern Europe were seen by gentile elites as uncultured and unclean; surround your average student with enough of these Jews, it was suggested, and that student can’t help but get sick of them.
I don’t know if anybody who espoused such theories really believed them, but the crux of one of the most infamous periods of Western anti-Semitism was justified by its practitioners as being for the Jews’ own good.
A century later, here we go again.
Throughout the Western world, Jews are effectively being banned from public spaces and told it is for their safety. Once again, citizens of democracies apparently can’t be expected to control themselves at the sight of groups of Jews. Order the Jews to stay home and—voila!—problem solved.
The highest-profile example of this at the moment is the European soccer league’s exclusion of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from that team’s upcoming game in Birmingham, England. But this has been building for some time, and the trend that made this travesty inevitable has yet to be reckoned with.
More than a year ago, I wrote about several examples of this “for their own good” anti-Semitism. We saw the Israeli Olympic teams in Paris confined to their dorms out of concern over the constant threats they faced. There was the ban of an Israeli ultimate frisbee team from the European youth championships in Belgium; the International Ice Hockey Federation’s exclusion of the Israeli team “until the safety and well-being of all participants (including Israeli participants) can be assured”; the removal of the Jewish captain of South Africa’s under-19 national cricket team for the same reasons.
Yet now this trend has exploded.
Two weeks ago, a Brussels official announced that the government was canceling a concert scheduled for October 15 by the popular rock band Disturbed. “My priority and responsibility is the safety of residents, demonstrators, spectators and the staff of Forest National,” the official said. Disturbed frontman David Draiman is Jewish and has been an advocate for the hostages and a prominent bane of anti-Semites in general.
Draiman has been made a particular target by Jew-baiters in part because of Disturbed’s success. After two decades of recording and touring, the band is still releasing chart-toppers and selling out arenas despite all of the BDS movement’s efforts. The campaign to convince venues to ban Disturbed because of the war in Gaza has clearly failed, so the haters have turned to threats, which the local police then use as an excuse to cancel the show.
That’s what happened in Birmingham, too. “As Israel continues its assault on Gaza, killing thousands and devastating civilian infrastructure, sporting fixtures involving Israeli teams cannot be separated from the wider political context. Hosting such teams sends a message of normalisation and indifference to mass atrocities,” wrote infamous anti-Semitic former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and current MP for Birmingham Ayoub Khan in September.
When that failed, and the game was to go on as planned, Khan and his supporters pushed for Maccabi’s fans to be disallowed from attending. The local police force was convinced that the overt threats of violence being made against Maccabi fans—such as the one by a local Muslim cleric—were legitimate and tried to wash their hands of the responsibility to protect Jewish soccer fans.
As expected, the success of this tactic is breeding more of it. A week after the announcement of the cancellation of Disturbed’s show in Brussels, a Jewish film festival in Sweden announced it would have to be postponed because no venue would host it. Why? You guessed it: “Sweden’s largest cinema chain, Filmstaden, said in a statement that it had decided against hosting the festival because of ‘safety concerns’ back in the spring…. The theatre Folkets Hus, which sometimes hosts film screenings, also declined on security grounds, according to Euronews,” reported the Telegraph.
One of the festival’s organizers posted that it would be “outrageous if Sweden cannot protect cinema-goers who are interested in Jewish film.” It is both outrageous and becoming par for the course.
To be clear, none of this makes Jews safer. Indeed, the opposite: It is normalizing the idea that Jews cannot be protected at a soccer match, at the theater, at a concert, and wherever else they might want to gather. This, in turn, makes everyone less safe because it makes violence the most effective tactic to determine which cultural events are allowed and which are not. It’s an invitation to anarchy. As always, anti-Semitism is the gateway drug to the complete collapse of societal norms.
