Anti-Zionists must now hang their heads in shame over the French Jewish school shooting

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1014/anti_zionists_must_now_hang_their_heads_in_shame_over_french_jewish_school_shooting
(With thanks to Tom Gross)
Barely had the news broken that the appalling killings at a Jewish school in Toulouse earlier this week had been perpetrated by a French Muslim motivated by anti-Zionism than the head of the Grand Mosque in Paris was out in the media calling for the revelation not to lead to the stigmatisation of French Muslims in general. He's right of course. It shouldn't.

Our gripe here is not with what he said, or with him personally, it is with what most Muslim leaders don't say in such circumstances. For it is now clear that the killer was motivated by the same kind of lies about Israeli actions in Gaza that have been peddled and therefore legitimised for years by Muslim leaders in France and across Europe.

Let us be clear. There has not been one single instance, ever, of the Israeli military deliberately targeting Palestinian children in a school in Gaza. Palestinian children have died in the overall conflict of course. But even that indirect responsibility lies with the people who have started all the wars, namely Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas.

That is the incontrovertible truth of the matter. Yet you'd never know it if you listened to Europe's Muslim leaders who have whipped up the kind of hysteria against Israel in which the sort of attack that took place on Monday was always likely to take place.

The Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF) in 2008, for example, spoke of Israel's actions in Gaza in terms of "starving an entire population". That's not far short of an accusation of attempted genocide. In 2003, to quote one of many such instances from the UK, the Muslim Council of Britain openly described Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as "genocide" and made a thinly veiled comparison with the Holocaust.

It's not just the Muslim organisations of course. Mainstream media outlets across the continent have added a further layer of legitimacy to this lethal ideology with papers and magazines such as the Guardian and the New Statesman engaged in what is little better than a hate campaign against the Jewish state.

Still another layer of legitimacy has been added by senior politicians. Only this week, EU foreign policy supremo (and national disgrace) Catherine Ashton approvingly referred to a Palestinian child's description of Gaza as a "prison". Rather than contribute to the edifice of dishonesty, why didn't she tell the Palestinian group she was addressing that peace will only come when their parents stop lying to them and inciting hatred of Jews? (She was misquoted on Toulouse, but that's another matter)

Parliamentarians across Europe have far too often joined in the hate fest. Last week it was the turn of Sigmar Gabriel, leader of Germany's Social Democrats, who slammed Israel for "apartheid", one of the anti-Zionist movement's most common and most dishonest epithets.

No-one will ever know whether the tragedy in Toulouse would not have taken place if the atmosphere were different. But we can say that history teaches that mass demonisation can all too easily lead to the dehumanisation of the group or people or nation that is being demonised. From there it is only one single step to the belief that murder itself can be justified.

Muslim leaders, politicians, and journalists who have participated in the agenda of lies and hatred against Israel should today hang their heads in shame