An Anti-Semite Child?

The headline reads ”my foreign students believe that Jews are dangerous”. It’s quite a catch, as far as headline writing goes. Sure draws the eye. And it continues strong, with anecdotal evidence from a veteran teacher that children newly arrived from countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, and Somalia carry with them ideas that Jews ”burn children” and ”it’s okay to throw rocks at them”.

Sounds alarmist, right? But there are a few caveats that should be addressed if we’re to properly analyse these circumstances; a pre-requisite to properly judge these circumstances.

For starters, I know these children. I’ve taught such myself. And I know the basic background they have coming here, to little ole’ sheltered Sweden. Namely, they lack years and years of basic education. Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen have been in constant states of war for years. In Afghanistan’s case, one might argue for decades. Maybe even a century. And these children, finally at the stage of making an ”ordinary” life for themselves by western standards, simply haven’t been schooled. Illiteracy is rampant. And the one thing that festers in the lack of knowledge is prejudice. Here-say.

In the western world, and in Europe especially, the Holocaust is a still fresh reminder of the horrors of prejudice and demagoguery. It is an event that we are taught never to forget. But in our fervour to remember the most sordid parts of our modern past, we forget that it doesn’t amount to such a shattering revelation out in the rest of the world. In many parts of the world, the genocides of the Khmer Rouge, or the orchestrated famines of the Ukraine, or the Cultural Revolution of Mao, not to mention the many genocides of Central Africa, are much more cultural touchstones than the committed murder of Jews (among many other groups) during the thirties and forties in central Europe. The Holocaust, for all it’s moral lessons and human travesties, is not a pivotal point in human culture. It’s just another devastating example of deplorable human nature. There are many more examples more relevant for people from disparate parts of our world to know by heart.

It should surprise absolutely no one that children lacking years of schooling, that come from around the world, don’t innately know about our regional shames.

On to the next point of order; to explain immigrant children’s views on the Jewish ethnicity, and why the demonization thereof isn’t all that strange. They come from predominantly Muslim nations. Nations that are in varying forms part of a cultural group, upon which one nation’s predations are vividly predominant. While it is grossly incorrect that ”Jews burn children”, it is most definitely relevant to say that ”Israel kill children”. Muslim children. Children that these our pupils have much more in common with than a red-coated girl in an otherwise black-and-white movie.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter. Separating ”the Jew” from ”the Zionist”. The Jew, the ethnicity, and the Zionist, the colonialist expansionism on fundamentalist basis on the backs and bodies of “indigenous” people. Which is a separation that not even all Jews seem to be willing or able to make. But I will want to argue that such is the case, that there is a definite divide between the two. Because the alternative is a vile reality I would rather not have a part of. Because Zionism has mandated, over the course of some sixty years, the development of an apartheid state that periodically attack, oppress and slaughter civilian populations. At the end of the day, according to Zionist tradition, because it’s “their land by God’s decree”.

And too often does criticism of how the state of Israel enforces it’s rule, under Zionist ideology, get swept under the relevancy-carpet as anti-Semitism.

And naturally, if you’re not equipped to make a distinction between “The Jew” and “the Zionist”, it is no wonder that the fear of a nation state turns into fear of that nation state’s dominant ethnicity.

And for as long as we are so reluctant to separate ethnic Judaism from practical Zionism, is it really so surprising that children will incorrectly include the Jew in their prejudice against the Zionist? Because if you, educated and learned reader, won’t make the distinction, why should uneducated children be able to?

/Sebastian Lindberg 29/1-2019