Ben Cohen: If it turns out that accusations by singer Gil Ofarim aren’t as he says, then it will be a gift to those who believe that antisemitism is just a cynical means for Jews to morally blackmail non-Jews.
Ben Cohen: We all know that raw prejudice among Jews against those who are visibly Jewish—that they are loud, rude, unwashed, contemptuous towards outsiders and all the rest of that baggage—is our community’s dirty secret.
Ben Cohen: Like COVID-19 seeping around the world, antisemitism whipped up during the pandemic, with its echo of the medieval slander that Jews spread the Black Death by poisoning wells, remains with us.
Ben Cohen: As the world tunes in to the Olympics in Tokyo, watching an enormous variety of sports in which athletes of all nationalities compete, it’s evident that these ideas connecting race with sporting ability belong in the garbage can of history.
Ben Cohen: His election numbers might be respectable, but his ideas about the world are far less so, even by France’s standards, where the extremes of left and right have always enjoyed solid electoral support.
Ben Cohen: He talked about Israel positively while at the same time shining a light on the double standard that enables his government to cozy up to repressive regimes around the world, from Iran to China, while depicting Israel as a rogue apartheid state.
Ben Cohen: Trafficking in antisemitic canards should not be permitted to hide behind noble labels like freedom of speech, and nor should doing so leave offenders free from the consequences of their actions.
Ben Cohen: Haim Bresheeth-Zabner issues a wholesale fraud perpetrated on the public, one that encourages readers to believe statements about Israel and Zionism that are radically and demonstrably false.
Ben Cohen: Corona has exacerbated a new virus online, touching on the regulation of the Internet, global restrictions on hate speech, national security measures and the prospect of tougher legal sanctions against both individual extremists and the platforms that host them.
Ben Cohen: It’s hard not to notice the conjunction of a viral epidemic that is itself drowning in false information and malicious speculation with a wider context in which political, racial and religious extremism is flourishing.
Ben Cohen: For many in the Jewish world, it will be a seminal moment in the relationship between Catholics and Jews since the Second Vatican Council of 1965 famously exonerated the Jewish people of the charge of “deicide”—collective, eternal responsibility for the suffering and death of Jesus.
