Rising antisemitism fueled by hatred of Western civilization, warns Netanyahu

Israeli Prime Minister links rising hostility around the globe towards Israel to radical anti-Western agenda which celebrates “the complete breakdown of civilized society.”

By World Israel News Staff

The surge in anti-Zionism and antisemitism around the globe is part of a larger agenda by fringe elements to undermine Western civilization and to destroy “civilized society as we understand it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday.

Netanyahu made the claim during his address at a conference held by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance at the headquarters of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.

“What Israel is fighting here is not merely a seven-front war, which I’ll have to attend to it in a few minutes, but an eight-front war. It’s the war, ultimately, of civilization against barbarism,” Netanyahu said.

Antisemitism abroad, including attempts to undermine Israel’s legitimacy veiled as anti-Zionism, is increasingly linked with hatred of the West, Netanyahu argued.

“We see not only the burning of Israeli flags, and this is consequential, you see the burning of American flags, British flags, Canadian flags, French flags.”

“That’s not an accident. Because the people who are leading this charge are basically challenging Western civilization or free societies as we understand them. When you celebrate these killers, you’re celebrating the complete breakdown of civilized society as we understand it.”

This is not the first time antisemitism has been tied to wider attacks on the West, Netanyahu continued, noting that Hitler’s Holocaust of European Jewry was accompanied by his war on the liberal West.

“Six million Jews died in the Holocaust but 60 million died during the war that it inspired,” Netanyahu said.

Along with anti-Israel protesters in the West, the Israeli premier took aim at critics of Israel’s war against Hamas, including the International Criminal Court.

“In 1944, the Royal Air Force… tried to take out the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen.”

“But the British pilots missed their target and they hit a children’s hospital nearby and I think 70 or 80 children were horribly burned to death. That’s not terrorism. That’s not a war crime. That’s the incidental casualties of civilians that accompany any war. ”

Israel, Netanyahu continued, “has gone out of its way in ways that no other army has” to prevent civilian casualties.

“The ICC, the court that was established really after the Holocaust in order to prevent another Holocaust…declares that I and the former defense minister, effectively the State of Israel… we’re the war criminals.”

“What does it say to democracies? What does it say to free societies? It imperils the right to self-defense.”

“It means that this tactic of implanting yourself in a civilian population while sending rockets and murderers to murder civilians as you hide behind your own civilians, you’re given effective immunity. And once this idea is implanted, it will spread and spread and spread. It will spread to your own societies. So for the future of civilization, we can’t have that.”

anti-ZionismAntisemitismBenjamin NetanyahuIHRA