Figures released this month show that anti-Jewish attacks in Britain rose by 40 per cent last year, with teenagers beaten for wearing yarkmulkas, and swastikas carved into the side of synagogues. Some 24 per cent of British people, in a recent poll, agreed with statements like "Jews only care about their own kind" and "Jews have too much power in this country" - up from 18 per cent in 2002.

[...]

There is no other form of racism that would make decent progressive people equivocate. But how many of us hesitate before we call this hatred by its proper name? How many of us wonder - just for a moment - if perhaps this wave of hate is a legitimate response to the crimes committed by Ariel Sharon in the Occupied Territories? But wait. Does anybody think the global wave of hostility towards Muslims was a legitimate response to Bin Laden's crimes?

[...]

Why is this happening, and should we be worried? A few months ago I was talking to an old woman who survived Auschwitz. She said: "Growing up in Weimar Berlin, I used to laugh when I heard my grandparents ranting about anti-Semitism. I told them they were paranoid. Well, I wasn't laughing in the cattle trucks. I obviously don't think Britain is about to turn Nazi. But in Jewish terms, sixty years is nothing. Nothing. Sure, we're on top today - but how many times in history have the Jews been on top and thought we were safe, only to see it disappear in the blink of a gentile eye?" I must have looked sceptical because she quickly added: "Sure, we have the support of most Americans today. But power passes. The Pharoah looked very powerful once upon a time. American power will ebb away, and then what will my grandchildren be left with? At this rate, it will be a world that hates us more than ever."

And, yes, the debate about Israel is being infected with anti-Semitism. I passionately support the creation of a Palestinian state - and a real Palestinian state, not the string of Bantustans offered to Yasser Arafat in the summer of 2000. But why the constant rhetorical inflation of Israel's crimes to put them on a par with Nazi Germany? A recent poll found that 51 per cent of Germans believe "there is not much difference between what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and what the Nazis did to the Jews". In truth, more people died in one afternoon in Bergen-Belsen than have been killed in twenty years of conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. That doesn't make the murder of single Palestinian justifiable - but it does make me question the motives of those who would draw the comparison. Is it suppressed guilt? Is the old Jewish saying - the gentiles will never forgive us for what we revealed about them in Auschwitz - true?

Israel is committing real and terrible crimes in the Occupied Territories - but it does seem that human rights abuses committed by Jews provoke far more rage across the world than human rights abuses committed by any other group. Over the past 15 years, Russia has slaughtered at least 300,000 people in Chechnya - 40,000 of them children. This is more than ten times the number of Muslims who have (unforgivably) been killed by Israel. Western governments mostly supported and excused the killing in Chechnya, and Russia is - like Israel - a semi-democracy. So where's the comparable outrage? Does anybody constantly demand that Russians condemn Vladimir Putin before they have a right to be protected from racism?

I am angry about both Chechnya and Palestine - but why do so many people get furious about one and ignore the other? Some of my friends in pro-Palestinian campaigns say it's because our government is intermeshed with Israel when it comes to diplomacy, geopolitics and arms sales, so we have more responsibility for what happens there - but is that enough to explain the disparity? Aren't those things also true of Russia?

[...]

In case you still doubt the rise of anti-Semitism, let me offer you a small anecdote that opened even my flabby eyelids. At a recent debate about Iraq, one person in the audience came up to me afterwards and said: "Your skullcap is slipping, Mr Hari." Now, as it happens, I'm not Jewish (although a few of my relatives are). I asked him is he realised he was an anti-Semite, and he replied indignantly: "Criticising Israel isn't anti-Semitic!" I replied: "I agree. I criticise Israel all the time. But how are you criticising Israel by talking about my non-existent skullcap? You didn't mention Israel once, and nor did the debate." He scowled:. "You Jews are so paranoid!" he declared, before storming off. Jews across Britain are experiencing moments like all the time now.

[...]

So let’s get this straight: Zionism was created by a desperate people – many of them still emaciated from the camps – fleeing genocide. It was not, of course, morally simple. The cruel reality is that there was not – as many diaspora Jews had dreamed – "a land without people for a people without land". There was only historical Palestine, which had many Arab inhabitants who loved their land and their homes. 700,000 of these totally innocent people were ethnically cleansed to create the new state, as Israel’s new historians like Benny Morris and Tom Segev have shown.

This was a bitter tragedy, and an injustice against the Palestinians that should have been put right by Israel in 1967 with the creation of a heavily-compensated Palestinian state on all of Gaza and the West Bank. Every day of occupation since then has been unforgiveable. But I fear that only somebody with a prejudice against Jews would act as though – in the circumstances of 1948, fleeing the most psychopathically murderous anti-Semitism – they were acting in a purely evil way, even though the impact on the Palestinians was horrible and undeserved. We need to constantly remember that the Jews are not in the Middle East out of malice or as part of a “colonial project”, but because they were driven there; too often, in our desire to rightly criticise contemporary Israeli crimes, we forget this, and we forget to show that there have always been consistent Israeli advocates of Palestinian self-determination free to operate and campaign within Israeli society.

The great leftist historian Isaac Deutscher described the Israel-Palestine situation with an analogy. He said a Jewish man had jumped from a burning building, and he landed on an Arab man, breaking his arms and legs. The natural response of the Arab is to blame the Jew – but in truth he should blame the arsonist and try, slowly, to physically recover alongside the Jew.

The Palestinians themselves can hardly be blamed for failing to see the situation this way. Is there anybody in the world who would happily surrender half their land to a dispossessed and stateless group? In this country, we begrudge even giving the most paltry benefits and a few run-down council houses to asylum seekers. Imagine how we would react if the Kurds claimed Cornwall for a free Kurdistan, or the Roma violently seized Devon, ethnically cleansed the inhabitants and tried to establish a state there.

But – although it is understandable for the Palestinians to respond with rage and incomprehension – what excuse do the rest of us have? Is it really just that we are angry on behalf of the Palestinians? I would like to think so – but why the myopia about other victim groups? I fear that our reaction to Jewish crimes shows a latent anti-Semitism, because it is so disproportionate to our response to other, even larger horrors. Yes, be angry about Israel - very angry - but in the context of objecting to all human rights abuses. To single out Israel for unique condemnation - rather than the simple, shared condemnation it deserves - is a worrying sign that Israel has inherited the pariah status once applied simply to the Jews as a people.

The problem with anti-Semitism isn't with Ken Livingstone, folks. It is all around us.

DRESDEN, Germany, Feb. 13 -- Several thousand neo-Nazis and skinheads marched through the heart of this meticulously restored city Sunday to protest its incendiary destruction by Allied forces 60 years ago, the biggest effort yet by fringe groups to portray Germans as equal victims of World War II.

The demonstration was among the largest gatherings of Nazi sympathizers in Germany since the end of the war and overshadowed Dresden's official commemoration of the city's virtual annihilation by British and U.S. bombers on Feb. 13 and 14, 1945.

[...]

Police estimated that 5,000 neo-Nazis and other extremists attended their rally, which began outside the parliament building for the east German state of Saxony and continued past the renovated Semper Opera building and over the Elbe River, which bisects Dresden. Most of the marchers wore black clothes and carried black balloons and banners as dark-sounding classical music blared over loudspeakers.

"Here in Dresden, genocide took place in 1945, just like it did in Hiroshima," said Franz Schoenhuber, a former Nazi SS officer from Munich and a longtime far-right politician. "We're not afraid to call them war crimes."

[...]

German officials are considering new restrictions on public protests by neo-Nazi groups, which are planning an even bigger turnout in Berlin in May to mark the 60th anniversary of the surrender of the Nazi government. In Berlin, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder issued a statement criticizing extremists for trying to minimize the Third Reich's responsibility for the war and for the Holocaust, during which an estimated 6 million Jews and several million others were killed.

"Today we grieve for the victims of war and the Nazi reign of terror in Dresden, in Germany and in Europe," Schroeder said. "We will oppose in every way these attempts to reinterpret history. We will not allow cause and effect to be reversed."

Nazi symbols and public denial of the Holocaust are prohibited by law in Germany. But the government has reported a substantial increase in the past two years in the number of hard-core Nazis and their sympathizers. The trend has been fueled partly by the highest unemployment rates in Germany since the 1940s, anti-foreigner sentiment and a general dissatisfaction with mainstream politics.

Last September, the National Democrats, a far-right political party that attracts support from neo-Nazis, won more than 9 percent of the vote in Saxony, the eastern German state of which Dresden is the capital. Since then, they have forged an alliance with other groups in a bid to win representation in the federal parliament.

Emboldened by their electoral success, the National Democrats have courted controversy in recent weeks by arguing that the degree of German suffering during the end of World War II has been unfairly repressed or minimized. Last month, party leaders walked out of a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, complaining that the Holocaust was being overemphasized at the expense of the bombing victims in Dresden.

"There is a myth, the myth of the innocent Dresden," said Gerhard Besier, director of the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarian Research, a political think tank in Dresden that studies extremist groups. "People don't realize that the Nazis had been very strong in Dresden and in Saxony. They insist that the population of Dresden was innocent and was murdered, and that this bombing didn't make any sense."

That idea was emphasized for 40 years after the war by the East German government, which blamed Britain and the United States for attacking Dresden as part of a capitalist conspiracy to destroy parts of Germany that the Allies knew would fall under Soviet control. Besier noted that East Germany adopted terminology first used by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who referred to the Dresden attacks as the "Anglo-American terror bombing."

Oliver Reinhard, a Dresden journalist who co-authored a history of the firebombings titled "The Red Glow," said such sentiments remain commonplace in Saxony.

"For a long time it was attractive to say that Dresden and its people were only victims," he said. "People still stand up and say, 'Let's face it: The Americans didn't bomb Dresden to hurt Hitler. They did it to hit and destroy all the big cities in the Soviet zone.' "