Europe Loves Hate By John Podhoretz New York Post E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com April 12, 2002 -- For many American Jews, the past two weeks have been eye-opening in the same way Sept. 11 was eye-opening. Just as America was awakened to the threat of terrorism on that awful day, Jews who have never experienced a moment's anti-Semitism have had a chance to see it on the loose - and to consider that they too might fall victim to it. They've seen it spewed not just by easily dismissed extremist wackos like David Duke, but by mainstream politicians in Europe and by American Muslim groups whom the president of the United States himself has welcomed into the White House. Synagogues have been firebombed in France, Finland, Ottawa and, just yesterday, in Tunisia. A school bus filled with Jewish children was bombarded with stones outside Paris and a Jewish shopkeeper was shot and killed near Toulouse. A Hasidic Jew was brutalized on the streets of London. A pro-Palestinian protest in Calgary featured thousands of demonstrators chanting "Death to Jews" in Arabic. These incidents, and many others around the world, have all taken place in the two weeks since the Israeli government began its anti-terrorist campaign in the West Bank. You can now add to these actual horrors the intellectual horror emanating from Western Europe, featuring an outpouring of hostility toward Israel and Israelis that has entered the realm of the pathological. It has become commonplace for European commentators to refer to the Israeli action as a "genocide," which is disgusting enough, given the implicit comparison of Israel to Nazi Germany by residents of the continent on which the Holocaust occurred just a half-century ago. But it's particularly disgusting when you consider that even according to official Palestinian sources all of 500 people have died in the past two weeks - out of a population of 1 million. (And the vast majority of those 500 were, for all intents and purposes, soldiers in Yasser Arafat's army.) By comparison, in 1994, the Hutus killed an average of 8,000 Tutsis per day in an actual genocide in Rwanda. Nonetheless, the European Union has called for the imposition of economic sanctions against Israel (which won't actually happen; the body that voted for them is powerless to impose them) while remaining silent about the Palestinian Authority, which carried out the homicide-suicide bombings that caused the Israeli incursion. Ron Rosenbaum points out in this week's New York Observer "the astonishing hypocrisy of European diplomats and politicians . . . supporting the Palestinian 'right of return' when so many Europeans are still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder." Maybe the European reaction is not pathological at all. Maybe, rather, it's all too horrifyingly familiar. Consider Nobel Peace Prize Committee member Hanna Kvanmo, a 76-year-old leftist politician in Norway. She announced that she would very much like to withdraw the 1994 award from Israeli politician Shimon Peres but not from Yasser Arafat. It subsequently came out that Kvanmo served time in a Norwegian jail for collaborating with the Nazis during World War II (and lest anyone think this story of her life is Zionist propaganda, you can find a, yes, sympathetic treatment of her life story at a neo-Nazi Web site called www.newsturmer.com). This recounting of the recent resurgence in anti-Semitism leaves out entirely the bilious anti-Semitic filth pouring out on the notorious "Arab street" we're all supposed to be so worried about inflaming. "My father's been telling me this all my life, and I never believed him," a friend says, echoing the view of a million other Jews. "It can happen here." Fortunately, it simply can't happen here in the United States - except in terrible spasms of anti-Semitic rage like the Crown Heights pogrom of 1991. But it can happen elsewhere in the world - unless those who want to make it happen are stopped. And who can stop them? Only the Israelis and the United States. The Bush administration now surely knows that Arab countries are not interested in forcing Yasser Arafat to stop killing Jews - because they like it when he kills Jews. Whether they like it because they hate Jews too (Saudi Arabia) or because Arafat killing Jews makes their own jobs easier (Jordan) is immaterial. Eventually, the bloodlust so in evidence on the Arab-Muslim street will force America to choose - just as President Bush said the world would have to choose. Call it an "alliance for good" against the "axis of evil."