By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Seven months after starting her new appointment, Hannah Rosenthal received a gift: Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas.
“If Helen Thomas, coming out of the Jewish Heritage Festival at the White House, had just said, ‘Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,’ it would not have cost her her job,” said Rosenthal, the U.S. Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism. “That she followed it up with, ‘Tell them to go back to Germany and Poland’ made it a whole different statement.”
It became immediately obvious to Thomas’s colleagues that she had crossed a line.
“She was the first woman in the White House press corps, she’d been there since President Kennedy, she had amazing stories to tell, she had respect from the press,” Rosenthal said. “They did not back her.”
Such hard-won victories are not always so easy to attain, said Rosenthal, who visited Seattle on April 7–8 as a guest of the local chapter of the American Jewish Committee.
There is no question that anti-Semitism is on the rise, Rosenthal said — in this country, FBI figures bear that out — but its face is changing.
“I run across people all the time that think anti-Semitism was a disease that was cured when Adolf Hitler killed himself,” said Rosenthal. “It is not a disease, it is a chronic illness, and it has mutations and it is ever morphing.”
The worldwide increase in anti-Semitism was worrisome enough to members of Congress, including the late Tom Lantos (D–Calif.), a Holocaust survivor, that in 2004 it created an office within the U.S. Department of State to monitor and report on the phenomenon. President Obama appointed Rosenthal, a former director of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, an umbrella organization for Jewish community relations councils across the country, in November 2009. She took over from Gregg Rickman, an appointee of former President Bush.
Rosenthal has been criticized as being anti-Israel because of her ties to progressive organizations like New Israel Fund and J Street. She rejects such criticism, and said anyone who hears her speak will discover otherwise. Regardless of others’ opinions, she said the leeway she has been given to educate other envoys within the State Dept. on clearing up misconceptions about anti-Semitism and Israel has shown the Obama administration’s commitment to her post.
When Rickman was appointed, “his office was in a satellite office and he was kind of alone unto himself,” Rosenthal said. “When they appointed me they brought me into the State Department, totally integrated into everything that goes on there.”
Her data can be found in reports on more than 75 countries, as well as the soon-to-be-released International Religious Freedom report and a human rights report that was released earlier this month.
Rosenthal said that in her travels she has seen six trends in hatred of Jews:
• Traditional, old-fashioned anti-Semitism such as cemetery desecrations and graffiti on Jewish institutions. The conspiracy theory that Jews killed Christians to use their blood in religious rituals has changed to Jews now kidnap people to steal their organs.
• Holocaust denial, which is growing, Rosenthal said. “There is a sense of urgency that I think we all feel in addressing it because Holocaust survivors and camp liberators are in their 80s, 90s and sometimes 100s, and they’re not going to be with us much longer.”
• Holocaust glorification, meaning a “need to finish the job,” Rosenthal said. It has begun to appear in Eastern European cities, but is also growing in neo-Nazi parties in Germany, as well as the Middle East, where much of it comes from Egyptian TV and Al Jazeera.
• Holocaust relativism, which conflates the Holocaust with other oppressions or genocides. “Never before and never since the Holocaust have we seen a government employ its best minds and talents and culture into building killing factories, and how that can happen needs to be understood, and it needs to be understood from the particular and the universal messages that come out of that,” Rosenthal said. “The Holocaust remains something that the world has to realize represents the possible.”
But, she added, her challenge comes from avoiding the conflation “without trying to get into victimhood.”
• Ultra-nationalism, which isn’t always directly anti-Semitic, but “that of course is never good for the Jews,” Rosenthal said. “We are absolutely despised, but we’re not the most despised.”
Much of that sentiment, which focuses on ethnic purity and national identity, is directed toward Muslims and ethnic minorities. What alarms Rosenthal is “how clear the language is that these political parties are using, which once upon a time would have been completely unacceptable,” she said. “We all know what happened the last time someone said we need to protect the purity of our nation.”
She and her colleague Farah Pandith, the U.S. Special Representative on Muslim Communities, have worked closely together both in the U.S. and abroad to drive home the point that discrimination and hatred toward each other’s communities is unacceptable.
The State Dept., through Rosenthal and Pandith, has also embarked on an initiative using social media tools to stop bigotry and promote mutual respect across ethnic and religious lines, among others, called 2011 Hours Against Hate. The programs are designed for people under 30 and have begun to gain ground in Spain, Azerbaijan and Turkey, where they were first introduced in February.
• Opposition to Israel policy that crosses the line into anti-Semitism. “The most common statement I say on this job is, ‘George Mitchell is the Special Envoy on Middle East Peace and I am the Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism,’” Rosenthal said, but the two issues are so intertwined that she often jokes to Mitchell that she’s doing his job.
“It’s very hard to separate the two,” she said.
The U.S. government has very specific guidelines on defining anti-Semitism, and the section that relates to Israel uses what Rosenthal called former Soviet political prisoner Natan Scharansky’s three D’s: Demonization of Israel as a country; delegitimacy of Israel, or denying its citizens’ right to self-determination; and holding a double standard to Israel that demands behavior not expected of other democratic countries.
“If there is a rally that is criticizing a policy of the state of Israel, does that make it anti-Semitic? Of course it doesn’t,” Rosenthal said. But, she added, “the fact that they have rallies in opposition to Israel and not Burma and not China and not Vietnam and not the Congo and not Sudan — the list goes on of human rights abuses…. That they only do it to Israel is singling out Israel and holding Israel to a different standard than all other countries, and that is not objecting to a policy of the state of Israel. That is hating the collective Jew.”