KRAUTHAMMER ON EUROPEAN ANTI-SEMITISM:

In Europe, it is not very safe to be a Jew. How could this be?

The explanation is not that difficult to find. What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history. What is odd is not the anti-Semitism of today but its relative absence during the past half-century. That was the historical anomaly. Holocaust shame kept the demon corked for that half-century. But now the atonement is passed. The genie is out again.
This time, however, it is more sophisticated. It is not a blanket hatred of Jews. Jews can be tolerated, even accepted, but they must know their place. Jews are fine so long as they are powerless, passive and picturesque. What is intolerable is Jewish assertiveness, the Jewish refusal to accept victimhood. And nothing so embodies that as the Jewish state.

What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back. That Jew has been demonized in the European press as never before since, well . . . since the '30s. The liberal Italian daily La Stampa ran a cartoon of the baby Jesus, besieged by Israeli tanks, saying, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again."

Again. And this time the Christ-killers come in tanks. Just when Europe had reconciled itself to tolerance for the passive Jew -- the Holocaust survivor who could be pitied, lionized, perhaps awarded the occasional literary prize -- along comes the Jewish state, crude and vital and above all unwilling to apologize for its own existence.