Many of these mechanisms have since been prostituted: The international institutions have been taken over by the repugnant values of dictatorial regimes in the Third World; the great international conference against racism in Durban turned into an anti-Semitic orgy. The UN Human Rights Commission has been placed in the hands of the representative of Libya and a Syrian representative became the custodian of world peace in the Security Council. In the last decade, the virus has spread in Europe.

The new mutation of Jew-hatred in Europe is dangerous because it is immune to the medicine of enlightenment. The hatred is no longer focused on the individual Jew but on the national home that has been established, on the pattern of a European national state. The victims of anti-Semitism in its latest incarnation - the Jews in their ancestral homeland - are portrayed as the enemies of the basic values of enlightenment. This is Jew-hatred in the name of human rights.

What makes the attacks on the Jewish state rampant anti-Semitism are the three most repulsive characteristics of Jew-hatred throughout the ages: Questioning the very right of Jews to realize what is considered legitimate for all other national collectives, making unique and utterly impossible demands on them, and portraying them as threatening world peace and humanity.

Europe has sinned by all three. Its citizens have put Israel at the top of the threats to world peace. Its governments approved in the UN the scandalous decision of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which denies the Jewish state - alone of all countries in the world - the basic right of self-defense against terrorism. In the mainstream of European elites, impudently and dangerously questioning the elementary right of a Jewish national state is becoming increasingly legitimate.

Throughout the continent, which harbored the ideology that led to the extermination camps, the sick comparison of Israel to the Nazis is now taking root.

Public opinion in Germany was recently in turmoil when representatives of a neo-Nazi party in a regional parliament compared the Allied bombing of Dresden to the Holocaust. Approximately two months ago, there was no equivalent outrage when a comprehensive and scientific survey showed that 68% of the German people (not including immigrants) believe that Israel is waging "a war of extermination" against the Palestinians. 51% explicitly
compared Israel's actions to those of the Nazis against the Jews. 62% said that they were "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews". This abomination of German public opinion cannot be balanced even by President Kohler's sincere displays of humanitarian solidarity and by Foreign Minister Fischer's proven friendship.

More then half a century after the fact, Europe celebrated its victory in "the previous war" against the old strain of anti-Semitism. The new mutation is developing into plague proportions under the auspices of the memory of Auschwitz. Now, the executioners' descendants are portraying the Jews as the exterminators of the Palestinians while those who disseminate
the blood libel masquerade as defenders of human rights. This distortion undermine Europe's value infrastructure even more than it endangers the political status of Israel.

Dr. Dan Schueftan is a Senior Fellow at the National Security Studies
Center at The University of Haifa. He teaches at the School of Political Sciences of the University of Haifa and at the Israel Defense Forces National Security College.