Michele Mandel has worked with the Toronto Sun since 1986 and has been a columnist there since 1989. She can be reached at michele.mandel@tor.sunpub.com.

These are frightening, frustrating times to be a Jew.

Isolated, reviled, condemned in a topsy-turvy world where most politicians and journalists lay all the blame for the Middle East crisis at our door.

Anti-Semitism is alive and well and living in the 21st century. Of course, now it is all couched in anti-Israel rhetoric, the new cover for the old malady, and somehow socially acceptable. But it is not only in the one-sided media that I hear its echoes. Its very real manifestations are being played out in firebomb attacks on synagogues and community centers and Jewish school buses around the world. And where are the politicians and religious leaders? Deathly quiet.

When Muslim Canadians were being targeted after Sept. 11, there were rightful cries of outrage. Not for us. Anglican Archbishop Michael Peers, Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, issues a one-sided indictment of Israel. Other churches do the same. Not one of them has said a word about the global wave of anti-Semitism that has raised its ugly head across Europe and here at home.

In Saskatoon a synagogue is firebombed and in Ottawa a synagogue is desecrated. In Toronto, a community center and a Jewish agency that helps developmentally disabled adults are defaced. An arsonist breaks into the Anshei Minsk Synagogue in Kensington Market, one of the oldest synagogues in Toronto, and sets afire 2,000 Jewish holy books, just as the Nazis did in the 1930s. And a Jewish heart surgeon has his shoulder broken after he is shoved into a parked car during an anti-Israel demonstration on Bloor St.

And listen to the deafening silence.

Thugs and arsonists
In Europe, the birthplace of modern anti-Semitism, it rages with alarming impunity. Especially brazen in France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe, Jewish institutions, cemeteries, schools and synagogues have been attacked by thugs and arsonists. Five French synagogues were firebombed last week alone. A school bus filled with Jewish children was stoned and another was torched. And the government, too afraid of angering its large Muslim population, does little to stop it.

In Germany, two rabbis visiting from the United States were beaten by a group of six in Berlin after being asked, "Are you a Jew?" The same scene has been replayed in Belgium, Caracas, Casablanca and Helsinki, and there are no international demands for the anti-Semitism to stop.

And then there is the situation in Israel.

For weeks, Palestinian homicide bombers strapped with dynamite have targeted crowds of vulnerable civilians. Day after day after day, in pizza parlors and ice cream shops and discos. My, how quiet the world is. Where is the condemnation from church groups? Where are the non-Jewish protesters?

Babies are ripped to shreds outside a synagogue after a bat mitzvah. Families just like mine sit down at the Passover Seder and 26 men, women and children are blown to tiny pieces of bone and flesh. Where is the United Nations then?

When Israel finally retaliates, when they attempt to put an end to the vicious reign of terror by hunting for militants encouraged by Yasser Arafat, the world suddenly erupts in anger. Why must Israel turn the other cheek for Jewish lives, while the United States rightly launches an offensive to root out the terrorists who took American lives Sept. 11?

Ah, the pundits argue, Israel is the source of all this terrorism. If only they would leave the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, peace would reign. The apologists offer up a reprehensible justification for the homicide bombing -- that it is somehow the only route left to the desperate Palestinians anxious for a homeland.

"A huge lie"
But as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times notes, "That is a huge lie." The Palestinians were offered a state in 1947 and again in 2000 and it seems that on both occasions, nothing short of all of Israel was enough. More than 50 years ago, the UN partitioned the land into Israel and Palestine. Jewish leaders accepted the narrow territory. The Arab response was to launch an immediate war against the tiny Jewish state. Until Israel captured the territories in a defensive war in 1967, Jordan controlled the West Bank, Egypt held Gaza and neither nation did a thing to establish a homeland for the Palestinians.

Ancient history? Then let's talk about the summer of 2000. Almost everyone agrees there should be a Palestinian state and at Camp David, Israel agreed, offering to return up to 96% of the West Bank and Gaza and more dramatically, East Jerusalem. Incredibly, it was still not enough. Yasser Arafat not only refused it outright, but he strangely offered no counter-proposal for negotiation. But then Arafat has always believed a nation must "be born in blood."

So instead, he offered his suicide package -- the current bloody Intifada that has now raged since Sept. 2000.

Yet the world keeps telling us that it is Israel -- and the Jews -- who must bear the blame.

Views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.

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