Iceland is the last place that I’d associate with anti-Semitism, but when Iceland proposed to ban male infant circumcision – as common-sense dictates – then jews immediately began protesting about it (1) and eventually got it stopped. (2) In so doing they did the classic jewish thing of accusing the non-jews who dared to offend their sensibilities of ‘anti-Semitism’.
To quote a typical exponent in the form of Manfred Gerstenfeld writing in Mosaic Magazine:
‘Every year, during the Lent period before Easter, daily hymns full of hatred for the Jews are read by distinguished citizens and broadcast on Iceland’s public-radio station. These texts were written in the 17th century—many years before the first Jews arrived in the country—by the Christian priest, poet, and anti-Semite Halgrimur Petterson. One hymn, entitled “The Demand for Crucifixion,” reads: “The Jewish leaders all decide that Jesus must be crucified. The Prince of Life their prey must be. The murderer set at liberty.” In 2012, the Simon Wiesenthal Center tried in vain to stop this hateful practice of performing such hymns.
Iceland also gave warm refuge to the Estonian Nazi war criminal Evald Mikson. At the end of the 1980s, the Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff tried to bring Mikson to trial for his involvement in the murder of Jews in Estonia. This led to many Icelandic media attacks against Israel. And the country’s government took more than ten years after Zuroff’s initial appeals to set up a commission to investigate Mikson’s war crimes. . . .
In 2015, the city council of the country’s capital, Reykjavik, decided to boycott Israeli-produced goods. . . . In 2011, Iceland’s parliament was the first in Western Europe to recognize a Palestinian state. . . . And Iceland’s Birgitta Jonsdottir was the first parliamentarian of any country to visit participants of the failed second Gaza flotilla.’ (3)
Gerstenfeld’s original article in the Algemeiner is only slightly longer and is equally as a bad as it rather pathetically accuses Halgrimur Petterson of being an ‘anti-Semite’. (4) This is presumably related to Petterson’s most famous work ‘Passion Hymns’, which focus on the death of Jesus and mention the jewish role in it at length.
If Gerstenfeld had half a brain rather than simply being brain dead histrionic scribbler. Then he’d know that this isn’t ‘anti-Semitism’, but rather classic Christian anti-Judaism based upon the Gospel text on the death of Jesus.
The fact that Gerstenfeld styles these as ‘hymns full of hatred’ is simply laughable, while Efraim Zuroff shrieks about a single so-called ‘Nazi war criminal’ being given asylum after the Second World War as well as the fact that Icelandic politicians have dared to support Palestinian existence over Israel’s desire to rebuild a Davidic empire and get rid of the gentiles.
Then that is so-called ‘anti-Semitism’, which all goes to show the nonsense of the charge of ‘anti-Semitism’ by levelled at anyone or anything these days.
References
(1) http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/US-Jewish-organizations-urge-Iceland-to-nix-bill-banning-male-circumcision-550086 ; https://forward.com/news/world/398204/iceland-welcomes-first-rabbi-as-it-considers-ban-on-circumcision/
(2) http://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/uk-jews-welcome-icelands-decision-to-drop-brit-milah-ban/
(3) https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2018/04/icelands-long-history-of-anti-semitism/
(4) https://www.algemeiner.com/2018/03/23/icelands-long-record-of-antisemitism/