Last month, students at a Southern California high school were caught playing a late-night on-campus game of tag called "Beat the Jew." On the popular social networking site Facebook, a user named Alex Cookson launched an open invitation to an event called “Kill a Jew Day.” It was the fourth time that a call to murder Jews had been put on Facebook within recent days.

In D.C., White House press doyen Helen Thomas was captured on tape nonchalantly opining that all Jews should go back to Germany. Implicit in her statement was her assumption that everyone felt the same way, so what's the big deal? 

 

Also last month: Egypt decided to revoke the citizenship of any Egyptians married to Israelis. In Amsterdam, anti-Semitism has become so commonplace that Dutch police are now using "decoy Jews" in an effort to to cut the number of verbal and physical attacks on Jews, amid fears that anti-Semitic "hate crime" is on the rise. And in Germany, a Jewish dance group was attacked with stones by a group of children and teenagers during a performance at a street festival in Hannover. The teenagers also used a megaphone to shout anti-Semitic slurs.

 

European Jewish Congress President Moshe Kantor last week gave a bleak evaluation of European Jewry. "Jews are afraid to walk the streets in Europe with Jewish symbols," Kantor said. "Synagogues, Jewish schools and kindergartens require barbed-wire fences and security, and Jewish men, women and children are beaten up in broad daylight."