[Daniel Pipes] Note the contrast: when Matteo Salvini, Italy's interior minister recently visited Jerusalem, which he hailed as the capital of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called him a "great friend of Israel." Back home, however, Italy's liberal Jews denounced Salvini for, among other things, his Gypsy policy and his alleged "racism against foreigners and migrants."
A similar battle, pitting the mighty State of Israel against small and shrinking Jewish communities, takes place in many European countries, invariably arguing over the same subject: what the press calls far-right, populist, nativist, or nationalist parties – and what I call civilizationist parties (because they primarily aspire to maintain Western civilization). Israel's leadership unsurprisingly focus on these parties' foreign policy, broadly seeing them as its best friends in Europe, while Europe's Jewish establishment no less predictably emphasizes the parties' domestic profiles, portraying them as incorrigibly antisemitic, even auguring a return to the twentieth century's fascistic dictatorships.
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