Evidence mounted this week that much of the world is heading again for the edge of the same abyss that swallowed most of it in that black episode we call the Holocaust.

While we wring our hands about Israel’s attempts to protect itself from increasingly deadly rocket fire and other attacks from inside and outside its borders, anti-Semitic laws and other issues reminiscent of those dark times, are being considered and adopted all over the world.

For instance, far-right Hungarian lawmaker suggested counting his country’s Jews and “registering” Jewish Hungarian Parliament members, “to avoid the national security risk caused by the Jews,” JTA reports.

This came up during a discussion on Israel’s recent conflict in Gaza, illustrating, as I’ve said before, that the next Holocaust will wear a different hat, but will be the same animal.

Meanwhile, in Poland, a constitutional court reportedly ruled against allowing the kind of ritual slaughter that allows a religious Jewish community to exist. Once the center of the European Jewish universe, Poland now has some 6,000 Jews, according to the European Jewish Congress.

The Warsaw court ruled it unconstitutional to exempt Jews and Muslims from stunning animals before slaughtering them as their faiths require.

However, JTA reports that Jewish ritual slaughter is permissible under the 1997 Law on Regulating the Relations between the State and the Union of Jewish Communities in Poland, so the jury is still out on this one.

Meanwhile, Paris police arrested two men suspected of digging up two corpses at a Jewish cemetery, who “were found to be in possession of a number of human teeth.”

God only knows what that’s about, but I doubt their being Jewish is a random coincidence.

Also, two plaques on the wall of Avignon’s Jewish cemetery– one reading “Jewish cemetery” and the other of a Star of David – which had just been repaired from a previous vandalism, were “bludgeoned” this week. The attack followed the previous night’s discovery of “pro-Palestinian, ‘odious’ anti-Semitic texts against Israel and the police” on the municipal theater of a Paris suburb, JTA reported.

On the same day, a security unit of France’s Jewish communities praised French authorities’ prosecution of an Islamic studies university student who threatened in an email to a Jewish professor to start “another Shoah.” The email was sent the same day a Muslim extremist killed four Jews, including a rabbi and his children, in Toulouse.

Also this week, JTA reported that the websites of several Reform congregations were hacked and linked to anti-Semitic websites, meaning that we in the United States are not immune from this growing malady. Authorities say they suspect some group calling itself  Moroccan Ghosts, which, since March, “has hacked some 82 websites, mostly in the United States, but also in France, Britain, Vietnam, South Africa, Germany, Spain and China,” according to reports.

The widespread international anti-Semitic turn is being accomplished with the complicity of way too much of the press, which seems determined to see Israel destroyed, somehow missing the fact that right after they exterminate the Jews, the Islamists will eradicate any vestige of the press.

Nearly any story coming from the Middle East, lacks the context it needs to be balanced and some of them invent stuff altogether. This is done so often, I’ve predicted it myself. There are jokes about it. It’s meant to create the illusion that Israel is a Nazi-like racist entity bent on genocide when nothing could be further from the truth. And, when the truth emerges, as it always does, it never makes the same front page splash as did the original lie.

The latest dust-up with Gaza brought to the fore the question of what constitutes a journalist, which, I think, is an important definition to nail down.

Using an ambulance to carry out terrorism, does not make one a paramedic, and putting a “journalist” sticker on one’s vehicle to camouflage one’s terrorist activity, does not make one a journalist.

The Israeli army killed a couple of ‘journalists’/terrorists in Gaza, and some are reacting as though real journalists had been targeted, according to reports.

“The IDF noted that abusing the protection afforded to journalists or ambulances or schools or otherwise, won’t be tolerated,” a report said.

This use of traditionally off-limits institutions to escape reprisal or intentionally draw fire is yet another cynical human shield-like behavior the enemy employs to such incredible effect. And the press allows itself to be drawn in and used when they must know by now that that’s what’s happening.

Not all the news is bad, however.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper personally intervened to pressure the Palestinian Authority to drop its bid for upgraded status at the United Nations, JTA reports. This means that some governments are still resisting the sirens’ call to slip into the well-traveled path of least resistance; the less dangerous, though morally wrong, pro-Palestinian path that leads inevitably to the wholesale slaughter of Jews.

So, some sanity remains.

Meanwhile, though, staunch Israel supporter Australia will reportedly abstain in the U.N. vote on Palestine, despite the Prime Minister reportedly being intent on siding with Israel and America in voting against the motion. Internal political machinations may be behind this, according to reports.

Something circulating around Facebook may say it best: Those who are unfamiliar with history are doomed to repeat it. Those that are familiar with it, are doomed to stand by helplessly and watch everyone else repeat it.

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