Time to Fight the Jew Haters

This is a terrific article.

By Simcha Jacobovici, TOI, June 2/15

If the world is now a “global village”, Israel is the new Jewish ghetto, and the anti-Semites are sharpening their knives – planning their final pogrom. This isn’t Jewish paranoia. This is fact. The evidence is so stark that the very act of denying it is a form of anti-Semitism – a form of obfuscating the danger.

In our topsy-turvy world Israel, the Jewish State, is a racist, colonialist nation that needs to be isolated, ostracized and done away with. The Palestinians are the victims of the Jews, suffering a fate equal to the Holocaust. In this scenario – which is the increasingly accepted global narrative – the Israelis are the Nazis and the Palestinians are the real Jews.

The very existence of this warped reality is metaphysical in its implications. Meaning, since there is no normal explanation for the global lie concerning the Jewish State, the only way to account for this mass psychosis is that we have once again entered the “twilight zone” of anti-Semitism gone berserk. In this space, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main problem of our planet. But the fact is that over the past century the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has claimed less than 50,000 lives. In contrast, the civil war in Syria has claimed over a quarter of a million people in the last four years alone.

While the world focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, millions of people around the world have died in unmarked graves. Their deaths have hardly been noticed. For example, over half a million people have been killed in Darfur. And yet, few people even know where Darfur is. In the Congo, in the 21st century alone, some 5 million Africans have died and yet hardly anyone talks about them, much less cares about them.

Then there is the matter of refugees. There were 700,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948. There was an equal number of Jews that fled from Arab lands. Why is the world not obsessed with the Jewish refugees? In fact, why is the world not obsessed with any refugees except the Palestinians? At this very moment, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), there are 3 million refugees that have fled Syria and another 6.5 million displaced in Syria itself. That’s almost 10 million Arabs that nobody gives a hoot about. Why?

As unpleasant as it may seem to the civilized part of this planet, the answer is simple. The world doesn’t care about Africans, Arabs or Palestinians. What a good part of this planet is obsessed with is Jews. If the Palestinians were fighting the Sudanese, nobody would care about them just as no one cares about the oppressed Christians of Sudan. As another group, nobody cares about the Kurds. After all, the Kurds are unlucky enough to be fighting Turks, not Jews. If they started fighting Jews, however, the world would suddenly take notice.

But as the flames of anti-Semitism lick ever closer to the Jewish state, the political, religious and economic leadership of the Jewish people are blissfully clued out. Here’s the irony; the modern Jewish state was created out of the ashes of Auschwitz so as to “normalize” Jewish life. Israelis have been brought up to believe that Israel is as “normal” as Greece or Italy. As a result, Israelis are the least equipped people in the world to smell anti-Semitism. That’s why Israelis live under the delusion that their present predicament i.e., their isolation, is the result of bad politics. It’s not. It’s anti-Semitism. But we can be more precise. The late philosopher Emil Fackenheim didn’t like the pseudo-scientific term “anti-Semitism” because it masks what we are really talking about. He insisted on the term “Jew hatred”. And that’s what Israel’s present predicament is all about.

When modern Israel was born in 1948, the Vatican’s mouthpiece L’Osservatore Romano wrote that the Jews could no longer reclaim Biblical Israel because “the Holy Land and its sacred sites belong to Christianity, the True Israel”. According to this narrative, the Jews – ancient Israel – should no longer exist because they have been updated and replaced by the “True Israel”. The Vatican was expressing what is becoming ever more popular: the fundamental rejection of the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own. After modern Israel was born, it took the Vatican 45 years to “recognize” the Jewish State. But last month the “Holy See” recognized the Palestinian state even before its creation. In the most bizarre part of this twisted recognition, Pope Francis referred to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas as an “angel of peace”. This is the same Abbas who is a Holocaust denier, stands at the head of a terror organization that invented airplane hijacking and has driven practically all Christians out of the territories where he rules, including Bethlehem.

Then there is the flip side of Vatican-style Jew hatred. You know the kind; that’s the anti-Semitism that declares that some of its best friends are Jews. Lets take U.S. President Obama, for example. No doubt, he has many Jewish friends and colleagues. He is the first president to celebrate Passover at the White House and only last month he addressed a conservative synagogue in Washington D.C. But at the end of the day, what is his message? His message is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the central problem of the Middle East and, by implication, of the planet.

For 20 years, Obama sat quietly in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s Church listening to his pastor’s anti-Semitic rants. And now, he is really angry at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran. Think about it. Less than 70 years after the Holocaust, Iran is building nuclear bombs with the express purpose of incinerating Israel’s 8 million citizens and Obama is livid with Israel. What other country on this planet is facing the threat of nuclear annihilation? And what would any other country, including the United States, do if it found itself in Israel’s life and death predicament? Would it bet on Iranian rationality? Of course it wouldn’t. But for the Jews there is another standard all together.

It would seem that things, at the moment, can’t get worse, but they can. As practically every Arab state is collapsing in a heap of blood, guts and decapitated heads, Obama’s oft-repeated foreign policy goal is to create yet another failed Arab state – Palestine. Why? Even Hamas, the dictatorial rulers of Gaza, have made it clear that they don’t want a state, which they consider a Western invention. What they explicitly want is a launching pad from which to destroy Israel and create an Islamic Republic. But Obama doesn’t care. He’s going to give the Palestinians a state whether they want one or not, whether they deserve one or not, and whether its existence will further destabilize an already volatile region. Because, as should already be clear, it’s not about the Palestinians – it’s all about the Jews.

And what are Jews doing about all this? Well, nothing. Israel’s leaders don’t even realize that the noose is tightening. While billions of dollars are spent by Israel’s enemies to demonize and marginalize Israel in the media, on campuses and in the corridors of power, the Israelis counter with “spokespeople” whose only expertise is that they have heavy accents when they speak English. As for Israel’s friends abroad, some of them spend their time “defending” Israel. This is a nice thing, but it’s a losing proposition. As any sport coach can tell you; if you only play defense, you can’t win.

And here is a curious fact: many Jews in America are not interested in defending Israel or promoting her. They don’t want Israel to win in her struggle with her enemies. For example, most Jews in America support Obama and his lethal obsession with the Jewish State. Organizations such as J-Street claim to love Israel while routinely criticizing its elected officials. Why? In order to save Israelis from themselves, they say. These Jewish Uncle Toms express their tough love of Israel by routinely dumping on the Jewish State. “We’re not like those Jews,” they seem to be saying, “We’re different. We’re just like you.”

This self-hate phenomenon is not new. Prior to WWII, many Nazi SS officers had Jewish lovers. These were the “good Jews”, the ones that didn’t look too Jewish and understood why German nationalists would find orthodox Jews disgusting. Even Hitler had a favourite Jew – a family doctor – and he never forgot to send this “good Jew” a birthday greeting.

Like the pre-Holocaust collaborators, America’s Jewish Uncle Toms are not concerned with Jewish existential realities. They don’t care that millennia-old Jewish communities are dying. As I write these words, the Jews of Yemen are no more. The Jews of Iraq, Egypt, and even France have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing. But there is no American Jewish protest movement on behalf of oppressed Jews around the world. The progressives are not concerned about the fate of their persecuted co-religionists.

We’ve seen this Jewish self-hate before. During the Inquisition, Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor himself, was a Jew. He loved Jews so much he wanted to convert them to Christianity under torture, so as to save his brethren’s souls. Even earlier, during the Great Jewish Revolt of 66-70 CE, while hundreds of thousands of Jews were being crucified by the Romans, while Jerusalem was being besieged and the Holy Temple burned, the second in command of the Roman army was none other than the Jewish aristocrat Tiberius Julius Alexander. He loved the Jewish people, but he hated what he considered extremist Jews. He expressed his love of Jews by destroying their state.

Today, the spirit of Tiberius Julius Alexander lives on. Many Israelis are more agitated about Jewish settlements in ancient Judea, then a nuclear-armed Iran. It’s quite incredible, really, that 80% of British Mandate Palestine should be under Arab Jordanian rule and yet rational people can still say that there is no Palestine. 90% of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza are presently under Arab rule. And yet, people can still say that Jews are oppressing them. It’s actually incredible that over 1.5 million Arabs can live in Israel and sit in its parliament while not a single Jew can live under Palestinian jurisdiction. Let me clarify; even though Jews have lived in the Land of Israel for some 3,500 years, there is not a single Jew living in the territories administered by the “angel of peace”. More than this, there is not even a single dead Jew. Every Jewish cemetery under Palestinian rule has been desecrated. There is not a single Jewish tombstone that still stands erect.

Once again, the Jewish State and the Jewish people stand alone. Once again, Jewish existence is on a knife’s edge.

What to do? Fight back. Stop apologizing. Stop defending. Stop burying our collective heads in the sand. You can’t convince the Jew haters. You can’t embrace them, have sex with them or celebrate Passover together. All you can do is fight them toe-to-toe. You have to fight them in the media, you have to fight them on campuses, you have to fight them in the corridors of power – you can never surrender. You have to call them for what they are and you have to put them on the defensive. Remind the decent people of the world, for example, that Israel’s enemies practice clitorectomy. Remind them that millions of Arab girls are pinned to kitchen tables and have their clitorises cut off by family members wielding steak knives. This is the face of Israel’s enemies. They decapitate those who oppose them. They murder minorities, they throw gays off tall buildings, they rape little girls, they destroy archaeology, they crucify Christians, they don’t hesitate to use gas, terror or any other weapon that can wreak havoc with the civilized world and they cut the clitorises of their own children. They are not interested in “states” – not even Arab states – not even “Palestine”. They want to create an evil empire. They are interested in creating Islamic republics or caliphates that are ruled by an ideology of death. To support them and oppose Israel is to be on the wrong side of an apocalyptic war.

And this war needs funding. Israel’s supporters generally and the Jewish state specifically must fund an army of well-trained PR warriors to engage the enemy at every turn. All the money in the world will not make Jew lovers out of Jew haters. But it will bloody their nose, move decent people to the right side of this conflict and ensure that Israel and the Jewish people survive.

Simcha Jacobovici is a Canadian-Israeli filmmaker and journalist. He is a three-time Emmy winner for “Outstanding Investigative Journalism” and a New York Times best selling author. He’s also an adjunct professor in the Department of Religion at Huntington University, Ontario