Is it too late to clear the antisemitism swamp?

Jewish pioneers cleared the swamps of the Galilee a hundred years ago, hoping naively to be left in peace in their own homeland. But how are we going to clear the swamp of antisemitism that has engulfed the world?

By Prof. Phyllis Chesler, INN

Daily, Jews are being cursed, defamed, beaten, knifed, shot down, and bombed, both in Israel and around the world. Everywhere, weary scholars are publishing long lists of one incident after another—cemetery vandalisms, swastikas, Holocaust monuments defaced, Jewish students heckled and tormented on campuses, pro-Israel speakers dis-invited or shut down, “Jews to the Gas” chanted at sports events, boycotts of Israeli products and of Israeli professors, pro-Palestine/anti-Zionist marches and resolutions in almost every country on earth.

The world media has failed to connect the dots. Each incident is news without precedent, without context. No one notes that these incidents were inevitable given the massive number of Blood Libels that have infected the world—like a virus, a madness, for the last ninety years, a campaign which was accelerated the day after Israel won its war of self-defense in 1967.

Worthy colleagues write letters, draft petitions, bring lawsuits (which they sometimes win), pen passionate polemics, as Diane Weber Bederman has just done in The Serpent and the Red Thread: The Definitive Biography of Evil. Bederman tries to awaken the sleeping masses by quoting rather seamlessly from the Torah and the Prophets, and as such, has written a hasty but imaginative dirge, a poem, a mystical midrash, a great lament, one in which Abraham, Sarah, Issac, Yeshua, and Paul travel through time witnessing all that happens to the Jews.

The American FBI and the ADL both document the rise in hate crimes against American Jews which far exceeds hate crimes based on religion against any other group and which greatly exceed our existence in the population.

In the mid-1930s, both in Vienna and Berlin, Nazis starting beating Jews up on the streets and in parks. No one stopped them.

In 2019, elderly Orthodox Jewish men are being assaulted in “beat downs” in Brooklyn (my hometown), mainly by young black men, and I wonder if these visibly Jewish men will also be blamed as were the murdered Jews in Jersey City for daring to move in as a group to an all-black neighborhood, as if doing so was so provocative and aggressive an act that it deserved death. Jews Out! Jews Go Home! Ah, but when Jews are home in Israel, the entire world castigates us for taking over someone else’s land.

Back to Brooklyn, still in 2019.  What did that young Israeli Jewish girl do that was so wrong on the train from Tribeca into Brooklyn that could justify what the black Muslim woman unleashed? Her anti-Jewish curses, her repeated “Allahu Akbars,” followed by her breaking her would-be victim’s cellphone and then an all-out physical attack. I noted that the hater’s tongue flicked out malevolently to one side, a sign of evil (or so they say). To her credit, the young Israeli woman fought back, managed to record the altercation, pulled the emergency cord, and called the police.

In both the Jersey City attacks and the one on the train, one could argue that the Jew haters were mentally ill and had lived hard lives. But so what?  Perhaps their madness is precisely what empowered them to act out collective beliefs as individuals. But why scapegoat the Jews for their hard lives?

All over Europe Jews are also under siege. This time, the greatest, if not the only danger to Jewish life hails from sacralized Muslims of color, who are no longer in Muslim lands which are almost completely “judenrein,” but in Europe. This fact makes it difficult for the Western cognoscenti and glitterati to blame the murdering haters because of their color and because they have swallowed, hook, line, and sinker the false belief that something called “Islamophobia” exists.

In France, a Muslim Jew hater can torture-murder his elderly Jewish neighbor and get away with it as long as he’s smoked some marijuana first. So much for La Belle France. It is far easier to betray the Jews of Europe once again than to genuinely wrestle with one’s own history of colonialism and anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism.

Thus far, Jews in Europe have been advised to remove their Jewish stars and kippahs, and make sure their synagogues are well guarded by armed men. Tell the truth about what’s happening (as Oriana Fallaci, Bat Ye’or, and Elisabeth Sabadischt-Wolf did in terms of Islam in Europe) and you risk being defamed and sued. Our own great truth-teller, Melanie Phillips (Londonistan), was just savaged by the organized Jewish world in the UK for telling the truth about Jew hating in the UK.

Increasingly, my eyes begin to glaze over, my blood pressure soars, and I often stop reading. Full Stop. This madness must end. We must end it. We must pre-empt the “narrative.” We must, like Ya’akov/Yisrael “come from behind” because that is where we are in terms of the cognitive war against the Jews.

I’ve been covering this War for fifty years, first as a speaker and as an activist and, for the last twenty years, as a writer driven by a force beyond my control.

I’ve grown weary and older and find myself still fighting back—and still barefoot, without having been issued a gun, ammunition, boots, a uniform, food—or a common strategy. I am exhausted by having been disbelieved, mocked, censored, and ostracized. And, I am not alone. There is a hardy band of us in this exact position.

Now, twenty years into this, some Jews see that we have a problem. Millions are being promised ($25 million to be exact, offered by Ronald Lauder and by Robert Kraft) to “combat anti-Semitism.” Revered Gentlemen: It is very late in the day and we will need far more in order to fund the various efforts of our best teams, and such teams do exist.

There is no end to what must be done, beginning with funding, distributing, and doing whatever it takes to compose new textbooks on racism that include Jew hatred and that make them mandatory reading; new courses in antisemitism and Israel, new courses in the history of Islam and then doing whatever it takes to make sure that they, too, are mandatory; forging anti-indoctrination curriculums that will take 50-100 years before they can begin to exert some influence over the media, human rights organizations, government leaders, leftists, and the Muslim world, etc.

This is trench warfare. This is clearing the swamps, inch by inch. There is no one quick fix.

What about our Jewish leadership? Where have they been? Most have spent the last twenty years focused on white, right-wing Nazi Jew haters, have been too politically correct, and overly sensitive to the sorrows of recent immigrants, to note from whence the danger cometh. How do we re-educate our leaders? Failing that, how do we replace them, and in time to make a difference? How do we insure that this time round, we do not give up our religious brethren or our Israeli brethren? And that we do not surrender ourselves?

Finally—finally, even some left-wing American Jews are a bit frightened, on edge, and are asking the kinds of questions that we all should have been asking fifteen or twenty years ago—maybe seventy years ago if we hadn’t been living in such a “goldene medina” at such a golden time in history.

Now, a few more of us can hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse at full gallop.

This just in from a very liberal friend who was born in hiding in Europe and grew up in a DP camp. “Now I’m really getting frightened. My kids and grandkids all look very Jewish. Black hats. Payes. Sheitels. The works.”

This, from another non-religious friend. “This is wild. How can we stop this?”

This, from a former shul mate: “How did you know this would be happening? Are you some kind of psychic, a prophet, maybe a witch?”

Ah, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing…

Hannukah Sameach—our holiday which celebrates both military might and divine intervention. We need both.

The writer is a Ginsburg-Ingerman Fellow at the Middle East Forum, received the 2013 National Jewish Book Award,.authored 18 books, including Women and Madness and The New Anti-Semitism, and 4 studies about honor killing, Her latest books are An American Bride in Kabul, A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

My friend, Howard Rotberg, the publisher of conservative books in Canada (Mantua Books), including Diane Bederman’s book noted below, writes a powerful response to Phyllis.

Phyllis, a sad but true missive that, to those of us who have accompanied you into the trenches of this culture war for the last 15 years or more, is completely true.  You have been a great leader in this cause, just as you were in the cause of women’s rights.   Thank you for your elegant remarks about Diane Bederman’s magnificent new book, The Serpent and the Red Thread:  The Definitive Biography of Evil.

I knew it was too late when…

How does one answer your question about whether it is too late?   I knew it was too late when my book The Second Catastrophe, warning against a Second Holocaust, (this time at the hands of the Iranians and their allies)was banned in 2003 by Canada;s monopoly Jewish-owned book chair, due to taqiyyah from an 18 year old book clerk, member of the Muslim Brotherhood directed Muslim Students Association –  and no Jewish or civil rights organizations would speak out.

I knew it was too late when I lived in Israel for two months during the Second Intifada researching my book, and bombs went off around me every day..

I knew it was too late when my cousin joined JStreet.

I knew it was too late when my pleas to end Israel Apartheid Week were ignored by university presidents and Jews alike.

I knew it was too late when I had to write about Tolerism.

I knew it was too late when I had to write about Submission to the Islamists.

I knew it was too late when no one would use the term “classical liberal”.

I knew it was too late when “conservative” became an epithet hurled at those trying to promote Good over Evil.

I knew it was too late when a small town lawyer and property developer had to start Canada’s sole conservative and pro-Israel  publishing house because the main stream publishers were shunning those not “politically correct”.

I knew it was too late when more people think “relativism” has something to do with geneology and DNA than understanding what moral and cultural relativism is and why it is destroying the greatness of western civilization.

I knew it was too late when my documentary, “Conservative Authors in Canada” featuring a black female Evangelical host, a white Jewish female, a dissident Muslim professor, an elderly white Christian male retired professor, and myself as the white Jewish male, was shunned by all media (except YouTube).

I knew it was too late when Facebook started censoring content that some California anti-Israel leftists found objectionable.

I knew it was too late when Google searches showed only links to CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, MSNBC on the first page of the search results.

I knew it was too late when Wikipedia, with anti-Israel content providers and editors, became the main source of student research.

I knew it was too late when Jonathan Pollard was sentenced as if he committed treason when he gave information to an ally, and he is still being kept in the U.S. after so many years, when he just wants to move to Israel for his few remaining years.

I knew it when Steven Spielberg and Tony- Kushnir made a seriously anti-Israel movie, Munich, and 99% of movie goers did not see it for the propaganda that it was.  (see my chapter in Tolerism).

I knew it when America’s Jewish politicians like Schiff, Nadler, Schumer, Blumenthal et all act more like kapos than part of our people.

And yet, we continue on, hoping, praying, taking tiny steps, hunching over our computers, ostracized , marginalized, powerless in a world that worships power.  I was talking to the great Diane Bederman who is banned from Facebook regularly for gentle pro-Israel and anti-Islamist writing.   She is on a four month suspension, apparently for sharing Phyllis’ essay, above,  with her hundreds of Facebook friends, and being told she was sending out “spam”.

As Diane, in one of our depressive moods told me recently, we shall keep fighting until they put us back in the ovens.  Of course, it won’t get to that, because we shall, in a world where the Leftist-Islamist globalist alliance takes over the West, move to Israel and fight back, this time with high technology and nuclear weapons.

But yes, Phyllis, I fear it is too late, except for the one country that will remain a “light unto the nations” – Israel.  Unfortunately, those other Western nations won’t recognize that until after World War 3.   After that bloody war (which has already started) the West will carry on.  World War 3 will result in the death of tens of millions –  caused by the war against goodness and morality brought on by the Leftist/Islamist/Globalist alliance.   It may be too late to stop it, as the enemy has infiltrated our culture first.

Bob Dylan song, Not Dark Yet

In the mid-’60s, I was one of those who liked to listen to Bob Dylan and I close with a song of his that has a   Kabbalistic reference (which I explained in Second Catastrophe – hint – “I was born here and I shall die here against my will”) so that you can listen to it and read the words.     Not as profound as our religious texts but something else with which we can commiserate.