POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE: The hypocritical Europeans

By Valerie Sobel

On the eve of what will be the stupendously well-attended ceremonies marking the liberation of Auschwitz in Israel on Thursday and five days before the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, one can expect the usual melancholic pout by all the usual characters on prime time channels.  Forefront will be the well-dressed Europeans with their chorus of proclamations against general racism and fascism and the always best-selling favorite “Never Again” reprise.

Nothing makes a perfumed, silk-scarfed European official feel better about himself than to rub shoulders with a Holocaust survivor or two at a ceremony for dead Jews, on one day of the year. The Germans might even sport a crocheted hankie under a fallen tear. The fact that all this pomp and circumstance will be broadcast to millions watching on screens around the world is nothing if not icing on their ultimate virtue-signaling cake.

For the last 75 years, the apex of European moral righteousness has been the well-organized, visibly official sadness over Jewish corpses by the very public whose ancestors caused it.  It has just about the same weight of sincerity as incoming words of “sorrow” from American AOC and her pal, Ilhan Omar, voted 2019 Antisemite of the year.

Never mind the optics of the annual sideshow that deserves its own category of “Best Acted by an Official or a Group” at the Academy Awards.  Just as notable, but a hell of a lot more sincere, resonant, and consequential, is the annual non-televised version of a different drama by the same actors.  Only here it’s inconveniently centred around live Jews.  Ergo, it happens behind closed doors and away from cameras.

Enter the most consistently antisemitic court of official policy towards breathing Jews, the United Nations.  That’s where the same perfumed Europeans from annual voguish ceremonies have the opportunity to support same number of live Jews today (6 Million in Israel) as the ones they murdered in perfect silence and complicity yesterday.  Only here, oddly enough, their tear-shedding stops and Israel bashing begins.

Over the course of more than 4 decades, every year since 1977,  European voting bloc has ensured the mandating of a special “Division for Palestinian Rights” inside the UN Secretariat, devoted for fierce promotion of the Palestinian narrative against Israel.

This resolution isn’t some toothless impeachment asterisk against a country of Jews; it’s a set policy that allocates UN’s budget and human resources to promote active anti-Israel agenda.

The resolution mandating a “Division for Palestinian Rights” is just one of a package of 20 annual anti-Israel resolutions that have passed in the UN General Assembly since the 1970s. That’s approximately 900 discriminatory, libellous anti-Israel declarations by the same sorrowful, Holocaust-mindful Europeans and their crying violins.

In the court of public opinion, by way of complicit liberal media (BBC, The Guardian, to name a few), this consistent anti-Israel stance by the European Union harvests not only complacency to antisemitism but its justification. The loud majority of the UN voice incentivizes and empowers the Islamist world that decrees to wipe Israel of the map.  It legitimizes Hamas as freedom fighters, perpetuates the “occupied lands” narrative, enables Israel Apartheid weeks on campuses, stamps approval on academia’s incessant anti-Israel vitriol, condones harassment of Jewish students, and singles out the Jewish nation as a pariah state.

In turn, these UN-born anti-Israel platforms are what propels antisemitic events into the stratosphere of crime statistics we see today.  What begins with a closed-door vote at the UN is precisely that which also aids and abets Islamic terror and crime against Jews of Europe.  On the same continent that only 75 years ago birthed Hitler out of its womb of generational antisemitism, a new bar of Jew-hatred is being set with the arrival of Islamic hatred, right before our eyes.  The repercussions are evidentiary, real and tragic.

The chest of anti-Israel resolutions, all written by the Palestinians and the Arab countries, are customarily brought to the European Union before they are presented to the General Assembly. The EU proceeds to scribble over a few semantics before expeditiously voting to adopt them, each and every time.

Out of the annual 20 hate resolutions against the Jewish State at the UN, three are not merely declarative but are actual organizations that have staff and budgets – the “Division for Palestinian Rights” is one of them.

To Europe, status quo against Israel is sacred.  All with the exception of Hungary, which broke ranks at the UN in 2018.   On a good day, a handful of Europeans abstain from the anti-Israel vote, a move they know all too well.  In the 1940s, all but Denmark and Bulgaria abstained from confronting the Third Reich over the murder of six million of their own citizens, which apparently gives them the moral high ground to cry over the same genocidal crime tomorrow and on the 27th.

As of the last hate-fest vote against Israel at the UN in December of 2019, 11 EU countries voted “Against”.  A first, by all accounts.  The resolution still passed by a whopping 87-23, with 54 abstentions.

Amongst these 11 “No’s”, of Europe’s economic powers, only Germany and Netherlands mustered enough fortitude for calibration with their Holocaust Remembrance Day despondency.  Amongst the 14 abstaining Europeans were France, the UK, and Italy.  Undoubtedly in the days ahead, the trio will be erect on the podium of Holocaust town-crier Olympics with tissue boxes for everyone.

While the popular wailing over dead Jews plays out in Europe, France continues to enjoy a 70% increase in antisemitic crime compared to previous years.  In Germany, anti-Semitic crime averages four per day, including an average of one violent weekly attack for a total of 1500 documented incidents per year.  In the UK, 1,652 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded in 2018, including 123 involving violence. These are notoriously underreported figures, the real figures in these and other EU states are much higher.

Not to be outdone by its stats of Jew-hatred,  EU is a proud collaborator with Holocaust-denying Iran with billions in export-import contracts by the governments of U.K., Germany and France.  Yet these Europeans will have no trouble looking solemn at Yad Vashem on Thursday.  Macron will even visit the “martyrs”-paying Abbas in Ramallah, just as soon as he washes the mask of Holocaust doom and gloom off his face.

EU holds a VIP seat in De Hague’s international court, accusing Israel of “war crimes” by funding Palestinian NGO’s: the French, British, German, Belgian, Swiss, Dutch, and Swedish – all put significant funds in the pockets of Israel’s mortal enemies.  Mahmoud Abbas, the premier purveyor-employer of PA’s pay-to-slay terror against Israeli citizens is the beneficiary of an annual $250,000,000 gift from the EU.

Heck, Europe can’t even get behind the idea of Jerusalem, the eternal home of Abraham, King David and Judaism itself, as the home of the Jews.  But this Thursday will only be too happy to stay at the King David Hotel in “occupied” Jerusalem, while protected by the “occupier”, Israeli security…for dead Jews and all.

As touching as all the speeches and violin strings will echo for Jews six feet under on the 27th of January, the feckless, abstaining, Iran-supporting, Abbas-funding Europeans would look a hell of a lot more authentic if they used that Balenciaga scarf to strangle its own anti-Israel bias, instead of wiping off that single squeezed crocodile tear to the sound of Hatikvah and bright lights.

If Europe wants to repent for past sins against Jews and stand shoulder to shoulder with Holocaust survivors at ceremonies, it can start by ending its 75 year political-financial crusade against Holocaust descendants and their country.  And not a moment too soon, not that we expect a volte-face.

January 26, 2020 | 7 Comments »

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  1. Book review in Arutz Sheva.

    The open wounds of the Holocaust – where are my mother’s children?
    Emuna Elon’s newest book, House On Endless Waters, is an important, resonating addition to Jewish fiction, dealing with the tragedies survivors hid from the new families they built after the war.
    Ronn Torossian, 21/01/20 08:59 | updated: 09:30
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    Ronn Torossian

    Just finished reading an extraordinary new book, House on Endless Waters ((Atria Books, 320 pp., ???½ out of four stars). From start to finish, I found it to be well-written, touching chock full of character development – and for me like so many others – resonating with stories I could relate to.

    The book is a family mystery ripe with great character development and continual plot twists, exploring one man’s quest – initiated when renowned [fictional] Israeli author, Yoel Blum visits his birthplace,Amsterdam on a tour, despite promising his late mother Sonia, a survivor, that he would never return to that city.

    During a visit to the city’s Jewish museum he sees a picture of his mom with her family, a pre WWII photograph, and in it, his mom is holding a child he doesn’t recognize. The book explores his adventures to get to the bottom of the mystery throughout Amsterdam – past, present and future – and to trace his mother’s life, replete with dreams, visions and more, all in a beautifully written prose.

    90% of Dutch Jews did not survive WWII, many of them turned in by their neighbors, as were Anne Frank and her famly, although readers of her famous diary often do not internalize that important and telling fact. Jews in Holland, in a way that resonates today, found it hard to believe that Nazi horrors would affect them. “It’s common knowledge that harsh and frightening things,” Sonia says as Blum recounts her life in the book, “like those that are reportedly happening in certain other countries, can never happen in Holland.”

    Throughout the book, I had memories of stories of growing up in a home where my grandparents were Holocaust survivors, and my late beloved mom spent so much time researching, reading, and studying about the history of our many family members who were murdered by the Nazis. She attended conferences, discovered obscure files, and spent days at Yad Vashem.

    In the last few months of her life my mother learned that her father, Morris Waga, had been married with a family before he married my grandmother. He lost that wife and a 3-year old daughter in the camps to the Nazis. Throughout his entire life after the Holocaust, he never told my mother or her younger brother.

    The book discussed underground networks which hid Jewish children during the war, and the burdens which faced those who survived. The scars of the Holocaust which haunt families and people continues on for many generations. Many have never traced what happened to their loved ones.

    The book explored feelings, emotions, identity, belonging, family ties and more. It is beautifully written and a story which covers history and emotion, in the past and present.

    The author, Emuna Elon, is an internationally bestselling, critically acclaimed Israeli novelist, journalist, and women’s activist. Born to a family of prominent rabbis and scholars, she was raised in Jerusalem and New York. Her first novel translated into English, If You Awaken Love, was a National Jewish Book Award finalist.. She is the widow of much-respected MK Rabbi Benny Elon, who was a close friend.

    Interesting that so many Jews blame Poland for the Holocaust, but few blame Holland. Quarrels over the history of the Holocaust have severely strained Israel’s relations with Poland, but not with Holland. Yet it is quite possible that more Dutch turned over Jews to the SS than Poles.

  3. As long as the EU & UK calls Muslims as Palestinians, and a 3-state in Palestine as a 2-state, Israel should know who are not her friends.

  5. In 2015 when thugs shot up the offices and people at Charlie Hebdo, ‘leaders’ gathered in Paris, wearing ‘Je suis Charlie’ pins to deplore the incident. They did nothing to deal with it. Now many of these same ‘leaders’ will gather in Jerusalem to deplore anti-Semitism and then do nothing about it. Their very presence demeans the memory of the victims; these ‘leaders’ are the vermin of the earth.

  6. Valerie Sobel brilliantly describes the staggering hypocrisy of European antisemites who dress themselves up once a year and pretend they are not antisemitic. It is the same hypocrisy that afflicts once-a-year Jews who dress up for the High Holidays, and once-a-year Christians who only go to church on Easter Sunday. Being ethical is a 365 day-a-year commitment to morality. Dressing up and pretending once-a-year does not count!

  7. U ks prince chucky is also on the sodomites terror leaders guest list to meet in ha’melech David’s birth place , no doubt the official pic will be under the warped face of arafart.