Israel’s masochism while Germany submits to Islam

by Howard Rotberg, NER

In various essays such as “Germany’s Moral Choice,” “Munich 1972 and 2016,” “A ‘two-state solution for Germany and other Europeans,” “War Memorials: Do Nazi and Islamist soldiers qualify?” “Slave Labor from Auschwitz to Mali”and the recent “Michelle Goldberg and Angela Merkel seek moral absolution in the wrong place,” I have examined the current state of the German-Israeli relationship and challenged the notion that Germany still sees a “special relationship” with Israel arising out of the mass murder by the Nazis, tolerated by the German people.

I have given my attention to the immigration of Muslims, even Islamists, into Germany, meant to extend the rule of Islam into Europe (Eurasia) as part of the world-wide Caliphate, achieved by violent jihadism, Sharia law, and moral confusion in the West. If Germany appears to be casting aside any actual concrete steps to protect the so-called special relationship, then Israel shall have even worse problems with European complicity with Iran and with terrorists targeting Jewish civilians. Israel must formulate the proper response to an Islamified Europe.

A recent visit by outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel saw the Israelis give her all sorts of honors and praise, which bothers me for the reasons I set out in this essay.

This visit in October 2021 took place during a time when Germany and other European countries continue to fund Palestinian haters of Jews and continue to submit to Islamism within its own borders – and the Israelis compliment her over and over. Germany’s submission to Islamism is clear. And Israel’s recent welcome of longtime German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, with praise and honors, shows an abnormal psychological reaction akin to masochism. What is it about the Israeli national character that it confuses opponents and friends? Why is it so important to Israelis to tolerate what can only be seen as words that are contravened by actions, when it comes to Germany’s participation as a leading nation of the European Union.

Here is how Al-monitor saw the trip:

“President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and all of his Cabinet ministers went out of their way to show appreciation for Merkel, considered in Jerusalem one of Israel’s greatest friends on the international arena. In fact, Bennett cleared most of his day Oct. 10 to accompany Merkel on her visit.”

After the first official meeting between Bennett and Merkel at the King David Hotel Jerusalem, Bennett tweeted, “Welcome to Israel, dear friend of Israel!“

The government then hosted Merkel at its weekly meeting, an honor rarely bestowed on visiting heads of state. Bennett said that the very diversified Israeli Cabinet is united in its appreciation for the role Merkel had played over the years in shaping and deepening ties between Israel and Germany. ‘The bilateral  relations during your tenure as chancellor became stronger than ever and transformed into a true friendship, thanks to your leadership,’ Bennett told Merkel. He then said that his government greatly appreciates Merkel’s standing commitment to Israel’s security.”

Continuing to heap praise on the German, Bennett said: “Sometimes a leader makes a major difference, and I think that your leadership paved the way to Germany’s ongoing commitment to Israel’s security,” However, one must ask whether Germany has acted against Gazan missiles, Iranian missiles in Lebanon,

Iranian nuclear threats, incitement to terrorism and all other matters that objectively reduce security in Israel.

It seems to me that Germany’s actions do not equal its words. One can sympathize but not agree with Germany’s dilemma in this new age of Jew-hatred. But the bigger question is why does Israel praise the words that conflict with actions? Is Oslo thinking still in effect? Why does Israel see “peace” in other nations that support, in one way or another, the Islamist jihad to rid the Middle East of Jews? After the Hamas takeover of Gaza why would any friend of Israel support making Judea and Samaria yet another terrorist base against the Jews? Is it a case of trying look at the bright side to avoid creating any more rifts with the Germans? Or is it a matter of repressing the awful reality that for most of Jewish history, a substantial number of Jews have been murdered by antisemites, and that antisemites have come from all civilizations and all religions. The Israeli New Jew and the American materialistic and tolerant Jew have for separate reasons entered a world of make believe. Even the ultra religious Jews have failed to follow the dictates of the Holy Torah and the tefillot to avoid military service – and thus fail to take an eye for an eye, as that has been interpreted to fulfill Justice and Righteousness.

The Hebrew Prophet, Jeremiah, who prophesized about the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the conquest by the Babylonians, said in chapter 6, verses 10 to 14, in the Book of Jeremiah:

“(F)or I will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of the land, says the Lord.<
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For from the least of them even to the greatest of them everyone is greedy for gain<
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and from the prophet even to the priest everyone deals falsely. They have healed<
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the hurt of the daughter of my people superficially, saying, Peace, Peace, when <
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there is no peace.” (my emphasis).“Political correctness” in Germany as in the rest of the West inhibits full and thoughtful discussion of the effect of Merkel’s admission of nearly one million young male Syrians from lands where jihadism, Sharia Law, terrorism and hatred of women, Jews and gays are endemic. On New Years’ Eve 2016, some 100 of the recent immigrants, most from places where there is a “culture of rape”, began assaulting hundreds of German young women in Cologne. As has been done in Sweden, the police and politicians actively cover up the nature and extent of the  crimes and refuse to consider this as a consequence of immigration from certain Lands.

Cologne then, of all places, should be reluctant to make concessions to Islam, dominated by Islamists, that will be regarded as submitting to a more dominant  power. Yet, we read in an essay by Soeren Kern that “(t)he city of Cologne, once a stronghold of Christendom in Germany, has authorized mosques in the city to  begin sounding Muslim calls to prayer over outdoor loudspeakers. The move, ostensibly aimed at promoting multicultural diversity and inclusion, represents a significant step toward the cultural normalization of Islam in Germany. It is taking German multiculturalism into uncharted territory.”

Kern points out that the Islamic call to prayer is not the equivalent of ringing church bells because it is done with such religious slogans as “there is no god but Allah” and “Allahu Akbar” (“Allah is the Greatest”). Moreover the ringing of church bells is a reminder of the time for scheduled church services whereas the call of ‘Allahu Akbar” is not only call to prayer but a battle cry for jihadists seeking a world-wide caliphate and domination over western secular and Christian communities. As such, western submissives who accept that allowing of as many as five such calls per day is merely about religious freedom, respect for diversity and tolerance of multiculturalism, are very wrong.

In Canada, municipalities started waiving rules against such loudspeakers during early days of Covid19, on the basis that Muslims needed this as an alternative to actually meeting together in prayer. This shows that the point was not to simply have a sound reminding the time of prayers, but to further a message of Islamic doctrine and all that it seeks to dominate. Of course. in an era where everyone has cellphones and alarm bells to remind them of appointments or prayer times, the  very notion of calls to prayer is an anachronism.

What is the connection between the mass rapes in Cologne on New Year’s Eve of 2016 and the later concession to have Muslim theology played on loudspeakers?  It is the same answer as why America started submitting to Islamists and the  Muslim Brotherhood right after 9/11 and to the present day – terrorism works.

The more terrorism by the Islamists, the more the West accepts that Islam is a “religion of peace” despite the historical record, and the more the West accepts that any discussion of Islamism should be avoided as “Islamophobia”.

I wrote an entire book about the ways contemporary western ideologies conduce to the submission of the West to Islamist demands for power over immigration, foreign policy, education, and culture in general: The Ideological Path to Submission … and what we can do about it. 

I am not sure how anyone can view Germany as Israel’s friend when it takes an opposing position on the two most important threats Israel faces: how to deal with Iran on its nuclear threats against Israel and whether to put a Palestinian terror state in Judea and Samaria, mere miles from Israel’s international airport. Josef Federman of Associated Press stated:

“Germany’s lame-duck chancellor, Angela Merkel, received a warm welcome Sunday as she paid a final official visit to Israel, but differences quickly emerged between the close allies on the key issues of Iran’s nuclear program and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“Merkel said that Germany remains committed to reviving the international nuclear agreement with Iran — a step Israel opposes. She also said that Germany believes that a two-state solution remains the best way to end Israel’s decades-long conflict with the Palestinians.”

Caroline Glick in Israel Hayom writes: “Since she entered office in 2005, Merkel has assiduously maintained Germany’s position as Iran’s largest trading partner in Europe. She has opposed sanctions and backed her colleagues as they made light of Iran’s human rights violations, its nuclear proliferation and sponsorship of terrorism. She has been an indomitable supporter of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, despite the fact that it provides Iran with an open road to a  nuclear arsenal. She was unmoved by voluminous evidence of Iran’s bad faith negotiations and systematic, material breaches of the limitations the 2015 deal placed on its nuclear activities.”

The great Melanie Phillips discusses European and German financial aid to Israel’s terrorist enemies in “Europe’s Deadly Hypocrisy.” Phillips notes:

“The European Commission just released a new program of fighting antisemitism and promoting Jewish life and culture in Germany and all of Europe. The commission says it will work against antisemitic content online, and will  develop “counter-narratives.” Very good.

Yet Ms. Phillips makes clear the utter hypocrisy: She says that “the European Union (in which Germany is the largest nation) continues to funnel money to the Palestinians even while they pour out antisemitism and remain committed to eradicating Israel. Their educational materials, for which the EU helps pay, promote hatred of Jews and incitement to murder Israelis and steal their land.

“The EU also enables the Palestinian Authority to pay the families of terrorists for murdering Israelis. Last December, the PA announced that the EU had contributed 54 percent of the cost of benefits for ‘needy’ families.

By so substantially helping provide for the ‘Palestinian needy’ the EU allows the PA to use its own funds in order to pay rewards for terror. The purported wall between welfare assistance and ‘pay-for-slay’ is an illusion.

“The EU is also pouring money in to create a de facto Palestinian state, regardless of the Palestinian strategy of using such a state to destroy Israel — and while the EU condemns Israel for “illegally” building homes for Israelis in these disputed territories.”

Phillips also notes that the Palestinian news service Wafa recently reported that Germany had pledged 100 million euros to the Palestinian Authority over the next two years for projects in the Gaza Strip, eastern Jerusalem and Palestinian settlements in “Area C”.

How can the EU and Germany officially be committed to fighting terrorism but support, politically in the UN and financially, the Palestinian Authority – which clearly uses part of the EU financial support to incentivize terrorism and pay pensions to the family of terrorists who kill civilians?

Does Germany think that its “special relationship with Israel requires it to help set up an Islamist terror state pledged in its education system and media to incite its people to murdering another six million Jews, this time in our ancestral home of Israel?

Phillips worries that Germany’s pledge of financial support for the Palestinians is “merely an instalment of a 3 billion euro spending plan by 2030 designed to advance the creation of a Palestinian state, with different countries being allocated different areas in which to concentrate their funds.”

Perhaps German cash can assist in the area of brainwashing the Arab youth into giving their lives in the jihadist murder of Jewish children, which is clearly one of the “success stories” of tyrannical Islamism. It is estimated that Nazi Germany killed one million Jewish children; am I politically incorrect to suggest that Germany should be the last country to assist in killing Jewish children?

Or does German support for the murderers of Jews help obviate the nastiness and evil of German history? Does that support, like the rest of the Western Left, allow them to replace Christianity with secular leftist virtue signalling – , the new religion that has replaced the old one that proclaimed, “Thou shalt not kill”.

Previously, I have suggested Germany has an important moral choice – if Germany still sees a special relationship with the Jews including Israelis, it should stop its complicity with the Jew-hating nations. Germany’s historic guilt will not be assuaged by catering to Islamist refugees and harming the Jewish State, which now has a bit over 6 million Jews, the same number as the Nazis killed in their “Final Solution”.

It is time for Germany to accept the truth. It has a choice – it has to choose between being a friend with a “special relationship” or a foe with a “normalized” EU type of relationship with Israel and the Arabs.

Why does the Jewish state fail to see that Germany under Merkel has made its choice, and it is not a good choice for our people? What is the defect in our culture, our history and our religion, that we debase ourselves by honoring a foe as we would a friend?

Do we think that European nations, including most especially Germany, that, it is now clear, support the Islamist murder of Israelis and Jews around the world, deserve a pass on their emnity? Is the problem with us – that we see “peace, peace when there is no peace”? Is it time for Israel to supplement its military and economic strength with a moral strength where we stop blaming ourselves in an ill-timed masochism?   Should we instead start blaming supposed friends like Germany for the continuation of Iranian threats and Palestinian terrorism financed by our friends as much as by our foes.

There is another, somewhat painful, part of our history that can be avoided when we gloss over reality when it comes to Germany. This pertains to how the Zionist leadership during the Shoah, had an ideology of seeing themselves as a New Jew, different from the European Jewish ghetto dwellers. This ideology helps explain some of the historical record on what the Zionist leadership did or did not do on behalf of the Jews in the Shoah. Chaim Weizman, the first President of the State of Israel, in his autobiography, Trial and Error, only spends one page on the Shoah.

The secular socialists, who founded the State, in some ways repressed a very painful Jewish history, wherein the Zionist leadership in Palestine as well as America, had trouble making the fate of the six million as important as their supposed (and proper) solution to the next Holocaust.

This attitude was changed with the arrest in 1960 and the hanging in 1962 of the Nazi Holocaust organizer, Adolf Eichmann. His trial, covered extensively in Israeli and international media, forced the Israelis and the rest of the world to decide whether Eichmann was to be seen just as a bureaucrat evidencing in Hannah Arendt’s opinion the “banality of evil” or an evil both profound and key to the murder of six million. The tension between the two understandings of Eichmann went a long way to obviate the repression of anger, but it did not end it.

A mere five years after Eichmann’s hanging, the surrounding Arab nations invaded Israel to attempt to complete the Holocaust.

The whole topic of how one can operate a state and raise new generation, with the knowledge that no only Arabs hated you but that the cultured Europe participated in genocide was avoided somewhat due to the joy that Israel had won the war and once again Jews had sovereignty in all of Jerusalem and the historic Judea and Samaria. Israelis busied themselves with visiting and renovating sites that had been Judenrein between 1948 and 1967, especially in old East Jerusalem and the Temple site.

However, General Moshe Dayan showed that the anti-Jewish notion of tolerance of evil had contaminated the thinking of the New Jews, when he turned over the Temple Mount to the jurisdiction of the Arabs, a folly that in time has become understood.

And so, part of the transformation into the New Jew involved repressing the anger about how non-Jews have treated us, including the genocide of the Shoah – and pursuing a Christian-like tolerance of people who taught their children to grow up to kill Jews who were never to be given the tolerance that the Jews gave them.

Dr. Bernard Golden, a specialist in anger management and the effects of suppressing anger has written in Psychology Today in June, 2021, an interesting piece on suppression of anger. He says:

“Many of us use suppression from time to time in the management of anger. It can at some moments be constructive, as when we postpone a heated discussion of conflict for a more suitable time. However, the impact of employing this defense mechanism is significantly more detrimental if it is routinely used to deal with anger. Suppressed anger doesn’t just go away…

“Our anger is typically a reaction to some form of emotional pain: i.e., feeling disrespected, powerless, diminished, shame, guilt, or sadness. However, our feelings and thoughts seek to be acknowledged and honored.

Each time we overlook them we diminish self-awareness and, in the process, lose touch with what we value. Recognizing, accepting, and honoring our anger are distinct from impulsively reacting to it. They require the capacity to pause and reflect on, rather than react to our anger.

“When we suppress our anger, we disavow a part of our humanity… Short of full acceptance of our feelings, including anger, we distort the lens through which we view our world and react to it through that distorted perception.

It may be, therefore, that what I consider to have been a 70 year long repression of anger against antisemitic non-Jews has distorted the lens through which we view the world; that is, repression of this anger has caused us to make some inappropriate reactions to non-Jews. In the case of Germany, as shown by the Merkel visit, our repressed anger makes us unable to clearly articulate to non-Jewish leaders like Merkel, that their support for Iran and the Palestinian Authority is a moral travesty.

As in the case of kidnapped people adopting the Stockholm Syndrome, we have fallen in love with our abusers. Repressing all anger and thanking the abusers for any small perceived benefits completely dwarfed by their bad actions, is therefore a negative psychological reaction. A clear examination of why we have been justified in our anger is the best way to free ourselves from the effects of repressing that anger.

CONTINUE

Howard Rotberg is the author of The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author, Tolerism: The Ideology Revealed and The Ideological Path to Submission…and what we can do about it. He is president of Mantua Books, and is a retired lawyer

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