Israel cannot rely on Americans or Europeans as allies or partners when it confronts threats from its Jew-obsessed neighbors. Hatred of Jews is the central animating feature of the political and strategic reality of the Middle East. It is hatred of Jews that dictates the legal regimes, foreign policies, military aspirations, cultural mores, educational themes and even public health policies of our neighbors from Ramallah to Tehran.
Despite the centrality of Jew-hatred in all aspects of public life in the Arab and Muslim world, our neighbors’ unrelenting and irrational abhorrence for Israel and the Jewish people remains a dirty secret that you aren’t supposed to mention in polite company. From Washington to Brussels, talk of the policy implications of Arab and Muslim Jew-hatred is prohibited.
Omar Abu-Sneina, a convicted terrorist murderer, is one of the thousand Palestinian terrorists that Israel released from prison in order to secure the release of Israeli hostage IDF Sgt.- Maj. Gilad Schalit. Originally from Hebron, Abu-Sneina was released to Hamas-controlled Gaza.
This week the IDF announced that since his release Abu-Sneina has returned to the terror business. The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) intercepted a computer memory card he sent his family in Hebron with instructions for how his fellow terrorists should go about kidnapping and holding IDF soldiers hostage. The instructions demonstrate how for Abu-Sneina, Israelis don’t even deserve to be treated like animals.
Among other things, he discussed how to hide a hostage. As he put it, “Avoid hiding [the captive soldier] in desolate places, tunnels or forests, unless the aforementioned [captive] is a corpse or a severed head. If the aforementioned is a live human, that must be visited at least once a week and provided with food and drink, it is best to hide him in a house, an agricultural farm, a workplace, etc.”
Abu-Sneina’s coldblooded cruelty and rejection of the inherent value of the lives of Israelis is not simply a function of the fact that he is a terrorist. It is a reflection of the values of Palestinian society. Those values are continuously expressed and reinforced by Fatah- and Hamas-controlled media outlets, cultural and educational institutions and religious authorities. The ubiquitousness of Jew-hatred in the daily lives of Palestinians is so overwhelming it is difficult to imagine any facet of Palestinian life that isn’t inundated by it.
Take grammar lessons. According to a translation provided by Palestinian Media Watch, the Palestinian Authority’s Arabic language matriculation examinations for high school students include questions such as “Punctuate the underlined phrase: Do not view the occupier as human.” And “Punctuate the underlined phrase: We shall die in order that our land may live.”
THIS WEEK, a Palestinian court sentenced Muhammad Abu Shahala to death for selling a home in Hebron near the Cave of the Patriarchs to Jews. Shahala was arrested shortly after several Jewish families moved into the house last month. He was reportedly tortured and quickly tried and sentenced to die by a PA court.
The PA was established in May 1994. The first law it adopted defined selling land to Jews as a capital offense. Shortly thereafter scores of Arab land sellers began turning up dead in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in both judicial and extrajudicial killings.
Leaders of the Jewish community of Hebron wrote a letter to international leaders this week asking them to intervene with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and demand that he cancel Shahala’s sentence. They addressed the letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy, the director-general of the International Red Cross, Yves Daccord, as well as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. In it they wrote, “It is appalling to think that property sales should be defined as a ‘capital crime’ punishable by death.
“The very fact that such a ‘law’ exists within the framework of the PA legal system points to a barbaric and perverse type of justice, reminiscent of practices implemented during the dark ages.”
They went on to make the reasonable comparison between the PA’s law prohibiting land sales to Jews to Nazi Germany’s Nuremburg laws that constrained and finally outlawed trade between Jews and Germans. The letter concluded with the question, “Is the Palestinian Authority a reincarnation of the Third Reich?”
The Palestinians of course are far from unique in their obsession with hating Jews. Their hemorrhage of hatred, their obsessive need to reject any move towards peaceful coexistence with Israel, or what the renowned late Palestinian poet Yousuf Al Khatib referred to picturesquely as “the Jewish filth of Europe,” is matched in every Arab land. And of course, it is the primary obsession of the Iranian regime.
The parallels between Nazi laws and the laws of the PA and the Arab states that outlaw all cooperation with Israel and make such cooperation a capital offense are obvious and straightforward. Yet generally speaking, anyone who points out this fact is automatically dismissed as an alarmist or an extremist. Given the PA’s relative military weakness when compared with Israel and the Arab world’s current lack of interest in waging active war against Israel, noting their inarguable ideological affinity with the Nazis is considered socially and even intellectually unacceptable. The fact that they lack the ability to implement their ideology renders it improper to mention it.
The social prohibition on drawing parallels between the threats facing Israel today and those that faced the Jewish people 70 years ago is not limited to the discourse on the Arab world’s conflict with Israel. It also extends to polite society’s discourse on Iran’s nuclear program, which the Iranian regime has repeatedly made clear is aimed at destroying Israel.
In his address to the nation at the annual Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at Yad Vashem on Wednesday evening, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu took aim at that taboo when he attacked those who accuse him of belittling the Holocaust by comparing the annihilation of European Jewry to the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Netanyahu said, “I know there are also those who believe that the unique evil of the Holocaust should never be invoked in discussing other threats facing the Jewish people. To do so, they argue, is to belittle the Holocaust and to offend its victims.
“I totally disagree. On the contrary. To cower from speaking the uncomfortable truth – that today like then, there are those who want to destroy millions of Jewish people – that is to belittle the Holocaust, that is to offend its victims and that is to ignore the lessons.
“Not only does the prime minister of Israel have the right, when speaking of these existential dangers, to invoke the memory of a third of our nation which was annihilated. It is his duty.”
NETANYAHU IS right, of course. Unfortunately for Israel, raising the Holocaust in the context of a discussion about contemporary threats to the Jewish people is the rhetorical equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb. Just as no one is allowed to use a nuclear bomb, no one is allowed to mention the Holocaust. And that means that there is ultimately no way to speak about the violent hatred that animates our enemies in every aspect of their policy making. From the seemingly anodyne issue of property sales to the existential issue of nuclear weapons programs, the Jew-hatred that lies at the foundation of their actions is out of bounds for discussion.
Actually, the situation is both better and worse than that. Netanyahu’s rhetorical boldness in drawing the parallel between Iran and the Nazis is arguably the only reason that the EU and the Obama administration have taken any actions against Iran. No, as their feckless negotiations with the mullahs, their foot-dragging in implementing economic sanctions, and their outspoken opposition to military action against Iran make clear, they do not really mind the prospect of Iran acquiring the ability to wipe out the Jewish state. The only reason they have adopted sanctions at all is because Netanyahu’s Holocaust rhetoric made them fear that Israel would attack Iran’s nuclear installations if they didn’t.
On the other hand, when it comes to their direct dealings with Jew-haters, Westerners not only fail to confront them about their prejudice. They enable it. For instance, at a townhall meeting during her visit to Tunisia last month, Hillary Clinton was asked how US leaders can be trusted when during elections, “most of the candidates from both sides run towards the Zionist lobbies to get their support.”
Rather than reject the anti-Jewish premise of the question – that Jews exert inordinate control over US politics or that there is something wrong with candidates expressing support for Israel – Clinton treated the question as legitimate.
She said, “A lot of things are said in political campaigns that should not bear a lot of attention.”
Clinton even congratulated her anti-Jewish questioner, saying, “I think it’s a fair question because I… sometimes am a little surprised that people around the world pay more attention to what is said in our political campaigns than most Americans.”
Similarly, a report on the behind the scenes goings on at last weekend’s nuclear negotiations with Iran published by Al-Monitor described the friendly discussion that took place at a dinner Friday night between EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian chief negotiator Saeed Jalili. According to a European diplomat, the conversation was aimed at breaking the ice. And it included a discussion of “political party funding in the US.”
It is hard to imagine that such a discussion involved anything other than a group tongue-clucking session directed against the inordinate impact of “Jewish money” on US electoral politics. That is, it is all but impossible to imagine that the discussion involved anything other than Ashton attempting to build a rapport with her Iranian counterpart based on shared hatred or contempt for Jews.
The fact that the West refuses to consider the policy implications of the most powerful force in Arab and Iranian policy-making and political life does not mean that Israeli policy-makers should necessarily expand their discussion of the topic – although it would probably not hurt for them to do so. What it means is that the general policy debate in the West about the nature of Middle Eastern politics is completely divorced from reality.
Because the Americans and the Europeans refuse to acknowledge the elephant of Jew-hatred in the middle of the room, they cannot be trusted to make reasoned or rational policy decisions. And since they cannot be trusted to act rationally, Israel cannot rely on the Americans or the Europeans as allies or partners when it confronts threats from its Jew-obsessed neighbors.
@ yamit82:
dems were the good old days-
@ babara:
Well now that you mention it I do have a prejudice against Queers who are lousy poets and love Dylan Thomas.
”Great is the hand that holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.”
”There are many who say that a dog has his day,
And a cat has a number of lives;”
@ yamit82:
Now you take Yamit-he hasn’t a prejudiced bone in his body. A pure enlightened soul who we may hold up as a model for all to emulate.
@ rongrand:
Follow closely: Most Christians accept that the Jews are G-d’s chosen people. That mans that G-d manifests himself through the Jewish people.
Those who will not accept the supremacy of our G-d reject his people. It’s like blaming the messenger.
Hitler understood.
“The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between us, between Germans and Jews. All else is facade and illusion. Behind England stands Israel, and behind France, and behind the United States. Even when we have driven the Jew out of Germany, he remains our world enemy.
We are the joyous Hitler youth,
We do not need any Christian virtue
Our leader is our savior
The Pope and Rabbi shall be gone
We want to be pagans once again.”
– Song sung by Hitler youth
“They refer to me as an uneducated barbarian. Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians, it is an honored title to us. We shall rejuvenate the world. This world is near its end.”
“Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear.”
“The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention, it is a blemish like circumcision.”
“If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it.”
– Robert Wistrich, Hitler’s Apocalypse, p. 122; from a conversation with Croatian Foreign Minister General Kvaternik, July 21, 1941
“The internal expurgation of the Jewish spirit is not possible in any platonic way. For the Jewish spirit as the product of the Jewish person. Unless we expel the Jewish people. Unless we expel the Jewish people soon, they will have judaized our people within a very short time.”
“The heaviest blow which ever struck humanity was Christianity; Bolshevism is Christianity’s illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew.”
“.. Do you now appreciate the depth of our National Socialist Movement? Can there be anything greater and more all comprehending? Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than religion; it is the will to create mankind anew.”
@ Terence:
You don’t know what you are talking about.
@ Terence:
Now in my experience, when it comes to prejudice, the worst offenders are still the jungle bunnies, the rag tops, the hunkies and the fags.
@ rongrand:
Antisemitism is in the same category as
anti- Black
anti- Catholic
anti- Oriental
anti- homosexual
anti- Muslim
anti- Protestant
anti- Women
anti- Mormon
And you may add several thousand other antis to the list. It is prejudice and it is all bad. And probably all of us are infected by this virus to varying degrees.
Yamit, I don’t know if this kept Jews Jewish, the problem I have is what in the world or I should say what the hell in Jewish heritage prompted hated???
G-d frees His people from slavery and leads them out of Egypt to the Holy Land to live in peace. Does that warrant hatred??
Am I missing something??
What could they be guilty of??
I guess others blame their failures on the success of the Jews, jealously.
If you don’t stop hatred in its track its like wild weeds. Good grass will die if not properly attended to while weeds spread without any help.
@ rongrand:
Laudble sentiment but it can’t be done anymore than control of the weather is impossible.
Besides it’s the antisemitism that has kept Jews Jewish.
@ yamit82:
Yamit, I totally agree.
Bottom line, she is right. Sad but true.
I have often said the importance of anti-Semitism education.
Think about it, we the US, GB and the free world have every reason to support Israel, no reason not to.
Remove anti-Semitism from the equation and I am sure it would be different. More the reason to eradicate it now once and for all.
@ Calvary:
parable of the 3 minas
Mathew 25:24-30
Nice Guy?
Sounds like a bloody money grubbing Capitalist to me.
Every Israeli and Jew should View this video: NEVER AGAIN
Caroline Glick on the Holocaust: Competing Visions of ‘Never Again’
Read the comments: They are most informative.
Calvary says:
Where is your evidence that they were stealing from the poor? I assume there were many money changers. I assume there was also a brisk competition among them to attract the most customers. Maybe you believe that they were a cartel with a fixed rate of exchange? in any even a half shekel was a very low valued coin. so how much could they take as commission? Did your Jesus guy think they should do it for gratis? According to your book this was not his first visit to the Temple and you all claim him knowledgeable of the Law and customs of the Jews. The half shekel Temple Tax was required of every male Jew over 20 even if they lived in a foreign land. The temple was an expensive operation and Priests and Levites needed to be supported as well as the physical edifice itself needed upkeep and maintenance.
Your Jesus guy perpetrated a criminal act under anybodies law ancient or modern and should have been punished accordingly. It’s safe to assume he did injury to the livelihood of decent honest hardworking Jews who were mandated to do a necessary public and religious service.
In all of our history there is no record of any Jew who felt as your Jesus and complained about that service not to mention destroying private property and injuring and disrupting the orderly function of our Temple.
He was by that action no better than a common criminal. Then again he might just have been Nuts like his family believed of him.
Funny that his own mother a virgin who bore him did not know who he was nor did his brothers….
No way to treat your family and friends. Not Cool!!!
‘CBN’s Pat Robertson claims that “the poor Jews” can’t understand the source of anti-Semitism because they don’t believe in Jesus or the devil – “it’s too cosmic for most of them to grasp” (April 2012)’
Three reasons why Judaism and Christianity are light years away from each other: 1) Jesus 2) The Devil 3) Pat Robertson
Hey Jules,
Communism *is* thievery and it’s based on envy. …’you don’t need all that wealth, let me take some of that for myself and my friends. Oh, and we’ll give some to the poor too.’
Jesus himself was not a politician. Nor did he instruct his followers to effect change through politics. You can’t stuff him into any political box – period. But because he didn’t look at life through the prism of wealth and power like Marxists (and you I suppose), I don’t believe he’d have much in common with them.
Consider this passage from Mark as a counterpoint to the passages you cited. He speaks out against the hypocrisy of those who publicly flaunt their supposed love of the poor. But privately, they never lift a finger to help them:
While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table in the home of Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.
Some of those present were saying indignantly to one another, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.
“Leave her alone,” said Jesus. “Why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want. But you will not always have me.
—-
When he scattered the money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem, he did so because they were essentially stealing from poor Jewish pilgrims. That doesn’t make him Marxist. It means he was reaffirming the Torah’s instruction to not steal. And to not take advantage of the poor.
@ jules,
Here is what you wrote: “Why can’t Christian Zionists from the USA, have seats in the Knesset if Jesus was a Jew, Why cabn’t they take up Israeli citizenship or any Christian around the world like any Jew can?”
Do you detect a ‘slight’ problem with this line of logic?
@ Jerry:
America can destroy Iran using conventional weapons. But she won’t. Israel can’t destroy Iran using conventional weapons. Get the picture?
Now lets for arguments sake say that Israel opts to use only tactical nukes against hardened sites, what then?
the phoenix Said:
Why can’t Christian Zionists from the USA, have seats in the Knesset if Jesus was a Jew, Why cabn’t they take up Israeli citizenship or any Christian around the world like any Jew can?
@ jules,
Jules, Jules, Jules.
You are not listening!
Rx:
Read again comment # 13 and follow the advise.
Read again Linda Rivera’s post and write a few times her comment till you get it :”Jesus was a Jew”!
Also FYI, he did NOT create any new religion…..all this “new testament” stuff came +/- 100 years AFTER his death….
1. Caroline Glick rightly divines the extent and depth of Jew-hatred.
However, she no where attempts to speculate on its cause.
She should. So should others in her field.
Do not infer that Jew-hatred is justifiable. Of course it is not. But it’s not good enough to rail against it and have no idea of a raison d’etre.
2. Lee Habeeb, an Arab American of Lebanese origin, has recently released his view as to why mention of Jews, especially those living in the Jewish state, and Americans too, frequently
arouses instant and vitriolic hatred.
He says he believes American and Jewish achievement provoke feelings in many Arabs and Muslims of a profound lack of cultural self-confidence.
They believe they just don’t have it in them to do ‘the democracy thing’.
Mr. Habeeb is spot on in his diagnosis.
Our message to the Arab people should be: “Yes. You can!”. (Now where have we heard that before. And he did!).
Linda Rivera Said:
Jesus created a new religon. Communism doesn’t approve of sympathy for the thief, so Jesus was ‘worse’ than a communist, if you look at it in that perspective. Which Bible do you read?
Jesus said to Peter “If someone takes away your coat, let him have your shirt as well” Christianity has always been socialist.
“Jesus The Socialist: In the temple courts [Jesus] found men selling cattle, sheep and doves and other sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.
John 2:14-15. This story which shows Jesus’ rage against what is essentially corporate Greed, merging money with state & theological power, is also repeated in Matthew 21:12 (summed here essentially): Jesus walks into the temple courtyard and sees how merchants there change money, they have built their business up around what is supposed to be God’s temple. Jesus is horrified by the idea that God’s home could be profaned with money and the desire to be wealthy, he loses it, making a whip and begins turning over the tables the merchants are trading upon, he drives out the cattle being sold and screams a ton of insults at the people in the court yard. Jesus was filled with righteous indignation at the idea of Church being involved with business, he was horrified that it could be used as a network for making money.
@ jules:
Jules,
Just a reminder: Jesus was a JEW!
And Jesus was NOT a communist!
It is more than obvious that American and European leaders are rabid Jew-haters.
Israel, deal now with genocidal Iran, before it is too late!
@ jules:
“redistribute wealth”……
“Jesus Christ rejected materialism”……
Jules!
Please do not forget to take your meds before posting….
just sayin’
I do not believe America’s and Israel’s interests are the same. This is a lie. Americans should read their Bible properly.
The 99% should rise up, and defang congress, then redistribute wealth. Israel is a separate country that has cost us too much. It may be too late, but to avert civil war, people should move quickly, and finish the evil 1% who are destroying and robbing us.
Jesus lives. Jesus rejected materialism as espoused by the 1% who mainly reject Jesus.
Every time something nasty happens to someone, others say, in one form or another, “Thank God it was not me and mine.”
It is Israel’s error that it tries to entice others to take a moral stance viz a viz our existence. Note please the world’s muted response to the death of Iranian nuclear scientists, the destruction of their rocket facility, the under-reporting of the destruction of other facilities, etc. Only Stuxnet made waves because in infecting Iranian facilities, it also infected but had no effect upon many other computers worldwide.
Quietly destroying Iran will lead to no tears outside of Iran, no outbreak of antisemitism, no call for the destruction of Israel. It will be like a street gang murder in Chicago that never even appeared in the pages of the LA Times.
@ CuriousAmerican:
If somebody like Martin vanCreveld is to be believed, more than just Iran would be obliterated – the whole world would be. And it would deserve it.
The west is being led by moral midgets.
CuriousAmerican:
Yamit said:
By whom?
Theoretically only a Jewish State can prevent another holocaust. Those who think that the United States, the most powerful nation in the world and great friend of Israel(Hardly), will never tolerate such a thing, forget that the United States did not prevent Hitler from murdering millions. Roosevelt was aware of the death camps yet refused to bomb the railways leading to them. . . an act that could have saved thousands of lives.
Israels arch Jewish (sic) Rat Moshe Dayan remarked during the early stages of the Yom Kippur war, “We’re witnessing the Third Temple’s destruction,” and reportedly was on the way to offer capitulation instead of nuking the Arabs.
Until the Jews come to grips that they are alone and truly the Masters of our own fate, I fear we are in store for more tragedy, even more holocausts. I have no confidence in Israels current leadership civilian and military and haven’t since Shamir before Madrid and before we were hit by Saddam’s 39 Scuds.
@ CuriousAmerican:
By whom?
I love Caroline Glick because she ‘tells it like it is’. However even our best commentators still fail to recognize the real elephant in the room. That unmentionable ‘elephant’ is the Torah. The gentiles ignore their elephant and we ignore our elephant. Our elephant is our instruction manual for survival, our ‘tree of life’, the book we prefer to ignore, including the Prime Minister of a supposedly “Jewish” state. We deserve to be regarded as unworthy and inferior because we debase ourselves before the nations. We seek approval of pagans who hate G-d and wonder why they hate us. We will never be secure until we find self respect as Jews who follow the Law and end our groveling to those who despise us.
keelie says:
…And as long as this Holocaust is confined to some far-off region such as Israel, people in the West are quite content to let it happen. But, looking back at the 9/11 disaster which affected relatively few people in a relatively small area, just imagine what would happen world-wide if the Iranians were to destroy a Western city – any Western city. And they will.
Iran would be obliterated.
@ CuriousAmerican:
…And as long as this Holocaust is confined to some far-off region such as Israel, people in the West are quite content to let it happen. But, looking back at the 9/11 disaster which affected relatively few people in a relatively small area, just imagine what would happen world-wide if the Iranians were to destroy a Western city – any Western city. And they will.
How about the donkey of Jew hatred?!
The issue has to be addressed. What Iran proposes is a real Nuclear Holocaust.
And, political incorrectness will have to be curtailed.
There will have to be a calling out of vicious Arab plans.
But, there will also have to be a retreat from Hollywood’s practice of making a Holocaust out of everything. Hollywood has cheapened the discussion.
In this case dealing with Iran, raising the issue of the Holocaust is absolutely appropriate.
The reason it is not rasied now is because it has been abused.
I remember in the 1980s, I was in New Jersey where a store was fined for selling pornography. The owners, survivers of the Holocaust, put a sign in their window comparing the “persecution” of their store to the Nazis.
Comparing the right to sell pornography as equal to the Holocaust?!
I remember more recently in New Jersey where some Hasidim contesting a parking ticket brought up the Holocaust.
Unfortunately, the term has been abused, and NOW, when what you are facing is a real Holocaust no one wants to listen.
It is the old story of crying “Wolf” once too often; and when a real wolf comes along, no one will listen.
Hollywood, and even some Jewish magazines have cheapened the term
http://media.salon.com/2008/04/israels_nazi_porn_problem.jpg
Another example
http://newdeference.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/stalags.png?w=441