The U.S. secretary of state’s statements on his visit to Israel demonstrated how deeply blood libels have seeped into the Biden administration’s thinking about the Jewish state.
(February 3, 2023 / JNS)The 21-year-old who massacred seven Jews and wounded another five when he opened fire on them as they left synagogue last Friday night in the Neve Yaakov neighborhood of Jerusalem wasn’t a lone wolf. Neither was the 13-year-old boy who shot a Jewish father and son Saturday afternoon as they walked home from synagogue in Ir David in Jerusalem. How do we know?
A lone wolf is someone who operates outside the confines of his society and, in criminal cases, at least, does something sociopathic. The 13- and 21-year-old terrorists in Jerusalem were acting in absolute conformity with the norms and expectations of their society. The gunmen’s parents praised them as heroes. As soon as the news that Kairy Musa Alqam massacred innocent Jews in Neve Yaakov spread, Arabs throughout Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Galilee and the Negev broke out in celebration. They passed out candies in the streets, shot off fireworks and posted jubilant entries on their social media accounts.
The Palestinian Authority didn’t condemn either terror attack. And this makes sense, because like the rest of Palestinian society, the PLO government in Judea and Samaria and the Hamas government in Gaza enthusiastically support mass murder of Jews. In preschools, elementary schools, high schools and universities, from Hebron to Gaza, Ramallah to Tul Karm and Jenin, students of all ages spent the week celebrating the massacre and attempted massacre in Jerusalem. Preschoolers “reenacted” the massacre in Neve Yaakov with toy guns. Little girls in pigtails paraded around holding photos of Alqam. High school girls wrote poems in his memory. Boys pledged to follow in his footsteps.
Alqam murdered seven Jews and wounded five more on International Holocaust Memorial Day. The anniversary is notable. The parallels between Nazi Germany and Palestinian society are overwhelming. The Nazis were able to enact the physical annihilation of the Jews by building on a century of demonization of Jews and lionizing of antisemites in Germany and throughout Europe. When the Nazis first rose to power, they transformed Germany into a state organized around the demonization and dehumanization of the Jews.
As the late professor Jacob Katz explained in a recently republished address from 1975, the Holocaust couldn’t have been predicted, because it was unprecedented. But it was an eminently logical product of the Nazis’ dehumanization of Jews in the first five years of their rule. And those five years were a logical consequence of a century of demonization of Jews that preceded the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933.
The Palestinian people were created by a Nazi agent. The father of the Palestinians was Haj Amin el Husseini. Husseini, and his successors Yasir Arafat and his deputies in the PLO, and Ahmed Yassin and his acolytes in Hamas all forged a society which, like Nazi Germany, was organized around the hatred, demonization and dehumanization of the Jews as a people and as individuals. Husseini was an out and out Nazi. He began receiving direct support from Nazi Germany for his terror war of annihilation against the Jews in the land of Israel in 1937. In 1940, Husseini fomented a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq, and incited the Farhud, the massacre of Baghdad Jewry when it failed.
In 1941 Husseini fled to Berlin and met with Hitler. He began broadcasting to the Muslim world through Nazi shortwave radio in 1942. In those broadcasts, which continued until the end of the war, Husseini merged jihadist Jew hatred with the Nazis’ annihilationist antisemitism and popularized this new toxic mix throughout the Arab and Muslim world. His successors shared his admiration for the Nazis. Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas’ Ph.D. dissertation is a Holocaust-denying conspiracy theory. Abbas turned it into a bestselling book, which now forms the basis of World War II curricula in Palestinian schools.
International Holocaust Memorial Day was born in a blood libel, not unlike the Nazi blood libels. In April 2002, together with PLO spokesman Saeb Erekat, UN envoy Terje Larsen accused Israel of committing a massacre of Palestinians during a pitched battle in Jenin. Many likened the IDF soldiers in Jenin to the Nazis and the Palestinians to the Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
Every single aspect of the story was a heinous lie. There was no massacre in Jenin. There was a pitched battle. Fifty-two Palestinians, 34 of whom were terrorists, were killed. Twenty-three IDF soldiers were killed. Another 57 soldiers were wounded in the 11-day battle.
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