by ALAN DERSHOWITZ
Why are so many of the grandchildren of Nazis and Nazi collaborators who brought us the Holocaust once again declaring war on the Jews?
Why have we seen such an increase in antisemitism and irrationally virulent anti-Zionism in Western Europe?
To answer these questions, a myth must first be exposed. That myth is the one perpetrated by the French, the Dutch, the Norwegians, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Austrians, and many other western Europeans: namely that the Holocaust was solely the work of German Nazis aided perhaps by some Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian collaborators.
False.
The Holocaust was perpetrated by Europeans: by Nazi sympathizers and collaborators among the French, Dutch, Norwegians, Swiss, Belgians, Austrians and other Europeans, both Western and Eastern.
If the French government had not deported to the death camps more Jews than their German occupiers asked for; if so many Dutch and Belgian citizens and government officials had not cooperated in the roundup of Jews; if so many Norwegians had not supported Quisling; if Swiss government officials and bankers had not exploited Jews; if Austria had not been more Nazi than the Nazis, the Holocaust would not have had so many Jewish victims.
In light of the widespread European complicity in the destruction of European Jewry, the pervasive anti-Semitism and irrationally hateful anti-Zionism that has recently surfaced throughout Western Europe toward Israel should surprise no one.
“Oh no,” we hear from European apologists. “This is different. We don’t hate the Jews. We only hate their nation-state. Moreover, the Nazis were right-wing. We are left-wing, so we can’t be anti-Semites.”
Nonsense.
The hard left has a history of anti-Semitism as deep and enduring as the hard right. The line from Voltaire to Karl Marx, to Levrenti Beria, to Robert Faurisson, to today’s hard-left Israel bashers is as straight as the line from Wilhelm Mars to the persecutors of Alfred Dreyfus to Hitler.
The Jews of Europe have always been crushed between the Black and the Red – victims of extremism whether it be the ultra-nationalism of Khmelnitsky to the ultra-anti-Semitism of Stalin.
“But some of the most strident anti-Zionists are Jews, such as Norman Finkelstein and even Israelis such as Gilad Atzmon. Surely they can’t be anti-Semites?”
Why not? Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas collaborated with the Gestapo. Atzmon, a hard leftist, describes himself as a proud self-hating Jew and admits that his ideas derive from a notorious anti-Semite.
He denies that the Holocaust is historically proved but he believes that Jews may well have killed Christian children to use their blood to bake Passover matzah. And he thinks it’s “rational” to burn down synagogues.
Finkelstein believes in an international Jewish conspiracy that includes Steven Spielberg, Leon Uris, Eli Wiesel, and Andrew Lloyd Webber!
“But Israel is doing bad things to the Palestinians,” the European apologists insist, “and we are sensitive to the plight of the underdog.”
No, you’re not! Where are your demonstrations on behalf of the oppressed Tibetans, Georgians, Syrians, Armenians, Kurds, or even Ukrainians? Where are your BDS movements against the Chinese, the Russians, the Cubans, the Turks, or the Assad regime?
Only the Palestinians, only Israel? Why? Not because the Palestinians are more oppressed than these and other groups.
Only because their alleged oppressors are Jews and the nation-state of the Jews. Would there be demonstrations and BDS campaigns on behalf of the Palestinians if they were oppressed by Jordan or Egypt?
Oh, wait! The Palestinians were oppressed by Egypt and Jordan… Gaza was an open-air prison between 1948 and 1967, when Egypt was the occupying power. And remember Black September, when Jordan killed more Palestinians than Israel did in a century? I don’t remember any demonstration or BDS campaigns — because there weren’t any.
When Arabs occupy or kill Arabs, Europeans go ho-hum. But when Israel opens a soda factory in Maale Adumim, which even the Palestinian leadership acknowledges will remain part of Israel in any peace deal, Oxfam parts ways with Scarlett Johansson for advertising a soda company that employs hundreds of Palestinians
Keep in mind that Oxfam has provided “aid and material support” to two anti-Israel terrorist groups, according to the Tel Aviv-based Israeli Law Group.
The hypocrisy of so many hard-left western Europeans would be staggering if it were not so predictable based on the sordid history of Western Europe’s treatment of the Jews.
Even England, which was on the right side of the war against Nazism, has a long history of anti-Semitism, beginning with the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 to the notorious White Paper of 1939, which prevented the Jews of Europe from seeking asylum from the Nazis in British-mandated Palestine… And Ireland, which vacillated in the war against Hitler, boasts some of the most virulent anti-Israel rhetoric.
The simple reality is that one cannot understand the current western European left-wing war against the nation-state of the Jewish people without first acknowledging the long-term European war against the Jewish people themselves.
Theodore Herzl understood the pervasiveness and irrationality of European anti-Semitism, which led him to the conclusion that the only solution to Europe’s Jewish problem was for European Jews to leave that bastion of Jew hatred and return to their original homeland, which is now the State of Israel.
None of this is to deny Israel’s imperfections or the criticism it justly deserves for some of its policies. But these imperfections and deserved criticism cannot even begin to explain, much less justify, the disproportionate hatred directed against the only nation-state of the Jewish people and the disproportionate silence regarding the far greater imperfections and deserved criticism of other nations and groups including the Palestinians.
Nor is this to deny that many western European individuals and some western European countries have refused to succumb to the hatred against the Jews or their state. The Czech Republic comes to mind. But far too many western Europeans are as irrational in their hatred toward Israel as their for-bearers were in their hatred toward their Jewish neighbors.
As author Amos Oz once aptly observed: the walls of his grandparents’ Europe were covered with graffiti saying, “Jews, go to Palestine.” Now they say, “Jews, get out of Palestine,” by which is meant Israel.
Who do these western European bigots think they’re fooling? Only fools who want to be fooled in the interest of denying that they are manifesting new variations on their grandparents’ old biases.
Any objective person with an open mind, open eyes, and an open heart must see the double standard being applied to the nation-state of the Jewish people. Many doing so are the grandchildren of those who lethally applied a double standard to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
For shame!
@Frank Adam
Certainly:
William Perl “The Holocaust Conspiracy: An International Policy of Genocide” 1989
Because the time has come again to show the Jews that if they don’t liquidate the Diaspora, the Diaspora will liquidate them.
I hope that this time it will get through to them before its too late again.
US commentators should be cautious before – justifiably – panning Europeans as a whole for the Shaoah. The US quota acts especially the post 1918 Johnson Act are also responsible for the Shoah by not lettinig in European Jews and that well before the 1929 economic crash.
While I have always admired Dersh’s commitment to the fight against antisemitism I have also noted his relative lack of support for Israel and its` government.
@ Michael S:
Are you saying you didn’t call me “…such a cesspool of continual, habitual, repeated sin that no atonement you could make could grant you a moment’s remission.”?!
Then WHO did? The comment has “Michael S May 20, 2020 at 7:14 pm” over it.
@ Reader:
Reader, you just lied again, and compounded it with more BS. Why not just let the readers click on “Michael S” on your post, and see for themselves. I’ve had enough of listening to your crap, and so have others.
@ Michael S:
I read what you actually said.
What you said (and you repeatedly post the same comment) is impossible to misinterpret.
I DON’T attack anyone, I merely explain things or add information that others might have missed. One cannot reach the right conclusions until one has enough facts to think about.
I also assume I have the right to express my opinions (which may differ from the opinions of others) here in an INOFFENSIVE manner, unlike YOU who just called me “personally, … such a cesspool of continual, habitual, repeated sin that no atonement you could make could grant you a moment’s remission.”
WOW!!!
And it’s just for calling you out for your rather ungracious comment which you keep reposting but everyone has ignored until now.
@ Reader:
READER,
Anyone who reads what I actually SAID, instead of what you SAY I said, can see that you are full of BS. As the Bible said,
Rom. 3
[21] But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets;
[22] Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference:
[23] For ALL have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
[24] Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus:
You apparently think that you are an exception to this rule; so you have added an odious pride to your many other sins.
I did NOT single out the Jewish people as exceptional sinners, as you said; so of course, you have also borne false witness. In fact you, personally, are such a cesspool of continual, habitual, repeated sin that no atonement you could make could grant you a moment’s remission. If you don’t accept the forgiveness freely given by God, you have no hope — not the Jewish people, but you, personally.
I hope you and everyone else reading this understands what I am actually saying.
I notice, Reader, after reading your many, many comments on this site, that you tend to simply attack everyone, all the time, about everything, without rhyme or reason. As one once said, “When you point the finger at someone, you have three other fingers pointing back at you”. As the Preacher once said,
Proverbs 10:
[18] He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that uttereth a slander, is a fool.
[19] In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise.
They do. Just look at how they treated Orianna Fallaci in Italy, Briggite Bardot in France, Tommy Robinson in England or Geert Wilders in Holland. Though, it’s true that the Labor party in England is thoroughly antisemitic, not just dhimmi. All of it is objectively antisemitic, but much of the non-Muslim left is not subjectively so, which is why there are still so many objectively antisemitic Jews who claim to be proud of their heritage and even speaking in its name (unspeakably). Traditionally, rightists hate Jews personally, every one of us, leftists accept Jews who betray the rest of us. There are those of us who will do anything for acceptance by the goyim. kapos.
@ Sebastien Zorn:
“They regard all Jews as Europeans” Throughout the 19th century German intellectuals called German Jews “those Asiatics/Semites”, kept complaining about “the Jewish problem”, how incompatible these Jews were with German culture, and kept trying to find ways to solve “the Jewish problem”.
However, the Jews just ignored the complaints and did their utmost to become better Germans than Germans themselves which ended kind of badly for the Jews (not for the Germans).
@ Sebastien Zorn:
You just proved my point in regard to Islam.
As far as higher standards for Europeans – why then they don’t apply those high standards to the non-Jewish Europeans or Americans?
This is bigger than Right and Left, conservatives or liberals, Europeans or Asians.
Even those who reject Christianity now were brought up in that paradigm and it is the basis of Western Civilization.
“There are three pillars of western civilization in the modern age: Greco-Roman philosophy and government, Christianity, and European nation-states.”
Christianity was meant to REPLACE Jews and Judaism with New Israel, and the Jews were supposed to suffer until they accept Christ (i.e., disappear). The whole of Torah (the “Old” Testament) according to the Christian belief was supposed to prophesy Jesus Christ as the true Messiah and God.
Peaceful and safe Israel (especially in its Biblical borders) is INCOMPATIBLE with this belief.
This is the reason for the “higher standards”, BDS, weeping over the “suffering Palestinians”, haggling over Jerusalem and percentages of Judea and Samaria, etc.
They want to believe that THEIR prophesies came true.
That’s true of the Right but the Left, at least consciously, rejects Christianity and the Western tradition as much as it rejects the Jews and accepts dhimmitude. It regards Israel as a Western country that refuses to accept Muslim invasion and domination as they do. Their hero, Mohamas Karamchad (“Mahatma”) Ghandi, said it best for them:
“Do the Muslims claim Palestine, or will they restore it to the Jews who are the original owners?
‘The Muslims claim Palestine as an integral part of Jazirat-ul-Arab. They are bound to retain its custody, as an injunction of the Prophet. But that does not mean that the Jews and the Christians cannot freely go to Palestine, or even reside there and own property. What non-Muslims cannot do is to acquire sovereign jurisdiction. The Jews cannot receive sovereign rights in a place which has been held for centuries by Muslim powers by right of religious conquest. The Muslim soldiers did not shed their blood in the late War for the purpose of surrendering Palestine out of Muslim control. I would like my Jewish friends to impartially consider the position of the seventy million Muslims of India. As a free nation, can they tolerate what they must regard as a treacherous disposal of their sacred possession?” – “Notes in Young India” – April 6, 1921.
Sources:
GandhiServe Foundation – Mahatma Gandhi Research and Media Service (reprinted with permission)
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/notes-in-young-india-by-gandhi-april-1921
They regard all Jews as Europeans and hold Europeans to a different, higher, they think, standard, as laid out by Yoko Ono, apparently, in the song usually attributed to John Lennon, “Imagine.” (basically an Anarcho-Communist manifesto, I used to be one, I should know.)
“Imagine”
Yoko Ono
“Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or…”
Source: LyricFind
The reason for the ongoing antisemitism is religious.
If Israel is left in peace in its Biblical borders (which is perfectly reasonable – it will be a small country in any case), and the Jews of the Diaspora will gradually move there (The Ingathering of the Exiles), WHOSE PROPHECIES WILL HAVE COME TRUE?
Certainly not the Christian or Muslim ones.
Imagine if the Pope has to announce “That’s all, folks!” and to close up shop because a safe and thriving Israel completely contradicts Christian beliefs.
Imagine all those billions of believers who will have to realize that what they’ve been fed for 2,000 years is a fairy tale and the “opium for the people”.
So, unfortunately, “antisemitism” is here to stay for a very long time. We’ll just have to learn to live with it, hopefully safely in the Promised Land.
@ Michael S:
“His free giving to vilely, despicably unworthy people”
It wasn’t free, it was a contract, we said we will do it and other nations rejected it, and we get punished when we forget it and stray, so to speak.
I don’t appreciate you designation of the Jewish people as “vilely, despicably unworthy” and I fail to understand why Gentiles think that “the chosen people” have sunk lower than they.
At least the Jews didn’t kill well over a hundred million people like professing Christians did over two millennia while claiming that Christ is Love.
@ Walter Alter:
“Contemporary Mideastern anti-semitism” Really? How about the Mufti’s Haj Amin AlHusseini’s personal relationship with Hitler and the Nazis and all those top Nazis who after the war became top advisers to a few Middle East rulers?
@ Eleanor Doctor:I as Edgar concur 100% with what you have written. Copied below.
@ Eleanor Doctor:
I agree with just about everything you’ve posted.
@ Asherz:
“There are two things that kept the dispersed Jewish people in existence for 2000 years in the Diaspora. The Torah and anti-Semitism. When the gentiles love the Jews they assimilate.”
Asherz, I think you’ve nailed it. I would also add, that one of the main things that will keep aliyah going, and the continuance of the Jewish state going, is antisemitism (the other is global jihad).
Concerning Torah, I will say this: I am a non-Jewish Christian. I see Torah as God’s gracious gift to humanity, His free giving to vilely, despicably unworthy people the gift of knowing the very heart of our Maker. It is also the most detailed chronicle of how the most gifted and blessed of all nations, namely Israel, has repeatedly rejected Torah in pursuit of the pleasures of this world — in effect, of “becoming like the countries round about us”, If Israel ever ceases to be the target of antisemitism and antizionism, that is the direction the modern State of Israel will go, and it will be to their detriment.
As for us goiim, Torah is a warning to us: that if God’s chosen have sunk so low, we are in danger of also sinking this low and lower; and if and when we do, we needn’t fear being rejected by men; we need fear being rejected by God Himself.
The anti-Semitism in Europe is clearly demonstrated by the illogical charge without ANY evidence that the Mossad is responsible for leaking a tape which just brought down the Austrian government which showed corruption on it. In other words to distract from the corruption that occurred blame the Jews. We Jews know historically what it was that birthed such hatred to Jews in Europe initially and it carries on to this day. Clue it predates Islam and is younger than Judaism.
This Jew hatred has nothing to do with Palestinians but the traditional scapegoat of European problems the Jews.
Full article at
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5515741,00.html
@ Eleanor Doctor:
Eleanor, you are living in a fantasy.
There are two things that kept the dispersed Jewish people in existence for 2000 years in the Diaspora. The Torah and anti-Semitism. When the gentiles love the Jews they assimilate. 71% intermarriage in the US. It is a very bitter medicine but has kept the Jews as Jews. That continues even when they have their own state.
Mr Dershowitz asks us a question at the beginning of his article, but he does not answer it. He spends all his time dispelling a myth. And that is that. He should address himself to answering his question.
And the answer is quite simple: it is quite safe to attack Israel because it is a small country and, perhaps even more importantly, there will be no retaliation.One takes a chance if one were to examine carefully the practices of Israel’s Moslem neighbours. And criticism is safe and cheap when done from a perch in London, Paris or New York. To show oneself in possession of the correct attitude, after having read Edward Said, one conjures up an oppressed people and an oppressor. So we have the set-upon Jordanians ( erroneously called Palestinians) and Israel. And away we go. Israel is also a democracy, the only one in the Middle East and the Israeli haters have no love for an open and democratic society. The more successful Israel is, the more virulent the attacks. Self-hate is a powerful emotion.
As for those Jews who also attack Israel, there is no limit, apparently, to the scope of serious mental illness. One wonders if one shouldn’t follow the teachings of Chairman Mao and send these people off to re-education camps. That would, I think, be the kindest way of dealing with these self-hating souls.
Support of Israel by Dershowitz has always been conditional. He is a Lib Democrat American before he is a Jew and the Israel he supports must mirror his LIB Values and world view. In short in my book he is still a POS. He has never renounced Obama, Clinton or the Jew-hating Dem Party the main sources of Jew-hatred in America. America was every bit as complicit in the Holocaust as were most European countries. The Holocaust was a self-perpetuating spiral between Germans, Christians, and Zionists. Two years after Holocaust, Germany was again a respected member of the international community. It is impolite to call Germans a nation of murderers and remind the young Germans of their grandfathers’ atrocities. Polls indicate a quarter of Germans harbor anti-Semitic feelings; the real figure is probably higher, as many shrink from revealing such feelings to pollsters.
Two years after the Holocaust, Britain voted against establishing a Jewish state, and the United States abstained in the UN vote. Israel was repeatedly slapped with weapons embargoes (which the Arabs never had to endure). As a direct result of the US-imposed sanctions, Israel’s casualties in the War of Independence amounted to a whopping 1 percent of her population. No foreign government or media channel has the slightest problem with Arabs having killed and maimed more Jews in the post-Oslo hostilities than in the Yom Kippur War. Both Russia and the West prevent us from defusing the Iranian nuclear threat even with our own army, with no help required from them.
But, what is the source of European antisemitism? Deshowitz is too politically correct to say it, but we all know what it is – Christianity, of course. What is more interesting is that, with churches closing by the hundreds across Europe, European antisemitism thrives. It seems to have been bred into the the genes of a large majority of Europeans and is now exacerbated by Europe’s growing Islamic population. Jews, get out while the going is good and let Europe rot with her new immigrant population.
A book that will absolutely clarify the history of European antisemitism in modern times (from the early 1700’s Enlightenment) as a racial ideology is Prof. Dorothy Figueiras’ revelatory “Aryans, Jews, Brahmins”
https://www.amazon.com/Aryans-Jews-Brahmins-Theorizing-Literature/dp/0791455327
Figueiras tracks the modern phase of European romanticism and the racism inherent in its German romanticist offshoot. Her fascinating theory observes the Enlightenment intelligentsia’s repudiation of the domination of the Vatican, a repudiation which found a home in an attempted “spiritual” replacement by various appeals to “Eastern mysteries” which were based on a small number of ineptly translated Vedic texts that appeared in Europe at the time. The explanatory power of this theory is apparent to any open minded historian.
Contemporary Mideastern anti-semitism can be laid at the foot of the Soviet Union and Stalin’s attempts at reducing European inroads for oil exploitation in its southern sphere of influence. This and Stalin’s pre-war toying with the notion of a Jewish homeland in Uzbekistan are brought to light in the biography of Pavel Sudoplatov, KGB administrator of Trotsky’s assassination and the US atomic spy appparat. In this eye opening exposition of the treacherous infighting and jockeying for influence at the highest levels of the Stalinist bureaucracy, much understanding of the world we inherited from Marx can be gleaned.
https://www.amazon.com/Special-Tasks-Memoirs-Unwanted-Spymaster/dp/0316773522/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=special+tasks&qid=1558902974&s=gateway&sr=8-1
Dersh’s analysis of the antisemitism of Europeans, and how they disquise it as “criticism of Israel,” is spot on. However, his implied acceptance of the falsehood that Israel is “oppressing” the Palestinians is false. Not only was the Israeli “occupation” forced on Israel by Arab aggression, but it was the most benevolent occupation in human history, allowing the “occupied” Palestinians an economic growth rate equal to that of China, and raising the standard of living of people who had lived in desperate poverty for centuries to one near the standard of contemporary Europeans. The ‘oppression” of the Palastinians by Israel is a lie, and Dersh should say so.