by Alan Dershowitz (originally posted Feb 17/19)
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 anti-Semitism 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, must 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 forbearers 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!
@ Felix Quigley: Felix, you should read Karl Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question.” It is found in every standard edition of Marx’s collected works, including those published by the Soviet government. No major collection of Marx’s collected writings excludes it. In it, Marx writes that the Jews occupation is “huckstering,” that Judaism is the essence of the bourgeois values, and that what is needed is not the “emancipation” of the Jews from discriminatory laws (as advocated by the writer to whom he is replying) but rather the emancipation of humanity from “Judaism.”
Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams pointed out.
As for Proudhon, while he and Marx had their differences, no historian denies that Proudhon was one of the first socialists, and that his ideas–including his vitriolic, overt antisemitism-exerted an influence on the views of many socialists over the years.
WHAT DOES DERSHOWITZ MEAN BY EUROPEANS?
In my opinion Dershowitz is at his most damaging, dangerous and mischievous in the following. He has no understanding whatsoever what is Fascism? This is the question I posed at the beginning. Fascism is not just Antisemitism.
Not understanding what is Fascism, and taking a bourgeois and ruling class capitalist view that there are no such things as CLASSES IN SOCIETY Dershowitz begins gobbing on about various nationalities (being responsible as nationalities).
In reading history in this false way he is also giving up the struggle in the present to defeat reactionary forces that emerge.
Dershowitz is a reactionary politician in the end who cannot play any really progressive role, just the opposite.
He writes in this vein:
It would appear according to Dershowitz that the Nazis came to power uncontested. This is far from the case. It is THE main distortion of Dershowitz.
It also prevents youth of today learning from history and it prevents a real struggle in the present, all reduced by his fatalism into pessimism.
In the absence of any kind of help from any on Israpundit it is necessary to carry on. But I carry on in a situation where I am doing their work for them. This is because if Dershowitz is spinning a yarn on this then they also as Jews are going to suffer, because when lies are told in any way, Jews always suffer. Jews can only survive by the absolute truth, always.
I have established already that when Dershowitz draws a line from previous antisemites, and there are many, to Karl Marx he is actually lying. He both does not know the history himself and he is depending with gritted teeth on the general ignorance. Usually he is lucky and there is no challenge. How did Marx oppose Voltaire and his spokesman Proudhon, well that is an issue which can be studied by people on sites such as Israpundit. All the literature is at hand.
It is pretty obvious with the slightest research that Marx developed his theory in opposition to Proudhon. It is not a matter of “hostility” but of fundamental philosophical differences. It was this struggle against that train of thought that Proudhon represented that led Marx to undertake a struggle against the Antisemitism of Bruno Bauer and to stand for the political rights of Jews in Prussia. It was also the struggle against Proudhon, who was carrying the flag of the antisemite Voltaire, that led Marx to suggest that the best system as far as religious rights were concerned was that developed as a result of the American Revolution, that religion be taken OUT OF the state, made a private affair, outside of the ambit of the real state, that the state be secular, and this then would give the citizen the right to practice and believe how they wished in their private life. In that way America became the most religious of all countries, arguably. And this as we now know better is the exact opposite of Islam and Sharia.
@ Edgar G.:
In relation to King Kong I have also had an interest in this character. On the BBC World Service news this morning there was a report of a man arrested while he was smuggling an Orangutan through an airport in a suitcase. I happen to think that there is not one animal, including ourselves, but to focus at this point on animals, which is not in perilous danger.
On this general subject there is a very interesting article in Wikipedia which raises important questions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_racial_laws
If antisemitism was not so much integral in Italian Fascism, and if as Shirer suggests Mussolini did it to pacify the Nazis of Germany, then Fascism should not be (automatically as is happening) tied to Antisemitism. One case disproves the rule and the central argument of Dershowitz.
Antisemitism was very closely connected with Fascism, as it happened, but Shirer does suggest that we have to look elsewhere for the real roots of Fascism.
So the article by Dershowitz does not bring us any further forward in an understanding of Fascism, of the phenomenon of Fascism.
Dershowitz equates Antisemitism and Fascism but this is proven by Shirer to be wrong thinking.
So with that out of the way what then is Fascism?
To answer that it is necessary to turn again to the Marxist trend of thinking as carried forward by Lenin in his struggle in Russia but most of all by Leon Trotsky who lived on to have to confront the horrors of Fascism.
If there is a tendency to bad mouth Leon Trotsky and to get youth to turn away from his life lived experience than that equates to turning away from a study of a very critical part of human history, say from about 1926 to 1940.
Lesson in how to lie:
“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.”
Suppose, just suppose, that Karl Marx had nothing to do with Voltaire. Then that whole paragraph comes falling down like a ton of bricks.
But it seems to get past very easily because the general tendencies in the main blogs we are concerned with are devoted supporters of capitalism, the system of capitalism they are tied with to the very end, and nothing must ever enter that would ever conflict with that.
As far as I can gather the ideas and method of Marx and Engels were developed in a theoretical and practical struggle, especially in the economic field, against Proudhon and Proudhon was the person in history closer to Voltaire.
I would say that a line from Voltaire to Marx would have to pass through Proudhon and it is just an inconvenient fact that Marx was to struggle against Proudhon, and that the very basis of what was to become known as “Marxism” was in a struggle against Proudhon.
Not a disciple of Proudhon but a direct opposition to that whole way of thinking of Proudhon.
Such writers as this get away with all this because there is nobody willing and capable of real knowledge.
So with just a little research the claim by the writer above falls apart.
It is “Fake News”.
@ Buzz of the Orient:
Yes it was very good.. and…. like you, I also recall that there were great doubts as to how it would be received. I liked John Garfield. It was tragic how young he was to die. He also was very good in Tortilla Flat… which I used to re-see whenever possible- every year or two -but because of Spencer Tracy’s performance..
I had the same attachment (not the correct word of course) for “Ruggles of Red Gap.” and “King Kong”…….of which last, I bought a video cassette..
@ Bear Klein:
Bear- Your figure is just as unlikely as my figure. They both are rounded off in hundreds- which shows the approximation.. It’s the first time actually that I’ve seen 6500, and won’t dispute it -being immaterial anyway at this point. I merely wanted to get a retraction from Yamit, which I see I did not get. He’s always so dogmatically certain of his assertions, Almost smug….which he posts as if cut and pasted from Wiki…
And who’s to say they are not….?
I’ve always seen accompanied by the 6000 figure..”approximately 1% of the total Jewish population at the time”, So we can be both right.. But Yamit is unquestionably wrong. !!
He writes:
“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.”
{Why such a surge of worldwide antisemitism
by Alan Dershowitz (originally posted Feb 17/19)}
There are two immediate problems in this paragraph
Karl Marx, nor Engels either, was an antisemite.
People who continually make this claim have not studied the issue and find it to their own reactionary bourgeois and capitalist loving use to do down Marx and Marxism by means of this odious calumny.
The study of Marx towards Jews needs to be seen against these things which I list but are by no means exhaustive. They simply come immediately into my mind.
Marx was a materialist. He believed that the world was a material thing, and that thinking was a reflection (in the mind) of this material world. Thought has a material basis.
The concept of religion and the study of religion comes from this firm foundation.
You may not like that but there it is. It is the materialist outlook on our world.
On the issue of Marx towards the Jews you have got to deal with what Marx actually did? What he did is the great test.
As it is introduced by wikipedia
“”On the Jewish Question” is a work by Karl Marx, written in 1843, and first published in Paris in 1844 under the German title “Zur Judenfrage” in the Deutsch–Französische Jahrbücher. It was one of Marx’s first attempts to develop what would later be called the materialist conception of history.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Jewish_Question
The whole of this essay needs to be read, especially up to the following paragraph, with great care. Marx is up until this point describing the political position of Bruno Bauer who was indeed an antisemite, and Marx is doing this in order to fight against this Antisemitism. I said read with care. Understand the method of argument that Marx uses, which I presume is of his time.
“The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in general, of religious man, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In its own form, in the manner characteristic of its nature, the state as a state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion – that is to say, by the state as a state not professing any religion, but, on the contrary, asserting itself as a state. The political emancipation from religion is not a religious emancipation that has been carried through to completion and is free from contradiction, because political emancipation is not a form of human emancipation which has been carried through to completion and is free from contradiction.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/index.htm
In fact Marx has untangled the statements and false theories of Bruno Bauer.
Marx has come up with the importance of the American method. America is the most religious of all countries. Yet this is possible because religion is removed from the state. By removing religion from the state then in their daily life without any repression from the state the people are free (to practice whatever religion they chose) That is the essence of the American system which Marx exults in.
It is in this context that this famous essay by Marx, totally lied about, that Marx was setting out to fight for and secure the political and religious rights of the Jews in Prussia.
This is indeed quite a record that we Marxists today can base ourselves on.
@ Edgar G.:
6500 Jews died in the War of Independence in Israel out of a population of 650,000 Jews.
@ Frank Adam:
Of course that is so but do not spread it about. It suits the present neofascists of the present in Breitbart, Gates of Vienna, Jihadwatch, Pamela Geller to say the opposite. Antisemitism was well and truly sunk in by the time socialism was even a feature.
That is enough for now as I am aware of the massive hostility to so many to any kind of knowledge.
But it is an interesting historical question.
@ Edgar G.:
Excellent movie – and a bit daring for 1947. The “real” Jew in the movie was in fact played by a “real” Jew, John Garfield.
@ yamit82:
I thought that the US voted for and that Britain abstained
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_for_Palestine#In_favour_(33_countries,_72%_of_total_votes)
Mr Dershowitz , when you single out such rabid characters as Gilad Atzmon, you are pointing at the tip of the iceberg . Please do note that during the last municipality elections in Tel Aviv , thirty-five percent of the electors voted Hadash , the joint arab-jewish list which program is the dismantling of the Jewish State and the end of Zionism . A few days ago , the Supreme Court rejected the candidacy of Otzma Yehudit , on ground of racism while plainly endorsed the Hadash list , whose candidate Ofer Kassif is none else than a PLO stooge . Yes we still have to face ( and to defeat ) european antisemitism-antizionism and we also have to clean our own backyard , here in Israel . The wickedness of the current antizionism INTO Israel, inside its so-called ” jewish” population is a phenomena that must be studied .
@ Martin Dillian:
Martin, you have done a fabulous job of setting things right. Fully agree with your outlook on the “right” and the “left”.
@ yamit82:
My recollection (a very strong one) and also I’ve seen it in print about 100 times ..is that 1% of the Jewish population died in our War of Independence, not 7%. That Is..about 6,000 total against what you say is 42,0000, which is a complete impossibility. Let’s say it was a typo….
Otherwise I totally agree with you…
@ Frank Adam:
It was Gregory Peck not Grant. I remember that film well. I saw it when t came out.
It is all very well left bashing these last hundred years but the original demonisation of the Jews into the language and psyche of the World for modern ideologies to pick up and replay was the work of the solid religious, reactionary right wing Church and Mosque backiing hereditary monarchies who amongst other things when useful accused Jews of destructive modernisms such as usury, meritocracy and capitalism.
@ yamit82:
Well said. Just look up the late 40’s b&w Cary Grant film, “Gentleman’s Agreement”
“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.
Nonsense is an understatement. BS comes to mind. If Alan Dershowitz bundles the hard right into the hard left implying commonality of character and history, what an unintelligent statement! It sure seems like that to me. Shameful.
The rest of the article is very informative. I learned a lot reading it.
To the point, nowhere does Alan Dershowitz define what he views as ‘hard right’, but he sure throws the invective around loosely.
‘Hard left’ seems self-explanatory so I have no issue there. But who are these ‘hard right’ people? I know hundreds of people personally who would call themselves patriots, 2nd Amendment defenders, defenders of religious conviction, people who salute the flag and only kneel in faith, defenders of Constitutional originalism, people who are not racist (or any other insult) but disagree vehemently with redistribution, open borders, unequal application of the law, or weaponized law, oppose quotas of any kind, endorse meritocracy, prefer limited government, who advocate only two genders only, who are opposed to same-sex marriage, pedophilia and out of wedlock childbirth, and particularly the use of abortion as contraception, and the list goes on. People like me are what the MEDIA today calls/labels hard right, those few remaining among us that still embrace a value system, which for the most part adheres to the Ethical Commandments, and we cherish liberty, family and our birthright.
So what am I except ‘hard right’? And I’m proud of it. And why do people with my belief system hold any damn responsibility for the Holocaust? What Harvard-educated asshat gets off making that claim?
Nowhere except in mythology is Nazism and its variants anything but socialism, authoritarian Socialism at its finest. There’s nothing hard right about socialism. The only people defending life, liberty, and happiness these days are the ‘hard right’ and sadly few others.
Sure as hell nobody in elected office these days, whether in the United States, Canada or Europe is defending liberty.
So where did Alan Dershowitz go wrong? Alan Dershowitz assumes that the “hard right” are Nazis, reflexively, because that’s what he’s been told/taught his whole life. It all makes sense when you realize that when Nazi says “National Socialist Party” they meant it. It was just to contrast with Communists, who were “Globalist Socialist Party”. But they were all socialist (leftist).
There have not been any “far right” parties since Czar Nicholas, and not in the West since Louis XVI. “Far right” requires both totalitarianism, and the divine right of it.
Racism, which is what they call “White Supremacy”, (because there are many flavors of racism, but only White Supremacy is now called racist), can be of any flavor, but it’s usually socialist, because it rails against the “rich” (code word for Jews) and advocates expansive government power to oppress who they want oppressed.
What we actually need a hell of a lot more of is 18th Century Liberalism. And may I add, Alan Dershowitz to learn some history and economics, and engage in some enlightenment thinking that says, “governments should defend their borders, and otherwise leave their citizens alone”.
Why defend the borders? Because then leaving your citizens alone is pointless, as they will be harassed by foreigners and foreign governments. The only way to properly leave your citizens be, is to protect them from non-citizens.
Now who is there that is advocating for that? Only the people Alan Dershowitz labels ‘hard right’ and equates them to Nazis. And who are they really? The real Americans.
“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.
Nonsense is an understatement. BS comes to mind. If Alan Dershowitz bundles the hard right into the hard left implying commonality of character and history, what an unintelligent statement! It sure seems like that to me. Shameful.
The rest of the article is very informative. I learned a lot reading it.
To the point, nowhere does Alan Dershowitz define what he views as ‘hard right’, but he sure throws the invective around loosely.
‘Hard left’ seems self-explanatory so I have no issue there. But who are these ‘hard right’ people? I know hundreds of people personally who would call themselves patriots, 2nd Amendment defenders, defenders of religious conviction, people who salute the flag and only kneel in faith, defenders of Constitutional originalism, people who are not racist (or any other insult) but disagree vehemently with redistribution, open borders, unequal application of the law, or weaponized law, oppose quotas of any kind, endorse meritocracy, prefer limited government, who advocate only two genders only, who are opposed to same-sex marriage, pedophilia and out of wedlock childbirth, and particularly the use of abortion as contraception, and the list goes on. People like me are what the MEDIA today calls/labels hard right, those few remaining among us that still embrace a value system, which for the most part adheres to the Ethical Commandments, and we cherish liberty, family and our birthright.
So what am I except ‘hard right’? And I’m proud of it. And why do people with my belief system hold any damn responsibility for the Holocaust? What Harvard-educated asshat gets off making that claim?
Nowhere except in mythology is Nazism and its variants anything but socialism, authoritarian Socialism at its finest. There’s nothing hard right about socialism. The only people defending life, liberty, and happiness these days are the ‘hard right’ and sadly few others.
Sure as hell nobody in elected office these days, whether in the United States, Canada or Europe is defending liberty.
So where did Alan Dershowitz go wrong? Alan Dershowitz assumes that the “hard right” are Nazis, reflexively, because that’s what he’s been told/taught his whole life. It all makes sense when you realize that when Nazi says “National Socialist Party” they meant it. It was just to contrast with Communists, who were “Globalist Socialist Party”. But they were all socialist (leftist).
There have not been any “far right” parties since Czar Nicholas, and not in the West since Louis XVI. “Far right” requires both totalitarianism, and the divine right of it.
Racism, which is what they call “White Supremacy”, (because there are many flavors of racism, but only White Supremacy is now called racist), can be of any flavor, but it’s usually socialist, because it rails against the “rich” (code word for Jews) and advocates expansive government power to oppress who they want oppressed.
What we actually need a hell of a lot more of is 18th Century Liberalism. And may I add, Alan Dershowitz to learn some history and economics, and engage in some enlightenment thinking that says, “governments should defend their borders, and otherwise leave their citizens alone”.
Why defend the borders? Because then leaving your citizens alone is pointless, as they will be harassed by foreigners and foreign governments. The only way to properly leave your citizens be, is to protect them from non-citizens.
Now who is there that is advocating for that? Only the people Alan Dershowitz labels ‘hard right’ and equates them to Nazis. And who are they really? The real Americans.
@ Angel:
@ Angel:
It goes to show that Dershowitz, who claimed that he lost all his Progressive friends on Martha’s Vineyard (he doesn’t get invited to parties anymore) because of his bold regard for the truth, which most often conforms to the conservative narrative. So he apparently intends to tell the truth but just not too much of it.
However, despite his feel good honesty he must still maintain a smidgeon of
political correctness by not throwing a major abrahamic religion, Islam, under
the bus. It’s a compromise, but what the hell, you do have to live in the real
world where the trend and power still remain with the politically correct.
@ Yuri: Interesting and of course horrible if true, Yuri. Documentary source?
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
@ adamdalgliesh:
@ adamdalgliesh:
The final number is 42 million
@ yamit82: Yamit, From what I read in other sources, These statistics are dubious. For example, the Soviet Union lost about 25 million people in World War II, or about 15 per cent of its population, not 0.2 per cent. However, your larger point about the hostility of all of these countries to Jews is accurate.
@ yamit82: From what I read in other sources, These statistics are dubious. For example, the Soviet Union lost about 25 million people in World War II, or about 15 per cent of its population, not 0.2 per cent. However, your larger point about the hostility of all of these countries to Jews is accurate.
@ honeybee:
Don’t think your reasoning if true is accurate. Certainly, where you find larger long-standing Jewish populations they offer up many more visible targets to attack. Surveys that monitor Jew hating attitudes show that the animus and hate of Jews is widespread and not just confined to the coasts. Certainly, you will find such attitudes on college campuses across America. In conservative areas, Jews are defined by conservative Christians as LIBERALS pro-abortion, anti-christian attitudes of separation of church and state. pro LGBT and same-sex marriage. Far Right maintains its classic neo-Nazi beliefs against Jews.
Anti-Semitism seems strongest in the Eastern USA. I this due to a large Jewish population or the attitude of non Jews. Except for CA I find the Mid-West and West to be free of such incidents.
Continue article at https://www.france24.com/en/20181030-american-jews-confront-rising-tide-anti-semitism
90% of European Jews say anti-Semitism is getting worse
Almost one-in-three Jewish people across Europe have been directly targeted by antisemitic harassment.
From online abuse to being harassed in public, thousands of people told the European Union’s Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) antisemitism is impacting their daily lives.
Continue article at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/12/rising-antisemitism-90-of-european-jews-say-it-s-getting-worse/
@ yamit82:
Anti-Semitism is as strong in America as in Europe; the only difference is that the relatively young and dynamic American government has felt no need yet to institutionalize the hatred of Jews.
Jewish liberals influence anti-Semitism in several ways. They arouse the discontent of conservative Americans (not to be confused with amorphous political conservatives) by bringing down traditional values: religion in school, the heterosexual family, and non-discriminatory racial distinctions. They arouse hatred and fear by spearheading Jewish assimilation: gentiles don’t want us to assimilate and become untraceable among them. The Holocaust was largely a response to Jewish assimilatory movements: Germans, like anyone else, don’t want Jews to intermingle with them.
Liberals failed to destroy racial and similar preferences, which presumably prop up anti-Semitism. The whites’ response to the forced integration of American schools was flight into the suburbs where schools were free of black children. It is impossible to extinguish xenophobia because it benefits groups; evolution has made it a part of the human cognitive framework.
The liberals succeeded in diminishing opposition to evil. Anti-Semitism, like other variations of hateful behavior, is the province of relatively few; the majority doesn’t care. By their tirades and actions against hate speech liberals enhance the majority’s tendency not to oppose evil. Their rhetoric does not affect hardcore haters, but makes the majority incredibly soft, unwilling to employ violence even to oppose evil. They refuse even to criticize evil; try speaking to them about Muslim terrorists or Palestinian enemies.
The liberals fully accept the fact that their goals are detrimental to Jews. Jewish liberals marched against apartheid in South Africa, the only state in the world genuinely friendly to Israel; they brought up a predictably anti-Semitic black establishment in Africa’s most influential country. In 1967 and 1973, liberals screamed against Israeli preemption in the face of imminent attack. In 1944, 1948, and 1973 they did not march to the White House to demand support for fellow Jews threatened with annihilation; they expend much more effort on some exotic endangered species of cockroaches.
The liberals go against any sensible definition of Jewish interest—indeed, against the very goal of Jewish survival—by pushing for the peace process.
@ yamit82:
The Allies signaled Germans with utmost clarity to proceed with murdering the Jews.
The Nuremberg trials confirm the Allies’ attitude. Close to 200,000 Germans were directly involved in the extermination: they herded Jews to slaughter, guarded camps and death pits, and performed other indispensable functions. Even the most lenient judge would have found them to be accessories to murder. Of them, at least 40,000 Germans (besides a larger number of Ukrainians and Croats) were directly involved in killing Jews. Not even one percent of them were sentenced to death or very long jail terms in the Nuremberg and de-nazification trials.
Besides the ridiculously small compensation to survivors, Germany paid reparations to Israel which, theoretically, compensated for the abandoned Jewish property. In practice, the reparations were a lump sum amount. In 1945, Chaim Weizmann estimated the abandoned Jewish property at $8 billion; during the drawn-out Israeli-German negotiations, the amount was cut down to $750 million spread out over more than ten years. The payments were not adjusted for inflation and no interest was added. East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Ukraine, Byelorussia, France, Norway, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and every other country whose population happily joined hands with the Germans in exterminating the Jews, paid no reparations. The Christian nations profited immensely from the extermination. Even the otherwise friendly Netherlands and Italy confiscated the abandoned property of murdered Jews.
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 7 percent of her population; in WWII, the US casualties in Europe amounted to 0.2 percent of its population, and the Soviet ones to 2 percent. 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.
Israel had no person more dovish than Abba Eban. He called the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel “the Auschwitz borders.” Through the “peace process,” the world pushes us back into those borders.
Dershowitz fails to answer his own question. WHY?
@ myron sugerman:
Perhaps he is doing Tshuvah for all of his past sins. Who knows, maybe he will try to get back on the Derek he left more than 50 years ago to make his way in the world of the Goyim.
Professor – why would you have lead American Jewry down the road to destruction by being the loudspeaker for the election of the Jew hating Muslim loving Obama not once but twice when others, far less educated than you, understood that Obama was a disciple of evil men who hated Jews like his Pastor of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, an outspoken admirer of Louis Farrakhan. Obama’s legacy are the Jew hating Tlaib and Omar and others. Farrakhan told Omar yesterday she doesn’t have to apologize for being an anti Semite. How do you reconcile your past support of Obama, the bastard who gave Iran billions of dollars and a license to build Nuclear bombs for the purpose of destroying Israel with your thoughts of today?
@ Barry Rab:
Go on tell the whole story. These British Allenby scum generals were all motivated in the first case by hatred of the Russian Revolution of Nov 1917 and they followed the White meme of associating the Jews with the Revolution. Tell it all or else keep your mouth shut!
@ Jim Austin:
Notice the disrespectful use of the word “commies” and this is the enlightenment!!! Which in any case you do not understand!
@ Cathy:
Cathy, I think you have a point there. Also, in my estimation, God still has a plan, and no human can thwart that.
Rubbish. There is no answer for this anti-Semitic hatred apart from the ancient writings and wisdom of the Torah and Prophets. Jeremiah 16:16 states this scenario of hatred against Jews, and surprisingly enough, it’s not the usual suspects mentioned in the article and the comments. it is the Almighty one Himself who stated He would gather the Jews back to Israel and if they prefer to stay in exile, He will send fishers. If the fishers are ignored, He will send hunters. The anti-Semites of the world are the hunters, doing the will of G-d to return all Jews back home. We ignore this “elephant in the room” at our peril. Herzl was ignored and 6 million died. We dare not ignore the writing on the wall this time. It’s time for all Jews to come home to Israel.
@ Angel:
A pity he did not mention the British, when listing the European countries that helped the Nazis round up the Jews, for closing the door to then Palestine and turning away the Jews who managed to survive the camps, from entering the then Palestine.
That for me was the epitomy of anti-semitism.
The secret of Western domination of the globe were values developed during the Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment. The secret of Jewish achievements and resulting resentments is that they got there first.
The Renaissance and Enlightenment emerged after Thomas Aquinas convinced the Roman Catholic Church that Aristotelian reason was compatible with Christianity. This reduced (somewhat) Catholic opposition to values that led to fairly benign, free, civilized, technological, prosperous societies. Moses Maimonides achieved the same for Judaism about a century before Aquinas and did a more thorough job of it.
One of the byproducts of Enlightenment was greater respect and esteem for commerce. Prior to that, people regarded commercial activities as sufficiently low and unworthy as to defile a holy place as indicated when Jesus chased money changers and other business persons out of a synagogue.
Jews had a head start in business with their achievements in banking, international trade and other enterprises. Another effect of Enlightenment was greater interest in knowledge and learning per se. Their earlier start gave Jews an edge in the professions which occasionally inflames the inferior complexes of others.
Those who have a basic hatred for Enlightenment values like commies, Nazis, Moslems along with overall dumb, ignorant, inbred, knuckle-dragging rednecks will have a particularly virulent hatred of Jews in general and Israel in particular.
@ Felix Quigley:
I notice that John H is also saying the same things so I ask both to explain what they mean by “leftism”…not a hard question to answer.
@ joebillscott:
Hey joebillscott you must here say what is a leftist?
Welcome to the free thinking conservative side Professor. Leftism has always killed the most of us Jews.
See this excellent “Boomerang” video on Arutz Sheva (it is also on YouTube) regarding the double standard that all Palestinians, Israeli Knesset members, pro-Arab Jewish groups like J-Street, etc., have applied to the murder of Ori Ansbacher re supposed violations of Palestinian rights.
Dersh is 100 per cent right about this. This “criticism of Israel” is not antisemitism is “B——t.” 99.9 per cent of it is.
Great and very clear article by a brilliant man. I wonder if by now Professor Dershowitz has admitted that his past defense of “two state solution “ was so wrong? After all, that TSS was devised by those antisemites he so eloquently exposed
Why leave out the Swedes and Spanish who supplied the Nazis with much needed materiel and laundered their stolen goods?
Excellent piece, as might be expected from Dershowitz, except for the fact that he ignores the 800 pound gorilla in the room and its deadly embrace and revival of old European antisemisitm: Muslim antisemitism. The latter, fully sanctioned in their so-called holy book, has found a fertile ground to grow in most European countries and given Europeans yet another excuse to revive the old plague. That is, when they don’t do it all too complacently out of submission to Muslim intimidation. Europeans are the new Kapos. And they’re just as blind as they will eventually meet the same fate.
Except the Nazis were, in fact, leftists.