Yom HaShoah 2023 series - 3

“Whatever is wrong, it’s the Jews’ fault,” — the world returns to the old canards at an alarming pace

Andrzej Koraszewski

Listy z naszego sadu, 6 October 2022 http://www.listyznaszegosadu.pl/brunatna-fala/co-zlego-to-zydzi-czyli-swiat-w-coraz-szybszym-tempie-wraca-w-stare-koleiny

After two weeks of protests raging across the country, Iranian dictator Ali Khamenei (also called the Supreme Leader) declared at a graduation ceremony at a cadet school that the ongoing demonstrations in the country were “planned by the Zionist regime, not by ordinary Iranians.” Because the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic says similar things every other day, it was only noticed in Israel. Russia's war with Ukraine is not going as Putin had planned, so the Russian mainstream media blame “foreign agents” and point the finger at various well-known Jews.

The latest salvo came last week when the English-language Russian propaganda service, the Strategic Culture Foundation, used classic anti-Semitic phrases to attack French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy for supporting Ukraine.

“This 74-year-old French citizen, born into a family of Algerian Jews, sniffs blood and immediately flies to splash it – and for good money,” reads an article about a world-famous thinker and writer who went to see with his own eyes the country invaded by the Russians.

More than 20,000 Jews have left Russia for Israel since the invasion of Ukraine in late February, and thousands more have already opted for aliyah. Is it just fear of being drafted into the army? There are remarks from many quarters about the growing open anti-Semitism in Russian society.

Iran, Russia, what can you expect from them? After all, it's the far right and that's it.

At the University of California (the famous Berkeley's School of Law), nine student groups decided not to invite anyone supporting Israel or Zionism. The Dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, was in serious trouble, from which he got out of explaining that it was only one-tenth of the student organizations operating at this university. If even one, the smallest organization said "blacks are not allowed", he would probably sing differently. (Remember, “Zionist” was synonymous with Jew as early as Brezhnev.)

Law students, the flower of youth, maybe even read newspapers read, or at least look at the headlines. What can they learn from these newspapers? Take a test yourself and watch any 20 correspondence from Israel in the New York Times to see what they see where the flower of world journalism itself writes.

They see headlines such as “Whose Promised Land?”, “Israel Can Do More to Avoid Civilian Casualties”, “They Were Only Children”. Newspapers such as The Guardian and Le Monde are less enigmatic. The Guardian writes: “Every day is worse than the last: the Palestinian community is struggling to survive.”

How can we be surprised by these children studying law at Berkeley's School of Law? After all, they not only read the most responsible world-class press, they also love their student newspapers.

Politicians, professors, read articles carefully, listen to the BBC. What more serious source of reliable information about the world than the BBC?

A man looks at the BBC World website and immediately learns: “The number of Palestinian dead in the West Bank has reached 100.” Below is the note: “The largest death register in years as a result of Israeli military raids” announcement accompanied by a photo of a crying old woman. Great journalistic work, tempting to open, so I open (although most will go on to other messages, keeping in mind only the image of a weeping mother and anger towards those disgusting Jews).

BBC correspondent Tom Bateman "reports" from Jerusalem:

At least 100 Palestinians have been killed this year in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem amid a massive increase in Israeli military airstrikes, according to data compiled by the BBC.

Further, Bateman is almost honest. He writes that the last three gunmen were killed by a missile fired at the house, adding immediately that it was “the worst year for Palestinians since 2015,” and “human rights groups report that almost a fifth are children, the youngest of whom was 14 years old.”

Bateman reports from Jerusalem that “the United States called for an investigation after a seven-year-old boy died of heart failure when Israeli soldiers came to his family home because his brothers were accused of throwing stones.”

The style of this journalism is captivating. Israelis "carry out executions", earlier some strange wave of attacks killed 16 Israelis and two foreigners. “Airstrikes often trigger shootouts with young, newly armed militants in densely populated areas of Jenin and Nablus.”

In short, poorly trained terrorists only shoot, and the Jews kill them immediately.

This is an “unequal battle,” the report reads.

About a third of all those killed were militants. [...] Across the West Bank, at least a quarter of the total death toll occurred when soldiers used live ammunition to shoot young men or teenagers in groups that are said to have thrown stones, gasoline bombs or improvised explosives.

The BBC journalist admits that most of the Israeli military intervention was in the cities of Jenin and Nablus, where, he writes, there are strong units of Islamic Jihad and the new terrorist group Lion’s Den. We learn that the leader of one of these groups was wanted for arrest by Israeli forces for repeatedly “trying to shoot Israelis” (I wonder what “shooting attempts” are). This is indeed an unequal battle in which one side only tries to kill and does not always succeed, and the other side immediately kills armed bandits in action.

The BBC correspondent does not hide that Israeli civilians have been repeatedly targeted by Palestinian terrorists, he even shows a picture of a bus riddled with bullets, but quotes the opinion of an important figure from the UN, who implied that the defence of Jewish life violates international law (she said it differently, but it was evident that it came out).

There are more foreign correspondents in Israel than in any other country, and they all report in similar language. You will not find in these correspondences any mention of incitement to terrorism by the Palestinian Authority, by Hamas, by the press and by clerics in mosques. The word Islam practically does not appear in these reports.

Meanwhile, as one of the Jerusalem imams recently explained, a young man going out to kill Jews can only win. If he kills and comes back alive, he will be a hero, and if he dies, he will go to Paradise.

I don't remember any BBC journalist reporting from Jerusalem citing Palestinian sources who don't advocate terror.

Jerusalem-based Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh writes:

The growing involvement of members of Fatah and the Palestinian Authority in terrorism is one of the direct results of the Palestinian leadership’s extreme incitement to hate Israel. Abbas and his associates continue to make the worst accusations and slander against Israel. It is this kind of rhetoric, as well as generous payments, that encourage Palestinians to carry out attacks on Israelis. The fact that Abbas and his entourage do not even bother to stop or condemn the terrorists is apparently seen by many Palestinians as a green light to continue the attacks.

Reports and articles about Israel in the Western mainstream press do not give the reader any chance, that is, the consistent and constantly-repeated accusations of Jews, which in the end are accepted in whole or in part even by people completely untainted by prejudice. Further resolutions of the UN Human Rights Council, calls from the American administration, statements by European politicians; can all these institutions, journalists and politicians succumb to the old psychosis?

We recently received news that Amnesty International, together with Human Rights Watch, in cooperation with the Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, has prepared a conference aimed at highlighting Israel's human rights violations. Yes, by Israel, not by Palestinian terrorists, not by Mahmoud Abbas and his clique, not by Islamic institutions calling for murder, not by UNRWA schools that raise criminals, not by the Palestinian media inciting terror, by Israel, which must be condemned. On the occasion of the first meeting of the European Union-Israel Association Council in a decade, Human Rights Watch wrote: "The European Union must condemn Israel's crimes of apartheid and condemn its occupation."

HRW's Palestinian Office Director Omar Shakir added:

European officials should know that they will be shaking hands with representatives of a government that commits crimes against humanity and that has outlawed prominent civil society groups challenging these abuses.

Amnesty International, in a message on the same occasion on 3 October, wrote in the same language: “Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against the Palestinians. This is a crime against humanity, requiring the EU to hold Israeli leaders accountable and ensure that it does not support their apartheid system in any way. Any cooperation must focus on dismantling Israel's cruel system of oppression and domination.” (Eve Geddie, Director of the EU Office of Amnesty International).

In 1931, German actress of Jewish origin, Annemarie Hase, sang “An allem sind die Juden schuld!” Europe at that time was deeply convinced of this, after all, it was said by newspapers, scholars and politicians, it was really difficult to think otherwise. (Unless someone based their controversial views on less respected sources.)

Editorial round-up of the Yom HaShoah 2023 series

Yom HaShoah is a time when the world is awash with vows to combat anti-Semitism. In 2023 I see a world failing in those vows, even as it reaffirms them, for no one notices, that these commemorations do not generally take place in the Muslim world, and where they do, it is not to commemorate, but to ridicule, demean or deny.

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, first President of Czechoslovakia, was a leader from whom I draw much inspiration. Today I call on his tragic optimism in bringing this Yom HaShoah 2023 series to a close.

Good morning. A fine day after the fogs of the last week. And I see the new film. As yet, I didn’t see and hear it – a great invention of America. I am sure not the last one. If I observe the inventiveness of our modern scientists, I sometimes fancy a much greater invention – to see and hear in the distance without any wires. Just imagine: you could observe, from your place in the sitting room, the jungles of Africa and what the wild beasts are doing there. You could see and listen to the jungles of our human society. Every man then would be forced to be honest and there would be no secret plotting any more of all the wickedness. Wonderful….no?

Masaryk died on 14 September 1937, six years almost to the day, after the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Manchuria and set off the Second World War on 18 September 1931. Most of Europe still had neither seen nor heard the Japanese guns, let alone realise that the most devastating war of all time had begun. 300Km southwest of Masaryk's capital, Prague, four years and six months before his last breath, Dachau Concentration Camp was opened. Two months before he died, Buchenwald Concentration Camp, the largest within the then German borders, opened just 250Km away to the northwest. Masaryk died right in the middle of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1936-38. Two months after he passed away, on 8 November 1937, Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) anti-Semitic exhibition opened in the library of the German Museum in Munich. It would perhaps have been too much, in the early days of a new nation, to expect its leader to realise that exposing the “secret plotting of all the wickedness” would not impede the plotters and wickedness one bit, if those whom they plotted their wickedness against saw only what they wanted to see and heard only what they wanted to hear.

To the great man, truth was its own moral force, and he harnessed it to propel his country into existence with the slogan Pravda vítězí. Truth does prevail, but only if truth is unconditional, and in a world in which “Palestinian” victimhood and Jewish evil are axioms, truth cannot be unconditional, and so cannot prevail. Masaryk, as it happens, was closely associated with another nation straining to birth a country, Israel, whose very existence is now under threat because Pravda vítězí has been perverted. Those who wish, like Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, for truth to prevail, will find themselves on a steep hill with the new virtuous slinging all manner of offences at them. Who, for example, has not seen the appalling way in which Yair Lapid, who had joined hands with Mansour Abbas just one Knesset prior, addresses Itamar Ben-Gvir, the man whose task it is to keep Israelis, including Lapid and his family, safe from Abbas’s murdering brothers.

It has perplexed me to find so much Jewish hatred towards those Jews who warn of the secret plotting of wickedness against them, to the point of embracing the very plotters of the wickedness. What does it say about “Never again” when the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood inside the Israeli government is cause for pride and affirmation, while the presence of religious Jews in the government of the Jewish state is cause for alarm, mass demonstrations and calls for insurrection?

Secret plotters of wickedness only need secrecy when they are perceived as a danger. When not, they can unashamedly publish their wicked plots in school textbooks, openly train children in summer camps to become killers, and brazenly insist on paying their civilian population to kill Jews. Yet this anti-Semitism merely registers as distasteful, rather than set off alarm bells as it should. In understandable excitement about the promise of new technologies for a better world, Masaryk did not anticipate that the wicked would find protection from devices that “see and hear in the distance without any wires” in the hearts and minds of those will only see what they want to see, and only hear what they want to hear.

At a time such as this, there is much talk of “Never again” and of being vigilant, and we blame those of a century ago for having been remiss for letting the greatest horrors of history unfold under their watch. Anti-Semitism has been on the rise, this is true. But it is also true that anti-Semitism has emerged from secrecy. Any “invention to see and hear in the distance without any wires” can be countered with propaganda and inculcated lies, especially if we want to be lied to. Terrorism became “violent extremism.” Reports of terrorism stopped mentioning “Muslim.” Now they no longer mention “Islam” either. The conditioning is complete, and Muslims can now pursue their jihad without too much inconvenience, such as police, Courts or prison. To move against terrorists is to move against Muslims, who, it is virtuous to believe, have nothing to do with it. Only an “Islamophobe” or the “far-Right” would think otherwise

In the Israeli variation on this theme, terrorist are not Muslims, but “Arabs,” thereby hiding Islam, and tarring Druze and Christian Arabs with the same brush, despite their not sharing the desire to kill Jews. Otherwise terrorists are “Palestinians,” and terrorism becomes the understandable response of a tiny, bullied, impoverished and downtrodden nation with no other option in the face of overwhelming force. Everyone feels sorry for the “Palestinians” and many are determined to support them in their wickedness, even in their bankrolling the killing of Jews.

Anti-Semitism is not going to do us the favour of stepping into jackboots, slapping swastikas on sleeves and shouting “Sieg Heil!” Yet we want to see these first, before we will countenance a real Holocaust in the making right before our eyes. Let Yom HaShoah 2023 not be another occasion for playing feel-good games with ourselves. There is nothing feel-good about the Muslim holy books, nothing at all, especially for Jews.