UPDATED: ‘New Anti-Semitism’ Is As Old As Islam (‘Did Mohammed Invent Profiling?’)

Anti-Semitism, Europe, Islam, Judaism & Jews

Jewish leaders, reports the Washington Post, “are talking of the rise of a ‘new anti-Semitism.'”

Not again.

Following the lead of these self-anointed “leaders,” the WaPo tells of a French Muslim comedian who is as vile an antisemite as one can get. From that one-case study, the reporter, it would appear, deduced that he had sufficient evidence to support the leaders’ suggestion that antisemitism afflicts certain segments of European society (especially “far-right nationalists”) with equal ferocity. An equal opportunity bias.

(USA Today’s report is less Pollyanna-like.)

I haven’t researched the European hard right for some time, but last I looked, it was pro-Israel, unlike its American counterpart. Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front identified with Israel. Even the late Jörg Haider of the Alliance for the Future of Austria, who “exhibit[ed] every sign of antiSemitism”—Hugh Fitzgerald’s estimation, not mine—was … “not quite so systematically vicious when it [came] to the state of Israel.” Vlaams Belang of Belgium was pro-Israel. Leader Filip Dewinter told a Jewish magazine: “One has to choose sides. Which side are you on in the ‘war on terror,’ “the side of western democracy and western civilization, with its Judeo-Christian roots, or the side of radical Islam?”

There may be residual antisemitism in Europe, but the “new antisemitism” is associated with Muslim immigration into Europe, the UK and North America.

In Canada, Muslims now greatly outnumber Jews. What remains of a European Jewry devastated by the Holocaust comes under daily assaults and threats, mostly from the 20-million strong Muslim community.

Still the exponential growth of the Muslim community through immigration has failed to alarm Jewish leaders. Listening to them, you would think that the chief dangers to Jewish continuity are marauding Mormons, whose sin is to convert dead Jews, or Mel Gibson.

As Palestinian and Arab propaganda would have it, Muslim hate for the Jew is a contemporary phenomenon, caused entirely by the tiny “Zionist state.” While the contempt for the dhimmi, as the Jew was derogatorily termed, has evolved over the years—drawing on “traditional Koranic slurs,” as well as gathering vintage Nazi debris along the way—the hate boasts a pure Islamic pedigree.

The so-called “new antisemitism” is as old as Islam. Read on.

UPDATE (8/12): For those who failed to read relevant section in “Did Mohammed Invent Profiling?”, here they are:

… In the land that was once Babylonia, the Jews of Iraq weathered the vicissitudes of a daily life without rights but with endless indignities. Some particularly murderous landmarks stand out: the A.D. 1000 expropriation of Jewish property, the 1333 destruction of their synagogues, and the 1776 Basra slaughter, leading up to mob killings in 1941 and numerous public-square hangings between 1969 and 1973.

The chronicles of Jewish life over the centuries in Aden, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, and Libya are similarly marred. As one 19th-century observer recounted, the ancient community of Yemenite Jews was “in a position of inferiority, and is oppressed by a people which declares itself holy and pious but which is very brutal, barbarous and hard-hearted.” Of particular note is the murder in 1032 of thousands of Jews in Fez, Morocco, followed, in 1146, by the Almohad atrocities in which hundreds of thousands of Jews and Christians were massacred by the Muslim Almohads.

As Palestinian and Arab propaganda would have it, Muslim hate for the Jew is a contemporary phenomenon, caused entirely by the tiny “Zionist state.” While the contempt for the dhimmi, as the Jew was derogatorily termed, has evolved over the years—drawing on “traditional Koranic slurs,” as well as gathering vintage Nazi debris along the way—the hate boasts a pure Islamic pedigree.

“In 1940,” … “the mufti [a kind of rabbi] of Jerusalem wrote to the Axis powers requesting the right of the Arabs to settle the question of the Jews along similar lines to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.” Egyptian Minister Anwar Sadat’s touch was somewhat comical. In 1950, Sadat, who may have confused Hitler for Houdini, published an open “Dear Adolf” letter, commending Hitler for “saving the world from this malignant evil.”

In 1964 a “scholar” from the University of Damascus issued a warning to the Syrian public to refrain from “letting your children out at night, lest the Jew come and take their blood for the purpose of making matzot for Passover.” (My mother’s matzo balls, incidentally, are nowhere near that labor intensive.) Such a sentiment is still very much within the realm of respected political and intellectual discourse throughout the Arab world.

An anti-Semitic czarist canard and fraud like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” has been adopted as Arab lore. Last year, UN-funded Muslim pamphleteers handed out The Protocols at the “anti-racist” conference in Durban. The charge that Jews are taking over the world joins the deicide charge and the denial—and justification—of the Holocaust, among Saudis, Egyptians, Palestinian…you name them.

Before Arab leaders realized they had won the propaganda war and could relax, they had frenetically and cunningly been extending specious invites for Arab Jews to return to their homelands. You see, the approximately 1.5 million Jewish refugees from Arab lands could have become a considerable obstacle to the Palestinian propaganda machine had Israel been as conniving as her enemies. Imagine the kind of trump card Israel might have wielded had she, like her uncivilized neighbors, kept these legitimate Jewish refugees in camps, refused to settle them, fomented hate among them for the Arab, and turned the fugitives into political pawns—as Arab nations have so masterfully done to their so-called refugees.

In 1976, these Jewish refugees, represented by the American Sephardi Federation, responded to the cynical invites with a full-page advertisement in the New York Times. The ad entailed a news service photo that showed a mob of Iraqi onlookers surrounding two bodies suspended from a scaffold. The dangling bodies were those of Sabam Haim, and David Hazaquil, both Jews, hung in Baghdad. Beneath the photograph the organization responded: “Invitation declined.”

‘Humanitarian Corridor’ Requires Heroic Efforts

Christianity, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Religion

They are “cultural anomalies,” wrote Washington Monthly correspondent Laura Rozen, with respect to Qubad Talabani and Kurdistan, the region he represents. “His most distinctive attribute may be that he represents perhaps the sole triumph to emerge from postwar Iraq: a relatively peaceful region free of foreign troops, eager for American protection and open for business.”

Similar information was imparted in “Bush Betrays The Kurds,” back in 2007:

The Kurds are the only sect in Iraq that has been consistently loyal to America—the Peshmergas assisted American forces in the north during the invasion. Not one American soldier has been killed in that region. Kurds are also the only group to have made good on their newly found freedom. Monocultural Iraqi Kurdistan is an oasis in the democratic desert that is Iraq, “where business is booming and Americans are beloved.
“When visiting Kurdistan,” … “one can see nation-building wherever one looks—Kurds are building their country day by day. There are more cranes here than minarets and there’s a run on cement.” No wonder the constructive Kurds want nothing to do with the destructive Iraqi Arabs, who’ve persecuted them in years past and have now turned on one another.

Talabani, a most affable and intelligent Kurdish statesman, spoke to CNN simpleton Wolf Blitzer. Refusing to harp on legalistic definitions of genocide, Talabani stressed that absent assistance, the Yazidis, who’ve “maintained pre-Christian beliefs and practices from Nineveh and Babylon,” would be doomed (as has been the fate of the Christians of Iraq).

It would be essential to fashion a humanitarian corridor through which to facilitate a safe passage for the besieged on Mount Sinjar, advised Talabani.

Where are the Europeans in all this? The Israelis? The head of the Vatican? (Another simpleton, the new Holy See is no match to his predecessors. In fact, Jorge Bergoglio is more of a bumpkin than expected. Still, people love a populist, socialist fool.) Can’t the Vatican afford to cobble together a private army of crusader-mercenaries to pave the way out—and off the mountain—for these Iraqi innocents?

Fabricating a “humanitarian corridor” to allow the Yazidi safe passage will require the heroic efforts of other human beings.

An American Rabbi Who Can Reason: The Ten Commandments, Killing, and Murder

Christianity, GUNS, Hebrew Testament, Judaism & Jews, Justice, Law, Reason, Religion

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“American Rabbis For Israel First” wiped the floor with two feeble-minded rabbis. Admittedly—and by virtue of being publicity hounds—the rabbis had already self-selected into a pretty odious social-group sample.

Thus, when I retired (to bed), a few nights back, with the commentary of Rabbi Dovid Bendory, rabbinic director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership—I expected little by way of intellectual fare, given the mostly liberal rabbis we’re accustomed to enduring in the public eye. Their impetus is invariably emotional, not intellectual.

Indeed, Jews, who’re usually an analytical lot, have also been infected with the contempt for reason running throughout society. “Curricula in schools emphasize the non-analytical. The media convey emotionalism. Religious institutions junk doctrine for feel-goodism, and what goes for compassion is really sappy sentimentality.” (From “Why Read Return To Reason.”)

Understanding liberty, of course, demands reason (again, from “Why Read Return To Reason”):

In the introduction to F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” economist Milton Friedman puts his finger on the backdrop to the growth of collectivism: “The argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. The argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument.”

In his biblically based argument against pacifism, and in defense of a “righteous killing,” Rabbi Bendory demonstrates a command of Hebrew grammar as well as impressive deductive, analytical thinking. In particular was I intrigued by Rabbi Bendory’s distinction, bolstered by references or the absence thereof in scripture, between retzach (murder) and hariga (killing).

Essentially, JPFO’s rabbinic director argues that the Sixth Commandment enjoins against murder, not necessarily against killing, and that, translated, the Hebrew Lo tirtzach! “has a clear and unequivocal meaning:

“Do not murder,” and not do not kill.

Read “The Ten Commandments, Killing, and Murder”: A Detailed Commentary by Rabbi Dovid Bendory, Rabbinic Director, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

Updated: Israel Should Help Its Kurdish Friends

Iraq, Israel, Jihad, Middle East, Religion

I hope the following unconfirmed rumor is true. Accordingly, “Israel may be attacking positions held by the terrorist Islamic State, or ISIS, militia,” in Iraq.

Israel is the region’s superpower, not the US. It should save its friends the Kurds, who’re besieged—dying or soon to die—in the north. The Kurds have been loyal friends to Israel, and vice versa. (See “Why Israel Wants an Independent Kurdistan.”)

For its part, “The United States military launched a humanitarian operation in northern Iraq Thursday night,” reports National Journal. “The military air-dropped food and water for thousands of Iraqis who have been under attack by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). That drop is now over, and the aircraft that conducted it is out of the area, says the official.”

“Nearly all the displaced are members of the Yazidi sect,” seconds McClatchy, “ethnic Kurdish adherents to a religion that combines Islam and ancient Persian pagan beliefs and is considered heresy by the radical Sunni Muslims who make up the Islamic State. Since Islamic State militants took control of Sinjar on Sunday, there have been widespread, though unconfirmed, reports that Yazidis who failed to escape the takeover have been executed, tortured and raped.”

The United Nations said this week that at least 40,000 people, including 25,000 children, were in the Sinjar Mountains with no shelter, food, medical supplies and, most crucially, because of the brutal Iraqi summer heat, drinking water. While the mountains’ remoteness and barren terrain offers some protection from the Islamic State, the militants control all approaches to the area.

Local news outlets have reported that dozens of children and elderly already have died from dehydration and that thousands more could succumb if massive amounts of aid are not delivered. Efforts to confirm those accounts by dialing the cellphones of people believed to have fled into the mountains failed, most likely because after days without electricity the cellphones’ batteries have died.

This is the face of real religious persecution; this is what authentic refugees look like. Let us hope Israel rescues its Kurdish friends.

UPDATE: Do I want Israel to be involved militarily in fighting for the Kurds? No. It can drop supplies and air lift those poor people to safety. They should. They did this before for roughly 36,000 Ethiopian Jews, who were lifted to safety in a series of daring operations initiated by successive Likud governments headed by Menachem Begin and then Yitzhak Shamir. It’s hard to imagine an American government doing the same for say, white, persecuted, Christian farmers in South Africa or Zimbabwe, who are no less oppressed than these Ethiopian Jews were by the brutal Marxist-Leninist Col. Mengistu Haile Mariam, at the time.

Will I shed tears and twist into ideological pretzels over Israeli counter-aggression in the service of the Kurds? No.