I have written many posts about antisemitism because it is so infuriating. Lies about Jews and Judaism and Israel spoken with authority, such that one is easily deceived.
Here is a brief history by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.that I am reprinting so that you can never say that you were not warned.
Antisemitism is a form of senseless irrational hatred towards Jews couched as truth. And that is the infuriating aspect of it that it is no longer politically incorrect to espouse antisemitic views, longstanding irrational hatreds against Jews.
What are these irrational ideas about Jews? Is it true that all blacks are lazy? Is it true that all Jews are rich? that Jews control the media and US foreign policy. That jews are treacherous and disloyal? That Jews kill Christian children to use their blood to make matzo on Passover? Many people in the world in the past and the present espouse these beliefs about Jews.
If Jews are so rich and so powerful, how did Hitler manage to murder 6 million of them in such a short space of time?
and what is this obsession with Israel described as an immoral, apartheid driven genocidal entity? Why did an obscure academic organization called the American Studies Association recently vote to endorse a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli universities. The self-appointed moralists were purportedly outraged over the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. Given academia’s past obsessions with the Jewish state, the targeting of Israel is not new. Yet why do the professors focus on Israel and not Saudi Arabia, which denies women the right to drive and only recently granted them the right to vote? Why not Russia, which has been accused of suppressing free speech, or India, which has passed retrograde anti-homosexual legislation? The hip poet Amiri Baraka (aka Everett LeRoi Jones) recently died. He was once poet laureate of New Jersey, held prestigious university posts and was canonized with awards — despite being a hateful anti-Semite.
After Sept. 11, 2001, Baraka wrote a poem that suggested Israel knew about the plan to attack the World Trade Center. One of his poems from the ‘60s included this unabashedly anti-Semitic passage: “Smile, jew. Dance, jew. Tell me you love me, jew … I got the extermination blues, jewboys. I got the hitler syndrome figured.” Yet that did not preclude The New York Times and National Public Radio from praising him after his death.
Trendy multicultural French comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala is known for his anti-Semitic provocations and for making a gesture that has been described as an inverted Nazi salute. He recently quipped of a Jewish journalist: “When I hear him talk, you see … I say to myself, gas chambers … a pity.” Auschwitz is now a joke? Not only do people talk of it as a joke, they say the Jews are using the Holocaust for personal gain, and even lying about its extent. Several years ago, David Irving, an English historian was convicted of libel in an English court for publishing that there were no crematoria at Auschwitz and that the murder of 6 million by the Germans is greatly exaggerated. Sadly it was the Germans themselves who were so sure of the correctness of their hatred towards jews that they kept careful records of their evil deeds.
Antisemitism has existed since ancient times because the Jews have always been different, adhering to their own peculiar laws, and always a minority among world powers such as Rome, Egypt and Persia.
As Christianity gained ascendance over Rome, the church was obsessed with negating Jewish theology and demonizing Jews. Mohammed also had to explain why Jews did not accept his prophesy. And so he compares them to apes and monkeys and antisemitism is used to fuel Arab hatred away from their despotic rulers.
Real life Jews and Israelis have multiple identities and multiple attitudes towards the state of Israel, towards the Jewish religion but the anti-Semites paint all Jews and Israel with the same negative brush. Oh and yes even some Jews agree with them. Even that does not make their mythical fantasies about Jews true.
What is true is that immediately after the Holocaust, it became politically incorrect to express antisemitic thoughts or ideas. Sadly since about 1995, it has become more and more fashionable and even politically correct to express hostility towards Israel, to question its right to exist, to smear it with a Nazi and genocidal apartheid label and we see the rise of antisemitic attacks on Jews and their property and their human rights to dignity.
We see these thoughts and ideas propagated on the internet and in books and films and Youtube videos and also in rising antisemitic attacks on Jews and their property, all over the world. It is this acting out that is most worrying.
We see the extent to which antisemitism has become politically correct in the responses to Harper’s visit to Israel in Canada in the Canadian papers. Many of them were shocked and disappointed by his support of Israel asking whether his stance was “balanced”. He is the only world leader who has grasped the insidious nature of the Arabs’ hatred of Jews, and how that is what is keeping a state of war alive between Israel and the Arab population: a hostility that Israel has been contending with since it inception during the war of 1948 and 1967 and the continuing violence against Israel which the Palestinians have not abjured. to this day.
It is hardly anti-Semitic to focus on problems between Israel and the Palestinians, or even to pressure the Israelis. It becomes so, however, when problems elsewhere are simply ignored, and Israel alone is singled out to be chastised. The record of the United nations vis a vis Israel amply demonstrates this. I have the statistic but I won’t bore you with them.
Has the United Nations ever focused on the 13 million Germans who were ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe about the same time that thousands of Palestinians left what became Israel? Would the American Studies Association boycott Chinese universities over the absorption of Tibet?
Is the world really troubled about divided capitals such as Jerusalem? If so, why not an international conference on the Turkish occupation of a divided Nicosia on Cyprus?
Can’t Mr. Kerry use shuttle diplomacy to settle who owns all those disputed rocky islands that have led China and Japan to the brink of war?
Nazis and racists in our time, spearhead Jewish hatred, based on ancient crackpot defamations that date back to the Jewish Diaspora in Europe since the Roman destruction of Judea.
Victor Davis Hansen, a classicist and historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University writes in his blog “the cowardice of political antisemtism:
“ lately, anti-Semitism has become more a left-wing pathology. It is driven by the cheap multicultural trashing of the West. Jewish people here and abroad have become convenient targets for those angry with supposedly undeserved Western success and privilege.
Aside from the old envy, and racial and religious hatred, I think cowardice explains the new selective anti-Semitism. Mr. Kanye West would not dare slander radical Muslims, given the violence and threats against European cartoonists and filmmakers who have dared to create work perceived as insulting to Islam. The American Studies Association would not call for a boycott of Russia despite its endemic persecution of homosexuals. After all, Russian President Vladimir Putin is as unpredictable as Israeli politicians are forbearing.
Mr. Kerry is not rushing into Damascus to stop the bloodletting that has claimed far more lives than all the Palestinians lost in 70 years of conflict with Israel. Syrian President Bashar Assad, Shiite terrorists and al Qaeda would not listen politely to Mr. Kerry’s pontificating sermons.
The sort of anti-Semitism we see from buffoons such as Dieudonne M’bala M’bala is appalling, but the double standard to which Israel is held in matters of foreign policy by those who should know better is in many ways even more galling.”
What is to be done about it? We need to talk about it and expose it as we are doing here. Silence is aquiescence and we dare not be silent. We know where that leads.
As Hemingway wrote;
Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.
And don’t think this does not include you:
As martin NieMoller, a German pastor says:
First they came for the communists
And I did not speak out,
Because I was not a communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
The they came for the Jews
But I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
And there was no one left to speak for me.
by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/15/hanson-the-cowardice-of-the-new-anti-semitism/#ixzz2rkvMq5mn
And this was just published: It says the same truth, only more bluntly. Antisemitism is an “industry of lies” that are reported as truth.
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