Now What?

Posted on August 1, 2025 by Victor Rosenthal

Today, Jews cannot walk down the street in North America, Europe, or even Australia without the possibility of being spat on, beaten, or even murdered. Country after country mulls punishing Israel and rewarding Hamas [!] by the absurd recognition of Palestine, a non-country without defined borders. Almost 700 days after Israel was invaded and more than 1200 Israelis viciously slaughtered, tortured, raped, kidnapped – Hamas survives, receiving water, food, fuel and electricity from Israel. The war in Gaza is static, almost 900 Israeli soldiers have been killed and countless wounded, and 20 living hostages still remain in the tunnels under the Gaza strip.

How we got here is not the issue. International and domestic politics, manipulation of consciousness, covert financing of ‘popular’ movements, religious imperatives, power struggles, wars, terrorism, honor and shame, and of course, the oldest hatred all played a part. But the hour is too late for historical analysis and philosophical arguments. It’s time to act.

I can’t speak for diaspora Jews. I only have one piece of advice: take what’s happening seriously. The golden age for Jews in North America is over. Create a strategy to protect yourselves and implement it.

Israel, too, needs a whole new set of strategies. She needs a strategy for the kinetic war in Gaza and the closely related information war, both of which she is losing despite her clear military superiority.

Someone recently said that on 7 October 2023 we were the “good guys,” but Hamas propaganda quickly turned us into the “bad guys” in the story. That isn’t correct. It’s true that Hamas’ propaganda – crude as it is – has been remarkably effective, but that is because it falls on very fertile ground. We became the “bad guys” the moment the news of the obscenely vicious pogrom perpetrated by Hamas hit the professional and social media.

There are two reasons for this: one is the prior preparation of opinion leaders in the West by a decades-long takeover of the educational system and media by a red-green alliance financed by Arab petrodollars with ideological direction from the anti-Western Left. The other is a fundamental fact of human psychology: people, like turkeys, admire the strong, and peck the weak or injured ones to death. The horrors of 7/10, just like the gas chambers of Auschwitz, caused people to identify with the perpetrators, rather than the victims (incidentally, this is why so much “Holocaust education” has the opposite of its intended effect).

This is the paradox of the response to Hamas’ propaganda. Although they present the Gazans as victims, they proudly broadcast live video on 7/10. The open brutality of Hamas is contrasted with the weakness of Israel, which is forced to make concession after concession, including freeing hundreds of murderers of Jews (an act that incurs great dishonor), in order to get her tortured hostages back. Israel has even been forced to feed and supply its enemy with fuel and electricity, for which Hamas has given nothing in return.

This is why it doesn’t matter when the numbers of dead Gazans provided by Hamas are shown to be false, or when the emaciated children on the front pages of Western newspapers turn out to be suffering from various wasting diseases rather than starvation. Concern for the suffering of Gazans is an excuse, a rationalization for a deeper, less attractive emotion. Indeed, the less convincing the propaganda, the better. The important subtext is that despite its tanks and air force, Israel is a weak, wounded, loser. Hamas represents a courageous indigenous people who are winning, despite their suffering. Nobody likes a loser.

Practically speaking, the success of its information warfare has encouraged Hamas to hold on, believing that the world will come to its rescue and stop Israel before they are forced to give up control of Gaza.

There is little that can be done now to overcome the indoctrination of young people, including those who have begun to move into positions of power in Western media and politics. Reversing that damage will be a long and expensive process. But Israel can adopt a strategy to gain a psychological, as well as physical, victory over Hamas. And that will require her to change her behavior by 180 degrees.

Israel has responded to the false Palestinian claims of genocide, deliberate starvation, and so on by taking extra care to avoid civilian casualties. She has endangered her own soldiers to this end. She has allowed truckloads of food and fuel to be handed over directly to Hamas. She has even airdropped food to Palestinians in Gaza, something unprecedented in war. All of these actions send a message of weakness and submission. They in essence say, “yes, we’ve been bad, we’ll make ourselves better.” Israel has allowed herself to appear both evil and weak at the same time. No wonder the world holds her in contempt!

Rather, Israel must act like the stronger party, which in fact she is. She must use her firepower to defeat Hamas, in all parts of Gaza. No aid can be permitted to reach Hamas. Our government understands that Hamas will never release all the hostages in return for anything less than complete surrender, and it must make it clear, inside Israel and to the world, this is a price that we will not pay. If the UN, Europe, and the US want to ameliorate the condition of the Gazans, then they should force Egypt to allow refugees from the war to enter the Sinai where the UN can take care of them, and from where they can emigrate to other countries. Their welfare is not Israel’s responsibility.

Israel should make it clear that she does not accept the narrative of Palestinian peoplehood and ownership of our land, and emphasize this by annexing parts of Gaza and applying Israeli law to the Jordan Valley and Area C in Judea and Samaria. She should make it clear that after the Second Intifada and 7/10, the idea of a Palestinian state in the territories is permanently off the table. No terrorist murderer should ever again be freed from an Israeli prison in return for a hostage, and a death penalty for terrorist murder should be instituted.

We do not have unlimited time to do these things. Although they would provoke condemnation in Europe and other places, I think they would be acceptable to American president Trump, which would enable us to weather the storm. But he will not be president forever, and the demographic changes in the US and other Western countries are not favorable. If we don’t act soon, we may be prevented from acting at all.

 

One Choice: Fight to Win

October 1, 2024 Israel, politics

From AbuYehuda.com posted on August 26, 2024 by Victor Rosenthal

Yesterday Israel preempted a potentially disastrous attack by Hezbollah on the center of the country. Thirty minutes before launch time, our aircraft destroyed literally thousands of launchers, rockets, and drones that were aimed at various targets including IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv and sensitive installations in the North.

Despite being an impressive technical and tactical achievement, it does not herald a new, more aggressive Israeli military policy. A column in the Israel Hayom newspaper this morning was titled “Preemptive operation, not preemptive attack,” and that sums it up. The 100 aircraft that were involved were simply a more elaborate and expensive Iron Dome. Admittedly the enemy lost more assets than the rockets and drones it had planned to use; launchers and installations were also destroyed. But the objective of the operation was entirely defensive. Great care was taken to ensure that it would be seen as a “legitimate” response to aggression. Israel waited until just before Hezbollah was expected to fire, and the attack was limited to southern Lebanon. As is always the case when we play pure defense, the enemy has learned lessons and will try again.

It was telling that Israel and the US both indicated that the US knew about it in advance, and that the attack was “fully coordinated” with the US. It’s well known that the US forbids Israel to preemptively attack its enemies, so it was important to present it as limited and “intended to prevent escalation.” But it should be noted that Hezbollah did succeed to launch some 300 weapons at the northern part of Israel, from which tens of thousands of citizens have become refugees. The defensive strike still did not enable them to return home. No purely defensive operation can.

American policy continues to have as its top objective the prevention of escalation. The pressure to reach a cease-fire agreement with Hamas continues at a high level. Although they are often presented as “hostage return” deals, no proposal has been seriously considered that allows more than a minority of the living hostages in the hands of Hamas to return. The Americans have made it clear that they intend for any temporary cease-fire to become permanent, or at least extended; and this implies the continued rule of Hamas and the abandonment of more than half of the hostages.

Israel cannot allow a situation to continue in which large numbers of her citizens from both the northern and southern parts of the country have been driven from their homes and can’t return for fear of rocket attacks and 7 October-style invasions. Essentially, a third of our country has been occupied by our enemies since 7 October. This is the status quo that American-brokered diplomatic “solutions” will perpetuate.

American forces have been sent to the region to prevent escalation by either side while they pursue diplomatic initiatives. But today Israeli deterrence is at its lowest point in years, and any American-brokered compromises with Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran, will be disastrous to us.

If the Democrats win the US presidency, it’s expected that the pro-Iranian policy begun under Obama will gather steam. The Iranian regime is not sitting idly by, but is galloping toward the finish line in developing its nuclear umbrella. Israel can’t afford to wait and hope for a more friendly administration next January, which may or may not materialize.

Israel lost her way strategically at some point, when her military leadership buckled under American pressure, abandoned Ben Gurion’s philosophy of taking the war to her enemies, and began to fight, as Gadi Taub said, “with a shield but without a sword.” We have paid a huge price for this, and it’s not sustainable. Now we are at the point at which we have no choice but to fight to win.

Thoughts on the Jersey City Shooting

From AbuYehuda.com posted on December 15, 2019 by Victor Rosenthal

 

In Israel, we are familiar with the story. A couple of armed terrorists walk into a building and start shooting Jews. A pigua (terrorist attack). Americans are also beginning to become familiar with it as well, after piguim  at synagogues in Pittsburgh and California, and now a Jewish market in Jersey city. Europe, too, has long since accustomed herself to such things.
In Israel we also have street attacks on Jews, sometimes with knives and sometimes with cars. In America the street attacks have mostly been with fists or bricks or bats, but unless something changes, the knives will come out soon, if they haven’t already.
Hardened as they may be to anti-Jewish violence, Israelis were shocked by Jersey City. Not so much by the attack, which was small by our standards with “only” three civilians and one police officer murdered, but by the response of the local community, captured in a video (here) which appears to show (I have reservations, discussed below) local residents blaming the Jews themselves for the attack, and expressing vicious hatred of them.
There are various factors contributing to the wave of violent Jew-hatred that has suddenly burst upon the world. It’s not simple. There are several foci of infection that have festered independently as well as cross-fertilizing themselves, gaining new ideas, strategies, connections – and adherents. There is the leftist/Arab Israel-focused thread which flourishes at the UN and in Europe, which grew from a seed planted by the KGB in the 1960s; there is the neo-Nazi thread which truly goes back to the original Nazis; there is the paleo-Catholic Christ-killer theme that Pope Paul VI’s nostre aetate never succeeded to stamp out; there is the Quran-based Islamic version; there is the Christian Identity movement in the US; there is the Nation of Islam’s ideology, beginning with Elijah Muhammad and espoused today by Louis Farrakhan; and there are countless small groups with various forms of antisemitic thinking, including the Black Hebrew Israelites with which the Jersey City killers were associated.
And those are just off the top of my head. Seventy years or so after the Holocaust, the pressure from all of these antisemitic memes – especially those connected with the Israel-Arab conflict – broke through the taboo against public expression of antisemitism. It became possible to say openly that Jews were every bit as bad as Hitler thought they were, and that the best thing would be for them to disappear. At the same time, the example provided by the Palestinians, who showed that if you really hate Jews, you can murder them, made killing Jews a thinkable option for today’s antisemites. Mix in a little social media to serve as a catalyst and medium for coordination, and here we are today.
So what can be done, say, in Jersey City?
First, I’m not sure that the video is an accurate depiction of the mood of most of the non-Jewish community. There are some accounts (also here) that say that the Hasidic community got along well with the local, mostly black, residents, despite tensions about gentrification of the neighborhood. I don’t entirely trust the video: it appears to be edited heavily, and none of the speakers responsible for the anti-Jewish remarks were visible. But still, I heard what I heard.
Let’s assume that at least some local residents share the feelings expressed in the video. Should we try to educate them, to explain to them that their attitudes are wrong – that the Satmar Hasidim who live in their neighborhood are people just like them, and don’t deserve to be shot? That would be hard to do. They are not just like them, they dress differently, eat differently, speak a different language, educate their children differently, and of course practice a different and perhaps sinister religion. They stay aloof from the locals, which is often interpreted as “they think they are better than we are” (I am not speculating on whether this is a correct interpretation).
The secret to educating antisemites so that they will stop being antisemites remains undiscovered. What exactly do you say to someone to make them stop hating Jews? Teaching them about the Holocaust just gives them ideas.
It is also not possible to make the Hasidic Jews more appealing to non-Jews. Should we tell them to dress differently? To eat the same food? To send their children to public schools? To convert to Christianity or Islam? All this was tried before, with very unhappy results. Trying to change Jews in order to reduce antisemitism is a losing proposition; antisemites will always find a reason to hate them. This was true for Spanish Conversos in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, for Germans of the Mosaic Persuasion in the 19^th, and probably will someday be true for the progressive Reform Jews of North America. The problem resides with the antisemites, not the Jews, and it can’t be fixed by “fixing” the Jews.
But even if we can’t eliminate antisemitism, there are things we can do to mitigate the current wave of antisemitic acts. One is to understand and act on the principle that although we can’t guarantee that people will like Jews, we can force them to respect us, both as individual Jews in the diaspora and collectively in the State of Israel. In the diaspora, Jews should secure their institutions and arm themselves to the extent that the law permits. Self-defense training should be part of all Jewish education. Nobody is respected for being a victim.
The primary function of a state is to guarantee the security of its citizens. Insofar as we must depend on government, particularly when restrictive laws make self-defense difficult, then we have to demand that it does its job. When there is a crime wave targeting a specific sector of the population, police resources in that sector have to be increased. Jews ought to have enough political power in a place like New York City to insist that street violence against their fellow Jews, even if the perpetrators are black and Hispanic De Blasio voters, be suppressed. Unfortunately, this is not the case in Hudson County, New Jersey, where Jersey City is located.
Finally, if it turns out that diaspora Jewish communities cannot be defended or that their host governments do not care to do their part in doing so, there is the option of aliyah. This puts the Satmar Hasidim, who bitterly oppose the Jewish state, between a rock and a hard place. But that is their problem, not mine.

Europeans, Jews and the Holocaust

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on February 5, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

The story of Jews, Poles and the Holocaust is not simple.

Of course some Poles cooperated with the Nazis in murdering Jews. Some even murdered Jews by themselves, sometimes even after the Germans were gone. On the other hand, the Poles themselves suffered tremendously from Nazi brutality. Certainly, some Poles saved Jews from the Nazis. And some hunted them down or turned them in. In different ways, Poland’s behavior during the war was both better and worse than that of other countries occupied by the Nazis.

The Nazis tried to erase the Jewish people from the world. They also tried to cripple the Polish nation by murdering  everyone of even the smallest intellectual, cultural or political importance. It was a less ambitious crime than what they did to the Jews, but it was bad enough.

It is true that Polish people were highly antisemitic before, during and after the war, and the reaction by some Poles to criticism of the law recently passed by the Polish parliament criminalizing certain kinds of speech about the period shows that Jew-hatred isn’t gone (even though most of the Jews are: Poland has about 8,000 Jews, 0.02% of its population).

The law criminalizes the use of the expression “Polish death camps.” I can see how this is annoying to Poles, but there is hardly a need for a law to enforce the common knowledge that the camps in Poland were built by the Nazis. Unfortunately, it tries to do more. It forbids anyone (with exceptions for scientific research or art) from saying that Poles were “responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.”

The law is stupid, and probably impossible to enforce fairly (what counts as “art?”). You can’t legislate history. What happened, happened. It’s important to know what and how so perhaps it will be possible to keep it from happening again.

But while it is ill-advised, the law is important as an expression of nationalist feeling in Poland, like the nationalism that has been growing in other European countries, reflected in the newfound strength of right-of-center parties in many of them, including France, Austria, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and others.

Probably the single most important reason for the shift toward nationalism in formerly universalist Europe is the wave of immigration by non-Europeans, particularly Muslims. The threat from outsiders, with their unfamiliar and often objectionable cultures is met with a heightened appreciation of one’s own country, people, culture, religion, attitudes, and so on. Depending on your point of view, this is either healthy patriotism or racist xenophobia.

Given the hostility of many of the migrants to European/Western norms, hostility which sometimes takes the form of terrorism, it is entirely understandable that native Europeans want to shut their doors and strengthen the connections between themselves and their nation. Nationalism is a tool for national self-preservation.

Naturally, the Jew in Europe, always an outsider – indeed, the paradigm case of the outsider within a nation not his own – is not included as part of the native group, even if his people had been living there for hundreds of years. So in countries with a tradition of Jew-hatred – that is, most European countries – increased nationalism is often associated with antisemitism. This leads to a paradoxical and decidedly unpleasant situation for Jews in countries like France, where there are a significant number of violently antisemitic Muslim immigrants, and the Jews who are their targets find themselves dependent on the “natives,” who aren’t always sympathetic.

But could Herzl have been right in his belief that the transformation of the Jews into a “normal” people, living in their own state, would eliminate antisemitism?

Today, for the first time in millennia, more of the world’s Jews live in Israel than anyplace else. This concentration will probably become stronger in the future, as persecution drives Jews out of places like Europe and assimilation reduces their numbers in North America. The status of the Jew in the world is therefore changing from that of an (unwanted) outsider trying to preserve his heritage in a foreign culture, to a citizen of a legitimate state, a nation among nations. He may be an expatriate, but he nevertheless has a patria.

This conception is opposed by the enemies of Israel, who believe that the Jewish state is illegitimate, and by those Jews who believe that they can both assimilate to the cultures of their “homes” in the Diaspora and still remain fully Jewish. Often they too are hostile to the Jewish state. But the trend will continue. Like it or not, most Jews in the Diaspora will soon see themselves either as expatriate Israelis or merely “persons of Jewish extraction” with ethnic food preferences.

While Muslim/left-wing anti-Zionism (the “red-green alliance”) is becoming the most common and serious manifestation of Jew-hatred in the world, traditional “right-wing” antisemitism is becoming more and more he province of the mentally disturbed fringe, both in Europe and North America. The nationalist movements in Europe are beginning to see that they have more interests in common with Israel than with her enemies, while the Israeli government is less ready to condemn them when, for example, they venerate historically antisemitic figures as heroes. The Polish government is clearly not interested in having a diplomatic crisis with Israel over the Holocaust speech law, and Israel isn’t pushing it.

The presence of anti-Jewish elements in Polish (and other European) nationalism isn’t a permanent obstacle to relations with Israel. Both sides see it as a bump in the road that can and will be overcome.
Perhaps in the long term, the enemies of Diaspora Jewish culture, antisemitism and assimilation, will reduce the population of “persons of Jewish extraction” outside of Israel to irrelevance, and then national interests alone will determine attitudes toward the Jews and their state.

I can think of worse outcomes.

How not to remember the Holocaust

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on February 2, 2018 by Vic Rosenthal

 

International Holocaust Remembrance day was observed this week. I suppose it is a good idea to have such a day, if simply to counteract the increasing popularity of Holocaust denial. But some aspects of it are disturbing.

There is the continuing phenomenon of Americans and Europeans who are moved to tears when they contemplate the horrific murders of the Jews of 75 years ago, while at the same time supporting the true heirs of Nazi ideology, the Palestinian Arabs and the Iranian regime (not to mention the crocodile tears shed by politicians like Barack Obama, a true enemy of the Jewish people, who recently had the chutzpah to call himself a “liberal Jew”).

The Germans, who provide massive funding for NGOs working against Israel’s interests everywhere, might behave better if they could forget about the Holocaust. The preferred outlet for their feelings of shame seems to be to try to get people to believe that Israel is worse than their grandfathers who served in the SS.

There are also those who see in the Holocaust a “lesson” that “Jews should not behave like Nazis” and criticize the arrest of terror sympathizer and provocateur Ahed Tamimi as Nazi-like behavior. Some have even compared her to Jewish heroes who were murdered by the Nazis.

This past Shabbat I listened to an Israeli rabbi say in front of his congregation that the arrest and deportation of illegal migrants from Israel is similar to the way the Gestapo rounded up Jews for deportation to extermination camps. “Of course, I am not making a comparison…” he said. But of course he did make the comparison.

We shouldn’t need to denounce this vile inversion of history. It’s odious to compare the besieged Jewish state’s response to the endeavor to destroy her with the almost-successful attempt by the Germans to exterminate the Jews of Europe. It is so wrong, so backwards, that our trying to survive as a people should be compared to that. But apparently, this isn’t obvious to many people, even Jews. Even rabbis.

Then there is the universalization of the Holocaust. I once attended a memorial service in which 11 candles were lit for the “11 million victims of the Holocaust.” I believe the 11 million number came out of thin air, but it is supposed to represent the Jews plus Roma, homosexuals, disabled and mentally ill people, and so forth that were murdered by the Nazis.

But why stop there? The Nazis murdered 100,000 Polish intellectuals, doctors, teachers, officers, members of the upper classes and so forth in order to destroy Polish culture so they could Germanize the parts of Poland that they intended to annex to the Reich. They, too, should be added. And what about the roughly 24 million Soviet citizens (civilians and military) who died in the war? Hitler was responsible for killing them, too.

The uniqueness of the Holocaust is that the Jews were targeted for extermination for their genetic content. The Nazis saw the Jewish people as a species, like the polio virus, and wanted to eradicate us. Their goal was that there would be no more Jews in the world, ever. The thoroughness with which they approached this task was remarkable. Nobody else got that treatment. Not the Poles and not the Roma (among whom the Nazis pardoned individuals of “pure blood” or who “didn’t act like Gypsies” or who had honorable war records). No such exceptions were made for Jews.

I am ambivalent, therefore, about the utility of an international day to remember the Holocaust. But especially for Jews there are clear lessons that can be drawn from history (and one of them is not that Israelis are in danger of becoming Nazis):

The most important lesson is about self-reliance: the world community, even those parts of it that understood what the Nazis were doing and the degree of evil involved, was unwilling to take even small steps – absorbing Jewish refugees fleeing Europe, bombing the tracks to the death camps, allowing Jews to enter the British Mandate of Palestine – that would have made a great difference in the outcome for the Jews of Europe. The Jewish people – and other peoples, like the Kurds today – must understand that their survival depends upon obtaining and deploying the means to protect themselves. They cannot rely on anyone else.

A corollary to that principle is that one needs to have a consciousness of oneself as a member of a people. Don’t think that when they come for you, you can say that you are a “citizen of the world.” Your enemies know what you are, and if you want to defend yourself, you better know too.

Another corollary: know the enemies of your people. They will usually tell you who they are themselves. Understand them and never turn your back on them.

Do not think that the world has progressed morally since 1940. It hasn’t.

Finally, understand  that war is not only fought with guns and bombs. The Nazis prepared the way for the Holocaust far in advance by the use of propaganda. They employed the Big Lie technique to demonize and delegitimize a people, just as the enemies of the Jewish state are doing today. Self-defense starts by fighting back against the lies.

Today it seems that the real lessons of the Holocaust have not been learned, even by Jews, despite all the emotional catharsis that takes place on the various Holocaust memorial days.

That is unfortunate, because the consequence of not learning something easily from history is learning it the hard way from current events.

Zapata was a Zionist

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on September 25, 2017 by Vic Rosenthal

72 years after Hitler’s suicide, the story of the Holocaust has lost its power to deter public expressions of Jew-hatred. In Europe and America, the extreme Right is not embarrassed to say, for example, that massive immigration from the Third World to Europe or from Mexico and Central America to the US is a Jewish plot, that Rothschild family interests still control the destiny of nations, or that all wars are fought to profit Jewish arms merchants.  Meanwhile, the Left has pumped up its irrational anti-Zionism so high that one would have to be blind, deaf and stupid to fail to understand what is so “special” about Israel to prompt such hatred. And don’t forget the religious and culturally-based abomination of Jews that characterizes Muslims everywhere, which is more and more frequently finding violent expression.

Almost every day there is a new example in the news – a murder in France, an ugly celebrity tweet in the US, street harassment in the UK, and on and on. Students of Jewish history will not find this surprising. It is in part a list of times and places which were “good for the Jews” interspersed with persecutions, expulsions and genocide. Human civilization in general seems to be moving toward a dark period, and in particular the quality of life and social/political stability in America and Western Europe are rapidly declining. These places have been refuges for several generations of Jewish people – America has arguably been the site of a “golden age” for Jews since the end of WWII – but all historical situations come to an end, and the rapidity of change brought about by our advanced technology is bringing this one to an end sooner rather than later.

There has been a distinct Jewish people for as long as our historical memory. They have been expelled from their homeland and returned several times, but through the various times and places of exile, they have always maintained their self-consciousness as a nation. It’s not too abstract to talk about the collective consciousness of the Jewish people having a drive to survive, to find stability and peace, to be together with itself. The establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 is an expression of this “urge for being” that characterizes the Jewish people (and other peoples as well).

Jew-hatred is a force that is opposed to this. It wants to disperse the Jews, to weaken them, to kill them, to take away the stable ground from under their feet, to set the nations against them and to set them against one another. Its goal is to end, finally, the existence of a distinct Jewish people, to create a world in which no individual sees himself as a member of the Jewish nation.

It does this by persecuting Jews because of their Jewishness, so as to cause them to try to escape persecution by escaping their Jewishness. It creates fear and anxiety among Jews. It tries to associate Jewishness with undesirable characteristics, like weakness, immorality, and lack of social status. All forms of Jew-hatred, from the historical pogroms of Eastern Europe and Muslim countries, to today’s Islamic terrorism and street violence, and even the social pressure against pro-Israel students on American campuses, has the same objectives. If it can’t kill the Jews outright, it tries to kill their peoplehood.

We can look at the struggle with Jew-hatred as a struggle between the life force of the Jewish nation and its opposite.

Once we understand this, we understand how the various responses to Jew-hatred succeed or fail. In particular, assimilation is no less than surrender. Yes, you can stop suffering caused by Jew-hatred if you stop being Jewish. Change your name, practice another religion, intermarry. Maybe it will take a few generations – the Nazis and inquisitors of the world need proof that your Jewish identity is truly dead – but ultimately the thugs on the street will leave you alone. If that’s the solution that you want, if you want to save the Jew-hater the trouble of murdering you by killing the Jew inside of you, go ahead. You are already lost.

There is a form of partial assimilation that is popular today among American Jews. It goes like this:

• Proclaim that you are a proud Jew.
• At the same time, do not observe any of the commandments that historically distinguished Jews from the nations.
• Adopt a moral system whose fundamental premises are those of secular humanism. Let these premises override Torah commandments when they conflict.
• At the same time, insist that this is a Jewish moral system.
• Take the position that other things being equal, every human is equally valuable to you. Do not favor, for example, the rights of Jews over the rights of Palestinians.
• Assert that Israel is just another foreign country to you. Be ready to harshly criticize her for her relationship to the Palestinians, or for the Orthodox monopoly on Judaism, or for her actions in self-defense, or for the personality of her Prime Minister.
• Make common cause with Muslims because you are both victims of prejudice. You can ignore their hatred of Israel because it is just another foreign country.

Assimilation protects the individual against Jew-hatred (sometimes). But it works together with Jew-hatred against the survival of the Jewish people.

Traditional Diaspora Jewish communities which do not assimilate keep a low profile. They try to submit to non-Jewish authority with the minimum of compromises. They flourish in good times, and suffer in bad. Sometimes this policy is harmless, as in the US in recent times. Other times, as in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, it was disastrous. The Jewish leadership of the time and place opposed emigration until it was too late, trusting in Hashem to ultimately bring the Jewish people to the land of Israel. In fact, what happened to these communities decisively refuted this belief.

There is another historical response to Jew-hatred, and that is Zionism. Zionism (as understood by Jabotinsky, anyway) holds that the best way to protect the Jews against Jew-hatred is to establish a well-armed Jewish state which will guarantee its rights and the rights of the Jewish people by force if necessary.

Zionism tries to provide long-term stability and peace for the Jewish people in a place where they can express their Jewishness without fear of Jew-hatred. Naturally, this arouses the strongest possible reaction from Jew-haters of all kinds, in the Arab and Muslim world, in Europe and even in America. So it sometimes may seem that peace in Israel is in short supply, compared to currently quiet locations in the Diaspora. But this is deceptive. Peace in the Diaspora is always short-lived.

I am not expecting another Holocaust, not in America and probably not in Europe, although I am convinced that this particular golden age is coming to an end. Jewish life in the Diaspora will get worse before it gets better. But now is a special time, historically. The last time Jew-hatred peaked, the Jewish people had no options. Those who decided to stay put and those who wanted to escape but were unable to were both destroyed. Today there is a choice; there is a possibility to fight Jew-hatred and preserve the Jewish people in their homeland. There is a Jewish state with a Law of Return.

The option of aliyah could be uncomfortable or even dangerous. The forces arrayed against the Jewish nation are great. But as Emiliano Zapata (maybe) said, better to die on your feet than live on your knees.

Hands off my free press!

From AbuYehuda.com Posted on August 20, 2017 by Vic Rosenthal

As the founding fathers of the US understood, limiting speech and expression is a slippery slope. The recent controversy about statues and other symbols is an example of how slippery. Confederate flags are offensive, so get rid of them. But what about statues of Robert E. Lee and other Confederate personalities? Also offensive, so tear them down too. Andrew Jackson was a racist and guilty of genocide, so take him off the US $20 bill. Woodrow Wilson was a segregationist who went to Princeton, and his name and likeness are all over it; erase him. As Trump pointed out, Washington and Jefferson owned slaves (and held viciously racist beliefs); should their pictures and statues be removed too? Where do you stop? And who decides?

How dare I agree with Trump about anything? Because this time he’s right. But although the removal of symbols is particularly ominous – to me, it reeks of the Taliban, of Stalinism, of 1984’s Ingsoc – the limitation of speech is more immediately dangerous. Events like the shouting down of Charles Murray by students at Middlebury College represent a growing trend in which certain ideas are considered sufficiently objectionable that it becomes acceptable to use force to prevent their expression.

I started my first blog because I had things to say that weren’t popular locally. No big deal, just that my Jewish friends mostly found Israel an embarrassment, while non-Jews thought my obsession with defending it was boring. One day I was reminded of this remark by newspaperman A. J. Liebling,

Freedom of the Press Is Guaranteed Only to Those Who Own One

and I decided to get my own “press.” The Internet made it possible. I couldn’t afford to buy a newspaper or a radio or TV station, and even if I could, I doubt that I could do what I wanted with it and stay in business. But a blog costs nothing and can reach hundreds, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people.

Of course it’s not that easy, and I never achieved that degree of success. But I can say exactly what I want to say, and anyone who wants to read it can do so.

Unsurprisingly, the absolute freedom of the Internet has led to it being used for incitement to murder, invasion of privacy and other things which go far beyond the boundaries of legitimate speech. And even more unsurprisingly, those who want to shut up or shout down voices that they simply don’t like are using this fact as an excuse to impose their will on everyone.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), anything but a “conservative” organization, recently criticized three of the most influential companies providing internet services after they acted to take the neo-Nazi website “Daily Stormer” down:

In the wake of Charlottesville, both GoDaddy and Google have refused to manage the domain registration for the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that, in the words of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is “dedicated to spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism.” Subsequently Cloudflare, whose service was used to protect the site from denial-of-service attacks, has also dropped them as a customer, with a telling quote from Cloudflare’s CEO: “Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.” We agree.

Cloudflare’s CEO may have had regrets, but he didn’t shrink from using what he recognized as his excessive power. While it’s impossible to defend the Daily Stormer, we’re starting down the slippery slope here as well. EFF continues,

…we strongly believe that what GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare did here was dangerous. That’s because, even when the facts are the most vile, we must remain vigilant when platforms exercise these rights.Because Internet intermediaries, especially those with few competitors, control so much online speech, the consequences of their decisions have far-reaching impacts on speech around the world. And at EFF we see the consequences first hand: every time a company throws a vile neo-Nazi site off the Net, thousands of less visible decisions are made by companies with little oversight or transparency. [my emphasis]

I can personally attest to this. This blog, Abu Yehuda, is blocked by default by Sky, the second largest ISP in Britain (and probably the largest provider of mobile Internet services there). The reason given is content about “weapons.” As I pointed out to them, while I often write about things like Iranian or North Korean nuclear weapons, I don’t tell anyone how to construct them at home. But someone apparently found my message objectionable enough to complain, and Sky blocked the site. This has happened over and over to pro-Israel blogs, so either someone within the company is deliberately blocking these sites, or their procedures don’t include verifying complaints before taking action.

In a worrisome development, Google is partnering with several liberal organizations to help “document hate crimes and events.” This sounds reasonable, until you note that one of Google’s partners is the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which – according to Robert Spencer (not to be confused with neo-Nazi Richard Spencer!), has lumped together “groups such as Jihad Watch, [The American Freedom Defense Initiative], the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the Center for Security Policy with the KKK and neo-Nazis.”

SPLC focuses very heavily on right-wing groups and goes easy on radical left-wing ones. While its “hate map” has separate categories for anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim, KKK, neo-Nazi, black separatist, Christian identity, racist skinhead, white nationalist, radical traditional Catholicism, hate music, and Holocaust denial groups, there is no entry for radical Islam (those few Muslim groups that do appear are found under “general hate”), and none for anti-Jewish (other than Holocaust denial) or anti-Zionist organizations. Daniel Greenfield’s blog, “Sultan Knish” is included as a “hate group,” but Ammar Shahin, the Davis California Imam who called from his pulpit for Muslims to murder Jews is not on their list of “extremists.”

SPLC, incidentally, is also a prime mover in the movement to remove confederate monuments, which makes sense for an organization whose goal seems to be to stop the expression of views that it dislikes.

Another Google partner is ProPublica, which vows to diligently track “hate incidents” in the coming months. “Everyday people — not just avowed ‘white nationalists’ — intimidate, harass, humiliate and even harm their fellow Americans because of the color of their skin, how they worship or who they love,” they say. One could be excused from wondering if an article critical of Islamic ideology or denying that people have an inalienable right to the gender of their choice will be interpreted as a “hate incident.”

ProPublica created a list of websites that the ADL or SPLC consider hate or extremist. Then they took 70 of the most popular sites on the list and surveyed whether and how they were “monetized,” i.e., whether they ran ads, accepted donations, and so forth. The intention, although it is unstated, is to pressure the companies providing ads or payment processing to drop these sites as customers.

These organizations have created a category of vaguely defined “hate speech,” speech that is offensive – particularly to favored groups like Muslims. The next step is to enforce their version of political correctness.

But who is to decide? If it’s “hate speech” to warn (as several of the sites on the list do) that the Muslim Brotherhood wants to Islamize the United States, then isn’t the viciously anti-Israel site Electronic Intifada (which is not on ProPublica’s list) also employing hate speech when it calls Israel an apartheid state or accuse it of genocide?

I don’t think SPLC, ProPublica or left-leaning tech companies like Google ought to control my speech. The American founding fathers had the right idea. Hate speech has been made illegal in many countries, but the US has always insisted that no matter how vile their words, the government may not interfere with the freedom of expression enjoyed by neo-Nazis, the Westboro Baptist Church, and others like them. Unfortunately, Internet companies are not the government and can legally place restrictions on speech – even though today they may have a greater effect on free expression than the government could!

It’s true that the openness of the Internet has been a mixed blessing. But it’s a mistake to allow some political violence – of which there was more in the 1960s and 70s than there is today – to be the Reichstag Fire that will force us to knuckle under to the totalitarian vision of the PC Left.

I own my printing press and I’m not going to give it up.

Goebbels is alive and well in UNESCO

Dr Josef Goebbels did not commit suicide in the Berlin's bunker with Adolf Hitler. He is living and leading the work of Unesco, the UN agency that recently gathered in Krakow. 

Within three days, they made the first and second most holy cities of Judaism, Jerusalem and Hevron, “Jüdenrein” . They Islamicized the city of Abraham, Isaac, Sarah, Jacob and King David. These bureaucrats who have sold their souls to the Arab-Islamic countries are rewriting not only the history of Israel and the Jews, but that of the Western civilization.

Jew-hate is going viral.

85 days have passed since a Jewish pensioner in Paris, Sarah Halimi, was thrown out of the window by her neighbor, a Muslim, crying “Allah Akbar”. Where is the French government inquiry? Where is the obsequious French media, always ready to absolve Islam? Where are the French political authorities? And the French police? 

As Francis Kalifat, the president of the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France (the umbrella organization for Jewish organizations in France), wrote: “Attal-Halimi needs to be remembered as yet another casualty of this new hatred towards Jews that has been growing in our country since the beginning of the last decade”. That is probably exactly why the French establishment is presenting Halimi's killer as mentally insane when he is in fact a terrorist.

Meanwhile, the Islamic turbants who have ruined Iran have inaugurated in Teheran the clock that counts the days that are missing until the destruction of Israel. 8,411 .... A fantasy? As certainly as is Unesco's attempt to rewrite history.

No, dear Islamic-Iranian fanatics, French appeasers and Unesco history-deniers, in 2040 the Jewish State will still be there, more beautiful and strong than it is now. In Tel Aviv as in Hevron.

The German media and the demonization of Israel

From The Jerusalem Post By Manfred Gerstenfeld

Nazi Germany demonized the Jews by claiming that they were an inferior race. Tens of millions of contemporary Germans demonize Israel by viewing them as Nazis.

PEOPLE HOLD Palestinian flags during the Conference of Palestinians in Berlin in 2015.. (photo credit:REUTERS)

ARD, the first German Public Broadcasting network, has added new manipulations to the saga of the antisemitism documentary Chosen and Excluded – The Hate for Jews in Europe, co-produced by Joachim Schröder and Sophie Hafner. The EU-subsidized German-French public TV station ARTE had commissioned this documentary through WDR, an ARD member.

As far as is known, initially WDR did not raise any objections about the documentary before passing it on to ARTE. The latter, however, rejected the movie claiming that it had professional shortcomings and did not meet contractual terms.

Thereupon, the largest German national daily, Bild, broadcast the documentary online for 24 hours – for which it had no copyright. Thus this documentary was uploaded to YouTube. In response to the growing publicity around the censorship scandal, ARD decided to air the documentary late on the evening of June 21.

The film was maimed by WDR in an unprecedented way. There was an introduction that directed viewers how to view the documentary; in addition WDR added frequent inserts questioning the veracity of elements of the film. Furthermore, the day before the broadcast, WDR posted a “fact check” on its website listing close to 30 “errors” or “untruths” in the film. Some of these “fact checks” are baseless at first glance. Many others are convincingly contested.

Moreover, NGO Monitor wrote a letter to WDR detailing that the broadcaster had defamed it in their fact check. NGO Monitor asked for an immediate retraction of these remarks.

Thereafter, ARD added yet another manipulation.

Following the broadcast of the documentary, a panel discussion was held with the well-known talk-show host Sandra Maischberger. The producers of the documentary, however, were not invited to participate.

The panel was unbalanced. It did include three prominent critics of Israel versus two pro-Israel experts.

Moreover WDR’s chief broadcasting executive, Jörg Schönenborn, represented his station.

The quality German daily Die Welt wrote that only the two pro-Israelis among the panelists could be considered experts: historian Michael Wolfssohn and Israeli-Arab Ahmad Mansour, now living in Berlin.

The article said of the latter: “hardly anybody knows more than he about Islamic antisemitism in Europe.”

About the others it said: “Rolf Verleger [a professor of psychology] qualified only because he is a Jew who criticizes Israel.”

There was also a German journalist, Gemma Pörzgen, “an expert on apartheid policies in South Africa and about Eastern Europe.” She had already heavily criticized the movie on Facebook. The other anti-Israeli panelist was former Christian Democrat federal minister Norbert Blüm. Die Welt wrote: “He was there because he is always there. And because he has profiled himself as an Israel critic.” Blüm is also an indirect Holocaust inverter. In 2009 he linked Nazi persecution of the Jews with atrocities against Palestinians.

In 2002, Blüm stated that the Jewish state was conducting a “Vernichtungskrieg” against the Palestinians.

This is a German expression for a war of extermination.

Many decades before the Second World War invasion of the Soviet Union, this term was used for the German genocide of the Herero tribe in South West Africa.

Blüm’s inciting and false statement about Israel represented the opinion of a large majority of Germans at that time. In 2004, the University of Bielefeld undertook an opinion poll in Germany asking if interviewees agreed with the statement that Israel was conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians. Sixty-eight percent of those interviewed agreed.

Two additional studies were carried out by the same university in 2011 and 2014. The number of Germans who agreed with the statement had decreased to 48% and 40%, respectively. Additional polls by The Bertelsmann Foundation and the University of Bielefeld asked whether people agreed with the statement that Israel is acting toward the Palestinians like Nazis acted toward the Jews. The number of Germans who agreed with this was more erratic. In 2004, 51% of respondents agreed, while in 2007, 30% of respondents agreed. In 2014, 27% agreed and by 2015 the percentage of those interviewed had increased to 41%.

If Blüm and the large number of Germans who believe as he does were correct in their perception about the invented Israeli “war of extermination,” the filmmakers could not have shown any Palestinian patients being treated during visits at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. During WWII it took the Germans only two years to murder two million people, predominantly Jews, in three extermination camps: Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec.

Nazi Germany demonized the Jews by claiming that they were an inferior race. Tens of millions of contemporary Germans demonize Israel by viewing them as Nazis. In many other European countries a similar demonization of Israel takes place. However, there both the media and politicians are complicit in having created this atmosphere.

In Germany, most politicians, except a few from the mainstream – like Blüm or incidentally the country’s Socialist Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, and some from the Left Party – have been reluctant to use extreme verbal incitement against Israel.

Since people are not born Israel-defamers, it is evident that Germany is a country where the huge demonization of Israel mainly originates from part of the broadcasting and media companies. By its unprecedented maiming of the documentary about antisemitism, ARD has greatly damaged an important attempts to counteract this demonization.

The author is emeritus chairman of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, and the International Leadership Award by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.