It is why so many look the other way at the massacre of civilians
By the waters of Babylon there we sat down. Yea, We wept. When we remembered thee Zion…
For there we were carried away captive.
The Jews. The Jews.
It is always, so sadly, the Jews. Always.
There is not a humiliation, a torment, an affliction or misery, not a savagery, or horror, either contemplated or put into merciless execution, known to the human mind in its darkest most ungoverned contemplation — none — that with full rage-powered hate and sadistic purpose has not been visited on the Jewish people.
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Every vile malice known to the human heart has rained down on Jews since (at least) the days of the Babylonian Captivity — that was 2,700 hundred years ago — has had its “play date” on the minds and bodies — man, woman, child and elder — of Jews.
You may draw a viciously straight line from long ago Babylon to the 20th century of hate-crazed Hitler’s Berlin, and it will show a dread continuum. A continuum of ruthless contempt and murderous persecution of the Jews in every age or century you care to name. Pogroms, exile, blood libels and manic conspiracy theories — the Protocol of the Elders of Zion being the grand, despicable template.
Any normal mind and any decent human heart would think that after Hitler and the Nazis, after their remoreless torture and murder of six million Jews — six million! — that the hate for Jews, a hate that even has its own discrete category, antisemitism — so strong and perdurable has it been — would have been exhausted, or satisfied. That the witnessing world be finally sick of this plague disease, this deepest, bleakest shadow on the human conscience.
Hitler was antisemitism incarnate. His regime, Hell, brought to earth just and solely for the Jewish people. Gehenna. Akeldama, a Field of Blood.
Well, that normal mind and heart would have been sheltering a delusion. The powers of the world (or I should write, some of them anyway) for a while mouthed a grief show for the Jews, and gave out the pious resolve of Never Again.
Well, just as Oct. 7 in Israel, and the near five weeks following that day has egregiously manifested, the resolve was a mime, and Never Again but a pledge of hypocrites. Hatred for Jews, antisemitism, is a never-dying ember. All the inconceivable trials and torments of the Jewish people, the furious attempt of the previous century, literally, to exterminate them, all of them, merely put a hold on Jew-hatred, pushed it off stage (even then only in some countries) gave it a false “recess.”
No? How then can it be after a surprise onslaught, by fanatic, death-obsessed Hamas terrorists, the torture and rape, of at least 1200 people and the kidnapping of hundreds more, has the whole western world not been holding its breath lost in sympathetic shock for what is bitterly and correctly nominated as the worst menacing of the Jewish people since the Holocaust?
Anywhere else, any other democratic state, put under an equal, proportionate horror, wounded to its very foundation, would have magnetized the attention of the world, called forth tribute visits and delegations from world leaders, and vast public lamentations for the killed and tortured and kidnapped. The dear, dead-to-its-purpose United Nations would have hauled itself from its slumbers and packed off “special rapporteurs” by the dozens to document and denounce a vile horror. TV networks — perhaps even the CBC if it could find its way around to the proper terminology, evidently a real test for Tait — would every day since (like 9/11) be giving fresh detail, doing “specials” with those spared, but whose children, babies, and elderly parents were either taken, tortured or killed.
And Hamas, or its equivalent in this projection, would be deplored, condemned, sought out and brought to retribution.
This has emphatically not been the case. Why?
Because it happened in Israel. The still-infant state of Jews. And so it comes to pass that just a month-plus after the terror-raid, so many of the great capitals of the world are the scene of huge demonstrations, all coherently organized and simultaneous — not in solidarity with Israel and its citizens, but thick with raging antisemites, mouthing accusations at Israel as (these are truly vicious and meant to wound) perpetrating a genocide, its president as an avatar of Hitler himself, mocking the dead, and chanting “from the river to the sea,” an only slightly muffled call for the full end of the Jewish state.
Even here in tranquil Canada, synagogues and Jewish schools shot at or firebombed, shops menaced because they have Jewish owners, the same horrid chant of river and sea, and our Jewish citizens feeling that cold wind again, that to be Jewish it is now needful to be careful.
Someone skids on a “rainbow crosswalk” here and the Trudeau leadership gallops to protest the hate. Twelve hundred Jews slaughtered in a storm of real hate and you can taste the reluctance to publicly condemn Hamas, excoriate the hatefulness of some of the street demonstrations, and offer real succor. Flights to Ukraine have been almost a daily thing, Ukraine’s leader invited to our Parliament, frequent condemnations of Russia in the most explicit language. The pogrom of last month in Israel, by contrast, careful, exquisitely poised with simultaneous references to Islamophobia? A very curious yoking for this particular time.
From Babylon to Berlin the storyline does not vary. And from Berlin to last month in Israel. What a world. Jews under fear and anxiety — again. “Keep the world clean” posters with the Star of David going into a garbage bin, Jews being preached at to hold back, be “proportionate” — as even from the fanatics of Hamas there are public promises to have another Oct. 7 and another, till the ultimate goal of Hamas is reached — no more Israel.
Israel is the Job of nations. With this horrible difference. Job, after his immiseration, was restored. Those who hate Israel have a violently different end in mind.
National Post
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