Jake Wallis Simons
Spiked, Dec. 23, 2023
“Fascinating research by two German economic historians, Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth, has revealed that areas of Germany in which people burned Jews at the stake in the 14th century, blaming them for the Black Death, were more likely to vote for the Nazis 600 years later. This is despite the fact that Jews had been absent from the regions in question for 400 of those years.”
As the end of the year draws close, it’s clear the oldest hatred is back with a vengeance.
Following Hamas’s pogrom in Israel on 7 October, and Israel’s assault on Hamas in response, every day has brought new examples of Israelophobia. One episode from December that stands out in my mind was a statement from the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols. He said that the Jewish state had shot two women in a church in Gaza ‘in a cold-blooded killing’. But how did the clergyman, from the comfort of his home in London and having carried out no investigation, know with such certainty that it was a ‘cold-blooded killing’?
Similarly, Alex Crawford, Sky News’ most prominent foreign correspondent, tweeted at the start of December that Israel was barring entry for journalists into Gaza in order to hide its ‘war crimes’. Charges of ‘war crimes’ would need to be proven by a court of law. Yet without even being in Gaza, and presumably without any legal training, Crawford felt entitled to place the black cap of the hanging judge upon her head.
The ease with which supposedly impartial observers have unwittingly become activists belies something darker – the willingness to believe the very worst of the Jewish State. It has become commonplace to airily assert that Israel is committing ‘genocide’. And it has become commonplace to talk of its disregard for Palestinian life, especially the life of Palestinian children. Little wonder the fate of neonatal babies has been placed by Hamas at the very centre of its propaganda campaign. Hamas knows this will be lapped up by the world’s media. Why is this? Could it be because there has been a racist association between Jews and the murder of Gentile children since 1144, when the blood libel was invented in Norwich? Whether people realise it or not, the Israelophobia we see today contains dark echoes of an old anti-Semitism. … [To read the full article, click here]
________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________
US Media Now Numb to Antisemitism
JP Editorial
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 24, 2023
“Back in 2017, during the first few months of Donald Trump’s presidency, American media outlets reported on every single cemetery that was desecrated with swastikas or any bomb threat against Jewish institutions. Suddenly, six years later, a bomb threat against a synagogue isn’t breaking news anymore, and antisemitic flyers being distributed in Jewish-populated neighborhoods aren’t even mentioned nationally.”
Nationwide, American news media has gotten so used to antisemitic attacks across the United States that it has become numb to their existence, while most of the coverage is on local news outlets.
American Jews cannot remember when the rate of antisemitic attacks and vandalism has been so dramatic and violent. Since the Hamas massacre in Israel on October 7, antisemitic incidents in the US reached the highest number during any two months since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking them in 1979, according to preliminary data released recently.
Between October 7 and December 7, ADL recorded a total of 2,031 antisemitic incidents, more than four times the 465 incidents recorded during the same period in 2022, representing a 337% increase.
This includes 40 incidents of physical assault, 337 of vandalism, 749 of verbal or written harassment, and 905 rallies where there was antisemitic rhetoric, expressions of support for terrorism against the State of Israel, and/or anti-Zionism. On average, over those 61 days, Jews in the US experienced nearly 34 antisemitic incidents daily.
The data showed a significant increase in antisemitic incidents, including a tragic one in Los Angeles where a Jewish man lost his life as a result of injuries received during an anti-Israel protest.
Approximately 250 incidents specifically targeted Jewish sites like synagogues and university Hillels. On college campuses, there was a noticeable rise in antisemitic activity, with 400 recorded incidents, a stark contrast to the mere 33 reported in the same time frame in 2022. … [To read the full article, click here]
________________________________________________________
Jewish Voices for Hate
Joel K. Greenberg
Tablet, Dec. 18, 2023
“I asked him if he remembered when our rabbi believed that calling for the destruction of Israel from the synagogue pulpit was acceptable, and whether he understood that the synagogue had invited these poisonous ideas and organizations into our Jewish communal space—and in this way should be seen as, in fact, having participated in legitimizing them.”
My family and I used to be members at a Conservative synagogue. It seemed like a good match for us. We celebrated many family milestones there, and became friends with a number of families and other congregants, including a prominent judge.
But 20 years ago, something strange happened. The rabbi invited several Jewish speakers to address the congregation, from the pulpit, about the “boycott, divestment, and sanctions” (BDS) movement against Israel—namely, in favor of BDS. The rabbi argued that “the Jewish tent” was, or ought to be, large enough to accommodate all reasonable opinions, and he believed this was one.
I, on the other hand, was horrified. As a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s Nazi-hunting unit, the Office of Special Investigations, I came face-to-face with the foot soldiers of Nazi Germany and its “master plan” to exterminate European Jews. These men and women had been taught to think of Jews not as human, but as vermin. When I deposed them in the 1980s, four decades after they committed their heinous acts, they still clung to that view—giving me a valuable lesson in the longevity of hateful ideologies, and cautioning me against being at all tolerant of anyone whose views single out and spread lies about the Jewish people.
But one didn’t need that experience to understand what was wrong with what we were hearing from that pulpit. Regardless of the pseudo-sophisticated ideas and academic language these speakers couched their talk in, underneath it all was clearly a position that would result in the destruction of Israel—and the displacement, or worse, of its more than 7 million Jews. And that wasn’t merely another argument competing in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas; it was a call for annihilating the world’s sole Jewish state and depriving the Jews, and Jews alone, of the dignity of self-determination and the right to an indigenous homeland. This, I believed, was a dangerous idea with potentially disastrous consequences, and no Jewish space had any business tolerating, let alone promoting, it.
I tried talking to other congregants. Most dismissed my concerns. Along with the few others who saw how disturbing this was, we approached the rabbi. We tried to explain that this wasn’t an issue of freedom of speech or free inquiry (or “viewpoint diversity,” as it came to be known), in part because these particular views were widely available to any member of the community who wanted to pursue them: They were then, and are even more so now, prevalent throughout academia, the arts, and the media. The speakers were free to spew venomous ideas in the public square; doing so inside synagogues was neither a right, nor a privilege that should be afforded. … [To read the full article, click here]
