Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Post-1945 anti-Semitism

Child survivors of Auschwitz Photo: Reuters

The acclaimed British novelist Howard Jacobson opened his speech at the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem last October with piercing sarcasm: “The question is rhetorical. When will Jews be forgiven the Holocaust? Never.”
However, there has been a shift in the underpinnings of anti-Semitism. Israel has become the collective Jew among the nations, as the late French historian Léon Poliakov said about the new metamorphosis of Jew-hatred.
Jacobson was piggy-backing on the eye-popping insight of the Israel psychoanalyst Zvi Rex, who reportedly said: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.”
The anti-Semitic logic at work here is Europe’s pathologically guilt-filled response to the Holocaust, which, in short, is to shift the onus of blame to the Jews to cleanse one’s conscience. Two German-Jewish Marxist philosophers – Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno – coined an esoteric sociological term for what unfolded in post-Shoah Germany: Guilt-defensiveness anti-Semitism.

Benjamin Weinthal -- The Jerusalem Post

Nazi Germany prepared the world for the acceptance of Jews as sub-human, unworthy of sharing society with decent people of Aryan ancestry, the Nordic ideal. Nazi propaganda portrayed Jews as wretchedly nasty specimens of failed humanity, to be considered equal to vermin that afflict society, an obvious scourge that required cleansing, methodically and surgically, to be removed from the body of the world's populations.

Adolf Hitler's campaign began in Germany and encompassed the European countries his stormtroopers and armed forces would subjugate, and where concentration camps and work camps and death camps would be built, and accepted as a necessary means to restrain Jews from contaminating the larger community of wherever it was in Europe they had been part of its life for hundreds and thousands of years.

The dehumanization of Jews was largely successful, in part because Jews already in much of Europe occupied a very low standard of esteem, for anti-Semitism was well established and the oppression of Jews well entrenched. In Germany, Jews were more loyal than Goebbels himself to the country they loved and the culture they adored and became an integral part of. They would not, could not and did not believe that loyal Germans such as they would ever represent a target for extermination.

The world, and Europe in particular, but certainly not exclusively, is seeing a return to the old anti-Semitism, tinctured now with a denial of any such accusation being occasioned simply because Israel is being criticized, outlawed, slandered, and submitted to a widening global boycott-divestment-sanctions movement spearheaded by Palestinian 'human-rights' leaders, whose program has been heartily adapted by Western churches, unions, academic bodies and the liberal-left.

Europe is leading the way in this, as Europe tends to do. All the more so now that Europe has been swamped by its generosity in offering haven to tens of thousands, millions of Muslims eager to escape the confining limits permitted them in lifestyle and financial aspirations in their Muslim-majority countries of birth and inheritance, where anti-Judaism is complementary to the Islamism currently in practise.

"In the past anti-Semites boycotted Jewish businesses and today they call for the boycott of the Jewish state, and by the way, only the Jewish state. I think that it is important that the boycotters be exposed for what they are. They are classical anti-Semites in modern garb", stated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a group of Jewish-American leaders visiting Jerusalem. Preaching, as it were, to those not needing of conversion.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, February 17, 2014. Photo by AP

On the other hand, speaking loudly and in great anticipatory distress of things yet to come impacting dreadfully on Jews globally and Israel in particular, to the international community, protesting loudly to Europe, falls on somewhat deafened ears. While Mr. Netanyahu claims that Israel is battling BDS by exposing the boycotters' real agenda and their anti-Semitic hypocrisy, his audience is limited to those not afflicted with that deadly viral agent of anti-Semitism.

Dark images of the Nazi slander that effectively boycotted Jews from academia, the courts, employment and life in general in preparation for the Final Solution are brought to the fore by the current malicious deliberation of detractors of Israel intent on extracting their bleeding pound of flesh from an intact body representing liberal democracy in a world hostile to freedom and peace. More than evidenced by daily life in the larger Middle East.

Where oppression and endemic poverty of the disenfranchised, imprisonment, torture and death awaits those who engage in protest of political dissent, who are gender-challenged, who worship a religion other than Islam, who question the established order of minority sects ruling over majority sects, and who see profit in defaming and challenging the West, while using the West's treasury-for-oil to fund jihadist terror groups reflecting the counter-reality to Israel's presence.

Labels: Anti-Semitism, Boycott/Divestment, Europe, Hypocrisy, Israel, Middle East, Sanctions