SARAH HONIG: IT’S ALL CONNECTED
“What makes our times so chillingly similar to the era that conceived and tolerated the Holocaust is the broad social respectability accorded Jew-bashing.”
All the seemingly disjointed fragments of news that maddeningly disrupt the steamy summertime tediousness are in fact interrelated – disturbingly so.
The purportedly enlightened campaign against Jewish circumcision and the equally sanctimonious outcry against kosher slaughter (most gallingly and recently in the very same Poland whose soil is soaked with Jewish blood like no other spot on this planet) are links in the same chain that led to the European Union’s burgeoning anti-Israeli boycott (disingenuously hinged on the settlements pretext) and to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s artificial resuscitation of the moribund and grossly misnamed peace process (that hinges on the release of convicted murderers whose hands drip with Jewish blood).
The fact is that those who cannot abide ancient Jewish rituals for a variety of insincere excuses and who seek excuses to justify double standards against the Jewish state, stayed eerily silent when the Palestinian Authority demanded liberation for some of the most heinous perpetrators of hate crimes since the Holocaust (which Europe assiduously attempts to banalize/belittle).
No leading politician on the continent that presumes to set universal moral benchmarks had come up with even a marginal expression of discomfort. The apparent upshot is that there’s always justice on the Palestinian/Arab side and that there can never be any justice on the Israeli/Jewish side. It’s a built-in premise.
Thus the construction of Jewish homes in Jerusalem – where Jews had resided for many centuries and where they had formed the solid overwhelming majority going back to Ottoman rule (long before the advent of Zionism) – is something which progressive Europe cannot abide. It’s noteworthy that self-same Europe stayed remarkably calm when the Arab Legion violently violated the 1947 UN Partition Resolution and conquered the eastern half of Jerusalem. Due to the Arab 19-year-long occupation (1948-1967), East Jerusalem remained outside the green-tinted Armistice Line. Returning to the Arabs the fruits of their aggression is now the hallmark of Europe’s quest for virtue.
But while a bank branch in a Jewish neighborhood beyond the hallowed Green Line outlaws any dealings with the entire financial institution, letting loose outright butchers doesn’t so much as tickle those celebrated European sensibilities. Why? Given Europe’s history it won’t be a stretch to assume that it’s the identity of the victims that matters. They were Jews and Europe quite routinely gets over the shedding of Jewish blood.
If it weren’t so, Europe should have howled with outrage at the very suggestion by the PA that such convicts as Abu-Kharbish Salem Suleiman Mahmoud and Adham Ibrahim Jum’ah, both sentenced to life terms, be freed as the price of another chinwag with Israel.
On October 30, 1988 this inglorious pair lobbed firebombs at a civilian bus – line 961 – heading from Tiberias to Jerusalem. Although incendiary devices aimed at Israelis are treated indulgently abroad, they’re intended to cause grievous harm. They did just that to the bus on which 26-year-old Rachel Weiss travelled with her three sons – Nathaniel, Raphael and Ephraim – two toddlers and one baby. Rather than escape and save herself, Rachel tried to save her children but was engulfed in flames along with them.
David Delarosa, a 20-year-old soldier, did manage to flee before he saw Rachel and the tots. He then turned back to help them but was himself critically wounded. Corporal Delarosa succumbed to his agonizing injuries weeks later.
Now the international community’s icons of broadmindedness would have us believe that the cause of world harmony and fraternal goodwill would be best served if we set free those who with malice aforethought set out to burn innocent passengers.
The grisly nature of this crime (and others like it) as well as the identity of the victims are nowhere mentioned by any of the pompous pontificators who arrogantly preach to us. These details aren’t negligible incidentals. Although the heart of the matter, they’re deliberately obfuscated lest they highlight the clear pro-Arab bias of presumed impartial peace-promoters.
If it weren’t so, liberals worldwide would ask why the ostensibly moderate PA insists on springing the worst murderers – the very ones Israel had refused to swap during all previous episodes. Why are the bloodiest sadists upheld by official PA propaganda as heroic role-models for the young generation? Is the cause of peace boosted by glorifying the slayers of baby-Jews? Does this perhaps betray the fact that the Palestinians don’t genuinely yearn for coexistence but for an existence without Jews? Are Palestinians telling their own children that the only good Jews are dead Jews?
Should Europe be shocked? Should Kerry be dismayed? Should US President Barack Obama spare baby Ephraim Weiss a fraction of the emotion he lavished on Trayvon Martin? Should Obama wonder aloud how it feels to be Jewish and sense that the rest of the world considers you an expendable offering to the Moloch of whatever political correctness reigns at a given time and place?
But we better not hold our breath for Obama’s heartfelt sympathy. He managed to say nothing after the 2011 Fogel family massacre and after one-year-old Yonatan Palmer was murdered with his father in a rock-throwing incident at a time in which Obama already resided in the White House. He likewise kept expediently mum following the dreadful life-altering injuries inflicted on three-year-old Adelle Biton a few months ago, during another roadside stoning-fest.
Instead, Obama exerted excruciating pressure on Israel’s democratically elected leadership (the only one of its sort in this otherwise despotic and fanatic region) to release unrepentant genocidal murderers.
This blows our collective mind on many levels. First is the fact that Israeli babies, attacked for no reason, appear not to deserve the empathy reserved for Trayvon in less unambiguous circumstances (to say the least).
Moreover, there are practical considerations. The premature release of bloodcurdlingly callous mass-murderers isn’t likely to daunt those indoctrinated to adulate them. The awareness that perpetrators of the most atrocious of homicides won’t spend the rest of their days behind bars is likely to embolden their disciples. As with previous such releases, this one too will backfire brutally.
Then comes the whopping insult to our democracy and legal system. Our courts – autonomous like few others anywhere – deserve respect. Those whom Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas wants released to enhance his waning prestige aren’t – contrary to impressions imparted by foreign media – persecuted “prisoners of conscience,” locked up because of their beliefs and gallant championship of freedom.
These murderers were convicted after eminently fair trials with all the breaks of due process. They were granted legal representation replete with rights habitually denied defendants in Arab and Muslim countries, where instant kangaroo-court style rulings are the norm that the world blithely overlooks.
To ignore this basic is to make a laughing stock of Israel’s pedantic and ultra-liberal jurisprudence. All Israelis – especially those on the Left who make so much use of Israel’s famous judicial interventionism – ought to be insulted to the core by this American insolence. It’s unthinkable that our courts would be relied upon only when it suits a given agenda but that their decisions would be dishonored when it’s so dictated by diplomatic exigencies.
While Israeli verdicts and sentences are perennially set aside for Washington’s misjudged moves, American clemency is withheld from Jonathan Pollard who harmed nobody and who has served more than anyone else had for an espionage offense like his. In Pollard’s case, an inordinate sentence cannot be shortened but the two who burned a young mother and her tiny boys deserve to have their sentence commuted.
If this isn’t hypocrisy, it’s hard to pinpoint what is. It’s also hard to avoid the conclusion that had Pollard or the Weiss family not been Jewish, attitudes would have been vastly different.
This is what connects all those seemingly unconnected news reports. Minimal intellectual honesty compels us Jews to admit that we live in dangerous times – so dangerous that they cannot but remind us of the noxious atmosphere which led to the incomparable tragedy of the Holocaust.
Never in its annals was the phoenix-like Jewish state – literally arisen from the ashes of incinerated Jewish multitudes – so defamed, so unaccepted by the so-called family of nations and so tossed in a terrifying tempest of ill-will. Never since the 1930s have we experienced isolation so suffocating and so ubiquitous.
The vulgar bigotry of thugs – whether brown-shirted or skin-headed or keffiah-wrapped – was and is facilitated by the ideologically-honed vitriol of ostensibly exemplary, honorable sorts. They rationalize their abhorrence as decent and de rigueur. They were the ones who once made it possible for the storm troopers to terrorize and who now vindicate jihadist terror.
Once more these self-professed spokespersons of erudition and free-speech horrifyingly shout down and shut up the objects their scorn. They paint themselves as oppressed victims and slander Jews as ruthless oppressors.
When Jews are called Israelis, their maligners can fend off accusations of anti-Semitism. Such accusations are anyhow brandished as proof of manipulative intent to silence all criticism of the Jewish state. Calculated circuitous reasoning eventually turns Jew-haters into righteous persecuted underdogs, while Israelis are cast as ferocious hounds.
World peace will supposedly be secured by restraining these hounds. Submissive Jews/Israelis are presumably assured the affections of do-gooder ‘non-anti-Semites.’ Of course, vulnerable Jews weren’t ever loved Jews. In the 1930s Jews couldn’t have been more powerless or compliant. Nonetheless, their utter helplessness won them no compassion.
What makes our times so chillingly similar to the era that conceived and tolerated the Holocaust is the broad social respectability accorded Jew-bashing.
It matters little if the pretext is the fake ogre which the Nazis called “International Judaism,” or the state which the Jews established so they would never be as defenseless again. What matters is that Jewish self-defense in the framework of the Jewish state is as persistently demonized as was the nonexistent cabal of the Elders of Zion.
Jewish self-preservation today is as illegitimate as it was then and assailing it is as bon ton as in those dark days before the great cataclysm. It’s all connected.
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