RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.firstthings.com/

Soon after Sir Roger Scruton was appointed to advise the UK’s Ministry of Housing as chair of the new Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, certain Labour MPs accused him of being an anti-Semite. But there is more than a modicum of chutzpah in this charge.

The Labour Party itself stands credibly accused of anti-Semitism. The distinguished former Chief Rabbi of Britain, Lord Jonathan Sacks, has denounced Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as an “anti-Semite” who “has given support to racists, terrorists, and dealers of hate who want to kill Jews and remove Israel from the map.” Corbyn openly associates with terrorists who murder Jews. He has publicly described Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends.” The Iranian regime paid him to appear on a government television channel. And in 2016 he was photographed laying a wreath at the graves of members of the Black September terrorist organization that conducted the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre. In the photograph, Corbyn stood next to the chief of the terrorist organization PFLP.

Corbyn’s Jew-hatred is a running sore in British politics and has caused deep divisions in his own party. Earlier this month London’s Metropolitan Police made public a criminal investigation into Labour Party anti-Semitism. It is reasonable to suppose that the putative discovery of a mote in Scruton’s eye serves to detract attention from the beam in Jeremy Corbyn’s.

A 2014 speech Scruton gave in Budapest is the sole exhibit for the Labour party’s prosecution. During this speech, Scruton noted in passing that some Jewish intellectuals took a dim view of nationalism after the hideous experience of World War II, and that some moved in the orbit of George Soros, the preeminent adversary of the new Hungarian nationalism as exemplified by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

In response, an outpouring of support from the conservative camp has defended Scruton as “Britain’s greatest living philosopher,” “one of the great intellects of our age,” and “Britain’s most famous living philosopher.” I should like to add my voice to Sir Roger’s defense, first as a Jew, and second as a harsh critic of his work (see, for example, my First Things review of his recent book on Wagner). I have no prior reason to defend Scruton, but I am revolted by the Labour party’s spurious charges of anti-Semitism that trivialize a matter of urgent importance.

The distinguished British journalist Melanie Phillips, who has written frequently and fiercely on the matter of Jew-hatred, skewered the problem deftly:

Sir Roger said in a speech: “Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire.” Cue claims of antisemitism. But here’s the whole passage from which those words have been taken:

“Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire. People in these networks include many who are rightly suspicious of nationalism, regard nationalism as the major cause of the tragedy of Central Europe in the 20th century, and do not distinguish nationalism from the kind of national loyalty that I have defended in this talk. Moreover, as the world knows, indigenous antisemitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarians and Jews.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271899/mullah-terror-europe-joseph-puder

The Trump administration has been urging its European allies to adopt a tougher stance on Iran, emphasizing in particular the Islamic Republic’s terrorism on European soil. To corroborate the administration’s point, on October 30, 2018, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) announced that a Norwegian nationalized citizen of Iranian decent was arrested on suspicion of attempting the assassination of Iranian Arab separatists.

Lest we forget, the Iranian regime has masterminded and carried out the destruction of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, on March 17, 1992, as well as the Jewish Community Center called Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA) on July 18, 1994, in the same city. The embassy bombing took the lives of 29 people and injured 250, including Israeli diplomats, children and clergy from a nearby church. The AMIA bombing killed 87 people and over 100 were injured. In 1998, an intercepted call from the Iranian embassy in Buenos Aires proved conclusively that Iran was involved in the bombing. In 2006, Argentinian prosecutor Alberto Nisman accused top Iranian officials of orchestrating the bombings in Argentina’s capital. Nisman, an Argentinian Jew, was murdered on January 15, 2015. It is more than likely that the Iranian regime had a hand in it.

While Iranian terror is worldwide, Tehran’s operations in Europe at a time when the Ayatollah regime seeks European help in thwarting U.S. sanctions is most revealing. Weakened by internal dissent, it has resorted to assassinations which reveals the murderous nature of the regime. The target this time for the Iranian regime was the exiled leader of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz (ASMLA). According to Israeli media reports, the Mossad (Israel’s Intelligence agency) provided information to Denmark’s PET on the plot that helped prevent the assassination attempt.

Denmark, however, was not the only target for Iran’s murderous regime. The BBC News headline on October 2, 2018, proclaimed “France Blames Iran for Foiled Paris Bomb Plot.” According to the BBC, “On June 30th, Iranian opposition supporters gathered in Paris for a meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI). Guests included U.S. politicians Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, and Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump’s lawyer. The NCRI is considered to be the political arm of dissident group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), which Iran has designated as a terrorist organization. It later emerged that two Belgian nationals of Iranian origin – a husband and wife known as Amir A. and Nasimeh N. – had been arrested by Belgian police in possession of half a kilogram (1.1lb) of explosives and a detonator.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/europe_opting_for_submission_to_islam.html

Two seemingly unrelated events in Europe over the past 20 days point to what cannot be described other than as the slow suicide of European civilization. On November 9, Chancellor Merkel gave a speech in Berlin commemorating the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (lately renamed Pogromnacht). This 1938 event, which led to the willful destruction of 1400 synagogues, thousands of Jewish stores and the deportation of more than 30,000 Jews to the concentration camps, is widely considered the beginning of the Holocaust. For those familiar with Nazi history, though, the writing had been on the wall long before that.

What Hitler had in mind for the Jews is described in detail in his Mein Kampf and put in practice at the latest by the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935, which excluded Jews from German society, prohibited them from holding public office and marrying Germans and made them, in effect, stateless outcasts in their own country. As if to make sure that modern Holocaust doubters and anti-Semites, like labor leader Jeremy Corbin of the UK, have no place to hide, Hitler explained in detail his plans to annihilate the Jews to his military commanders in his Obersalzberg speech of August 22, 1939. “Who, after all,” said he, “speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians.”

The gist of Merkel’s speech was less about the commemoration of a dreadful historical event than a warning of the new wave of virulent anti-Semitism washing across Western Europe and assuming pandemic proportions in Muslim diaspora communities. For this, she should be congratulated, though she was less than candid in forgetting to mention that a good part of this explosion of anti-Semitism was caused by her in letting in two million mostly Muslim migrants, who get their anti-Semitism with their mothers milk. Nor did she mention that she had done her level best to perpetuate her awful policies by trying to force Eastern Europe to take migrants who have proven unwilling to integrate. Though Merkel is on her way out, it won’t be long before synagogues and Jewish businesses in Germany will have to be guarded by soldiers, as they already are in France.