Did they
run away from ISIS and accordingly hate us in the Assad-Hezbollah-Iranian
idiom? Or did they escape Assad and despise us in the rabid Jihadist vein?
 |
| No one
was about to shoot him, sadistically torture his wife or bash the baby’s head |
When it suits them, Israel’s left-wingers tug
manipulatively at Jewish heartstrings. They know how to play us – or so they
think.
And thus Labor leader Isaac Herzog would have us believe that just because we are descendants of persecuted refugees (literally running for their very lives), it now behooves us to open the gates of our still-beleaguered mini-state to the still-inimical descendants of those who denied asylum to distraught Jewish refugees (and thereby sentenced them to death).
Out to garner warm accolades from the indefatigable do-gooder set, Herzog urges that Israel admit Syrian refugees – the very ones who imbibe Nazi-like Judeophobic propaganda with their mothers’ milk. There’s no doubt that they hate us. The only question is whether they ran away from ISIS and accordingly hate us in the Assad-Hezbollah-Iranian idiom or whether they escaped Assad and despise us in the rabid Jihadist vein.
Conceivably, by Herzog’s reckoning, ushering into our midst outright intractable enemies is a sure-fire vote-getter. Besides, it appears that no pretext to embarrass the government is taboo. And so, to underscore his ploy, Herzog has posted on his Facebook page nothing less than the contention that those who disagree with him: “have forgotten what it means to be Jews”.
By so saying, he and like-minded beautiful souls (such as – how else? – Meretz’s Zehava Gal-On and Yesh Atid’s Elazar Stern) draw the analogy between existential Jewish desperation in the years leading up to the Holocaust (which the Arab world, including Syria, avidly supported and assisted) and the present Third World craving for Germany’s (or Britain’s) standard of living (versus that of Turkey, Hungary and even France).
Herzog’s very comparison not only insults our intelligence but it also insults the memories of yesteryear’s “unwanted Jews” (as the British Foreign Office shamelessly called them). Herzog should know better.
Recent scenes in Hungary were instructive. Syrians migrants (and among them also such non-Arab non-refugees as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) had no fear of grievous bodily harm, to say nothing of mass execution. Defiance posed no mortal risk. The hot-blooded father who pushed his wife and infant son onto the train tracks amid hysterical shouts impressed world opinion with his presumed plight.
To Europeans such volatile carryings-on denote utter hopelessness. But Western onlookers don’t know that a display of pseudo-impulsive out-of-control rage is part of the Mideastern body-language. Appearing to go crazy and throwing frightening tantrums is a common mode of expression in this region. Exhibiting an apparent deranged devil-may-care anger/aggression is hardly unconventional.
Furthermore, the man who seemed to go berserk could afford to be choosy, make demands of the local forces and flout their authority with all the self-stoked frenzy he could muster. No one was about to shoot him, sadistically torture his wife or bash the baby’s head.
But the bloodiest brutality is exactly is what the Jews once herded at Hungarian rail terminals knew for a fact would be their lot. They weren’t demanding, clamoring, chanting, shrieking or in any way expecting to force the troops around them to do their bidding. In the end they ended up in the Auschwitz crematoria, dispatched there by some of the forebears of some of those who now welcome Syrians to Bavaria with flowers and toys.
Reduced to its bare nitty-gritty, the big picture looms grotesque. Germany which once committed the greatest hate crime in history against Jews now appears to make amends by showering latter-day Jew-haters with kindness.
Should we participate in this travesty just because it has been made trendy by kitsch-mongers the world over? According Herzog, this is no less than the essence of our Jewishness.
We’re paradoxically obliged to surrender our most basic survival instincts for the sake of good press abroad – although it’s improbable that anyone would pat us on the back for yet another idealistic idiocy.
Our self-destructive altruism, assuming anyone at all acknowledges it, would at most only generate pressure for a follow-up of taking in so-called Palestinian refugees as well.
If anything, Herzog lifted the lid off a Pandora’s Box that a wiser man would have left alone. But in truth, there’s no surprise here. Our sanctimonious Left has a proven track record.
Its ringleaders are the very ones who serially scare public opinion against hanging on to even a scrap of territory won in the 1967 war of self-defense imposed upon us. Pointedly omitting mention of this country’s nine-mile wide waistline and the acute vulnerability of its densest population centers, leftists warn that Israel will lose its Jewish identity should it fail to forthwith divest itself of all its strategic assets.
To hear them, since this country was indeed founded to afford Jews the one place on earth where they aren’t an endangered minority, even suicidal sacrifices are mandated to maintain said Jewish majority.
It was in the name of this Jewish majority that the Left inflicted the Oslo folly upon us in 1993. Yet few Israelis are aware that as part of its Oslo undertakings Israel had admitted 150,000 Palestinian Arabs ostensibly to facilitate “family reunions.” Needless to say their numbers have since swelled and massively inflated Arab population proportions within Israel proper – all in the name of preserving the Jewish majority.
The political Left, moreover, bitterly battles legislation geared to prevent a further Arab influx into the Jewish state in the fraudulent guise of family reunions.
The very notion that Israeli-Arab/Palestinian couples can “reunite” beyond the Green-Line grievously offends its sensibilities. Our Left hankers for the migration of ever-greater numbers of Arabs into our Jewish-majority sanctuary – all in the name of that hallowed Jewish majority they purportedly champion.
Simultaneously, leftist groups cannot abide the notion that Israel require its hypothetical peace partners to recognize its legitimacy as a Jewish state rather than as an undefined de facto entity and candidate for future Arabization.
Who cares if the entire Arab/Muslim sphere’s quite unconcealed strategy has always been to overrun Israel, wipe out its Jewish majority and then obliterate the tattered remains of insufferable Jewish sovereignty? In short, anyone has an inalienable right to this country but us. While Jews are painted as amoral usurpers/settlers, it is somehow their duty to be inundated by hostile Arabs, African infiltrators and even clans of Filipino economic migrants.
However viewed, the common denominator between disingenuous leftwing slogans and contradictory left-wing actions is the weakening of Israel as a Jewish state.
It’s time to recognize that anything which weakens Israel is eagerly espoused by leftwing manipulators – be it yielding territory to ever-implacable enemies, importing hostile Arabs, opposing legislation to decrease the danger of being overrun by would-be annihilators or even undermining efforts to mitigate the illegal (mostly Muslim) deluge from Africa. Some sub-Saharans already intone the mantra that “this is our country – for Muslims, not Jews”” To allow all the above because of our erstwhile refugee status, grates hard against the raison d’être of establishing and defending our Jewish state. Israel exists so that no Jew anywhere would be left without a safe haven in any storm. Our paramount concern should be to safeguard our safe haven and never let it be compromised in the slightest.
This isn’t paranoia. It’s realism.
What happened to refugee Jews in the 1930s and 1940s? Did anyone shelter them? The contrary is true.
Anti-Jewish antagonism doesn’t derive from foreign aversion to Israel’s supposed strength (i.e. our so far unbearably successful self-defense). It fulminated most disgracefully when the Jewish people couldn’t imaginably have been more helpless – on the eve of the Holocaust. Worse yet – this antagonism wasn’t merely rife in the Third Reich. It also flourished among the democracies, even if in a sinisterly duplicitous guise.
In 1938 (when German concentration camps already operated, Jewish heads were busted in the streets, Jewish businesses were vandalized, Jewish property was robbed, Jewish books were burned, Jewish children were kicked out of school and all Jews had to don yellow-star patches) put-upon representatives of the world’s democracies conferred in Evian-les-Bains, on Lake Geneva’s French shore, to deliberate what to do about the bothersome refugees (whom they expressly refrained from calling Jews, lest they offend the fuehrer).
But, to Hitler’s raucous delight, it all turned into an unabashed contest to find the most inaccessible and inhospitable exile for Nazism’s desperate outcasts – no improvement to speak of on Hitler’s initial intent to banish the Jews to Madagascar.
Britain resentfully refused to allow Jews into the land mandated to it as the Jewish National Home. The Nazi-sympathizing forebears of today’s Arabs made sure that vulnerable Jews wouldn’t be rescued. His Majesty’s appeasement-minded government willingly acquiesced (i.e. the 1941 Struma episode).
Jews were likewise excluded from the immense unpopulated spaces of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
American benevolence notwithstanding, fleeing Jews weren’t wanted in the Land of the Free either (i.e. the 1939 St. Louis episode).
In the spirit of Uncle Sam’s effusive compassion, 10,000 Jewish refugees were even barred from Alaska.
FDR, though, proposed dumping German Jews in Ethiopia or Central Africa. Others suggested that the Siberian arctic might be a preferable hardship to the rigors of the tropics for urbane Jews.
Britain finally came up with the uninhabitable hinterland jungles of faraway Guyana, or as it was then known – British Guiana. Even so, London’s bureaucrats dragged their feet only to be rendered irrelevant by the “final solution.”
To be sure, the world’s holier-than-thou hypocrites have no more sympathy for Jews in our day. The only difference is that we are independent in our own historic homeland.
That’s why we can never remotely countenance the notion of endangering our precarious self-determination by allowing even limited entry (whatever “limited” means) to an enemy population. Our overriding rationale is to never again become refugees ourselves.
We can take it for granted that no kindness would be shown us in tragic circumstances.
Rather than try to curry favor with enduringly ill-intentioned world opinion, Herzog would do well to memorize what his party’s founding father David Ben-Gurion said to the “civilized nations” in 1942: “As long as the bias against the Jewish people continues, we will not believe the sincerity of your pronouncements about justice, freedom and truth.”
www.sarahhonig.com Debunking the Bull, Sarah Honig’s book, was recently published by Gefen.
And thus Labor leader Isaac Herzog would have us believe that just because we are descendants of persecuted refugees (literally running for their very lives), it now behooves us to open the gates of our still-beleaguered mini-state to the still-inimical descendants of those who denied asylum to distraught Jewish refugees (and thereby sentenced them to death).
Out to garner warm accolades from the indefatigable do-gooder set, Herzog urges that Israel admit Syrian refugees – the very ones who imbibe Nazi-like Judeophobic propaganda with their mothers’ milk. There’s no doubt that they hate us. The only question is whether they ran away from ISIS and accordingly hate us in the Assad-Hezbollah-Iranian idiom or whether they escaped Assad and despise us in the rabid Jihadist vein.
Conceivably, by Herzog’s reckoning, ushering into our midst outright intractable enemies is a sure-fire vote-getter. Besides, it appears that no pretext to embarrass the government is taboo. And so, to underscore his ploy, Herzog has posted on his Facebook page nothing less than the contention that those who disagree with him: “have forgotten what it means to be Jews”.
By so saying, he and like-minded beautiful souls (such as – how else? – Meretz’s Zehava Gal-On and Yesh Atid’s Elazar Stern) draw the analogy between existential Jewish desperation in the years leading up to the Holocaust (which the Arab world, including Syria, avidly supported and assisted) and the present Third World craving for Germany’s (or Britain’s) standard of living (versus that of Turkey, Hungary and even France).
Herzog’s very comparison not only insults our intelligence but it also insults the memories of yesteryear’s “unwanted Jews” (as the British Foreign Office shamelessly called them). Herzog should know better.
Recent scenes in Hungary were instructive. Syrians migrants (and among them also such non-Arab non-refugees as Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) had no fear of grievous bodily harm, to say nothing of mass execution. Defiance posed no mortal risk. The hot-blooded father who pushed his wife and infant son onto the train tracks amid hysterical shouts impressed world opinion with his presumed plight.
To Europeans such volatile carryings-on denote utter hopelessness. But Western onlookers don’t know that a display of pseudo-impulsive out-of-control rage is part of the Mideastern body-language. Appearing to go crazy and throwing frightening tantrums is a common mode of expression in this region. Exhibiting an apparent deranged devil-may-care anger/aggression is hardly unconventional.
Furthermore, the man who seemed to go berserk could afford to be choosy, make demands of the local forces and flout their authority with all the self-stoked frenzy he could muster. No one was about to shoot him, sadistically torture his wife or bash the baby’s head.
But the bloodiest brutality is exactly is what the Jews once herded at Hungarian rail terminals knew for a fact would be their lot. They weren’t demanding, clamoring, chanting, shrieking or in any way expecting to force the troops around them to do their bidding. In the end they ended up in the Auschwitz crematoria, dispatched there by some of the forebears of some of those who now welcome Syrians to Bavaria with flowers and toys.
Reduced to its bare nitty-gritty, the big picture looms grotesque. Germany which once committed the greatest hate crime in history against Jews now appears to make amends by showering latter-day Jew-haters with kindness.
Should we participate in this travesty just because it has been made trendy by kitsch-mongers the world over? According Herzog, this is no less than the essence of our Jewishness.
We’re paradoxically obliged to surrender our most basic survival instincts for the sake of good press abroad – although it’s improbable that anyone would pat us on the back for yet another idealistic idiocy.
Our self-destructive altruism, assuming anyone at all acknowledges it, would at most only generate pressure for a follow-up of taking in so-called Palestinian refugees as well.
If anything, Herzog lifted the lid off a Pandora’s Box that a wiser man would have left alone. But in truth, there’s no surprise here. Our sanctimonious Left has a proven track record.
Its ringleaders are the very ones who serially scare public opinion against hanging on to even a scrap of territory won in the 1967 war of self-defense imposed upon us. Pointedly omitting mention of this country’s nine-mile wide waistline and the acute vulnerability of its densest population centers, leftists warn that Israel will lose its Jewish identity should it fail to forthwith divest itself of all its strategic assets.
To hear them, since this country was indeed founded to afford Jews the one place on earth where they aren’t an endangered minority, even suicidal sacrifices are mandated to maintain said Jewish majority.
It was in the name of this Jewish majority that the Left inflicted the Oslo folly upon us in 1993. Yet few Israelis are aware that as part of its Oslo undertakings Israel had admitted 150,000 Palestinian Arabs ostensibly to facilitate “family reunions.” Needless to say their numbers have since swelled and massively inflated Arab population proportions within Israel proper – all in the name of preserving the Jewish majority.
The political Left, moreover, bitterly battles legislation geared to prevent a further Arab influx into the Jewish state in the fraudulent guise of family reunions.
The very notion that Israeli-Arab/Palestinian couples can “reunite” beyond the Green-Line grievously offends its sensibilities. Our Left hankers for the migration of ever-greater numbers of Arabs into our Jewish-majority sanctuary – all in the name of that hallowed Jewish majority they purportedly champion.
Simultaneously, leftist groups cannot abide the notion that Israel require its hypothetical peace partners to recognize its legitimacy as a Jewish state rather than as an undefined de facto entity and candidate for future Arabization.
Who cares if the entire Arab/Muslim sphere’s quite unconcealed strategy has always been to overrun Israel, wipe out its Jewish majority and then obliterate the tattered remains of insufferable Jewish sovereignty? In short, anyone has an inalienable right to this country but us. While Jews are painted as amoral usurpers/settlers, it is somehow their duty to be inundated by hostile Arabs, African infiltrators and even clans of Filipino economic migrants.
However viewed, the common denominator between disingenuous leftwing slogans and contradictory left-wing actions is the weakening of Israel as a Jewish state.
It’s time to recognize that anything which weakens Israel is eagerly espoused by leftwing manipulators – be it yielding territory to ever-implacable enemies, importing hostile Arabs, opposing legislation to decrease the danger of being overrun by would-be annihilators or even undermining efforts to mitigate the illegal (mostly Muslim) deluge from Africa. Some sub-Saharans already intone the mantra that “this is our country – for Muslims, not Jews”” To allow all the above because of our erstwhile refugee status, grates hard against the raison d’être of establishing and defending our Jewish state. Israel exists so that no Jew anywhere would be left without a safe haven in any storm. Our paramount concern should be to safeguard our safe haven and never let it be compromised in the slightest.
This isn’t paranoia. It’s realism.
What happened to refugee Jews in the 1930s and 1940s? Did anyone shelter them? The contrary is true.
Anti-Jewish antagonism doesn’t derive from foreign aversion to Israel’s supposed strength (i.e. our so far unbearably successful self-defense). It fulminated most disgracefully when the Jewish people couldn’t imaginably have been more helpless – on the eve of the Holocaust. Worse yet – this antagonism wasn’t merely rife in the Third Reich. It also flourished among the democracies, even if in a sinisterly duplicitous guise.
In 1938 (when German concentration camps already operated, Jewish heads were busted in the streets, Jewish businesses were vandalized, Jewish property was robbed, Jewish books were burned, Jewish children were kicked out of school and all Jews had to don yellow-star patches) put-upon representatives of the world’s democracies conferred in Evian-les-Bains, on Lake Geneva’s French shore, to deliberate what to do about the bothersome refugees (whom they expressly refrained from calling Jews, lest they offend the fuehrer).
But, to Hitler’s raucous delight, it all turned into an unabashed contest to find the most inaccessible and inhospitable exile for Nazism’s desperate outcasts – no improvement to speak of on Hitler’s initial intent to banish the Jews to Madagascar.
Britain resentfully refused to allow Jews into the land mandated to it as the Jewish National Home. The Nazi-sympathizing forebears of today’s Arabs made sure that vulnerable Jews wouldn’t be rescued. His Majesty’s appeasement-minded government willingly acquiesced (i.e. the 1941 Struma episode).
Jews were likewise excluded from the immense unpopulated spaces of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
American benevolence notwithstanding, fleeing Jews weren’t wanted in the Land of the Free either (i.e. the 1939 St. Louis episode).
In the spirit of Uncle Sam’s effusive compassion, 10,000 Jewish refugees were even barred from Alaska.
FDR, though, proposed dumping German Jews in Ethiopia or Central Africa. Others suggested that the Siberian arctic might be a preferable hardship to the rigors of the tropics for urbane Jews.
Britain finally came up with the uninhabitable hinterland jungles of faraway Guyana, or as it was then known – British Guiana. Even so, London’s bureaucrats dragged their feet only to be rendered irrelevant by the “final solution.”
To be sure, the world’s holier-than-thou hypocrites have no more sympathy for Jews in our day. The only difference is that we are independent in our own historic homeland.
That’s why we can never remotely countenance the notion of endangering our precarious self-determination by allowing even limited entry (whatever “limited” means) to an enemy population. Our overriding rationale is to never again become refugees ourselves.
We can take it for granted that no kindness would be shown us in tragic circumstances.
Rather than try to curry favor with enduringly ill-intentioned world opinion, Herzog would do well to memorize what his party’s founding father David Ben-Gurion said to the “civilized nations” in 1942: “As long as the bias against the Jewish people continues, we will not believe the sincerity of your pronouncements about justice, freedom and truth.”
www.sarahhonig.com Debunking the Bull, Sarah Honig’s book, was recently published by Gefen.
