According to S. J. Taylor, Stalin’s Apologist:
Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s Man in
Moscow,
p. 202 (Oxford University Press 1990), “. . .Soviet authorities
. . . require[d] that the shades of all windows
be pulled down on trains traveling through the North Caucasus, the Ukraine and
the Volga basin.” At pp. 239-40, Taylor says this famine “remains the
greatest man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish
Holocaust of the next decade.”
In
1932-3, the years of the great famine which followed the forced collectivisation
of the land, I travelled widely in the Soviet Union, writing a book which was
never published. I saw entire villages deserted, railway stations blocked by
crowds of begging families, and the proverbial
starving infants. . . . [T]hey were quite real, with stick-like arms, puffed up
bellies and cadaverous heads. I reacted to the brutal impact of reality on
illusion in a manner typical of the true believer. I was surprised and
bewildered—but the elastic shock-absorbers of my [Communist] Party training
began to operate at once. I had eyes to see, and a mind conditioned to explain
away what they saw. This “inner censor” is more reliable and effective than
any official censorship. . . .
Some Ukrainian accounts, and that of Muggeridge,
who covered the holodomor for the Manchester Guardian, take the
trouble to say that this mass starvation was imposed largely by Jews. Lazar M.
Kaganovich is often identified as an architect of the policy. A photograph in
Montefiore, Red Tsar, above, shows him personally searching a farm for
concealed food. In Muggeridge’s novel Winter in Moscow (1934) he appears
as Kokoshkin, “a Jew” and “Stalin’s chief lieutenant.”
Churchill’s views, as
expressed here, resemble those of the Times of London’s correspondent in
Russia, Robert Wilton. See George Gustav Telberg and Robert Wilton, The Last
Days of the Romanovs (1920), esp. pp. 222-30, 391 (“[t]aken according to
numbers of population, the Jews represented one in ten; among the komisars that
rule Bolshevik Russia they are nine in ten—if anything, the proportion of Jews
is still higher”), 392-93 and 400. The French version of the book, Les
Derniers Jours des Romanofs, also
published in 1920, contains a list of 556 top figures in the Bolshevik regime,
classified by ethnicity. The Jewish proportion is a bit over eight in ten,
including two-thirds of the leadership of the secret police. The non-Jews are
divided among various small categories—Russian, Lett, Armenian, German,
Georgian, etc. The list is absent from the slightly later English and American
editions, but is available online. See also John F. O’Conor, The Sokolov
Investigation (1971)(a translation, with commentary, of sections of Nikolai
Sokolov’s Enquête judiciaire sur l'assassinat de la famille impériale Russe),
especially for the comments of O’Conor and his sources on Wilton.[1]
Jews among the Bolsheviks who
imposed the holodomor of 1932-33 would have relished settling scores
after the 40 years of bloody pogroms that followed Czar Alexander II’s
assassination in 1881—especially the still-recent massacre of 50,000 to 100,000
Jews, mostly in the Ukraine, during the Russian civil war of 1918-21. (Far
greater numbers of gentiles, of course, also perished in that war; estimates run
well into the millions.)
Shahak, in Three
Thousand Years, above, ch. 4, traces Jewish “hatred and contempt” for
peasants— “a hatred of which I know no parallel in other societies”—back to the
great Ukrainian uprising of 1648-54, in which tens of thousands of “the accursed
Jews” (to quote the Ukrainian Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky) were killed.
Some say the number is more accurately stated in the hundreds of thousands.
Heinrich Graetz says the number “may well be. . . a quarter of a million.” See
his History of the Jews, vol. 5, p. 15 (1856-70, English tr., Jewish
Publication Society of America ed., 1956).
The Jews at the time
of the massacres were serving the Polish szlachta (nobility) and Roman
Catholic clergy on their Ukrainian latifundia as arendars—toll-, rent-
and tax-farmers, enforcers of corvee obligations, licensees of feudal
monopolies (e.g., on banking, milling, storekeeping, and distillation and sale
of alcohol), and as anti-Christian scourges who even collected tithes at the
doors of the peasants’ Greek Orthodox churches and exacted fees to open those
doors for weddings, christenings and funerals. They had life and death powers
over the local population (the typical form of execution being impalement), and
no law above them to which that population had recourse. See Graetz, vol. 5,
pp. 3-6; Subtelny, pp. 123-38; Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of
Poland, vol. 1, p. 444 (Oxford University Press, 1982); and Iwo Cyprian
Pogonowski, Jews in Poland, pp. 68-79, 283 (1993). According to
the last three of these sources, the arendars leased estates for terms of
only two or three years and had every incentive to wring the peasants
mercilessly, without regard to long-term consequences.
The best-known
contemporaneous account of the revolt is Nathan (Nata) ben Moses Hannover,
Yewen Mesulah, which appeared in Venice in 1653. An English translation was
published three centuries later as The Abyss of Despair (1950). Hannover
was well aware of the peasants’ grievances (see pp. 27-30 of The Abyss).
He described the massacres in the grimmest of terms, full of biblical
allusions. He then gave the rest of his life to the holy mysteries of Lurianic
cabbalism. As Graetz puts it (vol. 5, pp. 21-22), “that book of falsehoods,
the Zohar, [had] declared that in the year of the world 5408 (1648) the era of
redemption would dawn, and precisely in that year Sabbathai [Ze’evi] revealed
himself. . . as the messianic redeemer.” Sabbathai was a manic-depressive one
of whose followers, Samuel Primo, preached that “your lament and sorrow must be
changed into joy.” Spinoza and other rationalists were not amused. Thousands
of Sabbathai’s flock even followed him into “holy apostasy” when he converted to
Islam in 1666. His own conversion was under duress; theirs was not. Graetz’s
highly-readable account of the fervor (vol. 5, pp. 121-67) is similar in style
and tone to Gibbon’s account of the early Christian Church.
[T]he construction of the eschatological redemption in terms of the total
eradication of the nations, or at least in association with such an
expectation, has a potential of shaping a violent personality and might
contribute to. . . a violent mind-setting. For if one is hoping for God’s
redemption soon to come, and is inspired by the idea of a total vanquish-ing of
Israel’s enemies as an essential part of that redemption, one’s violent
inclinations are not entirely suppressed and in a sense they are being
fostered. (Emphasis added.)
Schremer’s paper was presented on May 5, 2002 at
the Yale Divinity School. The reference
in his title to suicide concerns the year 1096, when large numbers of Jews in
the Rhineland killed themselves and their own children, siblings and parents,
rather than submit to Crusaders’ efforts to convert them by force. By way of
explanation, Schremer quotes Sigmund Freud: “No neurotic harbors thoughts of
suicide which he has not turned back upon himself from murderous impulses
against others.” Schremer cites many biblical passages and rabbinical exegeses
that might feed such impulses.
For a much fuller discussion of this whole set
of issues, see Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb (English tr.,
University of California Press, 2006). At pp. 120-21 Yuval tells of prayers
that:
.
. . demonstrate the abyss of hostility and hatred felt by medieval Jews toward
Christians. And we have here not only hatred, but an appeal to God to kill
indiscriminately and ruthlessly, alongside a vivid description of the
anticipated horrors to be brought down upon the Gentiles. These pleas are
formulated in a series of verbs—“swallow them, shoot them, lop them off, make
them bleed, crush them, strike them, curse them, and ban them. . . destroy them,
kill them, smite them. . . crush them [again], abandon them, parch them”—and in
the best alphabetical tradition, the string of disasters the poet wishes for the
Gentiles goes on and on.
Yuval collects an abundance of such
material, from both before and after the events of 1096. In agreement with
Schremer, he says (p. 123) that “we are dealing here with a comprehensive
religious ideology that sees vengeance as a central component in its messianic
doctrine.” He repeats (p. 125) that this vengeance was to be “against the
Gentiles”—most of whom, it seems safe to say, were peasants—and that the
vengeance stood “at the very heart of the messianic process.” He says tellingly
(p. 134) that “the Christians were not unaware of the Jewish desire to see their
destruction.”[9]
The English translation
of Two
Nations was followed within six months
by Rabbi Dr. Ariel Toaff’s abortive publication in Italy of Pasque di Sangue:
Ebrei d’Europa e omicidi rituali
(Passovers of Blood: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murder)(2007). Toaff is a
professor of medieval and Renaissance history at Bar Ilan University, and son of
the former chief rabbi of Rome. Another Italian Jewish academic, Sergio
Luzzatto, a professor of history at the University of Turin, reviewed Toaff’s
book in Il Corriere della Sera (Feb. 6, 2007). The newspaper also
published extracts. According to Luzzatto, the book suggests that “from
1100 to about 1500. . . several crucifixions of Christian children really
happened. . . perhaps even many,” with their blood being used by
fundamentalist Ashkenazi Jews in Passover rites.
The Jewish Daily Forward (Feb.
18, 2007, available online) says “scholars have
. . . been quick to point out that Toaff is not
the only medieval Jewish historian to have cast a critical eye on the version of
history in which Jews emerge blameless in the face of the blood libel charge.”
The Jerusalem Post (Feb 7, 2007, available
online) says “Toaff refers to kabbalistic
descriptions of the therapeutic uses of blood and asserts that ‘a black market
flourished on both sides of the Alps, with Jewish merchants selling human blood,
complete with rabbinic certification of the product—kosher blood.’” Toaff told
Ha’aretz (Feb.
12, 2007, available online) that “over
many dozens of pages I proved the centrality of blood on Passover. Based on
many sermons, I concluded that blood was used, espe-cially by Ashkenazi Jews,
and that there was a belief in the special curative powers of children’s
blood.”
Toaff added that “the rabbis permitted [its use] both because the blood was
already dried,” and because it was “an accepted custom that took on the force of
law.”
Sergio Luzzatto called Toaff’s book
“courageous” and “magnificent.” But then, in Toaff’s words, his work of seven
years “was torn apart by the Italian rabbis with just a few phone calls.” Dr.
Amos Luzzatto, former president of the Union of
Italian Jewish Communities—not to be confused with Sergio—told the Jerusalem
Post (Feb. 7) that “even if [Toaff] should manage to prove that a
deviant sect existed for centuries. . . clearly it could never be identified as
a Jewish group, or as part of a Jewish community.” Toaff said “I
will not give up my devotion to the truth and academic freedom even if the world
crucifies me” (Ha’aretz, Feb. 12).
Nonetheless, he denied he had ever meant to allege ritual murder—despite the
title of his book, and despite his having told La Stampa (according to
AmericanThinker.com) that:
My research has shown that in the
Middle Ages, a group of fundamentalist Jews did not respect the biblical
prohibition [against the consumption of blood]. . . . It is just one group of
Jews, who belonged to the communities that suffered the severest persecutions
during the Crusades. From this trauma came a passion for revenge that in some
cases led to responses, among them ritual murder of Christian children.
(Emphasis added.)
Toaff withdrew the book to revise it,
after some 3,000 copies had been sold, and donated his income from the book to
the Anti-Defamation League. On Feb. 11, the Jerusalem Post reported that
Toaff “has been prevented from seeing or even
contacting his [91-year-old] father.” In its Feb. 22 online edition, the
Chronicle of Higher Educa-tion noted the obvious—that Toaff’s “public
statements varied widely as the controversy played out.” Israel Shamir, in a
thorough analysis (IsraelShamir.net), says “Toaff
came under strong community pressure: he was about to find himself at 65, on the
street, probably without pension, without old friends and students, ostracized
and excommuni-cated. Probably his life was threatened as well: Jews employ
professional secret killers to deal with such nuisances.”
For more such commentary, see DannySteinberg.blogspot. com.
How all this bodes for revision of Toaff’s book
remains to be seen, assuming it ever reappears.[10]
Note the words “essential for Jewish
well-being.” The “virtue of hate” seems to come of a positive need to be
hated. The widely-published Rabbi Dr. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, professor of Jewish
history at the University of Wales (Lampeter) and author of The Paradox of
Anti-Semitism (2006), says in an interview with the Independent
(U.K.), March 19, 2006 (available online) that: “Jews need enemies in order
to survive. . . . [I]n the absence of Jew-hatred, Judaism is undergoing a slow
death. . . . We want to be loved, and we want Judaism to survive intact. .
. . [T]hese are incompatible desires. . . . Why do we endure? Because
we’re hated.” (Emphases added.) Cohn-Sherbok says of a founder of Zionism,
Theodor Herzl: “He warned that if our Christian hosts were to leave us in peace
for two generations, the Jews would merge entirely into surrounding races.”
Id.
Herzl also wrote in his conclusion to Der Judenstaat (1896): “Universal
brotherhood is not even a beautiful dream. Antagonism is essential to man’s
greatest efforts.”
In his book (p. 209) Cohn-Sherbok
says that “in the past ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders were profoundly aware of
this dynamic.” One of his examples is Schneur Zalman of Lyady, the first
Lubavitch Rebbe and author of Ha’tanya (1796), the fundamental book of
the Habbad movement, whose first chapter famously concludes by saying gentile
souls “contain no good whatever.”[11]
In 1812, Zalman worked with the anti-Semitic Czar Alexander I to defeat
Napoleon. He feared Napoleon would liberate the Jews, who might expect to
benefit materially—although that’s a much-disputed calculation—but whose souls
would be lost to assimilation and intermarriage.
Similarly, according to Ha’aretz,
June 3, 2004 (available online), “in
the mid-19th century, Rabbi [Samson Raphael] Hirsch, the leader of Germany’s
Orthodox Jews, wrote that anti-Semitism is the tool through which the God of
Israel preserves his people.” In 1958, Rabbi Dr. Nahum Goldmann, then president
of the World Jewish Congress, com-plained that the “current decline of
overt anti-Semitism might constitute a new danger to Jewish survival,” one that
“has had a very negative effect on our internal life.”
In 1957, Leo Pfeffer, then counsel to the same organization, said much the
same. As to both, see Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II,
p. 412 (1982). See also Charles E. Silberman, A Certain People, p. 165
(1985):
“For all that we are preoccupied by
the damage once done to us by our enemies, we are still more concerned by the
curse of friendship we now encounter,” Leonard Fein, editor and
publisher of Moment magazine, told the Conference of Jewish Communal
Service in 1980. . . . “Deep down—and sometimes not so very deep—we still
believe that we depended on the pogroms and persecutions to keep us a people,
that we have not the fiber to withstand the lures of a genuinely open society.”
(Emphasis added.)
Hannah
Arendt says of this whole line of thinking, in The Origins of
Totali-tarianism, p. 7 (1973 ed.), that “. . . eternal anti-Semitism would
imply an eternal guarantee of Jewish [corporate] existence. This superstition
is a secularized travesty of the idea of eternity inherent in a faith in
chosenness.”
It follows from this “superstition” (or
psychological insight) that where
anti-Semitism is inadequate to prevent an erosion of Jewish identity, it has to
be fabricated or provoked. A seemingly encyclopedic survey of such
fabrication—at least as it’s appeared in recent years—can be found in Norman
Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah, pp. 21-85 (University of California
Press, 2005).[12]
As to the other technique, provocation, see
Yuval, Two Nations; Shahak, Three Thousand Years; Lindemann,
Esau’s Tears; some of the other material discussed above; and the private
diary of Moshe Sharett, then prime minister of Israel, for May 26, 1955.
That diary entry records the view of
Sharett’s colleague Moshe Dayan that only by a strategy of endless “provocation
and revenge” toward its neighbors can Israel survive. Israel, says Sharett
(paraphrasing Dayan), “must. . . invent dangers” to “keep its morale high
and to retain its moral tension.” Sharett even quotes David Ben Gurion: “It
would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war.” See the
extended quotation from Sharett’s diary in Livia Rokach, Israel’s Sacred
Terrorism, p. 44 (1980) (available online; emphasis in original). Rokach,
whose father was Sharett’s minister of the Interior, says (id., p.
8) that by the mid ‘50s, if not before:
Terrorism and “revenge” were. . . to be glorified as the “moral . . . and even
sacred” values of Israeli society. . . . [T]he military symbol was now Unit
101, led by Arik Sharon. . . . The lives of Jewish victims. . . had
to be sacrificed to create provocations justifying subsequent reprisals. . .
. A hammering, daily propaganda, controlled by the censors, was directed to
feed the Israeli population with images of the monstrosity of the Enemy.
(Emphasis added.)
Meanwhile, she says, Israel’s leaders
never believed in any external threat to Israel’s survival. What they wanted
was regional hegemony, and of course internal cohesion. In 1984, after her book
had ceased to be news, Rokach was found dead in a Rome hotel room.
Boas Evron makes some of the same
points as Rokach, in Jewish State or Israeli Nation?, above. At p. 251
he says: “In the absence of a positive national bond, Ben Gurion deliberately
sought to base the national consciousness on the negative foundation of terror
and nightmare. . . .” According to two books by the Mossad defector Victor
Ostrovsky, By Way of Deception (1990) and The Other Side of Deception
(1994), Mossad doctrine is squarely in accord with the views of Dayan and
Ben Gurion, as recorded by Sharett and amplified by Rokach and Evron.[13]
For more on hostile solidarity as an
essential element of Judaism, see three books by Kevin MacDonald, A People
That Shall Dwell Alone (1994), Separation and its Discontents (1998),
and The Culture of Critique (1998); and John Hartung’s essay “Love
Thy Neighbor,” above. Hartung begins with an epigraph from Blaise Pascal’s
Pensees (1670): “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they
do it from religious conviction.” MacDonald and Hartung see Judaism as an
economic strategy for competing with host populations, from whom the sharpest
self-differentiation has to be maintained. One might infer from their work—as
from such passages as Deuteronomy 7:14-26—a system designed to suppress
the recognition of fellow humanity across ethnic and religious lines, a system
still functioning millennia after its inception. Of course, any such analysis
is taken as purest anti-Semitism, an occasion of “terror and nightmare” call-ing
for (of all things) hostile solidarity.[14]
See also Moses Hadas, Hellenistic
Culture: Fusion and Diffusion, chs. 7 and 20 (Columbia University
Press, 1959) as to the influence, via Plato, of closed, totalitarian Sparta on
Judaism as far back as the Maccabean period (142-63 B.C.).[15]
Then there’s the widely-reprinted
article that Rabbi Israel Hess, campus rabbi at Bar Ilan University, wrote for
its student magazine, Bat Kol, entitled “Genocide: A Commandment of the
Torah” (Feb. 26, 1980). Rabbi Hess took as his text Deuteronomy 25:17-19 (“[T]hou
shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not
forget [to do] it”). Amalek, he said, is any people that declares war on
Israel. The Israeli state rabbinate has never taken direct issue with Rabbi
Hess—as it has for example with Reform Judaism.[16]
In 2001, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, formerly Sephardi chief rabbi, and founder and
leader of Israel’s third largest political party, Shas, called sweepingly for
“extermination of the Arabs,” saying “it is forbidden to be merciful to them.”
Shas M.K. Eli Yishay (later Ehud Olmert’s vice prime minister) said Rabbi Yosef
was merely echoing Ariel Sharon. BBC News, April 10 and 11, 2001, available
online.
Some of its episodes are
simply unbelievable—or would have been, if they had not come straight from the
horses’ mouths: the heroes of the story, who gleefully boast about their
despicable exploits. The series was produced by Israeli immigrants from Russia.
* * *
[The oligarchs] exploited the
disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures of the state and to
amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to
safeguard the perpetuation of their business, they took control of the state.
Six of the seven are Jews. . . . [Boris] Berezovsky boasts that he caused the
war in Chechnya, in which tens of thousands have been killed and a whole country
devastated. He was interested in the mineral resources and a prospective [oil]
pipeline there.
. . . In the end there was a
reaction: Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed
power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs (Mikhail
Khodorkovsky) in prison, [and] caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in
England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, [and] another, Mikhail Chernoy, is
assumed to be hiding here [in Israel]).
For more extensive, annotated discussion of the same series, see
Alison Weir, “Russia, Israel and Media Omissions,” CounterPunch.com,
Feb. 17, 2005. Weir’s article is also posted at IfAmericansKnew.org.
[19]
These words are part of Cantor’s
introduction to a chapter by the Russian Jewish writer Arkady Vaksberg, entitled
“Stalin’s Jews.” It is most unlikely that Cantor, a professor of history at
New York University and a former Rhodes scholar, wrote in ignorance of the scope
of Soviet state homicide. Leaving aside issues of pride, shame, and ethnic or
religious loyalties, this passage puts Cantor in full agreement with Churchill,
Robert Wilton, and Ambassador Levko Lukyanenko, all above.
Edwin Schoonmaker, Democracy and World Dominion, pp. 211-12
(1939) confirms Cantor’s point:
Fifteen years after the Bolshevist Revolution was
launched to carry out the Marxist program, the editor of the American Hebrew
could write: “According to such information as the writer could secure while in
Russia a few weeks ago, not one Jewish synagogue has been torn down, as
have hundreds—perhaps thousands—of the Greek Catholic churches. . . .” (American
Hebrew, Nov. 18, 1932, page 12.) Apostate Jews, leading a revolution
that was to destroy religion as the “opiate of the people,” had somehow spared
the synagogues of Russia.
(Emphases added.)
The “Greek Catholic” church is the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic (or “Uniate”) church formed in 1596 under the rule of
Roman Catholic Poland. The rite is Greek Orthodox, but it recognizes the pope.
At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution it included much of the peasantry in the
western Ukraine. Acting out such verses as 1 Samuel 15:3 —“cultural legacies”
as Hartung would call them—the Bolsheviks destroyed communi-cants and buildings
alike. Schoonmaker goes on to say that while the Bolsheviks, as atheists,
permitted any amount of speech hostile to religion, they defined Jewishness in
terms of ethnicity rather than religion, banned ethnic slurs, and punished
expressions of anti-Semitism on that basis.
Again, as Hartung says, “the
half-life and penetrance of such cultural legacies are often
under-appreciated.” Shahak and Mezvinsky discuss din moser in the
context of Prime MinisterYitzhak Rabin’s assassination by a religious zealot,
heartily encouraged by Orthodox rabbis, only a few years short of the 21st
century. Also as to the Rabin case, see Allan C. Brownfeld, “Growth of
Religious Extremism in Israel,”
Washington Report on Middle
East Affairs,
Aug.-Sept. 2000, available online. Din moser may have some-thing to do
with the enormous antipathy with which some regard Shahak himself, and with the
death of Livia Rokach. It may also illuminate some of the matters
discussed in the endnotes below.
While
truth-telling is silenced, ad hominem vilification is amplified. David
Horowitz of FrontPageMag. com, to pick just one example, calls
former President Jimmy Carter a “Jew-hater, genocide-enabler and liar” for
saying Israel imposes “apartheid” on the Palestinians in the West Bank. He also
accuses Carter of “blood libel.” But Horowitz surely knows that Ariel Sharon
told former Italian Premier Massimo D’Alema—at length, according to D’Alema—that
Israel means to force the Palestinians into “Bantu-stans.” Ha’aretz, May
13, 2003 (available online).
See also the 24-page Report of the [UN] Special
Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the
Palestinian
Territories Occupied Since 1967, John Dugard
(advance edited version, Jan. 29, 2007, available online). Dugard is a South
African lawyer well acquainted with apartheid in his own country. He reports a
“humanitarian crisis” and Israeli “war crimes” (p.3); “particularly vicious
military action” against Palestinian civilians (p. 8); killing of “members of
the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance services” (p. 11); and Israeli
“viola[tion of] the most fundamental rules if international humanitarian law” (id.).
At p. 20, he asks: “Can
it seriously be denied that the purpose. . . is to establish and maintain
domination by one racial group (Jews) over another racial group (Palestinians)
and systematically oppress them?”
Shulamit Aloni (formerly Israeli minister of Education) says, in “Indeed There
is Apartheid in Israel,” Jan. 5, 2007 (available online), that:
On one occasion I witnessed
an encounter between a [Palestinian] driver and [an Israeli] soldier who was
taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its
owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order—this is a Jews-only
road,” he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign. . . instructing
[non-Jewish] drivers not to use it. His answer was. . .: “It is his
responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a
sign. . . and let some anti-Semitic reporter. . . take a photo
so he can show the
world that apartheid exists here?”
(Emphases added.)
Horowitz’s
invective is aimed, of course, not so much at Carter as at politicians and
others still worried about their jobs, not to mention university presidents
worried about fundraising. It’s meant to intimidate—which it does—and its style
is not new. Esau’s Tears, above, reports complaints of such
“intellectual terrorism” (Franz Mehring’s words) from the early 1880s. See p.
136; compare pp. 138-39, 193. There’s no reason to suppose such
character-assassination began only then, or that it’s unrelated to the
essential, unifying cycle of provocation and revenge discussed above. Current
Israeli treatment of Palestinians likewise seems part of that cycle, as does
Jewish treatment of Slavs in whatever period.
The Nazis, no
less than the Bolsheviks, regarded Ukrainian peasants with murderous contempt,
an attitude not traditional in the army general staff, but brought to
exceedingly full flower in the SS. See, e.g., H.R. Trevor-Roper, The Last
Days of Hitler, pp. 5-8 (1947). Arendt says the Nazi plan, on which
time blessedly ran out, “aimed at the extermination of the Polish and Ukrainian
people, . . . 170 million Russians [and] the intelligentsia of Western Europe.”
The Origins of Totalitarianism, above, p. 411. The Ukrainians learned
what the Nazis meant to do with them after they initially greeted the Wehrmacht
as liberators in 1941—a greeting the holodomor goes far to explain.
Most
likely, the lesson the Nazis drew was how safe, easy, even acceptable it was to
murder whole populations. That was demonstrably Hitler’s own conclusion about
the early-20th-century Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks
(“Who speaks any more [of that]?”)[23]
and the annihilation of the American Indians (“Treat them like redskins”).
Likewise, the Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky actually spoke of the “good
name” Hitler himself had supposedly given to forced “mass migrations.”
Just before his death in 1940, Jabotinsky
justified “transferring” the Palestinian people out of their homes on the ground
that “the world has become accustomed to
the idea of mass migrations and has become fond
of them. . . . Hitler—as odious as he is to us—has given this idea a good name
in the world.” Tom Segev, One
Palestine, Complete, pp .
406-07 (2000); see generally Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The
Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (1992).
Twenty-one years after Jabotinsky’s back-handed compliment to Hitler, Adolf
Eichmann was put on trial in Israel. Two of the counts on which he was
convicted alleged mass forcible expulsion of people—non-Jews at that—from their
homes. Those counts (nos. 9 and 10) both carried the death penalty. Hannah
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem,
p. 245 (1963).
Nicholas Lysson
[1]
In 1920 Wilton and Churchill both expressed hope that through Zionism,
Jewish energies could be channeled constructively (that is, one is
tempted to say, against non-Europeans) rather than destructively (that
is, on the same interpretation, against fellow Europeans, their social
and economic order, and their royal houses). Hence the title of
Churchill’s article. Churchill’s views evolved as Britain descended
what Robert Fisk calls “the bloody staircase”—as to which see my
companion essay, “On the Origins of the Balfour Declaration.” Note in
that essay threats made by both Chaim Weizmann and his protégé Samuel
Landman about the destruction Jews might wreak if frustrated as to
Palestine. Weizmann wrote of “overthrow[ing] the world,” and Landman
of “pull[ing] down the pillars of civilisation,” a metaphor obviously
inspired by Judges 16:21-31. Whence came these ferocious energies?
Part of the answer involves traditional eschatological doctrines and
attitudes toward gentiles, as discussed in the present essay. Another
part involves the Jewish population explosion in the Ukraine during the
19th and early 20th centuries. It swamped the
occupations traditionally thought suitable and—together with the pogroms
that followed the czar’s assassination in 1881—led to massive
emigration, heightened revolutionary activity, and other attempts to
recover those occupational niches. See, e.g., Subtelny, above, p. 276:
Throughout the nineteenth century, especially in its latter part, the
Jews experienced a tremendous rise in population. Between 1820 and 1880,
while the general population of the [Russian] empire rose by 87%, the
number of Jews increased by 150%. On the Right Bank [of the Dnieper]
this rise was even more dramatic: between 1844 and 1913 the number of
its inhabitants rose by 265% while the Jewish population increased by
844%! Religious sanctions of large families, less exposure to
famine, war, and epidemics, and a low mortality rate because of communal
self-help and the availability of doctors largely accounted for this
extraordinary increase.
[2]
Similarly, the Soviet Union put Jews in charge of camps for German POWs
in the immediate aftermath of World War II. For the torture and killing
that ensued, see John Sack, An Eye for an Eye (1993). Sack’s
book was denounced by Elan Steinberg of the World Jewish Congress on the
CBS program “Sixty Minutes,” Nov. 24, 1993. Steinberg accused Sack of
“blackening history,” as if such a thing were possible.
[3]
For more on Dmitri Panin, see, e.g., David Remnick, “Seasons in Hell:
How the Gulag Grew,” the New Yorker, April 14, 2003. A search on
his name, in quotation marks, also brings up considerable material.
[4]
The Law of Return is based on heredity and ethnic affiliation, and
ignores issues of religious belief and practice (or lack of either) so
long as no other religion has been willingly adopted in lieu of
Judaism. Sec. 4A(a) and (b), enacted by Amendment No. 2 (1970) permits
qualification through certain Jewish relatives by blood or marriage.
Some have suggested connections through which Lenin, and even Stalin,
might have qualified. See Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin, pp. 8-9
(1994) as to Stalin’s suppression of information about Lenin’s Jewish
antecedents; compare Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, pp.
17-21, 28-29 (Harvard University Press, 2000). Stuart Kahan, The
Wolf of the Kremlin, pp. 169-71 (1987), alleges that Stalin
was married at one point to Rosa Kaganovich, Lazar’s sister. As befits
a regime that regularly “blot[ted] out the remembrance of [inconvenient
people] from under heaven,” the record is unclear. Some have denied
even that Lazar had such a sister. She is depicted, though, in Robert
Payne, The Rise and Fall of Stalin, pp. 410-12 (1965), in
connection with the apparent suicide of Stalin’s second wife.
[5]
See, e.g., Shahak and Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism, p. xix,
discussing the centrality of this theme in Lurianic Cabbalism and in the
views of its recent followers, including particularly Avracham Yitzhak
Hacohen Kook, chief rabbi of Palestine, 1920-35. They quote him: “The
difference between a Jewish soul and the souls of non-Jews—all of them
in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference
between a human soul and the souls of cattle.” They add that “according
to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of
Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.” Such tribal
narcissism pervades the various teachings discussed by Johann
Eisenmenger (p. 9, above), by Shahak in Three Thousand Years,
and by Israel Jacob Yuval in Two Nations in Your Womb (pp.
11-12, above). Biblical passages quoted herein, by the way, are taken
from the King James Version, but the bracketed reference to penises in
Ezekiel 23:20 is based on the Revised Standard Version, where the word
is “members.”
[6]
See also Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts From Judaism in
Germany, 1500-1750, pp. 212-13 (Yale University Press,
2001)(“Eisenmenger did not fabricate. . .; he quoted accurately and
translated literally. . .”); and Henry Hart Milman, The History of
the Jews, vol. 3, p. 49 (1871 ed.)(“[Eisenmenger’s] reading was
vast, his industry indefatigable. . . . I have never heard his accuracy
seriously impeached”). Having granted those points, Katz and Carlebach
are left to argue—most indignantly—that Eisenmenger errs by assuming
Jews are aware of rabbinical writings and take them to mean what they
say. On publication, Eisenmenger’s book was suppressed by official
decree; influential Jews had complained that it might lead to the sort
of massacres seen just 50 years before in the Ukraine. The
English-language version even now has a habit of disappearing from
libraries (see, e.g., the online catalogue of the New York Public
Library) and is available in many university libraries only online, with
access restricted. It is, however, available for purchase in a
facsimile edition published in 2006. Max Weber makes much the same
point that Katz concedes about ethical double standards, which Weber
traces to the Torah. See Ancient Judaism, ch. 13, esp. pp.
338-44 (English tr. 1952). Weber points for example to Exodus 3:18
(Yahweh’s instruction to lie to Pharaoh) and to some of the matters
discussed in note vii, below.
[8]
Compare Leviticus 25:44-46. Similar practices exist even now. See
Jewish Tribune (“The Trusted Voice of the Canadian Jewish
Community”), March 30, 2006 (available online):
According to a
report released in 2005 by the Knesset Subcommittee on Trafficking in
Women, between 10,000 and 15,000 women had been smuggled into Israel
over the previous four years to work as prostitutes. According to the
report, the women, who were mostly from the former Soviet Union, were
sold at public auction for as much as $10,000 and forced to work up to
18 hours a day. On average, the women received only three percent of the
money they earned from prostitution, and many were raped and beaten.
[9]
Yuval is a professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem and was a visiting fellow in the Council of the Humanities at
Princeton University in the spring of 2004.
His ventilation of the matters
covered in Two Nations has not been uniformly well received. His
introduction (p. xiii) quotes Ezra Fleischer’s reaction to an earlier
article Yuval wrote on the same themes: “This article is of the type
that it would have been better had it never been written; and once
written—it would have been better had it never been published; and once
published—it would have been better had it been forgotten as quickly as
possible.” Another version of those last five words is “sentenced to
oblivion.” See Israel Shamir, “A Yiddishe Medina,” available online.
Compare the discussion of din moser at pp. 21-22, above.
[10]
Some wonder why Toaff focused on events of more than 500 years ago, when
similar abuses, far more easily documented, are going on even now.
Consider, for example,
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of
medical anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley
(UNESCO Courier, July-Aug. 2001, available online):
Israel has recently
become something of a pariah in the transplant world. . . . “Why should
we Israelis be made to travel to third world clinics to get the kidneys
we need to survive from the bodies of peasants, soldiers, or guest
workers who may be in worse physical shape than ourselves?” a
71-year-old “kidney buyer” from Tel Aviv asked me rhetorically. “Organs
should be seen as a human, not as a national resource.” It was good to
see “Avirham,” an elderly gentleman, alive and happy with his
revitalizing 22-year-old “peasant” kidney. And his living donor? “A
peasant, without anything!” he replied. “Do you have any idea what
$1,000, let alone $5,000 means in the life of a peasant?”
Not all donors are as fortunate. See Jonathan Rosenblum, “Presumed
Guilty,” Jerusalem Post, Oct. 17, 2000 (available online): “Last
November, a local Tel Aviv paper Ha'ir ran a 12-page expose of
Abu Kabir [the Israel Institute for Forensic Medicine]
and revealed how the national lab. . . transfers body parts for
transplants without permission from the family of the deceased.”
Rosenblum, a rabbi who holds a law degree from Yale, also reported on a
Scottish tourist, Alastair Sinclair, who in 1998 supposedly hanged
himself in an Israeli jail. After University of Glasgow pathologists
autopsied his returned body, his family sued for the return of the
heart—apparently used for a transplant—and the crucial bone needed to
establish that death was indeed by hanging. For rabbinical approval of
using gentile organs “to save the life of [a] Jew,” see Jewish
Fundamentalism, above, pp. 42-43. Transplanting Jewish organs to
save gentiles is forbidden. Id. As to one possible source of
organs, see Chris Hedges, “Gaza Diary,” Harper’s, Oct. 2001, on
the IDF’s practice of shooting Palestinian children for sport. Hedges
was then a correspondent for the New York Times. Sara Roy, a
Jewish senior researcher at Harvard who lost over 100 relatives in the
Nazi holocaust, says Israeli troops freely admit the practice. See
RememberTheseChildren .org for the details of
individual deaths, of both Palestinian and Israeli children. For the
period since Oct. 2000, taken as a whole, the ratio has been above 7 to
1. For 2006 it was exactly 76 to 1 (152 to 2). Id.
Palestinians have com-plained of organ-harvesting in such cases. See
Aztlan.Net/palorgans.htm (Jan. 10, 2002):
The Tehran Times
published today a report alleging that Israel has tacitly admitted that
doctors at the Israeli forensic institute at Abu Kabir had extracted the
vital organs of three Palestinian teenage children killed by the Israeli
Army nearly ten days ago. The report says that the Israeli Minister of
Health, Nessim Dahhan, tacitly admitted to the horrific practice in an
answer to Arab member of the Knesset Ahmed Teibi.
The chief pathologist at Abu Kabir is Dr. Yehuda Hiss. On March 1,
2007, IsraelNationalNews.com reported a plea bargain—in
just one current case—that involves his legal admission of “unauthorized
removal of parts from 125 bodies.” Hiss does not seem to have
discriminated between Jewish and gentile corpses. It would be hard to
believe, though, that distribution of body parts is without
discrimination.
[11]
This is one of the milder translations. Others include “totally impure
and evil” and “totally satanic.” (See generally Eisenmenger as to such
matters.) Yisrael Meyerowitz, “Hasidic Primary Works in English
Translation” (2004, available online) says that “due to the difficult
homiletic style of most primary Hasidic works, a mere translation
will not properly convey the author’s intent.” (Emphasis added.)
Three Thousand Years (esp. chs. 2 and 5) might suggest that the
supposed futility of “mere translation” is quite intentional, allowing
simultaneous (a) practice of the “virtue of hate,” (b) denial to
outsiders—especially gentile authorities—that any such thing is actually
meant, and (c) assertion that any outsider who perceives hostility does
so only because of the anti-Semitism imputed to all gentiles.
[12]
See also, e.g.,
BBC News, July 18, 2004 (“[Prime
Minister Ariel] Sharon said that his advice to French Jews was that
moving to Israel was ‘a must and
they have to move immediately.’ * *
* A week ago, President Jacques Chirac rushed to condemn an apparently
anti-Semitic attack on a Paris train that turned out to be a hoax”);
Jewish News Weekly of Northern Calif.,
July 23, 2004 (“Three months after an arson fire that their son has
admitted to igniting charred their home, Rabbi Yosef and Hinda Langer
are turning their lives right side up again”); Agence France Presse,
Aug. 30, 2004 (“French police confirmed that a man arrested in
connection with what was first believed to be an anti-Semitic arson
attack on a Jewish social center a week ago was a Jewish man who had
worked there. . . ”); Associated Press, Sept. 19, 2004 (reporting that
Kerri Dunn, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, was
convicted of attempted insurance fraud after spray-painting her
own car with anti-Semitic slurs);
cbsnewyork.com, Oct. 19,
2004 (reporting that Olga Abramovich was caught after a spree of
painting swastikas through Jewish sections of Queens and Brooklyn, and
that her motives were not as might appear); and an FBI notice issued in
mid-Sept. 2005 for Adam Pearlman, a/k/a Abu Suhayb Al-Amriki, Abu
Suhayb, and Yihya Majadin Adams, wanted for questioning about “Al Qaeda”
terrorist threats against the U.S. Pearlman’s grandfather, with whom he
had lived, was Carl K. Pearlman, M.D., a prominent Orange County, Calif.
urologist and Anti-Defamation League board member. See also note xiii,
below.
[13]
As to Zionist false-flag terrorism, designed to look like the work of
others and (generally) to create the appearance of external threats,
see, e.g., By Way of Deception and The Other Side of
Deception (including plot to assassinate Pres. George H.W. Bush and
frame Palestinians for the crime after Bush froze loan guarantees for
Israel); Ari Ben Menashe, Profits of War: Inside the Secret
U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (1992)(S.S. Achille Lauro attack,
successfully blamed on Palestinians, and an attempt to blow up an El Al
airliner in England, successfully blamed on Syria, after which “Margaret
Thatcher closed down the Syrian embassy in London”); Patrick Seale,
Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire (1992)(City of Poros ferry attack,
successfully blamed on Palestinians, assassinations of Palestinian
moderates, shooting of Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London in 1982
to provide pretext for invasion of Lebanon); Naeim Giladi, Ben
Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews
(1992, available online) (Israeli bombing of synagogues and libraries in
Baghdad in the early 1950s to stampede Iraqi Jews into moving to Israel,
and a scheme to paint an airplane in Egyptian colors and use it to bomb
Israel); Abbas Shiblak, The Lure of Zion (1986)(bombing of Iraqi
Jews); Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the
Middle East (1980)(same, also Israeli bombing and strafing of
U.S.S. Liberty in June 1967: Eveland was a high-level CIA official
in the region); Cdr. Elmo H. Hutchison, Violent Truce (1956)
(Hutchison was the American chairman of the Israeli-Jordanian Joint
Armistice Commission, which the Israelis walked out of in 1954, taking
as their pretext killings that appear to have been false-flag); Stephen
Green, Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant
Israel (1984), and Living by the Sword (1988); Rabbi Moshe
Shonfeld, The Holocaust Victims Accuse: Documents and Testimony on
Jewish War Criminals (1977)(Haganah’s blowing up of S.S. Patria
in Haifa harbor in 1940 to embarrass British over policy on Jewish
immigration to Palestine, falsely blamed on Masada-style mass suicide of
passengers, who would otherwise have been taken to safety in
Mauritius); Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Nov. 2002
(Israeli false-flag attempt to assassinate John Gunther Dean, once
himself a Jewish refugee, and by then U.S. ambassador to Lebanon, in
1980); Barbara Crossette, “Who Killed Zia?” World Policy Journal,
fall 2005 (Dean’s accusation in 1988, when he was U.S. ambassador to
India, that Israel assassinated Pres. Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and Arnold
Raphel, then U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, by sabotaging their
plane—following which Dean was declared mentally unstable and relieved
of his office); Procuraduria General de la
Republica de Mexico, Boletin No. 697/01
(Oct. 12, 2001)(attempt by Israeli agents to bomb the Mexican
legislative palace a month after 9/11); Alfred M. Lilienthal, The
Zionist Connection II, ch. 10 (1982, available online)
(Lilienthal, a lawyer who advised the U.S. delegation at the founding of
the UN, is mostly concerned with overt Israeli terrorism that the
American and European media refuse to acknowledge as such, but also
describes letter bomb campaigns that he thinks were false-flag);
Margaret Truman, Harry S. Truman (1973)(reporting Zionist
attempts to assassinate Pres. Truman, various of his aides, and British
politicians such as Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin with letter bombs);
Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet (1990)(Israeli plan to use
Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League to embarrass U.S.- Soviet
relations by assassinating Soviet diplomats in the U.S.); George W. and
Douglas Ball, The Passionate Attachment (1992)(same: the senior
Ball was undersecretary of State in the 1960s); Guela Amir, “A Mother’s
Defense,” in John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s magazine,George, March 1997,
available online (article by the mother of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin,
Yigal Amir, conceding her son pulled the trigger, but alleging Shin Bet
involvement); many sources on the blowing up of the King David Hotel on
July 26, 1946 by Irgun Zvai Leumi agents disguised as Arabs; and Rokach
herself, above, on such subjects as the 1954 Lavon Affair, in which
Israeli agents bombed USIS libraries, theaters and other sites
associated with the U.S. and U.K. in Cairo. This list is hardly
exhaustive; nor perhaps could the subject ever be exhausted.
[14]
At the same time, of course, it’s perfectly acceptable—no evidence
whatever of bigotry—to use terms like “Islamofascism,” or to trace
problems to the very nature of some religion (so long as it’s not
Judaism), e.g., the supposed anti-Semitism of such passages as John
8:37-44 and Revelation 2:9—even Luke 10:29-37!—or “jihadist”
exhortations in the Koran. Many have remarked on the explosive reaction
that would ensue if anyone spoke of Jews in the terms the Talmud uses
for gentiles, to say nothing of the terms Maimonides uses for blacks.
As to the former, see Eisenmenger. As to the latter, see A Guide for
the Perplexed, bk. III, ch. 51 (12th c.); cf. the Talmud
tractate Sanhedrin, which as quoted by Eisenmenger (1748 tr., pp.
105-06) teaches that:
. . .Three different
Kinds mingled carnally in the Ark of Noah: And . . . they were
all branded and punish’d for it: Namely the Dog, the Raven, and Shem.
The Dog (in Coition) is linked to the Bitch. The Raven emits his
Seed by the Mouth. And Shem was punish’d on his Skin; for from
him has sprung the Black Cus [i.e., Cushite; compare the
Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Numbers 12:1, using that word,
with the same verse in the King James Version, which more
forthrightly—not contemplating sales in the American South—says
“Ethiopian”].
[15]
Hadas, pp. 81-82, quotes a well-known passage from Plato, Laws
942ab (360 B.C.?), which he says provided a model for both Maccabean and
then talmudic Judaism:
The principal thing is
that none, man or woman, should ever be without an officer set over him,
and that none should get the mental habit of taking any step, whether in
earnest or in jest, on his individual responsibility. In peace as in
war he must live always with his eyes on his superior officer, following
his lead and guided by him in his smallest actions. In a word, we must
train the mind not to even consider acting as an individual or know how
to do it.
Hadas
says Jewish religious leaders, unlike Plato and his “Nocturnal Council,”
have genuinely believed in divine revelation as a basis for this model.
(For Plato, the claim of divine authority was only a necessary lie.)
For Shahak’s comments on Hadas, see Three Thousand Years, in the
concluding paragraphs of ch. 1. Shahak sees Israel, unless it changes
course in a most unlikely way, as becoming “a
fully closed and warlike ghetto, a Jewish Sparta, supported by the
labour of Arab helots.” The resemblance of the Spartan model to Soviet
Communism is also obvious. Some have noticed a similarity between
Israel and the Soviet Union of the 1930s in terms of the
ideologically-blindered style of their respective apologists,
particularly in excusing state terrorism—e.g., Arthur Koestler and Lev
Kopelev in their days of hope and illusion, Daniel Pipes and Alan
Dershowitz today. That seems understandable in terms of Boas Evron’s
point, above, that “the backgrounds of the two groups were much the
same.”
[16]
Not only have the rabbis reacted indulgently to such verbal
expressions. They have also endorsed mass murder directly after the
fact, a time when sober second thoughts might be expected. See David
Hirst in the Nation, Feb. 2, 2004 (online only) on Dr. Baruch
Goldstein’s Purim 1994 massacre of 29 Palestinians and wounding of
scores more, children included, by machine-gunning them in the back as
they bent heads-to-ground in prayer (whereupon Israeli troops killed 25
more as the survivors rose to retaliate):
Many were the rabbis who praised this
“act,” “event” or “occurrence,” as they delicately called it. Within two
days the walls of Jerusalem’s religious neighborhoods were covered with
posters extolling Goldstein’s virtues and lamenting that the toll of
dead Palestinians had not been higher. In fact, the satisfaction
extended well beyond the religious camp. . . ; polls said that 50
percent of the Israeli people, and especially the young, more or less
approved of it.
[17]
Sometimes the esotericism is dispensed with. See the Passover Haggada,
a document seasonally available (courtesy of Maxwell House coffee) in
American supermarkets. The Haggada blesses God, “who hast made a
distinction between holy and not holy, between light and darkness,
between Israel and the other nations. . . .” It goes on to thank God
not only for his mercies to Israel, but also for his vengeance upon the
Egyptians, “sen[ding] forth against them the fierceness of His anger,
wrath, indignation and trouble, a band of evil Angels, . . .
sl[aying] their first-born, g[iving] us their wealth [Exodus 11,
and 12:29, 35]. . . [and] drown[ing] our adversaries in the sea.
. . .” (Emphasis added.) It denounces “Laban, the Syrian” (note vii,
above) for what “he intended to do to our father Jacob.” The“shfoch
hamatcha al hagoyim” prayer
(p. 10, above) is a curse on gentiles in general. At least one
commentary suggests it not be recited when gentile guests are present.
Psychiatric theory has a good deal to say about those who cannot relate
to others as equals, but assume a position of vengeful superiority
(disguised, as may be needed, in circumstances that don’t permit its
open expression; compare Gibbon as quoted at p. 13, above). The Haggada
notes the consequence of such an adaptation—“in every generation some
have arisen against us to annihilate us”—but seems designed to suppress
insight as to cause and effect. See MacDonald and Arendt on
self-deception as an essential part of Jewish group strategy, p. 21,
above.
[18]
See id. at p. 43 for a similar statement by the head of a yeshiva
near Nablus, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, that a Jew’s killing non-Jews does
not constitute murder in the Jewish religion, and that killing of
innocent Arabs for reasons of revenge is a Jewish virtue. Ginsburgh, an
American with an advanced degree in mathematics, wrote this in his
contribution to a book of essays praising Baruch Goldstein. The
interesting point is that “[n]o influential Israeli rabbi has publicly
opposed Ginsburgh’s statements.” At p. 63, Shahak and Mezvinsky quote
Rabbi Yehuda Amital—whom Shimon Peres considered a moderate and
appointed to his cabinet in 1995—as saying “our war is directed against
the impurity of Western culture and against rationality as such.”
(Emphasis added.)
[19]
On the other hand, the New Republic, April 2, 2007, managed to
run a long article on Berezovsky, his fellow expatriate oligarchs, and
their looting of the Russian economy, without once mentioning what was
boastfully proclaimed in the television series, that the oligarchs are
almost all Jewish.
Berezovsky, by the way, like many another Jewish opponent of the Russian
state over the past two centuries, portrays himself as a liberalizer, a
democratizer, even a civil-libertarian.
[20]
Power is spoken to truth. See Noam Chomsky, “The Fate of an Honest
Intellectual,” available online, on how Norman Finkelstein, then a
Princeton doctoral candidate, became a non-person there after he exposed
as fraudulent Joan Peters’s hugely successful From Time Immemorial
(1984), a purported proof that there had been no significant indigenous
population in Palestine prior to Zionist settlement. See also Tony
Martin, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches From the Wellesley
Battlefront (1993) on what happened when Martin, using Jewish
sources, tried to explore the Jewish role in the trans-Atlantic slave
trade that arose more or less contemporaneously with the arenda
system. Search on the combination of “Mark Roberts” and
“Columbia University” as to the ongoing Zionist “witch hunt” at that
institution. Search on the combinations of “Juan Cole” and “Yale,” and
“Rashid Khalidi” and “Princeton” for Zionist vetoes over faculty
appointments. See also Jewish Week, Feb. 16, 2007 (“Major donors
to Brandeis University have informed the school they will no longer give
it money in retaliation for its decision last month to host former
President Jimmy Carter”)
and Feb. 23,
2007 (“[Daniel ] Pipes called publicly on
Brandeis donors to consider cutting off the school—[President] Jehuda
Reinharz disavowed a report that he and an aide had criticized Pipes”)(both
available online; compare p. 22, above). See Paul Findley, They Dare
to Speak Out (1985 and subsequent editions) on other academic and
political freezeouts. Findley’s first edition also has stories about
how Jewish professionals—doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.—risk
destruction of their livelihood if they oppose the official line (as
might be predicted by the observations of Moses Hadas in note xv and the
accompanying text, above). Something similar happened to the New York
Times, threatening to put it out of business, when Arthur Hays
Sulzberger refused in 1947 to run an advertisement by an alter ego of
Menachem Begin’s terrorist organization Irgun Zvai Leumi. See Alfred M.
Lilienthal, “Book on New York Times Editor [A.M. Rosenthal] Helps
Explain Media Bias for Israel,” Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs, June 1989 (available online). See also Victor Ostrovsky,
“First-Hand Accounts of Pro-Israel McCarthyism [sic],”
Washington Report, Nov. 1997 (available online). Ostrovsky reports
threats to the safety of a Montreal law firm’s employees, which forced
it to abandon a lawsuit. The suit was based on an Israeli request,
televised in Canada, that some “decent” Canadian Jew assassinate
Ostrovsky, who assertedly had “no right to live.” Ostrovsky also tells
of arson that succeeded in burning to the ground his house in an Ottawa
suburb. In fairness to the unlamented Joe McCarthy, he never did
things quite like those. Again, compare the discussion of din moser
at pp. 21-22, above. It is in light of such matters as these that the
reaction to Pasque di Sangue, above, has to be considered.
[21]
Such moral inversions are pervasive and seem to form with automatic
ease. Three examples: First, Sholem Aleichem’s “Tevye der
Milkhiker” (1895) and its adaptations (most notably Fiddler on the
Roof) present Jews in the highly anomalous role of lovable Ukrainian
peasants. (Compare Subtelny, above, p. 276: “Traditionally the Jews
were an urban people. Tsarist restrictions against their movement into
the countryside reinforced this condition”). Second, the movie
version (1960) of Leon Uris’s novel Exodus (1958) has Jews, per
Lee J. Cobb, “beseech[ing]” Palestinians in 1948 to remain on their
land—whereupon the Palestinians depart of their own volition, presumably
out of gratuitous anti-Semitism. (Compare p. 577 of the novel: “If the
Arabs of Palestine loved their land, they could not have been forced
from it. . . . The Arabs had little to live for. . . . This
[departure] is not the reaction of a man who loves his land.”) Third,
rabbinical involvement in the American civil rights struggle of the
1960s presents baffling anomalies. As Shahak puts it in ch. 2 of
Three Thousand Years:
Surely one is driven to the hypothesis that
quite a few of Martin Luther King’s rabbinical supporters were either
anti-black racists who supported him for tactical reasons of “Jewish
interest” (wishing to win black support for American Jewry and for
Israel’s policies) or were accomplished hypocrites, to the point of
schizophrenia, capable of passing very rapidly from a hidden enjoyment
of rabid racism to a proclaimed attachment to an anti-racist
struggle—and back—and back again.
At present, Israel’s closest non-Jewish ally
is exactly the white “Christian Zionist” element in the Old Confederacy
against which much of the civil rights struggle was waged. The alliance
is based on shared fear of repressed populations seeking to gain or
assert rights. See, e.g., Michael Lind, Made in Texas, p. 156
(2003). Lind also reports (id.) Benjamin Netanyahu’s
“contemptuous comparison,” before a Dallas audience in 2002, “between
Palestinian Arabs and Mexicans.”
[22]
Norman Finkelstein gives some examples of that duality at pp. 2-3 of
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (2d ed. 2003),
where he describes the progress of the philosopher Michael Walzer, of
the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, from (a) defending Israel
on the basis of a universal ethic, in Just and Unjust Wars
(1977), to (b) defending it, once that became impossible, on the basis
that there is no universal ethic, in Spheres of Justice
(1983) and Exodus and Revolution (1985), to (c) arguing, in
The Company of Critics (1988), that even if there were a
universal ethic, a “connected” social critic would still privilege his
“own” people. Finkelstein comments that “for Israel’s ‘friends,’ the
ring of Walzer’s message is as welcome as it is familiar: to be
‘connected’ is to ask, ‘Is it good for the Jews?’” Compari-sons, of
course, run not just to the Gypsy double standards described by Guenter
Lewy, but also to the NSDAP slogan “Think with your blood.” The latter
parallel has plainly occurred to Finkelstein. He compares Walzer, in
the second and third stages of his metamorphosis, to “the fascist
ideologues that Julien Benda chastised in The Treason of the
Intellectuals” (1969). As to denial of a universal ethic by
another prominent defender of Israel, see Hadley Arkes, “The Rights and
Wrongs of Alan Dershowitz,” Claremont Review of Books, fall 2005
(available online)(“Dershowitz
has insisted that ‘reason’ has no truths to disclose in the realm of
morals”). See also Jewish
Fundamentalism and Three Thousand Years, both above, for
rabbinical pronouncements, not otherwise translated from the Hebrew,
that could easily pass as expressions of Nazi ideology if certain proper
nouns were changed. It appears, by the way, that the comparison between
Jews and Gypsies has occasionally intruded on Jewish consciousness, and
that the subject is a sensitive one. See Graetz, vol. 5, p. 197. The
comparison with the Nazis, of course, is absolutely forbidden, as
became clear when the Israeli politician Yosef (Tommy) Lapid told the
cabinet that a picture of a suffering Palestinian woman reminded him of
his own grandmother. See “Gaza Political Storm Hits Israel,” BBC News,
May 23, 2004 (available online)(“referring to the TV picture, Mr. Lapid
said he was ‘talking about an old woman crouching on all fours,
searching for her medicines in the ruins of her house and that she made
me think of my grandmother. I said that if we carry on like this, we
will be expelled from the United Nations and those responsible will
stand trial at The Hague’ . . .”).
Lapid’s remarks produced an uproar. He
was reprimanded by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and had to deny publicly
that he’d intended a comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany. More
recently, however, he has returned to the theme. See his article “Stop
the Jewish Barbarians in Hebron,” Jerusalem Post, Jan. 17, 2007
(available online)(“[L]iving here among us are Jews that behave toward
Palestinians exactly the way that German, Hungarian, Polish and other
anti-Semites behaved toward Jews”).
23 For an excellent—and thoroughly disgusted—account of the
Armenian genocide and the general present-day reluctance to discuss it,
see Robert Fisk, The Great War For Civilisation: The Conquest of the
Middle East, pp. 316-55 (2005).
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