Anti-Semitism's rising tide (George Jonas)

Anti-Semitism's rising tide

George Jonas, National Post
Published: Saturday, November 25, 2006

These are not propitious times for Jews, either in Israel or in the Diaspora. "Never before," wrote Hillel Halkin in The New York Sun last week, "has the political scene in Israel seemed so directionless or depressing." The Israeli novelist Naomi Ragan goes even further. "The world seems mired in the same kind of lethargy and Jew-hatred which preceded the Holocaust," she wrote in a recent mailshot.

Several commentators have said this in the last few years, which doesn't make it carry more weight, but shows that it's "blowin' in the wind." Has it ever been different, one might ask. The answer is yes. It's hard to believe today, but there was a brief period during which being Jewish was a social asset rather than a liability. Roughly between 1948 and 1970, while the memory of Hitler's genocide was still fresh and the miracle of Israel seemed like a portent of the future, Jew-hatred appeared to be dormant in the West.

In America, this span of about 22 years saw actors and baseball players convert to Judaism: Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr., Elliott Maddox, to list a few. When entertainers convert, it's an unmistakable sign of fashion. Vaguely, temporarily, Jews were the "in-thing." North American kids spent their summers in kibbutzim, including some who weren't Jewish, and Hollywood was making movies like Exodus with Paul Newman. Israel had good press. The phenomenon was probably due to success-worship, elicited by the Phoenix-like rise of a Jewish state from the ashes of history, combined with a mixture of guilt over the Holocaust and realpolitik -- alliance with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, had tangible value during the Cold War.

Euphoric as this period may have been, for a child of the Holocaust like me it was also curiously disorienting. Nineteenth-century Zionists had conceived of Israel as a lifeboat for Jews drowning in the waves of Gentile hatred, but the waves parted in those postwar years like the Red Sea, making a lifeboat seem superfluous. What worried me was that the sea might return prematurely, closing over the heads of haven-seeking Jews rather than the Pharaoh's chariots.

And so it happened. I pinpoint the date the tide reversed as Sept. 12, 1970. That was when the world's brief honeymoon with my people went up in big puffs of smoke at an airstrip at 34 degrees 10' 4N 85 degrees 15' 31W, 675 feet above sea level. Being Jewish ceased to be a fashionable choice for entertainers after Arab terrorists hijacked and blew up the first Western airliners in Dawson Field, Jordan.

That day a coin seemed to drop for people in the West. Feelings of guilt over the Holocaust were all very well, but this lifeboat for Jews was leaking and seemed to come with a hefty price tag. Were Westerners supposed to pick up the tab? Why did Jews need a lifeboat, anyway? No one was persecuting them. Exodus, hell, the Allies took out Hitler so Jews could live happily all over the world. Let them leave those few acres of arid space to the Arabs if they wanted it so badly. Why did Westerners have to risk being hijacked or blown up, or live with the inconvenience of lineups and body-searches at airports, just so that some Russian or American Jew could fly a blue-striped flag over some orange grove he didn't need in a strip of desert between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea Palestinians thought of as their own?

Things got even worse after the collapse of the Kremlin. The Cold War was over; Israel's alliance ceased to have the geopolitical value it had in the days when the West was contending with the Soviets for access to Suez and other resources of the Middle East. Now Muslim militants were stirring, wreaking havoc in Europe, bombing buses and trains in England and Spain, assassinating filmmakers in Holland, crashing airplanes into office buildings in Washington and New York -- intimating all the while that they might stop if the West stopped propping up a Jewish entity inside the House of Islam.

Well, maybe they would, too, wouldn't they? Worth a try -- except we can't try, can we, because the Jewish lobby won't let us. Nothing against Jews, but they do own the press, the banks, they run Hollywood ...

Sounds familiar?

It didn't happen overnight. It happened gradually following Dawson Field, step by step, over the last 35 years, until being Jewish in the Diaspora reverted to what it has always been: a liability. In a sense, it made me feel at home.

"The Jewish people's existence is more important than that of the Jewish state," wrote Eliahu Salpeter in a recent issue of Ha'aretz. "If Israel cannot ensure the Jewish people's survival -- it sometimes seems to even impair that survival -- a giant question mark hovers over the very justification of its existence."

A giant question mark deserves a giant answer. I can only offer a small one. When leaks appear and the water rushes in, keep bailing. The Jews still need a lifeboat.

I didn't think it would happen so soon. Here I teach my sons to be proud of their Jewish heritage and part of my heart fears it will lead them into danger. I am scared and I don't feel safe, even in the USA today. I listen to my liberal Jewish relatives and they scare me too. My grandfather in late 1930s Germany wasn't scared ENOUGH. I hope that my fear is the right amount to ensure the survival of my children and the rest of us, too.

These are not propitious times for Jews, either in Israel or in the Diaspora. "Never before," wrote Hillel Halkin in The New York Sun last week, "has the political scene in Israel seemed so directionless or depressing."

True. However American Jews voted on Nov 7th overwelmingly for the party that is least likely to support Israel and most likely to implement polices that are helpful to mortal enemies of the jewish state. (i.e., Iran, Syria, et.al.).

Interestingly, public support for Israel in Canada has enjoyed a real up-swing over the past year thanks, in most part, to our new Prime Minister Stephen Harper's unwavering leadership.

Since early summer, several prominent Liberals have made such mealymouthed and/or effectively pro-terrorist statements with respect to the recent conflict in the Mid-East that a fair number of prominent, formerly Liberal-supporting Jews have now publicly denounced & left the Party.

While perhaps it's tough to picture Canadian Jews suddenly voting Conservative as a block, its even harder to imagine them once again automatically voting Liberal after some of the appalling things which have been said.

Personally, I'd be more than content to see wholesale shunning of the polls next time out & especially few, if any, significant financial contributions to the Liberals as this would definitely be the next best thing to outright support for the Conservatives.

But according to the Republican Jewish Coalition, more Jews voted Republican -- 25% -- than was reported by the mainstream media. The trend may be for Jews to vote more Conservative since those Jews voting Republican were the younger ones and the Orthodox, the fastest growing sect of Judaism.

Republican Jewish Coalition report

And Israel still has a LOT of friends with buckets!

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There failed not ought of any good thing which the LORD had
spoken unto the house of Israel; all came to pass. (Joshua 21:45)
Letter To The President In Support Of Israel ~
'Final Solution,' Phase 2 ~
Warnings ~

"The West has given more significance to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significant than God, religion, and the prophets...."—Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
The Holocaust Chronicle ~

" ... It's time we recognized the nature of the conflict. It's total war and we are all involved. Nobody on our side is exempted because of age, gender, or handicap. The Islamofacists have stolen childhood from the world."—FReeper Retief
"Palestine is the wrong name for their State. It should be called Anarchy."—FReeper sgtbono2002
"Then let's wait and see what the Arabs do after they take Gaza. There's nothing like Arab reality to break up a Jewish fantasy."—FReeper Noachian
A student told his professor he was going to "Palestine" to "fight for freedom, peace and justice,"—Orwellian leftist code words that mean "murder Jews."
The Nature Of Bruce ~

"What worried me was that the sea might return prematurely, closing over the heads of haven-seeking Jews rather than the Pharaoh's chariots.

And so it happened. I pinpoint the date the tide reversed as Sept. 12, 1970."

Indeed a shift in attitudes toward Jews did occur, but at least here in the USA, two events may have ushered in the change.

The first occurred on the fourth day of the Six-Day war, June 8, 1967. It was on this day that the USS Liberty was attacked by Israel, killing 34 US service members and wounding 134 others. Without assigning blame, this event did dampen the sense of euphoria Americans shared with Israel.

The next incident that affected attitudes towards Jews in the US and presumably all western nations cannot be underestimated as to the impact it caused. It was crucial as it brought any sense of alliance with Israel to a level most every citizen questioned personally. The event was the 1973 Oil Embargo initiated by Col. Gaddafi of Libya during the Yom Kippur War, and enacted by Arab oil producing nations. The significance of the embargo shifted the financial costs of supporting Israel from governments alone, to individuals waiting in long lines and paying higher gas prices.

It was this second event that triggered in the loss of “fair weather friends” Israel had. Now people were involved personally, and many gave a greater significance to their personal plight than that of Israel.

Muslim nations still exert such strategies today that continue to erode western support for Israel. Oil is not always the weapon employed. Iraq today might be at peace if our Muslim allies neighboring Iraq had lent their support. By withholding such support, there has been a deepening erosion in the US and western nations of all our Middle East policies, including those affecting Israel.

Why these Muslims strategies are effective is open to debate. In large part the responsibility has to fall upon our own western leaders that have not adequately neutralized the strategies, and are ill-equipped to keep the base of support among their citizens.

Israel does still have many friends outside their borders, but they lack champions among western leaders that will articulate their cause. When troubles arise, the leaders mute their voices simply allowing events to unfold with little comment. The leaders claim Israel has a right to exist, but they lack the conviction to give reason to their claims.

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