WarSclerotic

Vilifying Jews is nothing new: Goldstein | Lorrie Goldstein | Columnists | Comment | Toronto Sun.

In every era, the haters find new ways to spout the same old evil

Last Updated: March 21, 2010 2:15am

Following last week’s column on Israeli Apartheid Week, a number of readers have asked if I’m arguing anyone who participates in this annual event is a Jew hater.

No. There may well be those who participate in IAW, which started at the University of Toronto in 2005, out of a genuine humanitarian concern about Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.

They may also be genuinely unaware the IAW campaign — as British Conservative MP Michael Gove noted during a Canadian tour last fall — uses an age-old tactic employed by Jew haters throughout human history.

That is, to take the founding paradigm of any era, that which we say we most value or believe in, and twist it to portray Jews not just as capable of wrongdoing — since that can be said of anyone — but rather to portray Jews as the most evil people on Earth.

Our paradigm today — what we say we value most — is human rights.

That’s why, to the Jew hater, it’s vital, through IAW, to portray Jews not just as human rights violators, but as the world’s worst violators.

Hence the unrelenting, unfair comparisons of Israel — the Jewish state — in its treatment of the Palestinians, to the most publicly reviled human rights violator of the modern age — apartheid South Africa.

This without any qualifiers — the security threats to Israel posed by Arab and Islamic terrorism — or context — how human rights in Israel compare to the Arab and Islamic dictatorships surrounding it.

Why? Because for Jew haters, none of that matters.

To the contrary, it’s perfectly acceptable to them when Muslims violate the human rights of other Muslims, Christians, or Jews, or when the state-run media in much of the Arab and Muslim world constantly spout Jew hatred.

That’s because Jew haters don’t care about human rights, only about maliciously depicting Jews not just as human rights violators, but as the world’s worst violators.

Similarly, they attack the legitimacy of Israel as “the Jewish state” in a way they would never attack, say, the Islamic character of “The Islamic Republic of Iran”.

None of this is new.

Go back to the Second World War when our emerging paradigm was the supremacy of science over religion.

That’s why the Nazis, even as they were exterminating six million Jews (and millions of others), sought to “prove” through “scientific” means, including medical experimentation (torture), that Jews were not simply an inferior race, but the most degenerate race on Earth. Not just that they were flawed, but irredeemably corrupt.

Go back hundreds of years to when religion was our founding paradigm and we see Jew haters portraying Judaism not just as a flawed religion, but as the most evil religion on Earth, with Jews even accused of using the blood of non-Jewish children (the “blood libel”) to make Passover matzah.

The message of Jew haters has always been consistent.

It’s that Jews aren’t merely fallible, as is everyone. Rather, Jews are unimaginably evil and thus hating them is justified.

So, yes, it’s possible some IAW enthusiasts aren’t Jew haters, just as it’s possible some people who deny the Holocaust are merely ignorant about history.

That said, it’s a given many, if not most, Holocaust deniers are Jew haters.

Why? Because anyone who wants to portray Jews as the puppet masters behind every major global conflict of the past century, of, absurdly, being the simultaneous instigators of tyrannical communism and corrupt capitalism, and of controlling both the international banking system and what movies Hollywood produces, has to discredit the Holocaust.

Why? Because if the Jews are so all-powerful, why did they allow it to happen?

Hence the Jew haters’ argument that not only is the Holocaust a hoax, but that the evil Jews have now fooled the world into feeling guilty about something that never happened and stolen billions of dollars in reparations in the process.

So yes, it’s possible some folks who attend IAW events aren’t motivated by Jew hatred, just as it’s possible some who deny the Holocaust aren’t, either.

It’s just that in so many cases, it’s not probable

This entry was posted on March 21, 2010 at 8:55 AM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.