The list of the Top 10 Living Tough Jews it is not only about brute physical strength – it is about a people who are smart, strong, resilient, rugged, bold and fearless. This is a reflection of good, tough Jews who are positive representations of the Jewish people, (no gangsters here) – don’t let a yarmulke fool you.

In no particular order here’s my List of the Top 10 Living Tough Jews – it’s a list compiled by a Public Relations pro, not a Rabbinical Authority.

Open for Debate, (In No Particular Order):

1. Israel Defense Forces: All of the men and women of the Israel Defense Forces – the holy Jewish army are the toughest (and holiest) Jews one can ever imagine. They protect the people of Israel against tremendous odds, and with Israel’s survival threatened daily these Jews are consummate warriors, fighting not only for a country but for an important ideal.

2. Elie Wiesel & All of The Holocaust Survivors: Elie Wiesel and all of the Holocaust survivors who survived the tremendous inhumanity of the Nazis are tough beyond comprehension. Wiesel said: “I have tried to keep memory alive. I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are all accomplices.” The Holocaust survivors all lost so much – and fight on every single day in life; few can imagine how much toughness and inner strength that takes.

3. Yitzchak Shamir: Israel’s founding father, Shamir served as Prime Minister of Israel in 1983–84 and 1986–92. Before Israel became a state he served in the heroic underground, and then in the Mossad (Israel secret service).  Shamir is a man with amazing legacy – elegant, strong and determined, this tough man devoted his whole life to building the land and people of Israel. Shamir, whose name means “hard stone,” always said “I would like to be remembered as a person who loved Eretz Israel and never ever gave up an inch.” Tough man.

4. Liev Schreiber: Defiance is one of the greatest Jewish movies ever, as it makes my point clear for audiences around the world to see, and it can make any tough guy cry. Schreiber’s character in the movie, Zus Bielski, is a real life tough Jew.  (Bielski is one of three Jewish warrior brothers who fought the Nazis). As Schreiber says, “this was a remarkable story — a triumphant story. It sets out to redefine the Jewish image — that of fighter. We all know tough Jews like that. My own grandfather was incredibly tough and athletic and was the main male role model in my life.”  For his portrayal and his own pride of his heritage,  Schreiber makes the list.

5. Sandy Koufax: Perhaps the greatest known Jewish athlete ever, Koufax was a legendary pitcher – the youngest player ever elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972 at the age of 36. Skilled and determined on the mound, he had tremendous inner strength to be able to not pitch in Game One of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.  As legendary Dodgers scout Al Campanis said, “There are two times in my life the hair on my arms has stood up: The first time I saw the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the first time I saw Sandy Koufax throw a fastball.”

6. Sam Zell: This business magnate may be the most hated man in the newspaper business – and he’s one damn tough Jew. “I’m an immigrant’s kid. I have a very different perspective on the world than somebody who grew up in Chicago and led what I would call a normal life.” Zell was raised in an Orthodox household and is a supporter of Israel, and says no matter where he travels: “In no way, shape, or form do I hide the fact that I believe in Israel—open kimono!” he declared. “There’s this Yiddish term, derech ertez, and it means respect. My father and mother, particularly my father, brought us up with the premise that respect was non-negotiable. Love was optional. I’m not saying this in a bad way. It was: ‘I want you to love me, but you have to respect me.” A great lesson for all of the Jewish people.

For the challenge, they must pick three Middle Eastern Arab countries as well as Gaza, and speak in open advertised forums including Mosques and Universities. They must also travel without security as they do in Israel and Jewish communities. Upon completion of this tour I will sign the check, which I am prepared to place in escrow today with attorneys. J Street President Mr. Jeremy Ben Ami and Mr. Peter Beinart simply need to preach their message of co-existence in the Arab world.

While these American Jewish left-wing extremists have made a lot of noise in the United States about the danger of the “settlements” and the Netanyahu government, some even calling for the boycott of Jewish goods made in the West Bank, they seem to have completely ignored the other parties of the Arab Israeli conflict – and that doesn’t seem right. So I offer a dare to these so-called pro-Israel activists to proclaim their Zionism in Arab countries, speak of their “Jewish values,” deliver the same talks as they would in front of Jewish audiences. I believe they won’t – because they likely would not make it home alive. Beinart has foolishly said:  “Prime Minister Netanyahu distrusts Obama because Obama reminds him of leftist Jews − the Jews that Netanyahu detests, the kind of Jews that Netanyahu once famously told an Israeli rabbi ‘have forgotten what it is to be Jews.’”  So I encourage Mr. Beinart to travel the Arab countries – whose hostility Israel’s Prime Minister faces daily – and explain “what it is to be a Jew.”

“What really struck me when I read his writings and that of his father Benzion, and then about the Revisionist tradition, is this belief that the world is a very nasty place, and the Jews are in danger because they don’t recognize its nastiness….We’ve got to become like everybody else,” wrote Beinart. I am a proud product of the Zionist Revisionist movement – formerly serving as National President of the Betar Movement, which was founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and it saddens me to see people like Beinart and Ben-Ami neglect to notice the unfortunate nastiness that does exist in the world, especially the desire of many in the Middle East to destroy the Jewish people.

Jews however are a race, a fact that has been known for thousands of years and has been backed up by genetic evidence in modern times. A fact that has been dismissed by liberals who are eager to denounce racism except when it comes to the one particular race that they have given themselves permission to hate.

By embracing the Islamophobia narrative, the left prioritized combating discrimination against a belief system over combating discrimination against a race, reversing its past position that racial prejudice is worse than any other form of prejudice because it persecutes an innate aspect of the individual, rather than an external adopted one. And when the two were in conflict over the racist aspect of the ideology, it chose the ideology and its racism.

Leftist and Islamic persecution of Jews and the common alliance of the two groups have made it necessary for the left to ignore or even legitimize displays of Anti-Semitism. The supremacy of these two ideologies over the rights and humanity of the most persecuted racial minority in the world are the toxic ingredients in the “New Anti-Semitism” which has revived Anti-Semitic racial prejudice as a progressive value.

American and European elites have become obsessed with protecting a single religion from any criticism, even when that religion comes burdened with an ugly legacy of racism that believes the Jewish people are its eternal enemies who must be destroyed in an apocalyptic Islamic genocide that concludes with every rock crying out,  “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!”

The rocks have remained silent, but left-wing newspapers have taken up the call in their place. Jewish store windows are smashed, synagogues burned, schools attacked and children murdered, while the media ignores, justifies, whitewashes and even occasionally praises these crimes. Every other news story from the Middle East is either an attack on the Jewish State or a celebration of the Muslim Brotherhood and its plans for a genocidal theocracy stretching across the region and eventually across the world.

Attacks reminiscent of the work of Goebbels’ pet propagandists regularly make their way into the pages of The Guardian and Time Magazine as part of the Leftist-Islamic alliance against the Jews. Warnings about growing Anti-Semitism are ridiculed or dismissed while Islamophobia is treated as a grave threat, even though crime statistics clearly show a far higher numbers of attacks on Jews contrasted with a fairly insignificant numbers of attacks on Muslims.

The left cannot deny the hate crimes statistics, so instead it chooses to ignore them. The artificial reality bubbles sent up by its media empires clamor about the manufactured crisis of Islamophobia, while claiming Anti-Semitism is largely overblown, a tool that it insists Jews use to silence Muslims and leftists. The same elites who claimed that McCarthyism was worse than the Gulags, now claim that Islamophobia is worse than Anti-Semitism.

Gennarini has recently helped organize a concert at the Lincoln Center titled “The Suffering of the Innocents, A Symphonic Homage and Prayer.” It will be performed on May 6^th in the Boston Symphony Hall, on May 8th in Avery Fisher Hall-Lincoln Center in New York City and on May 14 in Chicago Orchestra Hall. The will be also a performance in a Synagogue in Teaneck with a scaled down version of the concert to give opportunity to other Jewish people to attend. For more information on all of these performances and how to attend, click here.

The Symphony was composed by Kiko Argüello, the initiator of the Neo-Catechumenal Way, as homage to all innocent victims and especially those of the Shoah. It is not only a beautiful musical performance, but also an event of meditation and friendship between Jews and Christians. It was performed for the first time in January of last year in the Vatican before Pope Benedict XVI, then in Galilee, Paris, Madrid, Düsseldorf and finally, in December of last year, in Jerusalem, at the Gerard Bechar Theater. It is now coming to New York, Chicago and Boston and being welcomed with enthusiasm by many Cardinals, Bishops, Rabbis and prominent leaders in the Jewish world.

FP: Giuseppe Gennarini, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let us begin with why Neo-Catechumenal Way is offering this symphony in homage to the Jewish people. What exactly does Kiko Argüello hope to achieve in this musical work?

Gennarini: Thanks Jamie.

Rediscovering that the roots of our faith are in the people of Israel gives us a profound gratitude towards them. Carmen Hernandez, who initiated the Neo-Catechumenal Way together with Kiko, lived four years in Israel, working and visiting the Holy places. There, she acquired a profound knowledge of the Jewish festivals and traditions, transmitting to all of us the love of the Jewish roots. We are grateful to the Jews for everything we have received from them: the Holy Scriptures, the Fathers, the Prophets, the tradition, the roots of our feasts and liturgies, Jesus, the Apostles, Paul, Mary, etc… Because of that, Pope Benedict XVI said that Jews are “our fathers in faith” (avoteynu ba’emunah).

So the only reason we have for offering this Symphony is our love of the Jewish people and the conviction that the union of spirit and love between Catholics and Jews is fundamental to face the new challenges of secularization. According to the Jewish-Catholic tradition, there is no love without communion in suffering. We would like to show our love for the Jewish people, recognizing the suffering of the innocents and especially the tragedy of the Holocaust. We would like to say through this opus: “We do not turn our back to the people of Israel and to their sufferings in history.”

FP: Kindly expand a bit on the significance of the theme of the “Suffering of the Innocents” in today’s society. Share with us the Christian view of the suffering of innocents.

Gennarini: The theme of the symphony reflects Argüello’s experience in the shantytown of Madrid, Spain, in the 1960’s where, after leaving everything behind, he went to live amongst the poorest of the poor. In the midst of all these shattered people living in shacks, Argüello contemplated the suffering of many due to the sins of others: homeless people lying in the streets dying of cold, children in horrible orphanages where they suffer violence, people abandoned because of their illness. In approaching these people, Kiko saw in the innocent victims a carrying of the sin of many, as the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, that in their mystery shines the presence of God. It is written, in the Jewish sources, that a good Jew must remain standing at the presence of a man struck with illness, because in him dwells the Shekhinah. Approaching these suffering innocents, he realized the magnitude of the tragedy that the Jewish people experienced in the Holocaust.

FP: What response has the symphony received before other audiences, especially in Israel?

Gennarini: We organized in Galilee and in Jerusalem two symphonies for a Jewish audience and in both occasions more than 700 people, several rabbis and civil authorities, were present. The response was marvelous and moving. I would answer your question by echoing the words of Rabbi David Rosen (Chief Rabbinate of Israel Honorary Advisor on Interfaith Relations, AJC, Israel). After hearing the symphony in Jerusalem, he stated:

“This concert represents a revolution in the relationship between those of the Christian Faith and the people of Israel; an acknowledgement that there are essential differences which separate us in faith – and yet all considered, there are very important elements which unite us. Kiko Argüello and the Way are committed to preserving the identity of the people of Israel, and I’m grateful to have taken part in this historical movement to foster the relationship between Christians and Jews.”

FP: Have you had help from the Jewish community in the US in organizing this event? Who is endorsing this event?

In the sixty-four years that the revived country has existed, there has been a dramatic population shift. Western and Eastern Europe and Russia, where the majority of Western Jews once lived, now hold a fraction of the Jewish population. The Muslim world, former location of the majority of Eastern Jews, is barely worth mentioning.

Globally the Jewish population is divided between Israel and the United States. Israel is the home of the majority of the world’s Jews, but the combined Jewish Anglosphere is still larger, not so much because of the United Kingdom, but because of North America, which holds the largest number of Jews. In a development that would have been all but incomprehensible a century ago, the majority of Jews in the world speak English or Hebrew. Smaller numbers speak French and Spanish, but in a generation hardly any will speak Russian or Arabic.

The majority of Jews live in the American Hemisphere. If we subtract Israel, the Eastern Hemisphere would barely muster up ten percent of the Jewish population because its Jews have for the most part either moved to the Western Hemisphere or to Israel.

Israel is the last Jewish outpost in the Eastern Hemisphere. The last significant Jewish populations there are either in the far west, in the United Kingdom and France or legacy populations in Russia and the Ukraine. The latter have no future and the former are dwindling under pressure from the growing Muslim population in Europe.

Over the last century, Jews have been moving West, though not quickly enough to outpace the Nazis and the Communists. The migration has gathered up Middle East Jews and Eastern European Jews, leaving a handful scattered on the Western shores of Europe, while the majority have either rebuilt in Israel or moved on to America, Canada or Latin America.

Jews have often been referred to as the “canary in the coal mine” and accordingly Jewish migrations may foreshadow Christian migrations from the Eastern Hemisphere.

The Christian populations of the Middle East appear to be going the way of the Jewish population. In thrall to Muslim propaganda, the media blames Israel for the vanishing Christians of Bethlehem, but how does one explain a comprehensive regional Christian decline and exodus?

The fall of Egypt into the hands of the Brotherhood, Turkey into the hands of the AKP Islamists and the strong likelihood that the Brotherhood will take Syria and Hezbollah will take Lebanon, along with Muslim control over Gaza and the West Bank represent the end of the remaining centers of Christianity in the Middle East. It is not difficult to foresee a near future where Israel is the last remaining safe place in the region for Christians.

An open letter authored by David Wilder and Noam Arnon of the Jewish Community of Hebron addressed to U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and other officials notes that “Mr. Muhammad Abu Shahala, a former intelligence agent for the Palestinian Authority, has been sentenced to death, following a hurried trial. His crime: selling property to Jews in Hebron.” The letter continues:

Mr. Abu Shahala reportedly confessed following torture sessions at the hands of his captors. The death sentence can be executed only following concurrence by Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, president of the PA. After he signs the death warrant, Abu Shahala may be killed.

It is appalling to think that property sales should be defined as a “capital crime” punishable by death. The very fact that such a “law” exists within the framework of the PA legal system points to a barbaric and perverse type of justice, reminiscent of practices implemented during the dark ages.

The letter then poses a pertinent question. “Is the Palestinian Authority a reincarnation of the Third Reich?” it asks.

Noted columnist Caroline Glick provides an answer to that question. “The PA (Palestinian Authority) was established in May 1994,” Glick writes. “The first law it adopted defined selling land to Jews as a capital offense. Shortly thereafter scores of Arab land sellers began turning up dead in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in both judicial and extrajudicial killings.”

A report by the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) contends that, before the creation of the PA, the decree had been in effect since before the creation of Israel in 1948. If CBN is correct, it reveals an inconvenient truth: the kind of irrational hatred that would make selling one’s home to a Jew an offense punishable by death pre-dated the creation of the Jewish State. Such a reality blasts a giant hole in the seemingly intractable belief among Western leaders that all of the region’s ongoing animosity is the result of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians — or that such animosity can be quelled by any “peace process.”

Howell joins the ranks of other MPs, including such prominently pro-Israel members of parliament as Louise Ellman and Robert Halfon, who have been on the receiving end of astounding volumes of vitriol and venom for refusing to align with the pro-terrorist position that dominates the political and intellectual climate in the United Kingdom. The threats that they have received are a taste of the charged atmosphere that defines the debate.

In a darkening atmosphere of hate, it has become increasingly dangerous to be Jewish or pro-Israel in the UK. That atmosphere extends all the way up to its highest bodies.

“Just as Lord Ashcroft owns one part of the Conservative Party, right-wing Jewish millionaires own the other part,” a Labour MP told the Friends of Al-Aqsa, basking in the cheers of his appreciative audience. Another Labour MP suggested that ambassadors to Israel should not be Jewish so that they “can’t be accused of having Jewish loyalty.”

Accusation of Jews having their “tentacles”  and “financial grip” on the Western world are not just the sort of thing you read about in old articles on the politics of the 1930s; they are a recurring theme in the parliamentary proceedings of the present day. That is what makes the courage of those members of parliament who retain the integrity to stand by the truth despite the torrent of hate that much more noteworthy.

Lord Janner, who had stood at mass graves, participated in the War Crimes Investigation Unit working with survivors at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp and headed up the All-Party Parliamentary Group against Anti-Semitism, was physically assaulted when he protested against Lord Bramall’s attacks on Israel. Lord Bramall was not charged. But Lord Bramall pales next to Lord Nazir Ahmed, who has promoted anti-Semitism, supported Islamic terrorism and announced a bounty for the capture of George W. Bush.

Lord Ahmed invited a speaker who stated that “in the Middle East we have just one reason for wars, terror and trouble – and that is Jewish supremacy drive” and Ahmed himself suggested that British volunteers in Israel should be prosecuted for war crimes.

Whatever line there is between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is swiftly being blurred away to nothing. While it might be tempting to dismiss a few email threats as the work of cranks, there is no denying the reality that views and actions that might have once been relegated to the margins, are now mainstream. In the UK of “Seven Jewish Children” and accusations of a “Jewish cabal” running Downing Street there is no longer any standard of decency or line that should not be crossed in the left’s bloody war against the Jewish State.

The focus of the presentation was the Shia-Sunni conflict in the Middle East and the rise to dominance of Islamism in the Arab world.  My colleague, Dr. Mikhail, a native Egyptian, related his personal experiences living as a Christian in Egypt.  He described the teaching of hate against non-Muslims, and the resultant killings and raping rampages against Christians in Egypt by Muslims. (In the most recent elections held in Egypt, since the fall of the Mubarak regime, the Salafist “Nour” party, members of which are extremist Islamists won 27.8% of the seats in the Egyptian Parliament and the more “moderate”Muslim Brotherhood won 37.5% of the vote.

“Progressive” thinking members of the clergy seem to have their minds made up and cannot and will not allow facts to alter their beliefs.  And, while our presentation focused on reported, factual events in the Middle East, these facts seemed irrelevant to our “progressive” Unitarian Minister host.  While it is true that there are extremist Christians and Jews, not since the dawn of the 21^st century has one heard cries from either Christians or Jews advocating the killing of an infidel Muslim as we have seen when a Muslim cries out “Allahu Akbar” while stabbing or shooting a Jew or a Christian.  There have been no reported killings of Muslims in the name of Jesus or Moses…

The exercising of moral equivalency by the “Progressive Left”  negates the teachings of all monotheistic faiths.  If one cannot distinguish between right and wrong, one invites chaos and confusion into society.  Moreover, our legal system will collapse under such a practice.  A murderer’s guilt will become “relative” not complete, and under such relativist conditions, it would be impossible to convict anyone, without having extenuating circumstances.

What holds true for individual offenders applies to communities of faiths as well.  In today’s Europe (most recently exhibited in Toulouse), as in Gaza and Cairo, Islamist incitement to murder infidels is excused by European elites who react to such heinous acts with moral relativism and political correctness.  Relativism and political correctness found in academia, media, churches, or government, regard the probing into aberrant Islamist behavior as Islamophobia or racism.

Similar complaints as that made by the Unitarian minister, regarding the call to restraint in the absence of Muslim representatives, reveals an endemic hypocrisy that exists not just in this particular church, but in the United Methodist and the Presbyterian USA churches, where anti-Israel and at times anti-Semitic resolutions are being discussed without consideration of the Jewish/Israeli point of view or, not including input from one of the parties – the Jewish/Israeli party as part of the discussion.

At the upcoming United Methodist Church (UMC) General Conference taking place this April 2012, and the Presbyterian Church USA General Assembly to be held in July 2012, leaders will be calling for divestment from companies doing business with Israel, and statements will be made labeling Israel “an Apartheid State” and equating Israel with South Africa.

The despicable murders in Toulouse, France, on Monday, March 19, 2012 that took the lives of Rabbi Yonatan Sandler (30), his two small children, Aryeh (3) and Gavriel (6), and Miriam Monsonego, the eight-year-old daughter of the Ozer Ha’Torah school’s principal by Mohammed Merah (24), an Arab-Muslim French citizen, has raised anew the question of whether France is a safe place for Jews.

When this writer asked Lyda Peltz, a French citizen born to Jewish parents who came from North Africa, if France is safe for Jews, her response was fast and furious, “France is no longer a safe place for Jews.”  Lyda, who moved to Israel several years ago, joined thousands of other French Jews whose accented voices fill the streets of Netanya, Ashkelon, and Eilat. She contends that the influx of millions of Muslims into France enabled the anti-Semitism that already existed to rise above surface and become legitimatized.

A spate of violent anti-Semitic attacks on Jews throughout France during the 2008-09 “Cast Lead” Israeli operation in Gaza, aided in great measure by the French media’s anti-Israel posture, prompted the exodus of thousands of Jews from France. In the aftermath, terrorists crashed two vehicles, one loaded with firebombs, into the façade of a synagogue in Toulouse, France January 6, 2009, while a lecture was going on. Fortunately, there was only physical damage and no one suffered any injuries. This attack was, however, the second serious terrorist attack on Jewish targets in France in less than a week.

A 29-year old Jewish man was attacked on January 4, 2009 at a Paris subway station by a gang of 20 people who yelled “Palestine will win.” They hit the man in the face and filmed the scene. Three days later, a 15-year-old Jewish girl in suburban Paris (Villiers-le-Bel) accused a gang of ten which included three of her classmates, of an anti-Semitic assault. She had been thrown to the ground, kicked, punched, and the attackers told her that they were “avenging Palestinians.”  On January 8, 2009, “Death to the Jews” was spray-painted outside a primary school in Nice. On that same day, the ORT Bramson High School in Marseille was attacked by vandals who threw aerosol cans soaked with flammable liquid at the school building.

Prior to last Monday’s calculated murders, the brutal murder of Ilan Halimi, a23-year-old Parisian Jew in 2006, was the country’s most shocking.  Halimi had been lured to an apartment by a female gang member, and sadistically tortured to death by Arab and African Muslim Frenchmen. One gang member admitted to having put out a cigarette on Halimi’s face “because he did not like Jews.”  The anti-Semitism of this gang of barbarians went much further.  According to one witness the torturers recited verses from the Koran while Halimi was tortured.

On August 9, 1982, during the First Lebanon War, Arab terrorists used grenades and machine guns in an attack that targeted Chez Jo Goldenberg, the famous Jewish establishment located in the Marais district of Paris.  Six people were killed and 22 wounded.

The work of the French media and academia reveals that a majority of members are not only leftist in their outlook, but anti-American and anti-Israel as well and, elements are allied with radical Islamists. Official policies of the French government since 1967 show they have sought cooperation with the Arab world at the expense of Israel. The actions of the media, academia and the government have all contributed to the rise of anti-Semitism.  However, the multi-cultural and political-correct French elites, who have looked the other way rather than face the violent excesses of many of the Arab Muslim immigrants, and have not spoken out against the radical Islamic imams who preach hatred against all non-Muslims and Jews in particular, are ultimately responsible for the harvest of anti-Semitism being reaped in today’s France.

After last week’s killing of three children and a rabbi at a Jewish school in Toulouse, early reports suggested that the murderer was a white, right-wing racist who was targeting minorities.  Indeed, one could be excused for getting the impression, from those first accounts, that the authorities and the media wanted him to be a white, right-wing racist – a lone maniac like the guy who mowed down dozens of teenagers in Norway last July.  Yet the Toulouse terrorist turned out, like so many perpetrators of unspeakable European atrocities in recent years, to be an Islamic jihadist – a self-declared Mujahideen and member of al-Qaeda who said he was out to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children and the military involvement of France in the Islamic world, and who, if a van had not blocked the path of his scooter, might have succeeded in executing as many young people as Anders Behring Breivik did on the island of Utøya.

If at first many highly placed Frenchmen were eager to attribute the Toulouse murders to right-wing racism, the revelation of Mohamed Merah’s identity initiated a rush to dismiss the relevance of the killer’s religion and his openly expressed motivations and associations.  Nicolas Sarkozy, who was quick tomeet with Jewish and Muslim leaders at the Elysée Palace, was equally quick to tell the French people that “our Muslim counterparts have nothing to do with the crazy motivations of a terrorist.”  Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque in Paris, declared that “what happened in Toulouse…had nothing to do with Islam.”  And in Le Monde, Jean-Yves Camus, an “expert” on radical Islam and the extreme right, insisted that in determining the root cause of the murders, “the impact of the re-Islamization of French Muslims by the conservative currents, that is to say fundamentalists, is less important than the unleashing of a radical anti-Zionism that has gone too far and that does not emanate from our own Muslim compatriots, far from it.”

It is certainly true that “radical anti-Zionism” – not to mention vicious anti-Semitism – is on the rise throughout Western Europe.  But it is also true that before the current wave of Jew-hate really took off, a deep-seated antagonism for Jews was already endemic among Muslims in France.

People across France were supposedly shocked at the massacre, shocked to discover that Jewish schoolchildren in their own country could be murdered in such a fashion.  I don’t know what to make of those declarations of shock.  The fact is that Jewish schoolchildren in France have been in danger for years, and anyone who cares anything about the subject has known this for years.

The killer is Mohammed Merah, a 24-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin who claims to be an Al-Qaeda member. Merah had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan in 2007 he was arrested for bomb making, but escaped months later in a large-scale Taliban jailbreak.

As for his recent attacks, he told police negotiators they were motivated by the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan and by a desire to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.

In that regard Merah’s words were remarkably similar to those of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Monday, the day of the school massacre. Speaking to a conference in Brussels called “Engaging Youth—Palestinian Refugees” that was sponsored by the Belgian government and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, she said:

when we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and in different parts of the world—we remember young people and children who lose their lives.

These words—clearly connoting that children in Gaza are brutally murdered by Israeli forces—sparked enraged responses in Israel, including from the prime minister, foreign minister, and opposition leader. On Tuesday, Ashton’s office issued a purported “clarification.” It stated that she had “referred to tragedies taking the lives of children around the world and drew no parallel whatsoever between the circumstances of the Toulouse attack and the situation in Gaza.”

The problem, though, is that Ashton’s statement clearly did draw that parallel, and her “clarification” is a weak and unconvincing denial rather than a genuine retraction. Israeli officials reportedly—with justice—see it that way and remain “unwilling to forgive” her remarks. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had put it, “What gets me especially incensed is the comparison between the targeted slaughter of children and the surgical, defensive activities of the Israel Defense Forces that are meant to hit terrorists who use children for human shields.”

“The desert is groaning”, declares Cornerstone magazine, the Palestinian Sabeel Theology Center’s publication. “The Israeli army and settlers have polluted the Palestinian areas,” writes Reverend Naim Ateek, who heads the notorious anti-Jewish Christian center.

Despite the fact that Israel is the only country to enter the 21st century with a net gain in forest growth, Green activists today are among the most virulently anti-Jewish. The Green Party mayor of Aachen, Hilde Scheidt, has just waged a media campaign against Israel. Prominent German author Henryk Broder called her a “Green anti-Semite,” after she defended a cartoon depicting a man sporting a Star of David on his bib as he devours a young Palestinian boy with a fork draped in an American flag and a knife with the word “Gaza” written on it.

Back in 1991, German Green Party’s spokesman Hans Christian Stroebele defended Saddam Hussein’s rockets on Tel Aviv because “Iraq’s attacks are the logical, almost compelling, consequence of Israel’s politics vis-à-vis the Palestinians and the Arab states,”

The Green lies about “the ecology of occupation” are now spreading at the highest European levels. The French parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee recently published an unprecedented report accusing Israel of implementing “apartheid” in its allocation of water in Judea and Samaria.

Meanwhile, environmentalists accuse Israel’s army of being a major cause of cancer in Palestinian children. This blood libel began in 1999, when Suha Arafat declared that Israeli gas is poisoning Arab children: “Our people have been subjected to the daily and extensive use of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to an increase in cancer cases among women and children.” She also said that Israel has “chemically contaminated about 80% of water sources used by Palestinians.”

Nazi-style rhetoric

The pollution myth spread through the literary milieu as well. British dramatist David Hare wrote that the Jews have “polluted” the Promised Land and “do not belong here.” According to this racist belief, “native species” originate in a certain place and that is where they “belong.” Hence, Israel’s “colonization” threatens the “original” Arab environment.

Green NGOs accuse Israel of “warfare ecology,” “deforestation,” “erosion of agricultural lands,” and “expropriation” of Arab land for Israel’s national park. European geographers denounce settler “cementification” and the “architecture of occupation” in a growing topography of hatred.

Friends Seminary invitee Gilad Atzmon

The Friends Seminary of New York, which invited the notorious anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon, to one of its classes, and assigned its students to read his hate-filled writings, has now backed out of an agreement to invite me to the school to talk to the students about the evils of anti-Semitism.  The Headmaster of the Friends Seminary, a school which is supposed to be committed to honesty and integrity, has broken his solemn promise to me, and to members of its own community, to allow its students to hear both sides of an issue which really has only one side:  namely, the illegitimacy of bringing hate mongers into high school classrooms.

After I exposed the original invitations to Gilad Atzmon—who justifies the burning down of synagogues as a “reasonable” response to Jewish efforts to “control the world”—the Headmaster of the school agreed to several things.  First, he would speak at an assembly to the students about the evils of anti-Semitism;  second, he would assign my essay to the students who were assigned Atzmon’s essay; and third, he would invite me to address the students.  He has now broken each of these promises.

Students who were at the assembly have confirmed that the speakers only made things worse.  The teacher who invited Atzmon talked about what a great musician he was.  The Headmaster was defensive about how his words were manipulate and justified bringing Atzmon based on Quaker principles.  Apparently the word anti-Semitism was never once mentioned during this meeting.  My article was not assigned to the students; a citation was sent to them saying that I wanted students to read its content.

When I wrote to the Headmaster complaining about these breaches, they used my letter as an excuse for canceling my appearance.  The real reason was almost certainly pressure from hard-left members of his faculty and others.

Let’s be clear what this means.  The school was unwilling to cancel Atzmon’s appearance, even after learning that he was a virulent anti-Semite who questions the Holocaust but believes that it may be true that Jews kill Christians to use their blood for religious purposes.  But they have canceled my appearance because they didn’t like the tone of a private letter that I wrote to them that was critical of the Headmaster’s failure to comply with his promises.  I ended my letter with the following words:  “Please assure me that I am wrong about my judgment about you.  I really would like to see this move forward in a positive direction, but you are not helping.  The ultimate sufferers are your students, who are being taught the wrong values that will serve them poorly in college and in life.”

In a speech given to the Domestic Affairs Committee of the German Bundestag in June 2008 on the subject of a renascent antisemitism, journalist Henryk Broder distinguished between a prejudice and a resentment: “a prejudice concerns a person’s behavior; a resentment concerns that person’s very existence. Anti-semitism is a resentment. The anti-Semite does not begrudge the Jew how he is or what he does, but that he is at all. The anti-Semite takes offense as much at the Jew’s attempts to assimilate as at his self-marginalization. Rich Jews are exploiters; poor Jews are freeloaders….The anti-Semite blames Jews for everything and its opposite.”

Of course, this is a story as old as the Judean hills. If there is anything “new” about it in the current historical moment, it resides in the form this ancient “resentment” happens to take. Its racist, religious and class manifestations persist, but a fourth ingredient has been added to this toxic soup of roiling hatreds, namely, a national element that goes under the rubric of anti-Zionism. The “historical strain of anti-Semitism continues,” writes Phyllis Chesler in The New Anti-Semitism, “but in the last fifty years it has also metamorphosed into the most violent anti-Zionism.”

What Jews cannot be forgiven today is the rebuilding of a national home. The re-creation of the state of Israel in its ancestral territory is broadly regarded as a colonial incursion into the Middle East and, in many cases, as the latest installment in a vast Jewish conspiracy to pursue the gradual conquest of the world or to assert a sinister hegemony. This conviction is obviously nonsense if not sheer madness, but it serves a time-dishonored purpose: the justification of an aversion to everything Jewish, whether expressed, in Norman Cohn’s phrase, as a warrant for genocide, or as a free-floating revulsion to the mere fact of Jewishness—even where no or very few Jews are present.

Examples abound. Soeren Kern, a senior analyst for the Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos in Madrid, considers Spain the most antisemitic country in Europe, nearly half of its people harboring negative opinions of Jews. Yet the Jewish community in Spain is infinitesimal, with only 12,000 Jews out of a population of 42 million, less than .05% (Pajamas Media, December 30, 2008). Similarly, there are only 1,300 Jews in Norway, approximately .003% out of a population of 4,645,000, yet Norway is a major Scandinavian purveyor of anti-Zionist and antisemitic attitudes and beliefs, and indeed challenges Spain for the European laurels (Behind the Humanitarian Mask, Manfred Gerstenfeld, ed.)

Not to be left behind, Sweden, where Jews form .01% of the population, is a veritable hotbed of antisemitic sepsis, its  largest daily, Aftonbladet, accusing the Israeli army of harvesting the organs of abducted Palestinians and its foreign minister Carl Bildt endorsing the blood libel as “freedom of expression.” One remembers, too, the graffiti in Potsdam after German reunification: Juden Raus, “Jews Out.” There were no Jews in Potsdam. As of this writing, Britain seems to have leaped into the forefront of the European antisemitic pack, with France breathing down its neck. Jews constitute .25% of the census in the former, .73% in the latter. Both countries have large Muslim immigrant populations, which increasingly influence the official tone of anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli feeling. Political authorities like Catherine Ashton and Nicolas Sarkozy are among Israel’s most fervid critics and appear little concerned with the plight of Jews in their own nations.

According to reports, South Korea, where scarcely a Jew is to be found, is also trending in the same direction, as witness a “top-selling series of comic books,” other anti-Semitic texts, a demonstrable strain of public sentiment, and a Secretary-General of the United Nations, the rather contemptible Ban Ki-moon, who considers Israel an occupying power that practices “violence against civilians.”

Then there is Japan, a world-leader in the promulgation of antisemitic material, though one would have to search far and wide to find a Jew in that country. Many writers, publishers and organizations in Japan are preoccupied with Yudakaya, “the Jewish peril.” According to the Stephen Roth Institute, books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The International Jew and Mein Kampf are regularly reprinted in new editions. Prominent authors, publishers, journalists and academics—the list is daunting—who blame Jews for everything from AIDS to cancer to Alzheimer’s to the revival of Nazism, are widely read. “Fascination caused by ignorance, but also in some cases fear and hatred of Jews,” says Roth, “probably explain the great popularity of…anti-Semitic yudayamono (Jewish books).”

Salman Rushdie, the author of “The Satanic Verses”, was quietly deleted from India’s Jaipur Literature Festival after the protests of the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary – one of Islam’s most powerful bodies.

Rushdie went into hiding after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian Shia leader, issued a fatwa calling for his death.

Rushdie’s saga is now, in many parts of the Islamic world, associated with a “Zionist plot” and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a short book concocted by the czarist police and presented as minutes of a secret meeting where Jews plotted world domination.

According to Iranian officials, Rushdie is a “mercenary author masterminded by Zionism, Britain and the United States of America”. Today Iran is one of the major world printers of the “Protocols”, the only book that has ever had the perverse distinction of being both globally influential and, at the same time, a forgery.

There is no accurate information on the sales of the “Protocols”, but it is undoubtedly one of the best sellers of all time.

Unfortunately, the “Protocols” rarely attracts Western attention, as we like to think that it is just a bad joke. We closed our eyes for too long.

In 1983, Yasser Arafat sent a letter to the UN secretary- general accusing Jews of “poisoning Palestinian schoolgirls”. It was the beginning of the monstrous Palestinian ideology.

Originally, the “Protocols” was meant as a warning to good Russian youths. The message: Beware of the machinations of the Jews, whose hidden aim is the subjugation of the Christian world.

Now the book is one of the most powerful propaganda tools of the Arab and Islamic world.
The only time the Protocols’ popularity dipped was immediately following the Holocaust. One suspects it was a little difficult to reconcile Jewish control of the world with the obliteration of a third of the Jewish people. But soon rationalizations began to appear.

On December 27, 2011, the Palestinian-Lebanese historian Bayan Nuwayhed Al-Hout published an article in the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, which dealt, among other things, with the “Protocols” and their connection to Judaism, the Zionist movement and the State of Israel. In her article, Al-Hout claims that the “the Protocols completely correspond to the words of the great Rabbis throughout the ages, and to the Talmud itself. The Chosen People is a basic Talmudic concept, meaning the people who were chosen to rule and dictate”.

Arab anti-Semitism has adopted all of Europe’s anti- Semitic myths. The “Protocols” are now prominently displayed not only in the Middle East, but also on the Western and Christian bookshelf. Though they are a proven forgery, they nevertheless receive worldwide recognition by those who seek to rely on them for promoting their own nefarious purposes.

I have often written, sometimes bemused, sometimes incensed, about what is surely the strangest fact of Jewish life, namely, its self-division. Since time immemorial, the Jewish people have been at war with themselves, both in the Holy Land and the Diaspora, allowing themselves to succumb to one of history’s most mordant ironies. In turning against themselves, they have effectively collaborated with those who would suppress, conquer or extinguish the Jewish community.

The template was already established in the Book of Genesis, where we read how one brother slew another in jealousy and resentment and a group of conspiratorial brothers sold their sibling into slavery. From that point on, the biblical archive presents a saga of recrimination, envy, hatred and fratricidal strife that in different degrees has imperiled the very survival of the Jewish “nation.” The pattern was consolidated in the story of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, the three rebels who “rose up” before Moses and challenged his authority. As the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen these people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people” (Exodus 32:9).

Brother against brother, prophet against people, king and priest, and even nation against nation form an indelible part of the Jewish chronicle. The history of the Two Kingdoms provides a continuingly relevant object lesson. After the death of King Solomon, the Israelite communality broke apart into the two warring monarchies of Israel and Judah. The shedding of kinship blood critically weakened the two kingdoms, leading to the conquest of Israel by the Assyrians and the reduction of Judah first by the Chaldeans, then by the Egyptians, and finally by the Babylonians. The Jewish epic may be described as: divide and be conquered. Indeed, surah 59:14 of the Koran tells us something very true about Jews: “There is much hostility between them: their hearts are divided…” It seems that the wise counsel of Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah has no resonance for the backsliders: “All of Israel and those who are joined to it are to each other like brothers. If brother shows no compassion to brother, who will show compassion to him?”

The fault line in the Jewish sensibility is tectonic in its dimensions and destructive in its effect. Perhaps the single most resonant case study in self-division involves the institutional founder of the Christian faith. The story of St. Paul is too well known to require much in the way of comment, yet it is richly instructive. A rabid persecutor of the followers of Jesus, Saul of Tarsus experienced a blinding conversion to the new faith and was shortly thereafter  called by the name of Paul (Acts 13:9). He then became the Apostle of Christianity, considering his Jewish identity a mere rehearsal for a larger identity and at times expressing strong disapproval of Jews who held to their traditional beliefs and identity. (His quarrel with the Desposyni, the “servants of the Lord,” led by James the brother of Jesus who wished to preserve the purity and exclusivity of the original faith, is a matter of historical record.)

But the details of the Apostle’s former activities and subsequent religious convictions are specific to the time. Jews today do not persecute Christians. Indeed, they are the ones who are relentlessly persecuted—by Muslims, by secular antisemites and unhinged fanatics from both sides of the political spectrum (though massively from the Left), and by several Christian denominations associated with The World Council of Churches, replacement and liberation theologians, and the Quaker-Presbyterian axis promoting its BDS campaigns. More to the point, and the most indigestible perversion of all, countless Jews harry and denounce their own congeners. The tendency to a kind of binary kinesis seems inherent in the Jew, whether it is himself he loathes or his own people he reproaches and undermines. It is the psychic split itself, not its local content, that transcends the ages. In this respect, the Saul/ Paul fracture represents a longstanding Jewish archetype.

This history of self-estrangement, political strife and cultural rupture has been played out from the biblical era through the centuries of religious factionalism and reciprocal excommunication culminating in our own epoch. The profound antipathy between assimilated Jews and their irredentist counterparts in Jerusalem, Tiberias, Safed and Hebron, as well as the caste-like contempt of Western Jewish intellectuals for the Ostjuden, that is, their assumed “plebeian” and “uneducated” East European brethren, are facts of modern Jewish history. The shame of many of the Jewish Councils in Nazi Europe that collaborated with their murderers (not all, as Gershom Scholem justifiably argues in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis) cannot be forgiven, despite attempts to explain it away as the least of worst alternatives. The legacy of the celebrated Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and the equally acclaimed Jewish political writer Hannah Arendt, who could never forget their German patrimony and were corrosively suspicious of the Zionist project, has been broadly and unambiguously noxious. In the present moment we observe their offspring, that is, left-wing “peace activists,” liberal rabbis and “post-Zionist” intellectuals, who strive to erode the Jewish character of the state of Israel and so deprive it of its legitimacy. The Jewish Left, as it dances around the golden calf of a fictitious peace, represents perhaps the gravest danger to the survival of the country.

Many Jews, as I wrote in Hear, O Israel!, tend to transpose the fight against iniquity and oppression to other nations and communities rather than press for the rights of their own people. Or they believe, “in traditionally Marxist fashion,” as Sol Stern writes in City Journal, “that the way to fight anti-Semitism was through the broader struggle for international socialism.” Thus they pursue their fugitive merit. Like Paul, their main focus falls on the Corinthians and Ephesians et al. of the time. Indifferent to the reality of their own condition—ignoring the rain clouds until they are drenched and catch pneumonia, as the 19^th century Jewish philosopher Max Nordau noted—these are the ostensibly benevolent Jews who wish to “repair the world” (Tikkun Olam). That it would be a world in which their place would nevertheless remain precarious escapes them entirely.

The benevolent Jews are bad enough. Their spirit of pharisaic charity, however, is exceeded by that of the reprobate Jews, who take their “idealism” to the next level of unctuous self-effacement. They struggle against injustice by reprehending, for example, not Palestinian terrorists and Hezbollah jihadists but Israeli Jews themselves whose right to national legitimacy they perceive as an affront and do everything in their power to misrepresent. Again, like Paul, they regard their own people as “those who please not God, and are contrary to all men” (1 Thessalonians 2:15).

Yesterday, FrontPage Magazine featured an article by Joseph Klein critical of Congressman Ron Paul’s proposal that the US use the “Golden Rule” in dealing with radical Islamists. As usual, Ron Paul followers descended on the article, unloading a wealth of hateful invective and anti-Semitic comments. A typical occurrence with such articles, the following selection of comments from the piece reflect a dark and disturbing sector of the Ron Paul movement. (Note: comments have not been edited for spelling or grammar.)

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“Why don’t you quote some scripture from the jewish talmud, like any non jew is subhuman and is on earth to be a jew slave. You are either a fool or are being paid by your jewish masters to write this filth. I am amerian, I do not pledge alegience to israel and I don’t care what happens to them just like I don’t care what happens to the arab country”

“LOL – I never can figure out how all the obvious fascists ended up Zionists?”

“This ‘journalist’ reminds me of the Jews who chose to spare Barabas over Christ. Sad, really…”

“Surprise surprise, another Zionist hit job against Dr. Paul from the loons at FPM. You Israel-firsters are getting pretty desperate, aren’t you? Anyone who doesn’t bend over and kiss Bibi’s rear isn’t a worthy puppet for you people, huh? What a disgraceful, treasonous lot you are. You are the primary reason why anti-Semitism still exists in the world, and you owe all the Jews of upstanding character (i.e., anti-Zionist) in the world a giant debt for the trouble you’ve caused them. Indeed, Jews would be a lot better off in the long run if Israel were erased from the pages of time.”

“Joseph Kleim is such a bad man that he believes even the Golden Rule is an object that belongs to the Jews, and is something to not only use for evil but to prevent other people from having. Really, Joseph? The Golden Rule is Jews’ intellectual property? You are wicked.”

“bloodthirsty AIPAC Neocon war profiteers”

“Interesting Perspective. We give Israel over 5 Billion a year in foreign aid. Some of it not just financial but hardware. I am sure Israel would never start a smear and fear campaign to ensure they keep getting our tax payer dollars. www.jewwatch.com”

“A ‘twist on the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule’?! You are the person whom Jesus was referring to when he said (to paraphrase): ‘Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him.’ Or, ‘But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken.’ Daft is not a good enough word for you Mr. Klein – you are Shylock. Take your pound of flesh.”

British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks visited with Pope Benedict XVI last month in Rome and defended Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage, including the “religious roots of the market economy and of democratic capitalism.”   In a speech there, he urged that Jews and Christians to work together to “help Europe recover its soul.”

Separately, in a speech to the British House of Lords, Sacks denounced increasing persecution of Christians by radical Islam, warning that the “fate of Christians in the Middle East today is the litmus test of the Arab Spring.”  In Rome and in London, he was more outspoken than are many of Europe’s often muted church officials, who typically fear to defend their faith, their culture, or their persecuted brethren.

“If Europe loses the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave it its historic identity and its greatest achievements in literature, art, music, education, politics, and economics, it will lose its identity and its greatness,” Sacks warned during his Rome speech.  “When a civilization loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children … we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice.”

Sacks admired and was encouraged by the warm response the Pope received during his 2010 visit to mostly non-religious Britain, when “everyone was amazed that the interest was so acute and so widespread.” The Chief Rabbi’s visit to Rome clearly was an attempt to strengthen Jewish and Christian voices in defense of historic Western cultural, political and economic principles.

Unlike left-leaning church officials in the West who simplistically equate free markets with sterile materialism, Sacks offered a more balanced perspective.  He critiqued Europe’s secularism and materialism while pointing out that biblical religion created the foundations of prosperous market economies.  “When Europe recovers its soul, it will recover its wealth-creating energies,” he said.  “But first it must remember: humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind.”   In contrast, the Religious Left, both in Europe and America, prefers to believe that markets are innately wicked and must be usurped by coercive national and international regulation.

Of course, much of the Religious Left is itself deeply materialist, preoccupied by the redistribution of wealth but unconcerned about the transcendence and timeless principles that facilitate justice and prosperity.  But appropriately for a spiritual leader, Sacks pointed to the primacy of the “soul” of Europe.

“We are very concerned obviously with the soul of Europe, I mean Europe was built on Judeo-Christian foundations, even the market was built on Judeo-Christian foundations,” Sacks told Vatican Radio.  In his Rome speech, he described the West’s democracy and prosperity relying on biblical understandings of “dignity of the human individual,” respect for property rights and labor, job creation over charity, and creation of wealth so as to become “partners with God in the work of creation.”   He noted that ancient rabbis “favored markets and competition because they generate wealth, lower prices, increase choice, reduced absolute levels of poverty, and extend humanity’s control over the environment, narrowing the extent to which we are the passive victims of circumstance and fate.”

Once one gets beyond the self-serving sloganeering of the Democratic Party — the notion that they and only they are “compassionate” or that they and only they “like air and water” — and addresses the actual policies and values of the different parties, it becomes clear that there is absolutely nothing Jewish about the Democrat Party.  In fact, the Democratic Party is antithetical to Jewish moral beliefs.

Jewish values reside in the Republican Party, which is the reason that the more Jewish a person is by belief and practice, the less likely he is to support the Democrats.  Secular Jews are overwhelmingly likely, Reform Jews somewhat less likely, Conservative Jews less likely than that and Orthodox Jews not at all likely to put their faith in the party of faithlessness.

So why, then, do any Jews vote for a party that stands in total opposition to Jewish values?  The answer can be found, at least in part, in the writings of Rabbi Joshua Hammerman:

Emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants.

Many Jews – I’ll call them the “Hammerman Jews” — have made a Faustian bargain.  Fearful of what “emboldened” faithful might do, they have betrayed their own faith in exchange for the temporary safety they believe can be found in the arms of the faithless.

The attraction the Hammerman Jew has for the Democratic Party is found in its entirety in a rather shallow, objectively false and logically fallacious conviction that those with no religion are closer to Jewish belief than are those from a different religion. The idea is that Christians are, by being people of a faith not Jewish, more of a threat to Judaism than are those antipathetic to any and all faith equally.  It’s as illogical and self-destructive as it sounds.

But the Hammerman Jew has signed onto the non-Jewish, wholly liberal conceit that it is not what someone believes but the existence of any beliefs that is the threat to world peace in general and the safety of the Jews in particular.  Only those who have beliefs, the argument goes, can become so emboldened in those beliefs as to be willing to burn down a mosque or bash a gay or, by extension, start a pogrom or support a holocaust.

The way to prevent the next holocaust, then, isn’t to stand up for good and rightful values, it is to join with those with no values, allied with them in their war against belief.

How frightened of the faithful are these Hammerman Jews?  Consider the impetus for Hammerman having raised the alarm with his piece in the first place.  What had set Hammerman off to become fearful enough to warn the world was not a gathering of the Ku Klux Klan or a meeting of the Neo-Nazis, it was the possibility that Tim Tebow might lead his team to the Super Bowl.  I kid you not:

If Tebow wins the Super Bowl, against all odds, it will buoy his faithful, and emboldened faithful can do insane things, like burning mosques, bashing gays and indiscriminately banishing immigrants…

When a man is so terrified of people of faith that he’s convinced the next holocaust is always just a field goal away, you can understand why he might chuck all of his values and blindly sign on with the enemy.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.  

To get the whole story on why leftist Jews side with those who plan to do them harm, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Catherine Herridge of Fox News reported last week that “despite Saudi Arabia’s promises to clean up textbooks in the kingdom, recent editions continue to raise alarms in the West over jihadist language.” The story of the Saudis’ supposed duplicity has been circulating widely, but what is more surprising than the contents of the Saudi textbooks is that anyone would be surprised by them. The Saudi textbooks teach Islam. What else did anyone expect?

Ali Al-Ahmed, director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs, correctly pointed out that “this is where terrorism starts, in the education system.” He stated, quite rightly, that “if you teach 6 million children in these important years of their lives, if you install that in their brain, no wonder we have so many Saudi suicide bombers.”

But there is nothing in the least unusual about what the Saudis are teaching given the fact that the official religion of the Kingdom is Islam. For example, Al-Ahmed explained that tenth-grade textbooks “show students how to cut [the] hand and the feet of a thief.”

Why not? The Qur’an says: “As for the thief, both male and female, cut off their hands. It is the reward of their own deeds, an exemplary punishment from Allah. Allah is Mighty, Wise” (5:38). Is the problem that tenth graders are too young to learn this sort of thing? But why should anyone be too young to learn the ins and outs of the eternal and perfect law designed by the supreme being for all human societies in all times and places?

Al-Ahmed also noted that a ninth-grade text called on Muslims to kill Jews in order to bring about the hour of judgment: “The hour [of judgment] will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. … There is a Jew behind me come and kill him.”

Here again, why is anyone surprised? The hadith collection that Muslims consider most reliable, Sahih Bukhari, quotes Muhammad saying this: “Allah’s Apostle said, The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. ‘O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him’” (4.52.177).

Should Saudi ninth graders not be learning about what they must do in order to bring about the blessed day and hour in which all things will be consummated and the golden age will dawn? Yes, it’s genocidal, anti-Semitic and monstrous, but then again, so is the original statement attributed to Muhammad. To condemn the Saudi textbooks is to condemn Muhammad and Islam. Yet the mainstream media stories that wrung their hands over the Saudi textbooks never pointed out that the noxious elements of those textbooks came straight from the Qur’an and the Islamic prophet.