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.)

***

“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.

Like many Jews of a largely secular persuasion, or like those who oscillate between doubt and belief, I have often wondered what I had to do with other “flavors” of Jewish communicants. Strolling along the streets of Montreal’s Outremont borough, home to a substantial Orthodox society, I feel absolutely no connection to the black-coated, earlocked, fur-hatted inhabitants who hasten by me without so much as a glance, immured in their own sequestered worlds. They may be bent on the preservation of Halachic Judaism and the maintenance of a sacramental community, but they have little interest in the world beyond their exclusionary domain and certainly none in the lives of individuals like me. “Ghetto orthodoxy,” writes James Parkes in A History of the Jewish People, “has no understanding of the moral problems of a modern and independent state.” Or, he might have continued, of modern and independent people.

At the same time, encountering Reformist and Reconstructionist Jews at local events, I feel no affinity with such nominal adherents to a faith they have re-interpreted as little more than a cultural tradition, that is, a set of mores and usages without serious reference to the God of the Hebrew scripture, the Mosaic and Noahide commandments, the poetry of David and Solomon, or the magnificent fulminations of the great prophets. How would they respond if angels appeared at their doors, as before Abraham (Genesis 18), or a divine command resonated in their ears, as in the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Jonah, or a latter-day Elijah descended upon their complacency? Heaven forfend!

Between these two constellations of Jewish postulants, the gap appears unbridgeable. In what way can they be regarded as members of the same extended family? Observing common holidays to which they attribute different meanings on the level of spiritual gravity is not a binding agent but merely a fugitive exercise in consanguinity. I am reminded of a Jewish joke that underlines the problem. An Orthodox and a Reform rabbi find themselves seated side by side at a religious conference. In the process of getting to know one another, the Orthodox rabbi recounts that he has recently officiated at a Bar Mitzvah in which he was informed that the celebrant received the gift of a Harley. Puzzled, he asks his Reform neighbour, “But what is a Harley?” “It’s a motorcycle,” comes the reply, “but what’s a Bar Mitzvah?”

And then, of course, there is the swarm of Jewish antisemites and anti-Zionists (which amounts pretty well to the same thing these days) whose names swell the roll-call of Judaism’s treacherous sons and daughters—a prime example of how a historical community can attack itself like an immune system gone haywire. The prophet Isaiah correctly foretold the future: “Thy destroyers…shall go forth of thee” (49:17). The so-called Jewish S.H.I.T. list (Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening Jews) furnishes the names of nearly 8000 contemporary Jewish tergiversators. These are people who casually court disaster in the remorseless anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist posture they affect, aiming their execrations and weaponizing their prose against their fellows. Living in what I’ve elsewhere called a latter-day Iberian delusion—if one recalls the eventual fate of the Spanish conversos—their only consolation in the ever-possible event of a resurgent and maniacal anti-Jewish national movement is that, like the Jewish Councils in Nazi Europe, they would be among the last to go, once their revisionist services were no longer needed by the demons they have agreed to traffic with.

What is it, then, that ultimately brings us together, that presumably unifies us as a people, and that, in effect, paints the bulls-eye on our backs? The answer should be obvious: it is precisely that which sews the yellow badge upon our lapels. As the great Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl came to believe, the Jew is defined by his enemies. However else he may understand himself, a Jew is also a Jew by default, in the same way that Hans Meyer (a.k.a. Jean Améry), as he recounts in At The Mind’s Limits, discovered he was a Jew with the passing of the Nuremburg Laws in 1935. A Jew remains a Jew even without positive determinants.

What many Jews do not seem to understand about antisemitism is that it is both a ubiquitous and an equal-opportunity pathology. As former Canadian Minister of Justice Irwin Cotler said recently at the signing of the Ottawa Protocol, a welcome if belated attempt to codify and affirm resistance to this malignant phenomenon, antisemitism is not only the longest known form of hatred in the history of humanity, it is the only form of hatred that is truly global. However we may describe it—as an irrational revulsion, or the need to scapegoat a convenient group for supposedly inexplicable miseries and reverses of which that group is innocent, or classic projection, or, to cite Ruth Wisse writing in The Weekly Standard, “the organization of politics against the Jews” in order to “win rather than assume the allegiance of subjects or citizens”—it eventually strikes Jews everywhere and indiscriminately. For the antisemite, all Jews are alike regardless of their politics, their professions, the degrees of their faith or lack of such, or even their rebellious and venomous denunciations of their own brethren.

There is a passage in Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness that makes this collapsing of distinctions painfully clear. Referring to the Nazi “cleansing operations” in the Polish town of Rovno, he writes: “the Germans opened fire and slaughtered on the edge of pits, in two days, some twenty-five thousand souls…well-to-do and proletarian, pious, assimilated, and baptized, communal leaders, synagogue functionaries, pedlars and drawers of water, Communists and Zionists, intellectuals, artists, and village idiots, and some four thousand babies.”

The message is that we’re all incriminated. As I wrote in The Big Lie, “Warm Jews, lukewarm Jews and cold Jews are equally at risk. At the end of the day, the antisemite never stopped to take their temperature.” Similarly, as the Jerusalem Post commented after the Mumbai massacre in November 2008 in which Chabad House was attacked and its occupants murdered, “the terrorists did not inquire whether their victims were haredi, Orthodox, traditional or secular.” If Noam Chomsky or Jennifer Lowenstein had happened to be on the premises, they, too, would have been tortured and killed. In the minds of Jew-haters, being Jewish is sufficient warrant to disqualify a person from remaining a member of the human race.

It is this perennial hatred, I submit, that forms the peculiar ethnic or historical collagen that binds the Jew to his community, even should he repudiate his people with his whole soul or turn against them with the rancor of the benighted. This vicious odium is the force or substance that constitutes his or her identity. Jewishness obviously has nothing to do with race, as the Nazis believed, since there are Jews of every hue and physical type. To define a Jew according to rabbinic law as someone born to a Jewish mother only begs the question and involves us in a regressus—what makes a Jewish mother Jewish, apart from excessive nagging and the artful manipulation of guilt? Is Jewish identity a function of following the thirteen articles of faith articulated by Maimonides? But not all Jews are capable of abiding by every one of these, and the last article asserting belief in the resurrection of the dead is hardly substantiated in the Old Testament, in which there are, depending on how one counts, only six references to the afterlife. Rabbi Akiva proposed that knowledge of the Torah is the essential touchstone of Jewishness, in which case the majority of the world’s Jews are not really Jewish at all and a certain number of Gentiles are.

Editor’s note: Below is the latest profile of Frontpage’s new series, “Voices of Palestine,” which will illuminate the core beliefs, in their own words, of leading figures in the Palestinian death cult. Click the following to view the profiles of Ahmad Bahr, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Ibrahim Mudayris, Yasser Ghalban, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Wafa al-Bis, Mahmoud Abbas, Ahlam Tamimi, Yassir Arafat (Part I and Part II), Abdallah Jarbu and Sheik Ismail Aal Radhwan.

Co-founder of the terrorist group Hamas, the late Abdel Aziz Rantisi (a.k.a. Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi) devoted his life to a single purpose: destroying the state of Israel. “By God, we will not leave one Jew in Palestine,” he said. “We will fight them with all the strength we have.”

Born in 1947 in a village near the modern-day Israeli city of Jaffa, Rantisi was forced to flee his birthplace with his family in 1948 – when five Arab states declared a war of annihilation against Israel. He was raised thereafter in the refugee camps of the Gaza Strip.

After completing his secondary school education in 1965, Rantisi moved to Egypt and studied medicine at Alexandria University, where he came under the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood. Upon graduating in 1972 with a master’s degree in pediatric medicine, Rantisi returned to Gaza. In 1976 he secured work as a resident physician at Naser Hospital in the Gaza city of Khan Younis. Two years later he found employment as a science professor at the Islamic University in Gaza. He also served on the administrative boards of the Islamic Complex, the Arab Medical Society, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

Inclined toward acts of civil disobedience, Rantisi was arrested a number of times during the early 1980s for his participation in anti-Israel demonstrations as well as for tax evasion.

In 1987 Rantisi, along with Ahmed Yassin, was instrumental in inciting Palestinian uprisingsagainst the Israeli Defense Forces. These conflicts escalated in tension, resulting ultimately in the First Intifada.

On December 14, 1987, Rantisi and Yassin founded Hamas (“Islamic Resistance Movement”), whose avowed purpose is “liberating Palestine” from its Jewish “oppressors.”

In 1992 Rantisi’s frequent calls for violence against Israelis prompted Israeli authorities to expel him, along with 416 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, to southern Lebanon. There Rantisi emerged as a leading spokesman for Palestinian terrorists, espousing what would become the twin driving themes of their collective creed: opposition to any cease-fire with the Jewish state and an unwavering support for armed resistance. Rantisi declared, “There is no difference between Akko, Haifa, Gaza, Jaffa or Nablus. The Palestinian Intifada will continue until the last Zionist is banished.”

By 1997, Rantisi had become Hamas’ chief spokesman and military general. In this capacity, he directed the group to intensify its campaign of terrorism, a move that was calculated to derail the peace negotiations which were then underway between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Inciting violent fervor among his Hamas faithful with his militant rhetoric, Rantisi called for attacks against any and all Israelis, resolutely rejecting any possibility of moderation. As he explained to the Manchester Guardian in 1997, Hamas’ “rifles will remain directed against the Zionist enemy.” Rantisi’s view that Israel was an illegitimate intruder on the Mideast landscape, Rantisi said to another British reporter: “If Israel was established in Britain, would you accept compromise?”

After the steadily mounting Palestinian violence flared into a full-scale Second Intifada in September 2000, Rantisi lauded those suicide bombers who had lost their lives in the process of murdering Jewish civilians: “I congratulate them. They will teach the Jewish mothers in Haifa, Tel Aviv and everywhere that our blood is not cheap.” “This is the answer to the Zionist terrorism,” added Rantisi. “In the future we will multiply the suicide bombing attacks and we will carry out operations that will shock the Jews.”

Rantisi’s deep hatred for Israel was mirrored in his contempt for the Jewish state’s closest ally, the United States. Following the explosion of the Space Shuttle Columbia in February 2003, Rantisi hailed the catastrophe as “part of the divine punishment of America and, together with it, Zionism.” In Rantisi’s view, the disaster was a manifestation of supernatural retribution for America’s complicity in the “massacres of Muslims, the destruction of their lives, the humiliation of their honor, and their desire to globalize corruption.”

The Jewish community is now under siege as it confronts a global wave of antisemitic virulence not seen since the 1930s. Almost everywhere we look, we observe the unmistakable signs of a mounting assault on the Jewish people, whether in the state of Israel surrounded by genocidal enemies or in the Diaspora, especially in Europe where Jews must increasingly remain alert or suppress their identity in the face of ramifying acts of vandalism and a devil’s assortment of hate crimes.

As if this were not enough, the situation is complicated by a bitter historical irony endemic to the Jewish people itself, namely, the tendency to engage in various forms of fratricidal conflict even as it is under sustained attack. The biblical record is dispositive, as is the political drama of the ages in which time and again an endangered community descends into a maelstrom of warring factions, thus rendering it ever more vulnerable to the predations of its adversaries.

We note this peculiar dilemma unfolding in every quarter of the compass. In Israel, the judicial, academic and literary Left form what I’m tempted to call an unintelligentsia that diligently works against the very survival of the nation, often siding with or abetting those—European-funded NGOs, Palestinian irredentists—who are intent on destroying it. It is as if they are paying their karmic debt for the sin of being Israelis. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, of many in the Diaspora who embrace the bogus Palestinian narrative, promote “interfaith dialogue” with duplicitous Muslim clerics and organizations, make common cause with anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish campus groups, or consider the state of Israel a historical liability.

Such manifestations of canting dishonor are evident everywhere in the West, not only in Europe but in America as well. Much has been written about Reconstructionist congregations, Jewish university administrators, Jewish student associations, diverse pseudo-rabbinical groups (for an extensive list, see my The Big Lie and Hear, O Israel!), and large formal organizations (the most notorious of these being Jeremy Ben-Ami’s J Street), often linked with a leftwing political orientation, that proliferate in the U.S. Similarly, there is a strong “collaborative” inclination in my own country of Canada, on the level of both major Jewish social institutions, such as the former and influential Canadian Jewish Congress more preoccupied with a scattering of Nazi  skinheads than with the growing Islamic threat, and of smaller, ad hoc coalitions like the Shalom-Salaam “dialogue group” that inveighs against Israeli “aggression” and supposed brutality.

A case in point is provided in microcosm in my home town of Montreal where, even as I write, a boycott of a Jewish-owned shoe store which sells Israeli products is in progress. The campaign against Chaussures Naot (Naot Shoes), which threatens to put the establishment out of business, is prosecuted by a group that styles itself as Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU) and accuses Israel of practicing apartheid and other human rights violations. Every Saturday afternoon, PAJU pickets the store, attempting to dissuade potential customers from entering on the most important shopping day of the week.  Naturally, these very same people would not dream of picketing the Jewish General Hospital, built with Jewish money, using Israeli medical innovations and serving the public irrespective of race, religion or ethnic origin, whose care they may one day require.

The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a panCanadian amalgamation of the Quebec-Israel Committee, the Quebec Jewish Congress, the Canada-Israel Committee and the Canadian Jewish Congress, initially adopted a hands-off, observer status vis à vis the PAJU demonstrators. But even this marginal and “evaluative” presence was, presumably, regarded as too intrusive. According to a report in The Canadian Jewish News, CIJA has since backed off, claiming that the battle has now been won thanks to public and official support for the embattled business, and concerned lest pro-Israel activism “may be associated in the public mind with activism that mocks traditional Muslims or associates Muslims as a people with repression.”

No surprise here for an organization which Isi Leibler, chair of the Diaspora- Israel relations committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, has described as a “cowardly” and “undemocratic body headed by professional public relations consultants.” After all, CIJA has circulated an internal document promoting a “risk-averse” approach and titled “The Ten Commandments,” instructing its members to take a low public profile. Commandment 5 states, in part: “Do not directly attack or assign blame to the Palestinians or their leadership.” Commandment 7: “Do not ask the government of Canada to appear—or be—more favourable to Israel.” Commandment 9: “Do not attack the media for being biased against Israel.” This form of anti-advocacy is known in the Yiddish idiom as the sha shtil philosophy—hush hush, do not speak up—an attitude whose consequences across the generations have been monstrous.

This reaction is typical of many Jewish groups and organizations that fall into line with a general policy of political correctness and craven appeasement rather than assume a resolute moral stance against the spreading plague of antisemitism and its deceptive confederate, anti-Zionism. In refusing to take issue the enemy, they effectively empower political covens like PAJU, Shalom-Salaam and numerous others. What is even stranger in this particular instance is that CIJA’s vice-president and spokesman Luciano Del Negro, who is not Jewish, allegedly has a damaging past of affiliations with the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Canada (PCCml), modeled on the late Albanian prime minister Enver Hoxha’s ultra-totalitarian Party of Labor. Indeed, according to the nationalist Tribune libre de Vigile, Del Negro was at one time Secretary General of the PCCml.

Editor’s note: Below is the latest profile of Frontpage’s new series, “Voices of Palestine,” which will illuminate the core beliefs, in their own words, of leading figures in the Palestinian death cult. Click the following to view the profiles of Ahmad Bahr, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Ibrahim Mudayris, Yasser Ghalban, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Wafa al-Bis, Mahmoud Abbas, Ahlam Tamimi and Yassir Arafat (Part I and Part II).

Since its founding in 1987, the Islamic Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas has been vigorously committed to annihilating the state of Israel and all of its Jewish inhabitants in an attempt to replace in its stead an Islamic state.

To that end, the terror group has launched over the ensuing decades countless terrorist attacks on both Israeli military and civilian targets, assaults which have left thousands of Israelis killed and wounded.

Fueling Hamas’ terrorist drive is a rabid anti-Semitic and racist ideology found in its governing charter, a modern-day Mein Kampf that not only rejects Israel’s right to exist but in the process blames all the evils in the world on Jews.

While Hamas has been able to cough up a litany of killers, apologists and supporters to spread its message of hatred and Islamic supremacy, some spokesmen have proven better than others in concisely articulating the terror group’s core ideological message.

One such gifted speaker is Abdallah Jarbu, Deputy Minister of Hamas’ Ministry of Religious Endowments, who displayed his genocidal eloquence in two interviews he gave in February and March 2010 on Hamas-controlled Al-Aqsa TV.

In his February 28, 2010, interview Jarbu outlined the basic Hamas premise as to why Jews pose such a grave threat to the world:

[The Jews] suffer from a mental disorder, because they are thieves and aggressors. A thief or an aggressor, who took property or land, develops a psychological disorder and pangs of conscience, because he took something that wasn’t his.

They want to present themselves to the world as if they have rights, but, in fact, they are foreign bacteria – a microbe unparalleled in the world. It’s not me who says this. The Koran itself says that they have no parallel: “You shall find the strongest men in enmity to the believers to be the Jews.”

May He annihilate this filthy people who have neither religion nor conscience. I condemn whoever believes in normalizing relations with them, whoever supports sitting down with them, and whoever believes that they are human beings. They are not human beings. They are not people. They have no religion, no conscience, and no moral values.

Picking up on the theme of Jews as subhuman vermin in need of outright extermination, Jarbu expanded upon his thoughts in a follow up interview he gave on Al-Aqsa TV on March 19, 2010, in which he said:

The Jews, just like a cancer, operate via dormant cells, until the body collapses. We must stop this swelling, criminal, Zionist cancer.

Then, in an effort to convince those who may have been lost in the subtlety of his message, Jarbu said, “Only a madman, who does not understand a thing, can possibly think that the Jews are human and should be treated as such.”

Lest anyone think Jarbu’s assessment of Jews lacked a sufficient scientific, medical or ethical foundation, he was quick to offer concrete examples to support his views:

The Jews have violated all the treaties and accords. They slayed the prophets in the past, and showed no respect for any prophet or messenger. The Koran says: “They slayed the prophets unjustly.

The Jews, the brothers of apes and pigs, have gathered from all corners of the world, in order to defile the Al-Aqsa Mosque. They have come to rob it of its purity, and they replaced it with their impurity, their filth, and their abomination.

You cannot go on living, oh Arab and Islamic nation, while the Al-Aqsa Mosque is being defiled by the Jews, the most despicable people on this Earth. By Allah, they are not human beings. They are not men who deserve to live, as long as we are alive.

We salute anyone who tried to run over Jews with his bulldozers. We salute anyone who tried to stab a Jewish settler pig.

Editor’s note: Below is the latest profile of Frontpage’s new series, “Voices of Palestine,” which will illuminate the core beliefs, in their own words, of leading figures in the Palestinian death cult. The profile of terrorist godfather Yasser Arafat is so extensive, it will be presented in two parts. For Part II, click here. Click the following to view the profiles of Ahmad Bahr, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Ibrahim Mudayris, Yasser Ghalban, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Wafa al-Bis, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahlam Tamimi.

Yasser Arafat is the founding father of Palestinian nationalism. He is also the godfather of 20th century terrorism. The nationalist movement that he created ab ovo remains unique in history as the only one throughout the entire world whose defining paradigm is terrorism, and whose raison d’etre is the destruction of a sovereign state and the decimation of its Jewish population. Even after its leader’s death, still loyal to his legacy, the Palestinian Authority remains focused on the destruction of Israel rather than on a healthy nationalism and the building of an economically viable, Palestinian state.

Arafat not only legitimized, but actually romanticized the murder of innocent civilians, turning terrorism into a populist revolutionary tool. He put airplane hijacking on the political map. He legitimized terrorism, beginning with the moment that he was welcomed to the UN General Assembly on November 13, 1974, kaffiyah on his head and side-arm at his waist, and got a standing ovation from the delegates present. When the Nobel committee awarded him its Peace Prize in 1995, he fulfilled the Orwellian fantasy of reality turned upside down, and truth turned inside out. Evil had become good, wrong had become right, and a mass murderer drenched in the blood of thousands had become a national hero to millions.

Arafat was a protégé of the Communist bloc and succeeded in making his cause a cause of the international left that survived the collapse of the Communist system. The alliance between radical Islam and the secular left that ripened during the post-9/11 war on terror was forged in the battles that Arafat waged.

Arafat resuscitated Jew-hatred and made it the official policy of the UN when the Arab bloc leveraged the passage of a UN resolution equating Zionism with racism in 1975. By relentlessly portraying Israel as evil, Arafat revived the heinous stereotype of the malignant Jew to international respectability, eclipsing the effects of the horror of Nazism and proving correct Josef Goebbels’ lesson to Hitler that if you repeat the same lie often enough, people will believe it.

Arafat is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians and 95,000 Lebanese Arabs who were killed by his minions during his twelve-year reign of terror in that country. Nearly 500,000 Lebanese were made homeless in the same period. Arafat is also responsible for  ruin and poverty that pervades the West Bank. From 1967-1994, under Israeli rule, the economy of the West Bank Palestinians prospered. GDP grew at an average rate of 13 percent per year, tourism sky-rocketed, seven universities were created, infant mortality plummeted, life expectancy increased, and the well-being of the Palestinian Arabs improved substantially by World Bank measures. At one point almost 300,000 Palestinians were working in the Israeli economy, with earnings well above their counterparts in neighboring Arab states. Spurred by this prosperity, the Arab population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip soared from about 950,000 in 1967 to over 3,000,000 in 1994.

But after the Oslo Accords transferred authority in the West Bank to Arafat in July 1994, the decline of its economy followed swiftly. Arafat plunged the West Bank and Gaza into a ten-year reign of terror, poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. After Oslo, billions of dollars in international aid flowed into the PA, from the EU, the US, and Arab countries. Yet the Palestinian people saw almost nothing of this bounty. Rather than using that aid to build his state, with schools, hospitals, roads, and social services, Arafat created a massive kleptocracy of cronies and loyalists who siphoned off vast fortunes to personal accounts in Switzerland and elsewhere. The rest he squandered on his terror war against Israel.

Although hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies entered the West Bank and Gaza regularly, almost none reached Palestinians, because Arafat created a monopoly on the transfer of food to Arab cities in the West Bank with supplies going only to designated PA officials who then sold them to favored merchants. Thus Arafat and his cronies grew rich by intensifying food shortages at the expense of his own starving people.

Instead of building his state and using its assets for the benefit of his people, Arafat created a terrorist army, waged a terror war, and brought the Palestinians nothing but death, destruction, poverty, humiliation and grief.

As head of the Palestinian Authority, he transformed the schools of the West Bank and Gaza into centers of Jew-hatred. After Hitler, Arafat is the first national leader in history to set up a school system whose purpose was to teach the nation’s children to hate another ethnic group and to instill in them the ambition to murder as many as they could.

Arafat maintained a state of permanent warfare in the Middle East, rejecting one peace proposal after another, culminating in his refusal of the Clinton-Barak offer in 2000 which would have given Palestinians a state on 97 percent of the territory they had asked for. Throughout his career, Arafat’s greed, his hunger for power, and his compulsion to push the Jews into the sea subordinated all other considerations. No matter how many died, no matter how much suffering he caused, no matter how catastrophic his one-man rule, he stubbornly pursued his destructive course to the end.

Early Years

The moment and place of Arafat’s birth are uncertain and still debated. His birth certificate and documents from Cairo University indicate that he was born in Cairo, Egypt, on August 4th or 24th, 1929. His name was Mohammed Abd el-Rahman Abd el-Raouf Arafat el-Qudua el-Husseini, the 7th or the 4th child of a middle-class merchant.  But he and many supporters insist that he was born in Jerusalem, British Mandatory Palestine; and that his detractors forged the documentation of his Cairene origins.[1]

His childhood was difficult and unhappy. His mother died when he was only four.  He did not get along with his father or his step-mother and was sent from his home in Cairo to relatives in Palestine at an early age. He claims to have worked for the infamous Hajj Amin el-Husseini during the 1948 war, leading troops into battle (although he was only 18) and even destroying an Israeli tank in an act of great personal bravery. Historians point out that Israel had no tanks in 1948, so this account of derring-do is obviously fictional. But apparently his involvement in that war was active enough for him to witness the atrocities that the Egyptians committed against the Arabs of southern Palestine. His authorized biography[2] includes his eye-witness account of how the Egyptian army drove Palestinians in the south from their homes and forced them at gun-point into what he describes as ‘concentration camps’ in the Gaza Strip. No doubt inadvertently, his biography tells the world that the Egyptians, and not the Jews, were responsible for at least 40 percent of the Palestinian refugees.

After the war he returned to Egypt and studied engineering at King Fu’ad University in Cairo, but did not complete his degree. There he rose quickly to leadership in the Union of Palestinian Students, even though his Egyptian accent was so thick that many Palestinian students refused to believe that he could be trusted as a proponent of the Palestinian cause.[3]

How he came to adopt the Palestinian cause as his life’s mission is not clear.  His early but short-lived membership in el-Akhwan el-Muslemeen (the Moslem Brotherhood) may have impelled him in that direction, since the Brotherhood – mentor to Osama bin Laden and forerunner of al-Qaeda — sought to create a renaissance of the “pure” Moslem culture of the Caliphate, by waging guerrilla warfare against errant or secular Moslem states, and against Israel and the West. In his own words, he claimed to be a “man of destiny,” and was moved even in his twenties, to fulfill that destiny at great personal sacrifice. He postponed marriage until his 60’s, maintained on the surface an austere, almost ascetic, lifestyle, and projected his self-made image to the world: the freedom fighter who would do anything for his cause.

Guerrilla Leader

In 1957 he went to Kuwait where he got a job with the Ministry of Public Works.  He claims to have started his own engineering company at that time, and amassed great wealth which he spent on the creation and development of his organization dedicated to the liberation of “Palestine.” However, there is no record to authenticate his claims. He petitioned the Emir of Kuwait who gave him $13,000,000, which he used to publish his movement’s newspaper, Falastinunu (Our Palestine), create and staff an office, and develop a para-military training program for his followers.  In Falastinunu he promulgated the ideology of Palestinian redemption by violent means. There too he laid the groundwork for what would later become the Palestinian revisionist faux-history with its claims of a Palestinian antiquity in the Holy Land, the late-comer Zionist invasion and attempted genocide of the indigenous “native Palestinians,” and the concept of the Palestinians as a separate and defined national group.

On October 10, 1959, while still in Kuwait, he officially founded his terror organization, called “Haraqat at-Tahrir al-Watani al-Falastini” (the Organization for the Liberation of the Palestinian Nation).  He used its reverse acronym, FaTaH, to generate the name el-Fatah (the break-through, the victory) by which his group would become known world-wide (interestingly, the acronym HaTaF has a negative implication in Arabic, meaning sudden or unexpected death).

Since the Arab states had failed to eradicate Israel in traditional warfare, he chose terrorism as his tactic of choice. After several years of recruitment and training, el-Fatah was ready. Along with his followers, he relocated to Lebanon, and on January 1, 1965, he launched his first attack from across the Lebanese border: the destruction of some equipment in an Israeli pumping station, with a hand-made bomb. Laughably ineffective, it became in the eyes of the Arabs a major victory, simply because this short, chubby, scruffy looking unkempt young man had the courage to strike at Israel. Spin and hype in a receptive Arab press turned what was little more than vandalism into a military assault, catapulting Arafat into the same league as Izz-ad-Din el-Qassam and other Arab terrorists of the previous era. Suddenly he was a hero to rank-and-file Arabs, but an embarrassment to the Arab leaders whose military efforts against Israel had failed.

From his new position of popularity he sought and obtained the support of the Syrian dictatorship (although he was imprisoned briefly in Syria due to some internecine rivalries). Within a few years, with a growing number of ‘victories’ to burnish his reputation, he became a serious threat to established Arab leaders, and especially the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abd el-Nasser.

Nasser recognized the potential popularity and power of a terrorist guerrilla force that could strike at Israel with relative impunity and then fade away into the obscuring fog of statelessness. However militarily ineffectual those strikes might be, the mere fact that some Arab leader was killing Jews in Israel generated popularity and support in the Arab world.  Under the tutelage of the Soviet dictatorship, Nasser founded the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in May, 1964, with Ahmed Shuqeiri at its head. Nasser’s goal was to have the PLO displace el-Fatah in the Arab popular mind as the new strike-force against the “Zionist enemy”.

The Six Day War between Israel and the Arab dictatorships changed things dramatically. Again the massive Arab armies, thoroughly outfitted with the best equipment that Communist Russia could provide, were humiliated by tiny Israel’s pre-emptive strike. Shuqeiri was indecisive, but Arafat seized the opportunity and forged an alliance with Nasser. From September to December, 1967, Nasser supported Arafat in his attempt to infiltrate the West Bank and to develop a grass-roots foundation for a major terror war against Israel. These efforts were unsuccessful because local West Bank Palestinians cooperated with Israel and aided them in their pursuit of him and his el-Fatah operatives.

Ironically, Arafat described this era in his authorized biography as a time of his greatest diplomacy. When word of Israel’s peace offers reached him, he and his adjutants understood at once that if there were peace between Israel and Jordan, there would be no hope for a Palestinian state. So he set off on a grueling shuttle-stop tour of major Arab countries, preaching the need to reject unconditionally any peace agreement with the Jewish State. Arafat claims credit for the results of the Khartoum Conference in which all the Arab dictators and the PLO unanimously voted to reject Israel’s offer to return much of the land it had occupied as a result of the war in exchange for peace. With this admission, Arafat inadvertently takes the responsibility for Israel’s prolonged sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Had he not intervened, Israel could have made peace with Jordan, and the West Bank would have reverted to Jordanian sovereignty in 1967.

Perhaps because of this, his efforts found no support among the Arabs of the West Bank. So he established a base for his fledgling terror army in the city of Salt which is in southwestern Jordan. From there he executed some raids across the Jordan River and began to establish clandestine contacts with Palestinian officers in the Jordan Legion, almost half of whose officers were Palestinians.

Arafat’s fortunes began to look up after the Israeli army under the direction of Moshe Dayan launched a limited invasion of Jordan in March, 1968. The invasion was a response to Arafat’s raids and its objective was the village of Karama, near the Jordan River, where most of Arafat’s men were encamped. The raid took a terrible toll of terrorist fighters.  When Jordanian artillery forces, under the command of Palestinians, unexpectedly opened fire on the Israeli force, the Israeli force retreated, not wishing to escalate the raid into a confrontation with Jordan.

Now Arafat’s brilliance as a propagandist came to the fore. Organizing his defeated force into a cavalcade, he marched into Salt with guns firing in the air, to cheers of victory and success, as though he had forced the Israeli retreat. He played upon the fact that Karama means “dignity” in Palestinian Arabic, and claimed that he had liberated Palestinian Karama in liberating Jordanian Karama, and at last had restored the dignity of the Arab people by smashing the Israeli force and driving it, fleeing in shame and disarray, across the Jordan. It was pure fiction, but the Arabs believed it. Soon money and recruits were pouring in, and he was able to reconstitute and equip his el-Fatah force into a formidable terror army.

With the West Bank and Gaza Strip now under Israeli control, Arafat needed to make some hasty changes in the PLO covenant. Since the PLO’s original 1964 Covenant explicitly recognized Judea, Samaria, and the eastern portion of Jerusalem, and Gaza as belonging to Jordan and Egypt, the only homeland it sought to liberate was the State of Israel. However, when Jordan and Egypt lost control of the West Bank and Gaza because of their defeat in the Six Day War, Arafat had the PLO revise the Covenant on July 17, 1968, to change its operative language and assert a claim of sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Leveraging his Karama “victory” and his newly won prominence, he displaced Shuqeiri as head of the PLO in February of 1969. While the PLO and el-Fatah remained distinct entities, they were unified beneath the umbrella of Arafat’s leadership. Nasser was not happy; but Shuqeiri was no match for Arafat, and after the failure of several assassination attempts (which may have been initiated by Nasser), Arafat emerged as the unchallenged leader of the Arab terrorist war against Israel.

At this point Soviet involvement became critical. Probably under Russian tutelage, Arafat signed the “Cairo Agreement” (November 3, 1969), which allowed him, with overt Egyptian and Syrian backing and covert Russian support, to move a large part of his terror army into south Lebanon. There his forces set up centers of operation and prepared for terror attacks against Israel’s northern border, while Arafat and the rest of his forces remained in Jordan.[4]

Black September

The three years of Arafat’s sojourn in Jordan were not without internal problems.  El-Fatah terrorists routinely clashed with Jordanian soldiers (more than 900 armed encounters between 1967 and 1970). Arafat’s men used cookie-cutter Mafia tactics to smuggle cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol, extort money from local Jordanians, set up road blocks to exact tolls, and kidnap notables for ransom to finance “the revolution.” When Jordanian forces tried to keep order, el-Fatah and the PLO shot them.

Dr. Yasser Dasmabebi holds the Edward Said-Noam Chomsky Linguistics Chair at Abdul Abulbul Amir University in Cairo. He is also presently serving as Visiting Professor at the I. S. Skavar Institute in Moscow.

Why did I become a linguist?  I seem to have inherited the traditional Arabic love of language and poetry. As Phillip Hitti wrote in his book, History of the Arabs:

No people in the world manifest such enthusiastic admiration for literary expression and are so moved by the word, spoken or written, as the Arabs. Modern audiences in Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo can be stirred to the highest degree by the recital of poems.

Ah! Who could fail to be stirred by the rhythms and melodies of thousands of poetry lovers marching down the streets of our cities chanting in unison:

Death To America!
Death to the Great Satan!
Death To Israel!
Death to the Little Satan!

And naturally, as our Palestinian national culture has exploded onto the world stage (so to speak) and now has come to embody a more mature wisdom and calm that anyone can plainly see in the conduct of public life in Palestine, the appreciation for the use of language to the fullest extent of purity of purpose, clarity of vision, subtle nuance, harmonic overtone, mellifluous allusions have likewise matured and deepened. All this inspires a linguistic heart such as mine to sing!

So, in the service of creating a discourse for which the expression of the yearning for peace and brotherly love are the ultimate fulfillment, and for which Palestinian society is universally known, I have compiled a short, though naturally far-from-complete, list of quotations from notable Palestinian political and devout religious leaders — almost all of whose salaries are paid by Palestinian governing bodies, and whose money is therefore donated by European and American governments, and thus by you, the taxpayers — SHUKRAN! –, who yearn for nothing more than a Jew-free country living in peace and harmony, so that we can return to our first love: reading and reciting beautiful poetry.

I must ask your forbearance, for many of these statements inevitably lose a bit of their inherent beauty and majesty in translation. Furthermore, it is far from easy to compile such a list, the more for what must be omitted than for what may be included, there being such a plethora of rich material. Please consider mine but a meager offering, a beginning, and, more importantly, a small contribution to the dream of Peace in Our Time.

In honor of our grand poetic tradition, I must begin with a venerable work, already cited this week at FrontPage Magazine:

3-1-44: Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem: “Arise, Oh Sons of Arabia! Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history and our religion. That will save our honor.” (The Grand Mufti, a true prophet, was fighting the occupation a full 23 years before it began!)

– 2006: Yasser Ghalban, Hamas leader: “The Jihad for Allah is the way of the truth and the way for salvation and the way which will lead us to crush the Jews…”

– 12-3-2008: Imam Safwat Higazi: “Dispatch those sons of apes and pigs to the Hellfire on the wings of Qassam rockets.”

– 5-15-2009: Dr Wafa Musa, psychologist (!): “The Jews deserved their annihilation by Hitler.”

– 9-1-09: PA Presidential advisor Omar Al-Ghoul: “Israel is a rogue country trafficking in the organs of Palestinians it kills.” (Note — notice the beautiful congruence of the poet’s name — “al- Ghoul” — with the content of his speech. How indeed can one not be moved by the utter beauty!)

– 11-15-09: Tawfik al Tirawi, PA Security Chief:  “Israel recruits Palestinians to sexually harrass their sisters and mothers.”

– 1-29-10: Al Aqsa TV (PA TV): “Even if donkeys cease to bray, the Jews will not cease to be hostile to the Muslems.”

– 2-28-10: Al Aqsa TV, Deputy Minister of Religious Endowments, Abdallah Jarbu: “Jews are bacteria, not human beings.”  (…reflecting Palestinian commitment to medical research and healing by means of research into bacteriology.)

– 3-31-10: Al Aqsa TV, Dr Salah Sultan, President of American Center for Islamic Research: “Jews murder non-Jews and use their blood to knead Passover matzos.” (Yum!)

I received this post from a friend in NY. One of his friends is living in France and posted this to him with the request that he distribute it to his American friends. He prefaces with:

Once again, the real news in France is conveniently not being reported as it should. To give you an idea of what’s going on in France where there are now between 5 and 6 million Muslims and about 600,000 Jews, here is an email that came from a Jew living in France. Will the world say nothing – again – as it did in Hitler’s time? He writes:

“I am a Jew — therefore I am forwarding this to everyone on all my e-mail lists. I will not sit back and do nothing. Nowhere have the flames of anti-Semitism burned more furiously than in France: In Lyon, a car was rammed into a synagogue and set on fire. In Montpellier, the Jewish religious center was firebombed; so were synagogues in Strasbourg and Marseilles; so was a Jewish school in Creteil – all recently. A Jewish sports club in Toulouse was attacked with Molotov cocktails, and on the statue of Alfred Dreyfus in Paris, the words ‘Dirty Jew’ were painted. In Bondy, 15 men beat up members of a Jewish football team with sticks and metal bars. The bus that takes Jewish children to school in Aubervilliers has been attacked three times in the last 14 months.

According to the Police, metropolitan Paris has seen 10 to 12 anti-Jewish incidents PER DAY in the past 30 days. Walls in Jewish neighborhoods have been defaced with slogans proclaiming ‘Jews to the gas chambers’ and ‘Death to the Jews.’ A gunman opened fire on a kosher butcher’s shop (and, of course, the butcher) in Toulouse, France; a Jewish couple in their 20′s were beaten up by five men in Villeurbanne, France The woman was pregnant; a Jewish school was broken into and vandalized in Sarcelles, France . This was just in the past week.

So I call on you, whether you are a fellow Jew, a friend, or merely a person with the capacity and desire to distinguish decency from depravity, to do, at least, these three simple things:

Editor’s note: Below is the latest profile of Frontpage’s new series, “Voices of Palestine,” which will illuminate the core beliefs, in their own words, of leading figures in the Palestinian death cult. Click the following to view the profiles of Ahmad Bahr, Mahmoud al-Zahar, Ibrahim Mudayris and Yasser Ghalban.

Appointed Mufti of Jerusalem by the British High Commissioner in May 1921, Haj Amin al-Husseini was the founder of the Palestinian Arab movement. He relied upon virulent anti-Jewish incitement to garner popular support. Throughout his public career, the Mufti used traditional Koranic anti-Jewish motifs to arouse the Arab street. For example, during the incitement which led to the 1929 Arab revolt in Palestine, he called for combating and slaughtering “the Jews”, not merely Zionists. In fact, most of the Jewish victims of the 1929 Arab revolt were Jews from the centuries old dhimmi communities (e.g., in Hebron), as opposed to recent settlers identified with the Zionist movement.

With the ascent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the Mufti and his coterie intensified their anti-Semitic activities to secure support from Hitler’s Germany, Bosnian Muslims, and the overall Arab Muslim world, for a jihad to annihilate the Jews of Palestine. Following his expulsion from Palestine by the British, the Mufti organized a brutal anti-Jewish pogrom in Baghdad (1941), concurrent with his failed effort to install a pro-Nazi Iraqi government.

Escaping to Europe after this unsuccessful coup attempt, the Mufti spent the remainder of World War II in Germany and Italy. From this sanctuary, he provided active support for the Germans by recruiting Bosnian Muslims, in addition to Muslim minorities from the Caucasus, for dedicated Nazi SS units. The Mufti’s objectives for these recruits, and Muslims in general, were made explicit during his multiple wartime radio broadcasts from Berlin, heard throughout the Arab world: an international campaign of genocide against the Jews.

For example, during his March 1, 1944 broadcast he stated: “Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion.” Haj Amin made an especially important contribution to the German war effort in Yugoslovia where the Bosnian Muslim SS units he recruited (in particular the Handzar Division) brutally suppressed local Nazi resistance movements. The Mufti’s pamphlet entitled, “Islam and the Jews”, was published by the Nazis in Croatian and German for distribution during the war to these Bosnian Muslim SS units. This hateful propaganda served to incite the slaughter of Jews, and (Serb) Christians as well.

Indeed, the Bosnian Muslim Handzar SS Division was responsible for the destruction of whole Bosnian Jewish and Serbian communities, including the massacre of Jews and Serbs, and the deportation of survivors to Auschwitz for extermination. However, these heinous crimes, for which the Mufti bears direct responsibility, had only a limited impact on the overall destruction of European Jewry when compared with his nefarious wartime campaign to prevent Jewish emigration from Europe to Palestine. Invoking the personal support of such prominent Nazis as Himmler and Eichmann, the Mufti’s relentless hectoring of German, Rumanian, and Hungarian government officials caused the cancellation of an estimated 480,000 exit visas which had been granted to Jews (80,000 from Rumania, and 400,000 from Hungary). As a result, these hapless individuals were deported to Nazi concentration camps.

As the discourse about Israel on university campuses continues to degenerate, there is growing concern that some of Israel’s most vocal detractors are crossing a red line between acceptable criticism of Israel and legitimizing anti-Semitism. The recent endorsements by several internationally prominent academics—including John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Richard Falk of Princeton—of an overtly anti-Semitic book written by a notorious Jew-hater illustrate this dangerous trend.

The book in question is entitled The Wandering Who? and was written by Gilad Atzmon, a British jazz musician. Lest there be any doubt about Atzmon’s anti-Semitic credentials, listen to his self-description in the book itself. He boasts about “drawing many of my insights from a man who … was an anti-Semite as well as a radical misogynist” and a hater of “almost everything that fails to be Aryan masculinity” (89-90). He declares himself a “proud, self-hating Jew” (54), writes with “contempt” of “the Jew in me” (94), and describes himself as “a strong opponent of … Jewish-ness” (186). His writings, both online and in his new book, brim with classic anti-Semitic motifs that are borrowed from Nazi publications:

Throughout his writings, Atzmon argues that Jews seek to control the world:

• “[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously.”
• “American Jewry makes any debate on whether the ‘Protocols of the elder of Zion’ [sic] are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews do try to control the world, by proxy.”

Atzmon expands on this theme in The Wandering Who?, repeatedly conflating “the Jews” and “the Zionist”:

• He calls the recent credit crunch “the Zio-punch” (22) and says it was not “a Jewish conspiracy” because “it was all in the open” (30).
• Paul Wolfowitz, Rahm Emmanuel, and other members of “the Jewish elite” remain abroad instead of moving to “Zion” because they “have proved far more effective for the Zionist cause by staying where they are” (19).
• The American media “failed to warn the American people of the enemy within” because of money (27).

Atzmon has written that Jews are evil and a menace to humanity:

• “With Fagin and Shylock in mind Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum.”
• “The Homo Zionicus quickly became a mass murderer, detached from any recognised form of ethical thinking and engaged in a colossal crime against humanity.”

Atzmon rehearses many of these ideas in The Wandering Who?:

• “[T]o be a Jew is a deep commitment that goes far beyond any legal or moral order” (20) and this commitment “pulls more and more Jews into an obscure, dangerous and unethical fellowship” (21).
• If Iran and Israel fight a nuclear war that kills tens of millions of people, “some may be bold enough to argue that ‘Hitler might have been right after all’” (179).

Atzmon regularly urges his readers to doubt the Holocaust and to reject Jewish history:

• “It took me years to accept that the Holocaust narrative, in its current form, doesn’t make any historical sense. … If, for instance, the Nazis wanted the Jews out of their Reich (Judenrein—free of Jews), or even dead, as the Zionist narrative insists, how come they marched hundreds of thousands of them back into the Reich at the end of the war?”
• “[E]ven if we accept the Holocaust as the new Anglo-American liberal-democratic religion, we must allow people to be atheists.”

Atzmon reprises some of this language in The Wandering Who?:

• Children should be allowed to question, as he did, “how the teacher could know that these accusations of Jews making Matza out of young Goyim’s blood were indeed empty or groundless” (185).
• “The Holocaust religion is probably as old as the Jews themselves” (153).
• The history of Jewish persecution is a myth, and if there was any persecution the Jews brought it on themselves (175, 182).

Atzmon argues that Jews are corrupt and responsible for “why” they are “hated”:

• “[I]n order to promote Zionist interests, Israel must generate significant anti-Jewish sentiment. Cruelty against Palestinian civilians is a favourite Israeli means of achieving this aim.”
• “Jews may have managed to drop their God, but they have maintained goy-hating and racist ideologies at the heart of their newly emerging secular political identity. This explains why some Talmudic goy-hating elements have been transformed within the Zionist discourse into genocidal practices.”

Atzmon returns to this theme repeatedly in The Wandering Who?:

• The “Judaic God” described in Deuteronomy 6:10-12 “is an evil deity, who leads his people to plunder, robbery and theft” (120). Atzmon explains that “Israel and Zionism … have instituted the plunder promised by the Hebrew God in the Judaic holy scriptures” (121).
• The moral of the Book of Esther is that Jews “had better infiltrate the corridors of power” if they wish to survive (158).

Finally, Atzmon repeatedly declares that Israel is worse than the Nazis and has actually “apologized” to the Nazis for having earlier compared them to Israel:

• “Many of us including me tend to equate Israel to Nazi Germany. Rather often I myself join others and argue that Israelis are the Nazis of our time. I want to take this opportunity to amend my statement. Israelis are not the Nazis of our time and the Nazis were not the Israelis of their time. Israel, is in fact far worse than Nazi Germany and the above equation is simply meaningless and misleading.”

In light of this Der Stürmer-like bigotry against Jews, it should come as no surprise that even some of the most hard-core anti-Israel activists have shunned Atzmon out of fear that his anti-Semitism will discredit their cause. Tony Greenstein, a self-styled “anti-Zionist” who recently participated in the Palestine Solidarity Campaign’s unprecedented disruption of an Israel Philharmonic Orchestra concert in London (which Greenstein compared to protesting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1930s), denounced The Wandering Who? as “a poisonous anti-Semitic tome.” Sue Blackwell, who co-wrote the Association of University Teachers’ motion to boycott Israeli universities in 2005, removed all links to Atzmon from her website and placed Atzmon on her list of “nasties” along with David Irving and Israel Shamir. Socialist Worker, a website that frequently refers to Israeli “apartheid” and publishes articles with titles such as “Israel’s murderous violence,” removed an interview with Atzmon and called the evidence of Atzmon’s anti-Semitism “damning.” At least ten authors associated with the Leftist publisher that published The Wandering Who? have called on the publisher to distance itself from Atzmon’s views, explaining that the “thrust of Atzmon’s work is to normalise and legitimise anti-Semitism.”

There is a disturbing undercurrent to the current Occupy Wall Street movement.  It isn’t merely its passionate denunciations of capitalism and excuses for corporatism.  It isn’t merely its perverse love for a president who has received more Wall Street money than any candidate in American history, and its hatred for Wall Street itself.

It’s anti-Semitism.

Even as President Obama comes out in support of Occupy Wall Street, more and more Occupy rallies are laced with anti-Semitic signs, placards, and slogans.  In New York, ralliers hold signs reading, “Google: (1) Wall Street Jews; (2) Jewish Billionaires; (3) Jews & Fed Rsrv Bank,”  “Gaza Supports The Occupation of Wall Street,” and shouting ugly canards like “Jews control Wall Street.”  The American Nazi Party is supporting OWS, with leader Rocky Suhayda stating, “Who holds the wealth and power in this country — the Judeo-Capitalists.  Who is therefore the #1 enemy who makes all this filth happen — the Judeo-Capitalists.”

Not everyone occupying Wall Street is an anti-Semite.  But there is far too high a comfort level among those in the movement for anti-Semitism.  If the Tea Party had been even one tenth as laced with racism as the OWS movement is with anti-Semitism, it would have been put out of business by the mainstream press long ago.

The OWS’ complacency with regard to anti-Semitism in its midst finds a mirror in the White House.  President Obama supports OWS wholeheartedly – and why shouldn’t he?  After attempting time and again to force Israel to the negotiating table with terrorists, after using Rahm Emanuel to threaten Israel into concessions by warning that the US would allow Iran to go nuclear, after backing anti-Semitic revolutionaries from Egypt to Libya, after making friends with notorious Jew-haters like Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright – why shouldn’t Obama extend that open hand to the folks at Occupy Wall Street?

The question is not why the left supports the anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street.  The question is why the left seems to support anti-Semitism across the globe.

Europe is a leftist continent – of that there can be little doubt.  Yet anti-Semitism runs rampant through it.  Socialist Spain leads the way in anti-Semitic polling, but countries like France and Austria aren’t far behind.  Britain’s anti-Israel policy is cover for anti-Semitism; Germany’s post-World War II history of stamping out anti-Semitism is beginning to fade into the past.  Crimes against Jews are up across Europe.

In the United States, the left is just as anti-Semitic, if less violent.  Their anti-Zionist rhetoric is certainly a cover for anti-Semitism, since Zionism stands merely for the principle that Jews deserve a state.  The left has no problem with anyone else having a state – Palestinian, Kurd, Tibetan.  When it comes to the Jews, however, they find it respectable to reject out of hand their right to a self-governing homeland.  Opposing specific policies of the Israeli government is not anti-Semitic.  Opposing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state is.

Editor’s note: Below is the first profile of Frontpage’s new series, “Voices of Palestine,” which will illuminate the core beliefs, in their own words, of leading figures in the Palestinian death cult.

Ahmad Bahr is the deputy speaker of Hamas’s Palestinian Legislative Council. He has praised the signing of a reconciliation agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party as a great triumph for the Palestinian cause against the “black agendas and malicious objectives” of Israel and the United States.

It turns out that the Hamas deputy speaker has some “malicious objectives” of his own.

The senior Hamas leader recently said on Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV that, since Allah had transformed Jews into apes and pigs as punishment for their disobedience, “Allah imposed the nation of Muhammad, and the Jihad-waging Palestinian people, upon those siblings of apes and pigs, until we sweep them out of our land and our holy places.”

Back in April 2007, during a Friday sermon at a packed mosque broadcast on an official Palestinian Authority-controlled television station, Bahr described Jews as “the cancerous lump… in the heart of the Arab nation.” He predicted that “America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing.”

“Allah, take hold of the Jews and their allies,” Bahr prayed. “Allah, take hold of the Americans and their allies…. Allah, count them and kill them to the last one and don’t leave even one.”

Just one week earlier on Sudanese TV, Bahr called Muslims “the masters of the world.” Jews and Americans, he said, are “cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah.”

Bahr praised his Sudanese hosts who have the blood of their own people on their hands: “Our Jihad-fighting Palestinian people salutes its brother, Sudan.”

Last year, in a speech aired on the Hamas-owned Al-Aqsa TV, Ahmad Bahr flatly condemned the very idea of negotiations, which he said “are aimed at uprooting Islam and the resistance here in Palestine, in Gaza.” He favors instead the path of martyrdom, holding out the promise of 2.5 million virgins awaiting the martyrs in a single palace in the Garden of Eden. That’s a big jump from the usual promise of 72 virgins, but apparently Bahr fervently believes that waging jihad to destroy Israel and kill Jews merits a tremendous bonus in the next life.

Bahr did not limit himself to discussing the heavenly reward of virgins for martyrdom. “When a man is having sex with his wife, he should be praying for a son who would wage Jihad for the sake of Allah,” Bahr said on Al-Aqsa TV while expounding on the lesson of a hadith (the sayings or deeds of Muhammad). “If this is the culture of the nation today, who will be able to stop it?… I say to you: As long as we continue on this path, nobody on Earth will be able to confront the resistance, or to confront the mujahideen, those who worship Allah and seek martyrdom.”

Muslims have been persecuting Christians ever since the time of Muhammed.  But in the wake of the so-called “Arab Spring,” such activity seems to be on the rise throughout much of the Islamic world, now that Muslims in several countries are enjoying greater freedom to do things they felt more restrained from doing before.  Christians are being beaten and murdered, churches attacked and destroyed.

If there is a positive side of this terrible development, it is this: if there’s more such persecution going on, more attention is finally being paid to it in the mainstream Western media.  Yet even as some of the media are daring to report on these events, there remains a strong disinclination to suggest that this pattern of persecution has anything whatsoever to do with Islam.

Last Thursday, USA Today ran an op-ed which did a splendid job of presenting the persecution of Christians as un-Islamic.  The author of the op-ed, a Muslim named Qasim Rashid, chided his coreligionists for persecuting Christians, and quoted the Prophet Muhammed against them: “Christians are my citizens, and by God, I hold out against anything that displeases them.”  And: “We defend Christians. … No Muslim is to disobey this covenant until the Last Day.”

Rashid went on to catalog various horrendous punishments that have recently been meted out in Muslim countries to Christians, blasphemers, apostates, and so on.  In response to these acts, Rashid insisted that all of them were at odds with the dictates of Islam, because, he insisted, “the Quran commands Muslims to protect churches from attack,” “Islam requires equal rights and protection for minorities,” “the Quran forbids punishment for blasphemy,” “the Quran forbids punishment for apostasy,” “Islam does not sanction the mixing of mosque and state,” “the Quran protects the rights of women and children, condemns rape, forbids inheriting women (let alone children) against their will, and forbids compulsion in religion,” and “Islam demands absolute justice in all affairs.”  Islam, in short, is not the problem – it is the solution.

To be sure, Rashid is an Ahmadi Muslim – a member of a sect that really does believe in all these good things.  Describing the Ahmadi movement as being “at the forefront of taking Islam back from the corruption of such ‘Muslim’ nations” as Pakistan and Iran, he explains that “Ahmadi Muslims believe in absolute justice, reject religious compulsion, are loyal to their nations of residence, uphold the absolute sanctity and equality of human life, believe in gender equity and spiritual equality, condemn religious aggression, and champion universal religious freedom.”  Rashid identifies these as Islam’s “founding principles.”

Alas, Ahmadi Muslims represent a tiny minority of Muslims around the world.  Other Muslims do not even consider them Muslims, and in many Islamic countries they are persecuted and punished for identifying themselves as members of the Muslim faith.  While Ahmadis, moreover, consider these “nice” passages from the Koran to be at the center of their faith, mainstream Muslim theologians overwhelmingly disagree.  For them, it is not just the Koran but also the Hadith, or sayings of Muhammed, that are legitimate sources of Islamic law.  Also, there’s the question of which parts of the Koran you prioritize over the others.  Like those who prefer Woody Allen’s earlier, funnier movies, Ahmadi Muslims tend to stress the older, more humane portions of the Koran, while virtually all other Muslims consider those benign passages to have been abrogated by the more violent and intolerant material that came along later.

There are times when those on the Left arise to defend Israel and end up proving, ironically, that American liberalism’s break with the Jewish state is real and dramatic.

Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent article defending Israel’s “special relationship” with the U.S. is one such example. He correctly identifies “liberals” as the demographic that is abandoning Israel, but thinks they have legitimate grievances against the Jewish state. In addition, he wrongly blames the growing partisan divide with regards to Israel on a ploy by Netanyahu and the Republicans. The fact that Republican pro-Israel pronouncements are enough to make leftists feel squeamish about sharing the pro-Israel space tells you all you need to know about the depth–or lack thereof–of the Left’s commitment to Israel.

Goldberg writes:

“It is true that Israel’s many friends on Capitol Hill, and many leading figures in the Democratic Party, would work tirelessly to protect Israel’s relationship with America in case of a collision between the U.S. president and the Israeli prime minister, but it is also true that Israel may one day soon find itself with fewer friends in America — in particular on the coasts and among the elites — than it previously had. Already, the Netanyahu government seems to have acquiesced to a Republican scheme to turn support for Israel in America into a partisan issue, which has obvious dangers for Israel. Particularly among liberals, Israel’s reputation is waning dramatically, and the Arab Spring will only accelerate this trend.”

When Goldberg refers to those “on the coasts” and “among the elites,” he clearly means liberals. Further down he simply states it outright, that support for Israel is “waning” among “liberals.” Goldberg touches on the elephant in the room that liberal Jews will simply not acknowledge.

According to Commentary magazine:

Remarkably, only 39 percent of Democrats agree that Israel’s enemies are our enemies, while 70 percent of Republicans and 48 percent of independents do. A plurality (42 percent) of Democrats do let on that Obama’s approach in criticizing Israel but not the Palestinians is objectionable, but that figure once again is far lower than it is for Republicans (68 percent) and independents (57 percent). Should Jerusalem remain Israel’s undivided capital? Sixty-three percent of Republicans agree, but only a plurality of Democrats (42 percent) do. Who’s responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Seventy-three percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents say it is the Palestinians fault; only 46 percent of Democrats agree.

Goldberg is accurate that there are many Democratic leaders who firmly support Israel, including Steny Hoyer, Henry Waxman and Howard Berman. However, support for Israel is still much stronger among Republican representatives. In 2009, the House of Representatives passed a resolution condemning the now disgraced Goldstone Report which accused Israel of war crimes; 33 Democrats and 3 Republicans voted against the resolution. But Goldberg, instead of questioning this lack of support for Israel among leftists and Democrats, criticizes Netanyahu and the Republicans for attempting to turn support for Israel into a “partisan issue.” This is a false observation. To the extent that support of Israel is becoming a partisan issue, it is not because of the devious plans of Netanyahu and the Republicans, it is because that is the unfortunate reality of the situation. If Goldberg is seriously concerned about the lack of support for Israel in America, he should advise his readers to vote for Republicans.

Later on, Goldberg makes it seem as though leftists who are growing tired of Israel have legitimate reasons:

The West Bank has been occupied now for 44 years. It is increasingly difficult to argue that the occupation is impermanent. I believe Americans still have a benevolent understanding of Israel — that it is a plucky democratic outpost and a haven for an oppressed people in an inhospitable part of the world. This perception, to my mind, is not wrong. But this interpretation of Israel dissipates with each year of occupation. Israel is popular in America in part because Americans believe, to borrow the most famous cliché in Middle East policymaking, that the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But more and more — and I hear this every week now — Americans, in particular those who pay attention to these things, believe that it is Israel that is missing opportunities to reach a compromise with the Palestinians. If, over time, Israel becomes unrecognizable to Americans, it will lose.

Here Goldberg is making excuses for those leftists who do not support Israel. If Americans sincerely feel the way Goldberg describes, that Israel is “missing opportunities to reach a compromise with the Palestinians,” then they are not clear thinkers. Who exactly does Mr. Goldberg want Israel to compromise with? Hamas and Fatah are on the verge of reuniting. How can Israel negotiate with an entity that includes Hamas, who openly calls for the destruction of Israel?

This is all preposterous. There have never been a people in the history of humanity less deserving of a country than the Palestinians. Palestinian society promotes hate and death. After 9/11, Palestinian civilians could be seen celebrating in the streets, handing out candy. Palestinian streets are named to commemorate terrorists, who murder innocent Israelis.

Nonetheless, the Palestinians have been offered their own state several times, including in 1947 when they rejected the offer, as the neighboring Arab countries launched war on Israel. In 2000, under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, they rejected their own state and initiated the second intifada. Then again in 2008 Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians a state of their own and they refused. What people like Mr. Goldberg fail to understand is that the creation of a Palestinian state is not the goal of the Palestinians or the hard-core Israel haters here in America. Their stated goal is to destroy all of Israel.

Conversely, Israel is the only Jewish state in the world. It has a culture, history and tradition that is completely original, and worthy of defending and conserving. Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people, where Judaism was born. In addition, the Jews have a unique history of being oppressed. They were outcasts in every society they have lived, dating back two thousand years ago when they were expelled from Israel, and culminating with the Holocaust, where the Nazis nearly exterminated the entire Jewish race (which is the goal of Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamists). Contrary to the Palestinians, there have never been a people more deserving of a homeland than the Jews. Yet Israel is the most hated country in the world.

The leftist and human rights advocates who truly want to help people in need, instead of hounding Israel to make suicidal concessions to a people bent on their destruction, should lobby on behalf of the Kurds, the Tibetans or the Sudanese. If they are determined to help the Palestinian cause, instead of lobbying against Israel, they should focus their energy on reforming Palestinian society, and particularly on defeating Hamas in Gaza.