Five And One-Half Years From Purging Jewish Ideas To Eradicating Jews

*Nazis burn books by Jews in Berlin in 1933*

During the night of May 10, 1933, tens of thousands of Germans in twenty-two cities gathered books written by Jews and tossed them into huge bonfires. It was part of an emerging effort to remove the supposed “depraved” culture of Germany instigated by Jews and replace it with something more pure.

In Munich, the Ludwig Maximilian University and the Technical University granted state recognition to students’ unions as legal entities in the university constitution, with a stipulation that Jewish students be excluded from these bodies. An estimated 8,000 Germans celebrated the action at a rally and then proceeded to burn books by Jews. An estimated 70,000 onlookers watched the spectacle.

Roughly one hundred book burnings took place from early March and ran through October of 1933. Universities were the main originators of the effort to identify and ban books, which led to libraries and other institutions following suit.

Five and one-half years later, the Nazi machinery had gained momentum. On November 9 and 10, 1938, Nazis throughout Germany and Austria burned Jewish stores and synagogues in what became knows as Kristallnacht. Citizens – mostly neighbors – ransacked and looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed at least 91 Jews, and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. Some 30,000 Jewish males aged 16 to 60 were arrested.

Jews were forced to pay for and clean up the carnage from which they suffered. They scrubbed streets on their knees before Nazis and their neighbors, as they had been forced to do for months in public humiliation.

*Jews in Vienna, Austria forced to scrub streets with their hands in March 1938*

Eighty-five years later, a new generation of antisemites labeled a different Jewish idea as a depravity to terminate and Jews to annihilate: Zionism.

On March 30, 2018, thirty thousand Gazans marched on the fence with Israel in what they billed the “Great March of Return.” They continued to rail against the fence demanding the “right to return” into the land of Israel, where grandparents lived until 1948. Backed by Hamas, the Gazans burned fires and sent burning kites into Israel to torch their fields, as they tried to take down the border fence.

Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious.
Hamas Charter

Five and one half years later, on October 7, 2023, over 1,000 members of Hamas and many Gazans effectively stormed and destroyed the border separation and stormed into Israeli towns where they butchered and slaughtered 1,200 people. They made clear that they did not just want to return to Israel but to end the existence of Jews and the Jewish State.

*Kibbutz Be’eri after Hamas October 7 Massacre*

Both Nazis and Hamas targeted Jews at their inceptions well before 1933 and 2018, respectively. The Nazis gained legitimacy over time through democratic elections and penetrated the mindset of universities. Hamas similarly won Palestinian elections and dominate Palestinian views in a manner that James Zogby of the Arab American Institute called a “deformity in Palestinian political culture.”

Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people.
Hamas Charter

The scary dynamic is that the Palestinian narrative about the evil idea of Zionism is no longer constrained to Arab and Muslim schools but global academia.

Ivy League schools push the idea to “Decolonize Palestine” and paint Jews as foreign invaders with no history in their homeland. They support a global putsch to take down the Jewish State and professors agreed “to recontextualize the events of October 7, 2023, pointing out that military operations and state violence did not begin that day, but rather it represented a military response by a people who had endured crushing and unrelenting state violence from an occupying power over many years. One could regard the events of October 7th as just one salvo in an ongoing war between an occupying state and the people it occupies, or as an occupied people exercising a right to resist violent and illegal occupation,” even though Israel left Gaza in 2005.

In face of the Jews’ usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised…. the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.
Hamas Charter

What is Zionism that so angers Palestinians and university “scholars”? A simple set of beliefs that millions of Jews and non-Jews believe:

Jews are a people, not simply members of a religion
Jews have history and deep ties to their particular homeland in the land of Israel
Jews have a right to self-determination, manifest in establishing sovereignty with the State of Israel
The State of Israel is a safe haven for Jews around the world, all welcome to return
That Jewish State will fight global antisemitism

Nazi Germany moved from burning Jewish ideas to burning Jews in just a few years. Palestinian Arabs and their supporters have similarly targeted Zionism, Jews and the Jewish State. The question is whether the civilized world will turn back the evil.