Some phrases get adopted by a wide range of co-fanatics. Something like “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will be Free,” is echoed by a range of anti-Israel agitators like Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voice for Peace, Code Pink and others.
The call to attack Zionists and Jews has now come to New York City, home to the largest Jewish diaspora community by Within Our Lifetime.
Within Our Lifetime is a radical Muslim group which has called to set New York City aflame with a “citywide day of rage” at Hunter College in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. It has urged students to “organize an action on your campus” and then descend on Hunter.
Hamas is in New York. This is no longer a campus issue for security guards or even local police. This is a federal matter requiring the National Guard.
The United States was alarmed and appalled at the “Unite the Right” mob march in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017. As right-wing marchers descended on a university holding torches, wearing Nazi symbols and yelling “Jews will not replace us,” the country watched a scene of racism and antisemitism unfold into a crime scene. PBS called it a “watershed moment for the white supremacist movement.”
The real life play is being revealed once again in real time, with a new set of actors and fashion brandished by radical jihadists and the alt-left, once again yelling “Jews will not replace us.”
Radical Jihadists
Radical jihadists are typically located in Muslim-majority countries in the Middle and Far East including Iran, Qatar, Pakistan, Indonesia and Somalia. They believe that Islam should dominate the world, especially in any location which was once dominated by Islamists such as the land of Israel.
The jihadi extremists began to slowly migrate into Europe and the United States starting in the 1960s but accelerated their movement in 2015/16 as the “Arab Spring” and Syrian Civil War decimated their homelands. They came to Europe (2015) and the United States (in 2016) and brought much of their instilled antisemitism.
The United States also encouraged foreign students to attend American universities. In 2003, as the American War on Terror raged in mostly Muslim countries, the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study Program was launched. The goal was to bring “High school students from countries with significant Muslim populations [to] live and study in the United States for an academic year through the U.S.” In the 2015/6 academic year, 61,000 students from Saudi Arabia were at U.S. universities. That high figure represents 0.2% of the entire population of Saudi Arabia to a single country. By way of comparison, the ENTIRE American students abroad cohort all over the world is around 162,000, or 0.05% of the U.S. population.
The U.S. continues to push for foreign Muslim students at American schools. On September 12, 2023, the U.S. embassy in Israel posted an advertisement that the U.S. State Department “is seeking a group of Arab citizens of Israel secondary school students to participate in a Study- in-the-USA initiative for high school students during the 2024-2025 school year.” (bold in original). No Jewish students from Israel were invited to be part of the program.
And what do radical jihadists, faces covered in kaffiyehs, preach abroad and in the United States?
They consider the entire State of Israel to be an illegal project that must be terminated
Palestinian Arabs demand a “right of return” to towns where grandparents used to live along with an expulsion of Jews who refuse to live as second class “dhimmis.”
In short, radical jihadists are chanting that “Jews will not replace us!” in Palestine, as they seek to “Free Palestine” from the clutches of the Jews.
Alt-Left
The far-left cohort in America is seeking to end capitalism and pursue a broad redistribution of wealth and power. They have advanced the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) into schools and corporations that demand the minorities of preference (Blacks, Hispanics, LGBT) be given priority in admission, compensation, title and power before Whites or somehow “privileged” minorities such as Asians and Jews.
The alt-left considers Jews to be part of the uber elite class, occupying too many CEO, Supreme Court and political positions. They attribute Jewish success as a matter of Jews only looking out for themselves, and cheating or stealing from the labor of the working class, in classic antisemitic tropes.
When Black Israelites shot up a kosher supermarket in Jersey City, NJ in December 2019, several leaders of the Black community were clear that they felt the killers were only REacting as a form of self defense: “Black homeowners were threatened, intimidated, and harassed by I WANT TO BUY YOUR HOUSE brutes of the jewish community.”
Jews do not belong. In the housing or their jobs.
“Jews will not replace us!” rained down in a hail of bullets in Jersey City and in federal and state mandated DEI programs.
Alt-Right
The alt-right coined the phrase “Jews will not replace us!” but far from monopolized the theme.
The alt-right version of the phrase in many ways is the most preposterous. White supremacists believe that Jews are so powerful that they are advancing a program of importing millions of non-White and non-Christian foreigners to dilute the White Christian backbone of the country. How and why that would have any remote advantages for Jews is never explained.
Muslim extremists, woke progressives and White nationalists have very different philosophies but congregate around a belief that Jews are cheats and thieves who are robbing the rightful owners of land, money, jobs and prestige. And they are coming for this beleaguered minority-minority “by any means they deem necessary,” much as antisemites have done for centuries.
We are at a “watershed moment for the jihadi and alt-left movements” in the United States to destroy Judeo-Christian values, capitalism and the West. How the government’s leaders and population respond will set the tone for our future.
The hangman’s noose has long been viewed as a potent symbol of racism against Black people in the United States. As the NAACP has written about the noose, it “has been used both directly and symbolically throughout American history to racially lynch, kill, terrorize and threaten African Americans, other racial or ethnic minority Americans and their allies.” As such, many municipalities – including New York City – enacted special hate crime laws which capture the noose alongside a swastika as a symbol of hate and terror.
The Southern Poverty Law Center wrote about the difference between simply displaying a noose, which may be protected by the First Amendment under free speech, to a threat to violence. It summarized a Supreme Court ruling on cross burnings which can be applied to hanging nooses:
“In her majority opinion in Virginia v. Black, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor defined true threats as “those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.” She noted “that the history of cross burning in this country shows that cross burning is often intimidating, intended to create a pervasive fear in victims that they are a target of violence.” O’Connor also recognized, however, that “a burning cross does not inevitably convey a message of intimidation.” For this reason, the court invalidated the part of the Virginia law that provided that any cross burning at all “shall be prima facie evidence of an intent to intimidate a person or group of persons.” In other words, prosecutors must prove an intent to intimidate; the First Amendment will not allow intent to be presumed.”
The phrase “globalize the Intifada” is Jews’ hangman noose, a phrase being used today to intentionally terrorize Jews on college campuses and on America’s streets.
Columbia University in New York City is becoming ground zero north for American Jewry, akin to ground zero south at the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001 for the United States. The so-called “pro-Palestinian protests” are loud and deliberate calls to taunt, intimidate and threaten violence against global Jewry.
The celebrations of the heinous and brutal slaughter of Jewish civilians on America’s streets and universities is a profound deformity in our culture but not a crime in itself. However, the chants to “globalize the intifada” shouted at Jews are hate crimes which must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Failure to do so is an abandonment of American Jews, the most persecuted minority, and a sign of the breakdown of society. Terrifyingly, that is the precise goal of the “axis of resistance” of Iran-Russia-China, backed on these shores by the DSA, the alt-left “Squad” and their supporters at leading universities.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman has saddled up with some of the most violent anti-Israel Jew-haters in his New York district. They are now actively coming for Jews.
At the launch of Bowman’s 2024 congressional campaign, he featured Nada Khader who said before a cheering Bowman that Jews in Israel will only be safe when Palestinian Arabs “return to our homeland!” Until then, they can expect more October 7 massacres.
Nada Khader of WESPAC threatening Jews with more attacks if Palestinians do not get to move into Israel, with Rep. Jamaal Bowman cheering “Free Palestine”
Khader has taken her screed directly to Jewish schools.
On March 10, 2024, Khader and about twenty fellow anti-Israel agitators came to the Jewish Leffell School, where Jews gathered to discuss buying homes in Israel.
This seemed like an ideal time and location for Bowman’s supporters to tell Jews that they should be attacked.
Jihadist extremists carry banners in front of a Jewish Day School in Westchester County, NY on March 10, 2024
Khader and friends carried signs to “end the 75 year occupation”, meaning to destroy the Jewish State, as well as to “end Western complicity in Zionism” to rip any protections for Jews, so Muslim extremists can seek “Palestinian Liberation by any means necessary.”
Pro-Palestinian extremists are very clear what “any means necessary” means – more October 7 massacres with raping, beheadings and burning families alive.
NYC – these vile stickers are being spotted all around Union Square.
Khader’s charity, WESPAC, is somehow a tax-exempt entity despite calls for violence. It operates openly in the heart of Westchester County, home to 150,000 Jews.
Nada Khader with allies calling for the rape and slaughter of Jews in front of a Jewish day school on March 10, 2024
Imagine the danger to Westchester’s Jews if Jamaal Bowman prevails in the June 25th Democratic primary.
Rep. Jamaal Bowman and Rep. Rashida Tlaib shout “Free Palestine” before crowd after the October 7 massacre and mass rape of Israelis by Palestinian Arabs
President Joe Biden addressed the nation on March 7, 2024 to discuss the state of the union. He discussed many points about situations abroad including Ukraine, Israel and China, and items on the domestic front such as immigration, abortion, education, the economy and crime.
President Joe Biden delivery State of the Union address on March 7, 2024
Biden put a very positive spin on the crime rate in the U.S. “All Americans deserve the freedom to be safe, and America is safer today than when I took office…. Last year, the murder rate saw the sharpest decrease in history, and violent crime fell to one of the lowest levels in more than 50 years.”
Sounds great.
But not for Jews.
Jews are being attacked and vilified on public streets and in schools. They watch university presidents smile when asked about calling for the genocide of Jews, and professors shout that they were exhilarated by the mass slaughter and rape of Jews in Israel.
In November 2023, Jewish Federations published a report that “70% of Jewish respondents said they feel less safe than they did a few months before [the Hamas war]…. Jews were twice as likely to say they worry very much about their personal safety compared to the general public.”
In February 2024, the American Jewish Committee released its own poll which found “63% of American Jews say the status of Jews in the U.S. is less secure compared to one year ago. In 2022, this number was 41%. In 2021, it was 31%.” The spike is found among the general public too in which “74% of U.S. adults say antisemitism is a problem in the United States today, compared to 68% who said so in 2022, and 60% in 2021.”
Biden knows about the tsunami of Jew hatred. In May 2023, five months before Palestinian jihadists butchered 1,200 people in Israel, Biden announced The U.S. Strategy To Counter Antisemitism. That document narrowly focused on the alt-right, with “Nazis” mentioned twelve times and “white supremacy” five. The more prevalent forms of Jew hatred from Islamic extremists, Blacks and the alt-left went completely unmentioned in the report.
The Biden administration was so blind to radical Islamic antisemitism that it put CAIR, the Council of American Islamic Relations, on the antisemitism committee at that time. The administration only removed CAIR after the head of the group said how pleased he was with the October 7 jihadi massacre.
The unwillingness of the Biden administration to clearly call out every manifestation of Jew hatred – not just from the alt-right – has upset many Jews. According to a February 2024 Siena College poll, the majority of Jews, who normally vote Democratic, are switching to Donald Trump for president in November 2024, buy a margin of 53% to 44%.
Joe Biden seems to be banking on math, that Jews are a minority-minority who are unlikely to tip the scales in any state. Or perhaps he just decided to “love the one your with” and cuddle up to the insidious jihad taking over America, protecting vile antisemites if the are Muslims or Blacks, who make up a much larger swatch of “minorities.”
Now in the 2024 election, Biden has informed Americans that the country is extremely safe, and is unwilling to acknowledge the tsunami of Jew hatred by his supporters in the Muslim, Black and progressive communities. Should Trump win the presidency, those left-wing and jihadi groups will surely come for the Jews in even greater numbers and ferocity than they are currently.
“We are still in shock at the scope and magnitude of the violence. If words cannot express the pain we feel in witnessing such loss, I cannot fathom that of the families of the victims. My prayers for their comfort have kept me sleepless. What we have just witnessed is a hate crime against an already victimized community, and it violates our principles, both as Americans and as Muslims. I join the millions of Muslims in our country who are repulsed by such an affront to our or any faith.” – Nihad Awad, National Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)
These were not the words of the head of CAIR after thousands of Palestinian Arabs invaded Israel and tortured and butchered 1,200 people in Israel, mostly civilians. It was his thoughts shared in an article by Time Magazine after a single Muslim man killed 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida in June, 2016.
When it came to the October 2023 sadistic killing of Jews, Awad shared on X/Twitter that the Israeli dead deserved their fate: “Palestinians have been experiencing ethnic cleansing by Israel for 75 years [from the founding of Israel in 1948]” and “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
The rape of Jewish women and burning families alive was seemingly not “an affront to our [Islamic] or any faith.” The shooting of Holocaust survivors was not a “hate crime against an already victimized community.” The young Jewish children taken hostage were not in his “prayers for their comfort.”
Leaders of CAIR see Zionists, including American Zionists and people who visit or work with Israel, as “enemies.”
Zahara Biloo, the San Francisco Executive Director of CAIR specifically called out “Hillel chapters on our campuses” and many Jewish groups. She denounced any normalization of interaction with “polite Zionists” whom she falsely claimed are inherently anti-Muslim. “I’m not going to sugarcoat that. They are your enemies,” which include anyone who argues for the continued existence of Israel, including in a two state solution.
CAIR strongly backed Biloo and said that it would “continue to proudly stand by Zahra and all American Muslim leaders who face smears and threats because they dare to express an opinion about Palestinian human rights,” which for CAIR means demanding the destruction of the Jewish State and confronting Zionists.
The leading American-Islamic organization has made clear that it believes that Jews and Zionists are inherently anti-Muslim and the State of Israel is an affront to Islam. For CAIR, Palestinian human rights demand the destruction of Israel, and the group will celebrate the demise of anyone who protects the Jewish State.
Note, for the 2021-2 Congressional election cycle, CAIR gave perfect scores to only a handful of politicians who supported all of its goals: Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA); Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI); Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY); and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). All members of the far-left.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has been very vocal and negative about the Jewish State of Israel since its founding. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has written that “key CAIR leaders often traffic in antisemitic and anti-Zionist rhetoric.” The ADL specifically called out Zahra Billoo, CAIR’s San Francisco Bay Area Executive Director, who called Jewish Zionist institutions in America “enemies”, as well as Nihad Awad, CAIR’s Co-Founder and Executive Director, who claims that “Zionist organizations” are “enemies of the Muslim community” and that “Zionist organizations make up the core of the Islamophobia network in the United States.”
On October 7, well before Israel responded to the sadistic massacre by the Palestinian Arab political-terrorist groups in Israel, Awad took to X/Twitter and defended the savagery.
He first wrote that “Palestinians have been experiencing ethnic cleansing by Israel for 75 years [from the founding of Israel in 1948],” seemingly calling for Palestinians to return the favor to ethnically cleanse Jews from the land.
He followed that tweet with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr “A riot is the language of the unheard,” minimizing the atrocity of killing 1,200 people – mostly civilians – as a “riot” under the name of a peaceful activist.
CAIR was originally part of President Biden’s May 2023 National Strategy to Combat Antisemitism. It took until yesterday, December 7, for the Biden Administration to remove the organization, as Awad has continued to argue that Palestinians have a right to “self defense” and that he was “happy to see people breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land.” It is also possible that Israel found evidence of ties between CAIR and HAMAS in materials the IDF captured in Gaza.
The US government may have also read the October 2023 George Washington University’s Program on Extremism paper about the Hamas Networks in America. CAIR was featured prominently.
CAIR and Students for Justice in Palestine are two groups pushing Muslim antisemitism into the United States’ mainstream. They must be combatted with the same vigor as other antisemitic groups.
Hamas’s grotesque butchery of people in Israel on October 7, 2023 was seemingly from another time and place. Burning babies in ovens. Chopping off fingers of young boys and amputating feet of young girls. Cutting off breasts of women and raping them. The sickening depravity of the Palestinian jihadists seemed born in hell.
These Islamic extremists were not simply invading Israel to take land; they came to embarrass, to dehumanize, to torment the infidels.
Like the Spanish Inquisition of hundreds of years ago, religious fanatics tortured and burned Jews whom they deemed to be “heretics”.
Heretics to Christians. Infidels to Jihadists.
Jews.
Burning Jews alive during the Inquisition before large local crowds in Lisbon, Portugal
So they brought back some corpses to parade through the streets of Gaza. Some 240 live people too.
Modern technology enabled their barbarity to be captured and shared with the world very quickly. From Australia to the United States, antisemites shouted their joy at watching the massacre of Jews.
In Sydney, Australia the crowds yelled “Gas the Jews,” “F–k the Jews.” Cornell professor Russell Rickford said the spectacle was “exhilarating” and “energizing.” A junior at the University of Pennsylvania asked the crowd whether they remembered “the several other joyful and powerful images which came from the glorious October seventh?… I remember feeling so empowered and happy, so confident that victory was near and so tangible. I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts. Never let go of it. Channel it through every action you take. Bring it to the streets!”
The butchering of Jews eventually brought out the crowds, albeit asynchronous to the slaughter. They cheered the guilty verdict and incineration of Jews.
The antisemites gathered in the streets with fellow Jew-haters to reminisce and pray for more days like October 7. They tore down “kidnapped” posters, staged walk-outs, blockaded streets and lobbied members of congress to protect their heroes in Gaza. They wanted to see the second, third and fourth wave of torturing Jews, as Hamas promised.
Maybe live next time.
The Catholic Church once tortured and paraded Jews before burning them at the stake for the local crowds amusement. Today’s religious devils are radical jihadists appealing to a global audience to hunt and torment diaspora Jews for sport and to gather support for their war effort against the Jewish State.
The biblical Samson did not die alone but was staged in a large theater to mock and kill for the crowd’s pleasure.
Recognize that today’s pro-Hamas “protests” are not silent, holding vigil for Palestinian civilians. They are a mob looking for the next Jewish Samson to eliminate.
The Jewish State and Jews around the world have woken up to the fact that they are in a war, hated for who they are, where they are and what they do. It took a monstrous massacre for the reality to awaken people to the situation, and having reached this point, it’s important to know more about the haters and their intents.
The article “The Center of Intersectionality looks a lot like Adolf Hitler” listed many vile antisemites including: the Democratic Socialists of America, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, Rep. Ilhan Omar, New York City Council member Shahana Hanif, Linda Sarsour and Zahra Billoo of the Council of American-Islamic Relations. There are many others like the Mapping Project in Massachusetts which is part of the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement, which wants to make it easier to target Jewish organizations throughout the state, and so listed them and their addresses. Organizations included those that promote “normalization” and peace, as well as synagogues.
After the brutal massacre of hundreds of Israelis on October 7, 2023, one would imagine that even everyday antisemites would distance themselves from the carnage and attempt to not appear as Nazis bent on Jewish blood.
Alas, the bilestorm is upon us, and those celebrating the murder of Jews are out in the open. Jews should take note and be prepared in both the near- and intermediate-term.
Immediately after the atrocities became public, The United States Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) threw its full weight behind Palestinian Arabs. It published a statement about the “recent unprovoked and continuous attacks by Israel on Palestinian towns, cities, and refugee camps have resulted in tragic loss of Palestinian lives. We condemn Israel’s targeted and indiscriminate killing of civilians, including innocent children, women, and the elderly, and we denounce the inhumane siege imposed on the nearly 2 million inhabitants of Gaza, a clear violation of international law and an implied declaration of open war on the Palestinians which oblige them to be in constant self-defense.” Members of USCMO are:
American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). They have a convention in Chicago November 23-5
Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) which vigorously backed Billoo’s antisemitic rant that all Jews are enemies of Muslims
Al-Awda – The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition
Within Our Lifetime
Samidoun
CUNY School of Law Students for Justice in Palestine
Decolonize This Place
Existence Is Resistance
CUNY for Palestine
Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America
Yalies for Palestine
Semilla Collective
Greater New Haven Peace Council
Wesleyan Students for Justice in Palestine
Party for Socialism and Liberation
Witness Palestine Rochester
ANSWER Coalition
Bard College SJP
Students for Justice in Palestine – Butler University
Jewish Voice for Peace – Indiana
Party for Socialism and Liberation – Indianapolis
SJP @ UC Davis
AMP Chicago
… and many more
The Democratic Socialists of America and Students for Justice In Palestine were in full force around the country backing the wanton killing of Jews. AMCHA Initiative has long tracked how the presence of SJP on college campuses results in antisemitic incidents jumping by five times.
The head of NYU Law Student Bar Association sent out a broad email about “my unwavering and absolute solidarity with Palestinian in their resistance against oppression toward liberation and self-determination.” Ryna went on to say Israel’s blockade of the terrorist enclave “made resistance necessary. I will not condemn resistance.” That such a person can be a lawyer and approve of the wanton slaughter of non-combatants en masse is terrifying. This person, Ryna Workman, should be rejected from all employment.
Ryna has company. Harvard University posted a letter signed by 30 groups supporting Hamas’s butchery. After billionaire investor Bill Ackman, an alum of the school, asked that the school release the names of the individuals behind the letter, someone posted their names.
Columbia University’s Student for Justice in Palestine produced a vile antisemite named Naye Idriss who gave a speech in Times Square in New York City the day after the massacre of Jews and called for more massacres to a reception of cheers.
Idriss was likely fueled in her hatred of the Jewish State from Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi who said that Israel’s treatment of Palestinian Arabs “will necessarily, inevitably bring a violent reaction (51:40). Another professor, Joseph Massad mocked how Jews fled on foot from their “colonies” (since he views all of Israel as an illegal colony) in the massacre. He didn’t mention a single slaughtered Jew but went on to lament Arab dead, which he hoped would be the “start of the Palestinian War of Liberation.”
Of course, this generation’s Nazis is the popular Palestinian political-terrorist group Hamas which carried out the slaughter. Its 1988 foundational charter is replete with antisemitism and the call to kill Jews and destroy the Jewish State, seemingly to the joy of Palestinian Arabs who voted the party into 58% of parliament in 2006. Its leadership calls on Muslims around the world to engage in a global intifada to support their annihilation of Israel.
Turkey, another Islamic, non-Arab country provides Hamas political support
Qatar hosts Hamas’s leadership and funnels money to it
Eugene Puryear, part of the Party for Socialism and Liberation organized rallies for Hamas and said “Palestinians are right to stand up against occupation.”
ADL has tracked many of the recent pro-Hamas protests which backed the massacre and called for the destruction of Israel. Chants included “Zionism has got to go!” and “Zionism is genocide!”, “You need to stop being apologetic about Palestinian liberation“, “Resistance is not terrorism.” Regarding the massacre of Jews, speakers said “make no mistake, we are in celebration.”
While Jews grieve and pray, they seemingly have not internalized that the pro-Palestinian community does not view this as a battle like 2008, 2012, 2014 or 2021. They don’t think it’s like the Second Intifada in which they rejected two states for two people.
Your enemies believe the war to end the Jewish State has begun. It’s 1948 Redux.
And they have called for the world to join them in their efforts to end Israel and prosecute its supporters in a “global intifada.”
Israel’s fight in Gaza is not about the terrorist group Hamas; it is about terminating Hamas’s jihadi dream of destroying the Jewish State.
Almost every Palestinian Arab is already an antisemite and this war will not make them hate Jews any less. However, it must teach them that Israel is here to stay.
The last book of the Jewish Bible, Deuteronomy, is both a recap of the origin story of Jews and a lesson plan for the Jewish nation as they readied to return to their promised land.
Chapters 27 and 28 of Deuteronomy lay out the positive blessings that God will ensure to the Jews if they listen to His commandments, and the curses should they abandon Him. Deuteronomy 28:25 speaks of a particular curse:
יהוה will put you to rout before your enemies; you shall march out against them by a single road, but flee from them by many roads; and you shall become a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth.
This is the foundation of a cursed diaspora. While Jews had been slaves in Egypt and wandered the desert for hundreds of years, that situation was circumstantial. The Jewish forefathers of Jacob and his sons came to Egypt to avoid a famine and became trapped – together – in the land. As they were ending their time away from their promised land, God warned that they could be banished from the land of Israel, scattered and hated around the world, if they abandoned His charge.
This happened over thousands of years. While Jews had initially established their sovereignty and self-determination in the holy land, over time, invaders came and took the Jews to far away lands. As described in the Bible, they were often hated and persecuted in those lands, with many antisemites validating their persecution with verses from the Old Testament.
The middle of the 20th century brought change.
The Holocaust forced the Catholic Church to revisit their dogma. The horrors inflicted on European Jews with tacit or active support of many, caused the church to rewrite its rulings on the hated wandering Jews in the Second Vatican Council. Twenty years after the Holocaust, on October 28, 1965, the Church issued Nostra Aetate in which it reexamined its relationships with non-Christian faiths.
As it related to Jews, the declaration stated its “rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel’s spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone…. The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion.”
The Church abandoned the inflamed zeal which served as a driving force against non-Christians in the Crusades and Inquisition – and front row spectator in the Holocaust – and replaced it with a foundation of love for people of other faiths. The Holocaust – the “horror to all the kingdoms of the earth” as described in Deuteronomy – compelled the largest faith group in the world to reverse course and begin anew with an attitude of love towards all people.
The Church was able to do this by focusing on the texts of the Old and New Testaments and facts of history. It did not rewrite history that Jesus and the apostles weren’t Jews. It did not pretend that the Holocaust did not happen. It did not deny that the land of Israel is that exact piece of land that God promised to the Jewish people.
The Catholic Church considered facts and extracted new meaning, especially in light of Jews returning to their homeland after nearly 2,000 years, inspired and directed by love and peace.
Alas, as the years 1936 to 1967 which brought the horrors of the Holocaust, the rebirth of the Jewish State, the Second Vatican Council and the reunification of Jerusalem under Jewish control, directed the Islamic world to turn to noxious antisemitism.
While Nazi Germany gained power from 1936 to 1939, the Muslim Arabs in Palestine waged a war against Jews. They killed hundreds and successfully petitioned the British who were administering Palestine to block the entry of Jews back to their homeland, just as hundreds of thousands were fleeing the Holocaust.
During World War II, Palestinian leaders conspired with the Nazis as they had a “shared recognition of the enemy,” as Heinrich Himmler wrote to the Palestinian Grand Mufti in Jerusalem about the Jews. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, Arab Muslims from Palestine and the surrounding countries invaded the new Jewish State in the hopes of a second Holocaust, to destroy the country and wipe out the Jews.
Palestinian Arabs are the most antisemitic people in the world according to polls. They are the center of Muslim antisemitism as noted in the same ADL poll that “while Muslims are more likely to hold antisemitic views than members of any other religion (49% Index Score), geography makes a big difference in their views. Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa (75% Index Score) are much more likely to harbor antisemitic attitudes than Muslims in Asia (37% Index Score), Western Europe (29% Index Score), Eastern Europe (20% Index Score), and Sub-Saharan Africa (18% Index Score).”
Ultra Orthodox Jews in the Me’a She’arim section of Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)
While Christians looked at the text of the Old Testament and saw the rebirth of the Jewish State as an affirmation of Jews being good and blessed by God’s love, Muslims were compelled to cast the Jews as evil and unworthy of the land and God’s love.
The conclusion of the Jewish Bible has stories of blessings and curses for Jews as it relates to their behavior and presence in the land of Israel. Over the last few decades, Christian Zionists have come to view the Jews as good and worthy of the promised land, while Muslims attempt to portray Jews as irredeemably evil and unworthy of of the holy land. Muslim Arabs then also fabricate stories that Jews don’t even have history in the land to further undermine any potential Jewish claim.
Muslim vilification of Jews is not simply antisemitism; it is a tool for ethnic cleansing.
First One Through 