Holding the Victim to Blame

Whenever there is a terror attack against Israel, the world media finds some way to make Israel the accused, whether for provocation or retaliation, for people dying or failing to die, for killing the terrorists, or failing to kill them.

This is not a new phenomenon.  Two thousand years ago, a significant Jew was murdered by non-Jews, and for two thousand years the Jews have been persecuted for his death.  In the current era, Jews are being blamed by anti-Semites for provoking the holocaust.  They have been blamed for its horrible death toll, with their accusers putting the blame on Jewish passivity, and failure to resist.  It is this latter blame that my father Yehuda Elberg addressed in a lecture approximately forty years ago.  He was a holocaust survivor, a member of the Jewish Underground in Poland, and part of the Ghetto uprising.  Immediately following the war he worked on smuggling Jewish survivors to Israel (then known as Palestine).  Below are excerpts from his lecture We, the Accused.

***

On the 35th anniversary of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, a great deal was written about this in Jewish newspapers the world over, especially in Israel. The influential Maariv carried an article by Chaim Baltsan entitled: “Yom Ha-Shoah 1978: Is it Different from Previous Years?” Among other things, Baltsan wrote: “Much has already been written and said about the heroism — and under the circumstances it was extraordinary — the heroism displayed by the Ghetto rebels and the organizers of the uprisings in the camps. We are proud of that heroism, we will always be proud of it. But not so with the Shoah, that dark and bitter phenomenon in which it is impossible to find even the tiniest spark of light. Yet we are compelled to couple it with the heroism and to utter words in the same breath. We have linked the Holocaust with the heroic uprising in order to conceal the unacceptability of the pain, more accurately the shame; when we recall how millions were led like sheep to the slaughter…”

In brief, they are ashamed of us, they are ashamed of the survivors as well as the fallen. We are guilty of having put on the yellow badge. Better we had all died than let ourselves be so degraded. We are guilty because we did not revolt against being locked up in ghettos; proud people do not allow themselves to be locked into cages like animals in a zoo.  We are guilty because we let ourselves be herded into cattle-cars and did not counter-attack the Germans with our fists…

I want to tell you about the individuals and let the Chaim Baltsans be ashamed of their own ignorance, their own narrow mindedness, their own heartlessness, their owned blindness to the heroism of the Ghetto even when that the heroism was not as spectacular as in the Hollywood film.

An episode from 1940:

The Germans had given the Jews out of a shtetl in that part of Poland which had been annexed to the Reich. They packed in Jews into trucks. One young woman with a baby in her arms was having difficulty climbing up into the truck. A German soldier politely took the child from her and helped her into the vehicle.  When she stretched other arms to take the child, he throw it to the ground.  The woman jumped from the truck.  The German pointed his rifle at her.  She didn’t budge.  He raved and raged and threaten to shoot her and the child.  She still didn’t budge. He then raised the muzzle of his gun and threatened to shoot all the Jews in the truck.  The woman dragged herself back into the truck.  When they arrived in Warsaw, she was out of her mind.

Who can evaluate the greatness of that sacrifice?  Who can measure the boundless love for her fellow Jews, that gave her the strength to make such a decision and incredible courage to carry it out?  The knowledge of what was going to happen to her baby burned so fiercely in her brain that consumed it.  Her nerves were strung so tautly that they snapped.  Yet she still managed to weigh and measure.  Her hands — a scale of destiny. In one hand the compulsive desire to remain with the child; in the other the lives of the few score Jews.  She made her decision and even succeeded in carrying it out before her unbearable anguish destroyed her brain.

Hunger, fear and pain weaken a human being physically, and diminishes his mental strength.  There’s no need here to recount what the Jews went through from the beginning of 1940 until the summer of 1942.  In the proceedings of the Nuremberg trials you can find the testimony of one Herman Graebe, a German who was present during the slaughter of the Jews at Dubno.  A group of naked Jews stood at the edge of a ditch.  Behind them we Germans were loading their rifles.  Among the Jews stood a woman with a child in her arms.  The woman tickled the child, and began singing to it, so the child was laughing merrily when the German bullets cut down the mother and baby, and they both fell into the pit.

Psychologists tell us that when a person stands face to face with death all the emotions are paralyzed.  Terror, hope, anger, love, hate, all disappear at the moment when one looks death in the eye.  Emotionally he is already on the other side of the fight.

Our martyrs, however, demonstrated that it is not necessarily so.  Maybe fear has vanished, maybe all hope has died, maybe anger and hatred have been extinguished.  But one thing in this woman continued to live—love.  The emotion of love remained awake, strong, self-sacrificing.  I do not know any poem more lofty.  I’ve never heard any song more beautiful, never seen any deed more holy than the singing of that mother to her child in Dubno.  The chuckle of her infant, on the edge of the grave, sent out into the world’s void a resounding testimony of Jewish love and self-sacrifice.  The giggle of that child is the most exalted ode ever sung to the Jewish mother…

I come back to the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto and I must begin with a prefatory observation.

Some years ago there was a fire in the movie theater where everyone pushed for the exits.  People stepped on each other.  More people died from the panic than from the fire.  Similarly, on a sinking ship, everyone tries to get to the lifeboats.  People grab the rope ladders out of each other’s hands.  The result: nobody gets to the boats.

The Warsaw Ghetto was a flaming inferno, a sinking ship.  But what happened with the people there?

On the day before the uprising began it was like Yom Kippur Eve in a pious Jewish household.  People spoke quietly, walk softly.  A kind of reverential air spread over the Ghetto streets, a trembling, but not out of fear.  Out of exultation.  A decision had been made, responsibility assumed.  But it did not weigh onerously on the people.  It hovered over their heads like an aura.  A whole community of Jews went forth to meet the inevitable with the purposefulness, with a sense of mission, and one could feel the presence of the wings of history, the duty to future generations.  Some sixty thousand Jews marched forth into greatness within the almost festive tread…

We, the Accused

It burns me when I hear someone say that the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto saved the honor and dignity of the Jewish people. No! Jewish honor stood high even when Jews were expiring with a quiet, unspectacular death. It was the honor of the entire humanity that was in mortal peril. And it was the greatness of the Jews in the ghettos, with their sanctified life and their heroic death that saved the honor of the human species, and gave flesh-end-blood mortals back their image of God.

I said that Jewish heroism did not begin with the uprising; it also did not end with the uprising. I need not describe the terror, the anguish, the scientific dehumanization system in the concentration camps. According to all experience in history, according to all the laws of psychology, the survivors should have emerged from the camps embittered destroyers, venomous killers and incendiaries, filled with hatred for a world that had led to all this and then permitted it to go on. Their physical health was destroyed. Their homes were destroyed. But the image of God within them was not.

Overnight, upon the liberation of the camps, a social life was created, with culture, with ideologies. The skeletal fingers did not yet have the strength to hold a pencil steadily, but they were already writing books, issuing newspapers.

I could tell you a great deal about the wonders and the miracles performed by the brands barely plucked out of the fire. Instead, let me quote from a letter by Professor Zelig Brodestski, the then head of Britain’s Jewish community, written to the survivors in Bergen- Belsen after he attended one at their congresses, immediately after the war.

“It was difficult for me to accept the task of coming here to you.  I did not know what to expect, how beaten or wretched you would look But you presented me with e picture of a proud Jewish life, a picture which I shall use in order to instill more pride and more life into the Jews in England. I had thought that perhaps you had fallen in your own esteem. But I have never experienced a more dignified congress. I had thought you would look with anger upon the Jews from abroad, who were able to do so little to save you from the Nazi murderers: but you welcomed me with love and warmth, and you spoke to me candidly and earnestly.  I was afraid you would only weep and lament but you combined your tears with the smile of the eternal Jew.  I had feared your disillusionment and hopelessness, but you displayed a faith and a resolution which all the .Jews in the world would do well to learn from you.”

There is an old legend about the flag of Jewish faith and determination which was hoisted over the Holy Temple in Jerusalem after the victory of the Maccabees.  Two hundred and thirty-five years later, when the Romans set fire to the Temple and the flames reached the mast, a whirlwind lifted the flag, the legend tells us, and carried it off to a faraway place to keep it safe for a future generation of Jews will redeem the Maccabean flag with their faith and determination.

To live and see this flag redeemed was my most ardent prayer and cherished dream since my childhood.  My dream came true in a strange and traumatic way. It was decades ago, the Warsaw Ghetto rose to fight a formidable enemy, and I was there when the blue-white flag was hoisted over the tallest building in the Ghetto.  It seemed to me that I had seen this flag before.  The dreamy blue and stark white flag was soon consumed by red flames together with the fighters.  It was then that I recognized the flag of my dreams.

Four years later in the Gulf of Lion, in the the harbor of Sete, over five thousand holocaust survivors boarded an old ship to fight the British blockade of the shore of Palestine, a ship later to be known as Exodus 1947.  Again I was there, watching the lineups of boarding passengers.  When I noticed the rolled-up banner under the arm of one of them, I immediately knew that this was the flag of my dreams.

I was not in the lines of battle during the Israeli War of Liberation and the subsequent wars of defense, but I knew that the Maccabean flag was there.  The legendary heroism, the devotion and self-sacrifice of the fighters are proof positive that the flag of faith and resolution inspired them.

***

We shall often be the accused.  But it no longer matters.  The flag that was over the Temple, over the Warsaw Ghetto, over Sete, is over Israel: it’s a flag that shall not fall again.

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This Wednesday evening, April 15^th, 2015 is Holocaust Remembrance Day. On Thursday, April 2^nd, 2015 an agreement was reached between Iran and the United States to lay the groundwork for another Holocaust, one much more technologically advanced, one much more capable of carrying out its goals.  On what day will we commemorate the future Holocaust against Israel? Or will there be anyone left to remember it?

Remembering Past Holocausts

After all, the Nazi Holocaust wasn’t the first; it was just more effective, using the most advanced technology of the mid-twentieth century. Weapons and instruments of torture based on seventeenth century technology led to the brutal destruction of three hundred thousand Jews in what was essentially a feud between the Cossacks and Tartars, Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine, with a mix of rivalry between branches of Christianity.

The gas chambers of the Nazis, the scythes and pitchforks of the Ukrainian peasants were nothing compared to the killing power of nuclear weapons. In the future Holocaust, Technology developed in large part by Jews may be used to rid the world of the Jewish state.

It’s clear that Israel cannot depend on the United States to protect its interests. The U.S. has abdicated its role as the world’s policeman, allowing gangs of religious fanatics and dictators to run rampant, pursuing their own evil agendas. It’s clear that Jews cannot depend on local police forces to defend their safety in cities and countries throughout the world.

It also seems clear that the Jews cannot depend on God alone to protect their physical well-being.

Many scholars and thinkers have been asking whether the unparalleled event of the Holocaust did not create a most serious existential crisis in which the text by definition was invalidated. After six million Jews, including nearly two million children, lost their lives within five years under the cruelest of circumstances, can we still seriously speak about a viable covenant in which God promised to protect His people?… The Holocaust, they believe, proved that we have only ourselves to rely on, and that even the return to Israel is to be understood as a secular liberation of the galut experience.

To write God out of the picture would be to write Judaism and the Jewish people out of the picture. So that too, is not a viable course of action.

Preventing the Future Holocaust

In fact, there is no correct answer, no proper course of action. There are too many variables, too many characters acting with their own free will; acting from a set of beliefs and values that are totally alien to us. Only hindsight may enable us to know what were the right and wrong choices in dealing with Iran’s promise to annihilate Israel, to destroy the Jews.

My great-grandfather was the senior rabbi in Warsaw during the Nazi holocaust. Prior to the war (following the death or Rabbi Kook), he was offered the position of Chief Rabbi of Palestine (Israel). Knowing difficult times were coming, he refused to leave his community in Poland, although he encouraged others to move there. At the outbreak of the war, Jewish leaders wanted to evacuate him to safety. Again, he refused to leave his people. When faced with a round-up by the Nazis, he made his decision. (A few rabbinic leaders made a different kind of decision)

Rabbi Zvi Yecheskiel Michelson, dean of the Warsaw rabbinate, deliberately remained at home while a large roundup was on. He did not go out as the Germans ordered, but put on his prayer shawl and phylacteries and stayed inside. He preferred to be shot on the spot, hoping that this his boy would be thrown into one of the wagons that accompanied the roundup and find a last resting place in the Jewish cemetery. So he willingly opened the door to the search party, but when the Germans saw the tall old man, with his long silver-white beard, they became uneasy. One of them mumbled, according to the Jewish policeman who accompanied the search: “This must be Moses in person.” They slammed the door shut and left the aged rabbi alone. He must have decided then that staying with his people in their last moments was even more important than being buried in a Jewish cemetery. He rose, went down to the courtyard, and joined the marching ranks of Jews towards the Umschlag, from which the people were sent to Treblinka. (p. xiii)

May the blood of my great-grandfather be avenged. May the future holocaust be prevented.

Your comments are welcome

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Historical Wrongs: Deportations and Expulsions

Assyrian Destruction of Peoples and Nations

In 1300 BCE, the Assyrian Empire ensured the docility of the nations it conquered by expelling peoples from their homelands, and replacing them with other deportees.  The best way for a nation to survive was to humbly submit as an Assyrian vassal state.  The northern Kingdom of Israel resisted, and its people becoming the Ten Lost Tribes.  The southern Kingdom of Judea acquiesced, and prospered for many years.  It was an era of displacement, great suffering, and the disappearance of many peoples.

Disappearance of the Dorset Eskimo

Between 1200 and 1500 AD, the Dorset Eskimo (known to the contemporary Inuit as Tunniq) disappeared from the archaeological record.  According to stories, the Dorset were powerful but timid people, driven out by the newcomers, the contemporary Inuit.  Whether any Tunniq survived, whether they moved elsewhere, is unknown.  It was a time of displacement, suffering, and the disappearance of a people.
(the Tunniq name, though not the culture, is used in the novel Quantum Cannibals)

Expulsion of the Jews of England

In 1290, Edward I expelled England’s approximately 3,000 Jews.  Having seized their property a few years earlier, he now declared that all money owed to Jews was owed to him.  It was a time of displacement and suffering, as the Jews wandered from one country to another, searching for security and stability.

Expulsion of the Jews of France

The Jews of France suffered the depredations of the Crusades, the burning of the Talmud, the seizure of their property, and finally, in 1305, imprisonment and consequent expulsion of a hundred thousand Jews by Phillip IV.  It was another chapter in their ongoing persecution and displacement.

Incan Mass Relocations

As the Incan empire grew in breadth and power, the native Incan population became smaller and smaller in proportion to the subjugated population.  Beginning in about 1400, the Incan rulers instituted the mitmaqkuna, where entire communities were relocated to serve the whims of the empire.  The able-bodied men became forced laborers for the Incan, dependent on whatever role the empire assigned them.  It was a time of great social upheaval, displacement, and the disappearance of many peoples and cultures.

Expulsion of the Jews of Spain

Perhaps the most infamous expulsion of Jews is when Spain expelled its Jewish population, numbering at a couple of hundred thousand.  The Catholic authorities were afraid that Jews would cause the tens of thousands of recent forced converts to Christianity to slip back towards their old religion.  By January 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella defeated the Muslim armies, and they could turn their attention to the Jews.  Fleeing to Portugal, North Africa, Italy and Turkey, they abandoned homes they had lived in for centuries.  The alternatives were conversion, the inquisition, or execution.  It was a time of displacement, suffering, torture or death.

Expulsion of the Acadians

Acadia was an area of eastern Canada ceded by France to Great Britain in the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713.  As the tensions between British and French continued to rise, the former wanted to make sure that the Acadians, descendants of French settlers, wouldn’t turn against Britain.  The Governor demanded they swear unconditional oaths of allegiance, but by the time the Acadians agreed to this, he was convinced that oaths were insufficient.  About 10,000 people were expelled in the period from 1755 to 1763, when France finally lost its last possessions in eastern North America.  It was a time of fear, suffering and displacement.

The Trail of Tears: Expulsion of the Cherokee

Although President Andrew Jackson’s military command and almost certainly his life were saved by Cherokee allies in 1814, he felt no debt of gratitude.  The Cherokee had signed treaties, but these all fell to pieces with the discovery of gold in northern Georgia.  The Cherokee turned to the courts for protection, and won a number of significant cases.  Jackson didn’t care, and proceeded to illegally force 17,000 Cherokee from their homeland.  About 4,000 died from hunger, exposure and disease.  It was a time of death, a time of tears, later known as “The Trail of Tears.”

The Long Walk:  Navajo

Another infamous Indian removal was the Long Walk, the forced relocation of the Navajo.  Although Navajo relations with American settlers were initially peaceful, they disintegrated quickly as more settlers moved into their territory.  The U.S. Army went to war against the Navajo, destroying their fields, orchards, houses and livestock.  Some 8,500 Navajo were then marched three hundred miles in harsh conditions to what was supposed to be their new home.  Hundreds died of cold and starvation on the way; many more died at their barren destination.  It was a time of terror and privation, forever etched into the memory of the Navajo.

Internment of the Ukrainians

From 1914 to 1920, over eight thousand Canadians with Ukrainian ancestry were interred as enemy aliens because the western Ukraine was occupied by Austro-Hungary.  Businessmen, farmers, housewives and children were placed behind barbed wire because of a war they had nothing to do with; a war eight thousand kilometers away.  It was a sad period in the history of Canada, a time of hunger, fear and shame for the victims.

The Armenian Genocide

In 1915 the Ottoman government embarked upon the decimation of its Armenian population.  Deportations disguised as a resettlement program were really intended as death marches.  Convoys of tens of thousands of people at a time were marched into barren territory, with no provisions for food, water or shelter.  Up to a million and a half Armenians perished at the hands of the Ottoman/ Turkish forces, in the first attempt at genocide of the twentieth century.  Hitler viewed it as an inspirational precedent, as a license to kill mercilessly.  The Armenian genocide was the horror that paved the way for future horrors.

Stalin’s Deportations

In the 1930’s Stalin removed entire populations from their ancestral homelands.  Among the populations who were forcibly displaced were Azeris, Chechens, Ingush, Karachi, Finns, Meskhetians, Crimean Tatars, Black Sea Greeks, Kurds, Koreans, Kalmucks, Germans from the Volga region and Ukraine and others.  Many of those deportations are at the root of contemporary ethnic and national conflicts.  Stalin’s callous brutality led to decades of conflict and suffering.

Internment of the Japanese

In 1942, both Canada and the United States feared that their citizens with Japanese ancestry were potential security risks.  Over twenty thousand Canadians had their property confiscated, and were put into internment camps.  After the war, the government refused to let them move back to the west coast, forcing them to either war-ravaged Japan, or Canada east of the Rocky Mountains.  In the United States, over one hundred and twenty seven thousand Japanese Americans were interned.  It was a time of racism, displacement and loss.

Expulsion of the Lhotshampa

In the 1990’s over one hundred thousand Lhotshampas, ethnic Nepalese, were evicted from southern Bhutan in order to protect Bhutanese cultural identity.  Living in overcrowded refugee camps in Nepal and India, their only option is to settle in a new country.  In 2008 the United States offered to take in sixty thousand Lhotshampa.  Other nations are willing to take smaller numbers.   Efforts at repatriation have been hampered by Bhutanese government resistance, and by the seizure of Lhotshampa land and property.  There is stress, there is displacement, there is suffering, but there is also hope.

“Culture carries no privilege to exist.  Cultures do not have value simply because they are.  Some cultures, the world is better off without.”- Terry Goodkind

Conclusion: An Aggressive Creed

In the twenty-first century, followers of an aggressive creed are living as ordinary citizens in Europe, Australia and the Americas.  They have full rights, and not subject to any serious discrimination.  Many followers of this creed refuse to give up their aggressive ways, committing violence, while at the same time claiming victim status.  Bombing buildings and trains, marathons and airplanes, they exploit the sense of equality and justice of the societies they dwell in.  Thousands of ordinary civilians have been killed as a result.  If the followers of this creed are not expelled, or deported, it will be a time of terror, a time of tears.  Their callous brutality will lead to decades of conflict and suffering.

Europe, Australia and the Americas can’t reject expulsion based on what happened in the past.  It would be learning the wrong lesson from history, because it’s different this time around.  It’s not racism, it’s not nationalism.  The followers of this aggressive creed shouldn’t be expelled because of who they are, but because of what they do.  It’s the only way for western civilization to survive.

Your comments are welcome

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Get Your Twisted Values Out of My Country!

Many years ago I went on a demonstration organized by a trade union, with the purpose of disrupting a convention of the ruling political party.  Since we couldn’t get through the police lines to approach the building, we settled for burning down one of the wooden poles that carried electricity to the convention hall.  The police quickly figured out what we were up to, the firemen were summoned, and tear gas was lobbed to keep us away.

But we were smart.  Instructions were shouted on how to handle a live tear gas canister, and I was soon lobbing them back at the police.

We weren’t smart enough.  The fire was put out, the convention went on; everybody had a good time, and we laughed and joked as we climbed aboard our chartered buses.  In retrospect, the police weren’t too smart either.  Why wasn’t I arrested?  Why were we able to get away with such attempted sabotage?

I was on another demonstration where the police batons came out as they dispersed an unruly, indeed an

ugly mob.  I saw some demonstrators climb a ladder to the roof of a building.  The cops followed, and the demonstrators pushed the ladder over, policemen falling with it.  The crowd cheered.

I didn’t.  My stomach turned at the crowd’s joy in seeing people injured, even if they were the police, our nemesis.  It was one of the last demonstrations I took part in.  The youth of the 60’s were supposed to be peaceful.  This didn’t fit the paradigm.

These days many demonstrations seem to have violence as their goal: the G8 (G7, after the expulsion of Russia) anti-capitalist destructive rampages, even celebrations of sports team victories somehow degenerate into opportunities for looting and vandalism.  Rioters laugh, joke, and film each other as they break windows, steal clothes and electronics, or destroy cars.  Destruction of property can be entertaining, especially if ennobled by some cause.

Now it’s gone beyond destruction of property, as demonstrators in major European cities, in major American and Canadian cities call for the destruction of a people.  My people: the Jews.  Not only are the demonstrators calling for it, they are trying to put it into effect with assaults on individuals in the streets, and home invasions.  The attackers’ cry is to protest the mistreatment of their co-religionists, but we can see from their selective concern (ignoring the horrors of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, etc.), that it’s just an excuse.  They want to go after the Jews, as they’ve been doing so since the dawn of Islam.

It’s not surprising when Muslims express hatred for Jews, even Muslims in countries that are Judenrein. The Prime Minister of Malaysia for example, blamed George Soros, a left-wing Jew, for his country’s 1997 economic crisis (it’s worth noting that Malaysian Buddhists are not especially anti-Semitic). Jews expect a hostile reception in any Muslim dominated part of the world.

But France? Belgium?  Germany?  There is native anti-Semitism, and there is Muslim Jew-hatred.  Contemporary violence comes mostly from the latter.  Ironically, in Britain the English Defense League, a group often depicted as far right or neo-Nazi, has been at the forefront of defending British Jews and Israel against Islamic assaults.

And Calgary?  Its Muslim mayor, Naheed Nenshi has generally had the support of the Jewish community, but failed to point a finger after pro-Israel demonstrators were assaulted by participants in a “Gaza peace rally.”

Who are these people?  What are they doing here, in countries that are generally considered as part of the western civilized world?

Well, look at the economies of their home countries: Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, Lebanon…  These countries have been ruined by decades of turmoil brought about by the violence of its citizens; by their intolerance for any kind of dissent, or freedom of thought.  By their constant blaming of their woes on America, the Jews, their colonial legacy.  Everyone is at fault, except themselves.  These people come to Europe, to North America to better their lives, but unlike past generations of immigrants, they are unwilling to give up the values which made their home countries such miserable places to live.  If we let them (and many parts of Europe have), they will make our countries as miserable as theirs.

They don’t give a damn about the deaths or suffering of their co-religionists.  Otherwise they’d be at demonstrations protesting the ongoing slaughters in Iraq and Syria, the turmoil in the Maghreb (North

Africa).  No, the only thing they care about is the opportunity to attack Jews, following the tradition set by the founder of Islam.

Britain has a great legacy of anti-Semitism, fully expressed in its handling of the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate.  Roosevelt’s antipathy towards Jews shut the doors on refugees fleeing the holocaust, condemning many innocent people to death.  Canada had its infamous “none is too many” policy towards Jews fleeing Hitler.

But these countries have evolved.  Western civilization has moved forward.  Racial ethnic and gender prejudice are no longer acceptable.  Not by law, not by culture.

So what do you do when a particular ethnic/ religious group embodies such prejudice as part of its culture?  What do you do when Muslim immigrants to the West bring along their hatred, their prejudice, their misogyny?  What do you do when they regularly violate our civilization’s standards of decency, of acceptable behavior, of tolerance?  What should you do when there’s a demonstration in the streets of Calgary, New York, Paris or Berlin chanting “kill the Jews?”

If you’re not Jewish, you can argue that it’s not your concern.  Ask the Christians of Iraq how that’s working out.  Starting in nineteen forty-eight, Jews whose families had been in Iraq for two thousand years were expelled. Now, seventy years later, the same fate has befallen Iraqi Christians.

Islam is the fastest growing religion in America.  As its numbers increase, what will become of America, of American values?  What will happen to all the advances Western civilization has made since the onset of the Enlightenment?  What will happen to the Jews of America?  The Christians?  Pious or secular, they are infidels according to Islam.

By the end of the Enlightenment certain values had become entrenched in Western nations.  Ironically, during the Enlightenment these countries came under attack by the Muslim societies of the Maghreb (North Africa).  They had been enslaving Europeans for centuries, raiding the coasts as far north as Ireland.  They pirated American and European merchant ships, demanding exorbitant tribute in exchange for prisoners.  America’s first international war was against North African Muslim terrorists.  The ruler of Algeria accepted a treaty to end the war, but then repudiated it.  The only thing that brought an end to the piracy was the French conquest; in retrospect a justifiable act of self-defense.

What is the purpose of your demonstration?

But the war continues.  There was a battle in New York on 9/11, in London on 7/05, in Madrid on 3/04.  In Marseilles it’s a series of ongoing skirmishes.  In most cases, the attackers are citizens or at least residents of the places they attack.  Centuries ago, President Jefferson tried unsuccessfully to appease them.  Presidents Bush and Obama had the same failure.  Each demonstration with the battle cry of “kill the Jews,” each time an American or British flag is trampled on, each demonstration where people are punched, knocked to the ground or choked, proves that appeasement doesn’t work.  It shows that these immigrants aren’t here to improve their lives by adapting to their new homes.  Rather, it demonstrates that they want to transform their new homes into the miserable places they fled.

And that’s the difference.  When I tried to burn down a pole carrying electricity to a convention, when I threw a tear gas canister at the police, I was trying to move our society towards a better future.  When a demonstration chants “kill the Jews,” it’s trying to drag us back to a time before the Enlightenment, when slavery, hate and misogyny were acceptable societal norms.  When freedom of expression was blasphemous, when tolerance was forbidden.

We can’t let those demonstrations succeed.

Some sources attribute the fall of the western Roman Empire (at the time the center of western civilization) to “immigration onto Roman soil, followed by a second stage of aggressive expansion of the territory under the migrants’ control.”  By the fourth century CE, the Roman armies were more barbarian than Roman.  Will western civilization fall again to the same cause, or will we finally accept the paradox that the intolerance we revile is necessary to protect the values we cherish.  If you want the benefits of western civilization, you must accept the ideals that made them possible.

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