For the whole of my adult life, it irked me when my fellow Jews would routinely and without compunction, accuse anti-Zionists of being anti-Semitic, and conflate anti-Israeli sentiment with the Nazis.Burston goes on to quote a rabidly anti-semitic sermon from PA TV from 2005. Why he only wakes up to the obvious after Mumbai and he ignored the evidence out there for years is a question only he can answer.
I felt that the latter eroded the memory and the magnitude of the Holocaust, and that the former was a slightly more elegant way of telling people with whom one took issue, to shut the hell up.
Only this week did I realize my error.
It turns out, that when Jews suspected that the Jihadi hated the Jew the way the Nazi hated the Jew, they were right.
After all this time, I am embarrassed to admit that only when the monsters entered Chabad House in Mumbai, did I understand.
Monsters, not solely for what they did there, but, if the reports are to be believed, for the fact that they were able to do what they did after having actually gotten to know the young couple who founded the center, after asking them for shelter in Chabad House, after telling them that they were Malaysian students eager to learn about Judaism.
Monsters, for having befriended these sweet people in order to better learn how to execute them. Monsters, for having targeted a young couple who had devoted their lives to helping others better live theirs, despite having had a baby who died of a genetic disease and a second child ill and under treatment far away in Israel.
The monsters in Chabad House were not Nazis because they were Muslims. It was specifically because they so faithfully emulated the Nazis, that they, in fact, betrayed Islam.
The hatred of the Jihadi for the Jew is such that - as in the case of the Nazis - the killing of Jews - anywhere they may be found - is an obligation on par with whatever other enemy, target, cause, mission, goal or creed they may be pursuing at the moment.
Their hatred of the Jew is such that - as in the case of the Nazis - all tragedy that befalls the Jews was brought on by the Jews themselves.
Their hatred of the Jew is such that even if a Jew rejects the concept of a state of Israel and is wholeheartedly opposed to Zionism, if he wears the clothing of a believing Jew - as in the case of victim Aryeh Leibish Teitelboim - he will be bound and tortured and put to death.
And, of course, he then goes on to distinguish between the bad Jihadis and the good Muslims (who also want to see the Jewish State utterly destroyed and who also reject the concept of Jewish self-determination, but whom Burston still feels an affinity to:)
Muslims the world over have recognized that the jihadi is a terrible threat to Islam. The world has seen that the jihadi, in hating the Jew, the Christian, the Hindu, the Muslim of another denomination, has become - like the Nazi - the enemy of all peoples everywhere.He clearly isn't, because he still ignores the celebrations from his moderate Muslim friends every time Jews are butchered in Israel.
The jihadi shows his love of death in brutality, sadistic executions, the self-righteous calm of the premeditated mass murderer, the blaming of the victim for the crime.
One lesson of the Holocaust is that one can't afford to miss the signs and the intentions.
I'm only seeing it now.
And, judging from his track record, this realization will fade again as he gets caught up in his next column bashing right-wing Zionists and ignoring the links - some explicit and mostly symbiotic - between the jihadis and Israel's "peace partners."
But at least he noticed it for long enough to write it down.