Thursday, October 20, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
For the 21st anniversary of Israel's Independence in 1969, the Arab Information Center put an ad in the Miami Herald that tried to link Israel with the US use of napalm in Vietnam, asking "what has Israel offered - Shalom or Napalm?"
Israel never used napalm against civilians, but the propaganda outlet wanted people to believe that it did.
Around the same time (maybe as early as 1968), Palestinian terror group Fatah issued a poster and stamp series with the same theme, "Shalom and Napalm," featuring a child victim of napalm that they implied was a Palestinian. (Both Fatah and the PFLP at the time issued stamps as fundraisers that often had antisemitic themes [h/t iTi].)
These were disgusting blood libels, made worse by juxtaposing "Shalom" with war crimes.
So naturally it was picked up by the far-Left in Germany.
Historian Jeffrey Herf notes that on November 9, 1969, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a bomb was found in the Jewish Community Center in Berlin. At the same time, monuments commemorating the Holocaust were defaced with graffiti saying “Shalom”, “Napalm” and “El Fateh."
Four days later, an article was published by a radical socialist group called the Black Rats in a leftist magazine in West Berlin, Agit 883, taking credit for the planned attack, and saying that the focus of the Left will move from Vietnam to the Middle East and vilifying "fascist" Israel, saying Germans should stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust because the Jews were the new Nazis.
The name of the article? Again, “Shalom and Napalm.”
The German Leftists behind this were clearly antisemitic by any measure.
Their leading figure, Dieter Kunzelmann, was antisemitic. His antisemitism was not complicated. He simply didn’t like Jews. As Albert Fichter, who planted the bomb in the Jewish Community Centre, later recalled:““Kunzelmann and Georg von Rauch [another Tupamaro] swore more and more about ‘shitty Jews’. Kunzelmann always spoke about ‘Jewish pigs’ and wound up people against them. At that time he was like a classic antisemite. Georg spoke the same way.”
Similarly, German Leftists are assumed to be behind the 1970 arson attack on a Munich Jewish community center that killed seven Holocaust survivors. And it was German Leftists, not Palestinians, who separated Orthodox Jews along with the Israelis on the 1976 Air France flight that was hijacked to Entebbe.
At the time, the accusation that Israel was using napalm against children was only an implication. Fatah and the German leftists knew enough not to directly make the slander that Israel napalmed Palestinians. It was pure propaganda meant to make people believe the lie, without saying it directly.
But there is an even more disgusting postscript to this blood libel, ten years later.
Way before "Jewish Voice for Peace" started hijacking Jewish rituals for antisemitic purposes, in 1978, the PLO issued its own "Haggadah" where they changed Jewish Passover songs to directly make the accusation of Jews killing Palestinian children with napalm while "repeating shalom:"
The Jew-hatred from both the Leftists and the Palestinians is undeniable in these examples. When they deny being antisemitic today, it is important to understand the history: they haven't changed their positions one bit - they are just obfuscating their antisemitism enough to convince self-described "anti-racists" who want to believe them.
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