Palestinians claim Israel will open a synagogue on the Temple Mount "Bab al Rahma" hall. (I wish!)

The Jerusalem Post reports:

The controversy surrounding the Bab al-Rahma (Gate of Mercy or Golden Gate) prayer hall, located east of al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, resurfaced on Saturday after the Wakf claimed that Israel Police officers halted renovation work at the site.

The site was closed by court order in 2003 after the police discovered that members of the Islamic Movement in the Israel-Northern Branch were using it for political activities. Despite the closure, Palestinian activists have made repeated attempts to reopen it.

In 2019, activists reopened the entrance to the prayer hall, allowing hundreds of Muslim worshipers to pray. When the police tried to close the area again, they were met with protests by Muslim worshipers, the Jordanian-controlled Wakf Islamic religious trust and the Palestinian Authority.

In the aftermath of the 2019 protests, Israel reportedly reached an agreement with the Wakf to keep the site closed, while allowing Muslim worshipers to pray near it.

There are no photos or video of the Israeli police doing anything at the prayer hall on Saturday, so this may be an excuse to start something up again. There have been condemnations across the Arab world for this event that may have never happened. (As is too often the case, I don't see any official statements from the Israeli authorities.)

Predictably, the rumors are starting. Palestinian news agency Safa says that Israel plans to turn the building into a synagogue:

The ambitions of the Israeli occupation did not stop the chapel of Bab al-Rahma, east of the blessed Al-Aqsa Mosque. Rather, it is actively seeking to re-close it again, and empty it of worshipers and stationed, in a dangerous attempt to convert it into a Jewish synagogue, and impose spatial division in the mosque.

The building is built into the wall surrounding the Temple Mount. It would actually make a wonderful synagogue (Yisrael Medad joked to me when he gave me a tour of the Temple Mount that it already has separate entrances for men and women). But the chances that the Israeli government is planning to do such a thing is exactly zero.

Palestinians made the same accusations in 2020. I noted then:

In a fair world, though, the Bab al Rahma prayer room would be an excellent place for a synagogue on the Temple Mount.

I have been interested in the site for a while. To the immediate left of the structure are some old beams of wood, barely covered in canvas. (Here is a screenshot from a video I made in 2019.)

 

There is serious evidence that some of these beams could be from the First and Second Temple periods, and conceivably from the Temples themselves.

Matti Friedman wrote a fascinating article about them in 2013.

Which is as good a reason as any to keep people away from the site until the beams could be properly secured. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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11/09 Links Pt2: The Jewish Studies Professors Who Traffic in Antisemitism‘; Thomas Friedman: Equal-opportunity Israel-basher; Chilling, newly discovered photos show Nazi Kristallnacht up close

From Ian:

The Jewish Studies Professors Who Traffic in Antisemitism

What is particularly disturbing is the fact that Jewish studies scholars have no compunction in deploying antisemitic tropes to further their agenda. Myers and Sokatch write: “The apparent return of Benjamin Netanyahu to power in Israel is a gut punch to people concerned about the state of democracy and the rule of law in the world. Netanyahu has been a key pillar in the global movement of illiberal leaders who have taken control and altered the rules of the democratic game—including in Turkey, Hungary and the United States in the Trump era.” While at first glance such a statement may seem little more than an anti-Netanyahu screed for his dictatorial propensities and underhanded machinations (which to be fair, is not unreasonable), a closer reading of this op-ed’s opening salvo reveals its perniciousness, the antisemitic trope embedded in their choice of words. Suggesting that Israel is a “key pillar” in a “global movement” to subvert democracy implies that the tiny Jewish state exerts disproportionate power in world affairs and it is exercising such power through collusion with actors who seek to enshrine white supremacy (or a local variation of fascism) in their own domains. Interestingly enough, they do not impugn Russia, China, Saudi Arabia or Iran, who are regional hegemons, in a manner that little Israel could never be, except in the minds of those who have read the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The wording is subtle yet clear, hiding in plain sight, echoing fantasies of Jewish power that have led to unimaginable violence against Jews in modern history.

Less subtle is the use by some Jewish studies scholars of the term “Jewish supremacy.” Professor Joshua Shanes of the College of Charleston has repeatedly used it in his op-eds and public Facebook posts. Although he is applying this phrase to the land “between the River and the Sea” and not to any global Jewish conspiracy, the very construction of this locution is antisemitic, insofar as it was a staple piece of Nazism and continues to be used by David Duke and others today (I invite readers to Google “Jewish Supremacy” and examine the results). “Jewish supremacy” is idiomatic and by definition it evokes images of the racial war between the Jews and Western civilization forewarned by Wilhelm Marr, Houston Steward Chamberlin and, of course, Adolf Hitler. However oppressive Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the stateless Palestinians may be, using this slogan to describe it is irresponsible and endangers the security of diaspora Jewry.

What’s even worse is that uttering “Jewish supremacy” today inexorably leads one to think of “white supremacy.” This is no accident, insofar as the Jewish people have been branded as white adjacent and even “hyper-white,” enjoying all the benefits of (and complicity in) whiteness while simultaneously claiming to be an oppressed minority. The centering of the Palestinians as the universal victim in the social justice movement has necessarily led to the branding of the Jews as a global oppressor. Paradoxically, “Jewish supremacy” marks the Jew as a racial scourge upon the world in addition to being an extension of the white European imperialists who not only enslaved Africans and decimated Native Americans but also committed history’s most systematic genocide against these very same Jewish people.

Myers and Shanes are professors of Jewish studies. They have written and taught extensively on the history of antisemitism. They cannot but know that their choice of words is pleasing to the ears of antisemites, all across the political spectrum. The people who hate the Jews, whether attendees at a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville or eminent academics like Marc Lamont Hill who celebrate Palestinian terrorists, yearn for confirmation of their fantasies of Jewish power. For if the leading Jewish experts insist that the world’s only Jewish state is a key pillar in the global campaign to subvert democracy in order to institute Jewish supremacy at home, then their fantasies cease to be illusions, and their struggle against us becomes defensible. As such, liquidating “Jewish power” becomes a matter of ethical urgency.

‘Arab Jew’ is another manifestation of Arab denial

The Juifs d ‘Orient: une histoire plurimillenaire exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris earlier in 2022 broke with conventional taboos and commendably illustrated Jewish history and culture in their own right, although the Arab antisemitism that precipitated the Jewish exodus was glossed over – presumably so as not to upset the IMA’s Arab funders. At the time, an open letter from a group of Arab intellectuals and artists objected to Israel ‘usurping Arab-Jewish culture’ for the purposes of the exhibition. Elie Beressi and Noémie Issan-Benchimol writing in K. magazine take issue with the expression ‘Arab Jew’ beloved of the letter-writers, which reduces the Jews to a subset of Arab identity (with thanks: JIMENA and Edna):

Starting with the Nahḍa, the Arab renaissance of the nineteenth century, and under the influence of European nationalist ideas being imported the former Ottoman Empire, Arab identity was to be constructed as a national category, including Christians, but excluding Jews, despite the important contribution of the latter to the intelligentsia and state apparatus, particularly in Iraq, Egypt and Morocco[6].

This is why it is appropriate to question the use of the expression “Arab Jews” by Arab intellectuals and artists. How can we interpret this a posteriori recognition of the Arabness of these Jewish populations, after they have left the Arab territories, after having ceased to be an important element of Arab societies? The general rhetoric of the above mentioned open letter gives us the answer. In the expression Arab Jews, the function of the adjective is to abolish the nature of the noun Jew, to make it only a facet of the real subject, the Arab subject. Less than a Jewish-Arab culture, there would in fact be only a “Jewish component of the Arab culture“. The Jews are not a reality in their own right, but a part of the Arab heritage. Consequently, it is only possible to talk about them in terms approved by the Arab intelligentsia, and this is precisely what the IMA exhibition does not do, as it gives the floor to Jews from Arab countries, but not the “good” ones according to Elias Khoury, who puts forward an Israeli anti-Zionist academic, Ella Shohat. Born in Israel in 1959 to Iraqi Jewish parents, professor of Cultural Studies at New York University – author of “Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the standpoint of its Jewish victims”. Social Text (1988) – Shohat sees the category “mizrahim” as a Zionist artifice to uproot Jews in Arab countries from their Arabness in favour of a uniquely Jewish identity, which she sees as being contrived, with a purpose to enlist them in the oppression of the Palestinian people. For her, the Mizrahim category is constructed in mirror image of the Ashkenazim category and is imbued with the negative archetypes linked to Orientalist representations.

These theses of Shohat are perhaps worth considering, but her claims to define Arab identity as the only authentic identity of the Mizraḥim and the irreducible opposition she portrays between this Arabness and Zionism as well as the claim of the Jews to self-define themselves as a people distinct from Europeans and Arabs, are nonetheless very objectionable.

How did Medieval Jewish Tombstones End Up in an Italian Monument?

In 1960, the Italian city of Ferrara undertook the renovation of the columns that flank the entrance to the ducal palace—which are among the city’s most important architectural landmarks. Workers soon discovered that one of the columns had been constructed using 36 fragments of local Jewish tombstones from the 16th and 17th centuries. Henry Abramson writes:
A noted patron of the arts, [the 15th-century duke Borso D’Este] and his immediate successors also made Ferrara a haven for Jews, especially those expelled from Spain and refugees from the Inquisition in Italian territories to the south. Under the House of Este, Jewish life flourished in Ferrara 1598, when the Papal States exerted control over the northern Italian city. The Jewish badge was instituted shortly thereafter, and Ferrarese Jews who once lived and worked throughout the city found themselves shut in the confines of yet another ghetto.

The column was first erected in the 1450s, and it had stood for over 200 years before it was heavily damaged by a fire on December 23, 1716. A chronicler of the period, Nicolò Baruffaldi, mentions that Marquis Francesco Sacrati secured the stones from the Jewish graveyards, “paying in full for their value to the masters of the ghetto.” It is highly unlikely that the Jewish community would have willingly surrendered the gravestones of their ancestors, especially since many of the graves belonged to people the contemporary Ferrarese Jews would have actually known—the grandparents and even parents of the generation alive at the time.

As Abramson explains, there is evidence of the confiscation of Jewish tombstones in contemporary Jewish records, although there is no extant mention of those used for the column. He adds:
Amazingly, [the fragments] were not returned to the Jewish community; they were rather put back into the column where they remain to this day. In fact, they were desecrated still further, with pieces removed and discarded to make room for a reinforced concrete core to protect the column from seismic activity (a devastating earthquake had hit Ferrara in 1570, which Pope Pius V blamed on the Este family for their historic protection of the Jews).

Matti Friedman: The Rich Past, and Promising Future, of the Middle East’s Date

If there’s one thing that unifies the people who live in the area stretching from Morocco to India, writes Matti Friedman, it is their appreciation for the fruit of the date palm:
Long before refrigeration, dried dates could keep for years, making them invaluable for travelers across seas and deserts. They can be turned into honey by boiling and straining the fruit; in fact, the biblical phrase “land of milk and honey” refers to honey from dates, not bees. They can also be fermented into liquor, like the date wine enjoyed by ancient Babylonians, according to the historian Herodotus. The tree itself was a source of fiber for ropes and baskets, fronds for shelter and shade and columns for construction. That led one rabbi to remark at least 1,500 years ago, long before environmentalism was cool, “This date palm—no part of it is wasted.”

“A righteous person will flower like a date palm,” goes the verse in Psalms, one explanation being that the date palm, like the righteous, grows straight and sustains others with its fruit. A scientifically minded rabbi in 12th-century Yemen, Netanel al-Fayyumi, explained that just as the pinnacle of the animal kingdom is people, and the pinnacle of the human species is prophets, the pinnacle of the plant kingdom, according to God’s design, is this tree. “And among the plants,” wrote the rabbi, “He created the most honorable species, which is the date.”

And perhaps even more than Iran, it might be the threat posed to the crop by the red palm weevil that will bring Israelis and Arabs together:
The enemy is at the gates, and this is what brought me to Abu Dhabi, the scene of the International Date Palm Conference. . . . Of particular interest at the conference was the presence of a few Israelis, which would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, before the American-engineered agreements known as the Abraham Accords inaugurated official ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. If we understand the date palm as a unifier in a divided part of the world, dates offer an obvious field of cooperation. A weevil sensor manufactured by an Israeli company, for example, has already been drilled into thousands of trees in the UAE and Morocco, as well as in Arab countries that won’t trade directly with Israel but purchase the sensors through a third party. The sensor picks up the vibrations of weevil larvae and sends a warning to an app installed on the farmer’s smartphone.

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05/12 Links Pt2: Matti Friedman: Jerusalem of Glue; Biden failed the Israel-Palestinian rocket and riot test; Kristallnacht in Lod; Gal Gadot, international celebrities speak out over Gaza crisis

From Ian:

Matti Friedman: Jerusalem of Glue

The idea of a complex place is anathema to the current mood in America and the West, where many people seem to be regressing to a world of childhood, of heroes and monsters. As I sit here typing by a window in Jerusalem, many seem to believe that Israel is attacking Muslim worshippers at prayer and ethnically cleansing the Arab population of this city, which is more than a third of our population and growing. For years, Arabic papers have described routine visits by Jews to the Temple Mount, or Israeli policing efforts there, as Israelis “storming” the Al-Aqsa compound; this wording has now spread to the Western press.

In the spirit of 2021, exciting video clips are ripped from their context here and injected into ideological circulatory systems to prove whatever needs to be proved. Explosions in the Al-Aqsa Mosque could mean that Israeli police are firing tear gas inside, desecrating the holy site, or that Muslim rioters are shooting off the stores of fireworks they hoarded inside to use against the police, desecrating the holy site. An Israeli driver hitting a Palestinian man near Lions’ Gate on Monday might be attempted murder, or a driver losing control of his car while escaping Palestinians who were trying to kill him. A video of Israelis dancing at the Western Wall as a fire burns on the Temple Mount is evidence of satanic intent, or of the coincidence that the annual Jerusalem Day celebrations at the wall were going on at the same time that one of the firecrackers set off by Palestinian rioters ignited a tree in the mosque compound above.

The subtleties seem beside the point when the villains and the heroes are so clear. The condemnations of Israel are pouring in from the strange coalition that gathers with increasing frequency for this purpose: the Turkish authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both of whom used the word “abhorrent” in their tweets, the dictator of Chechnya, the Saudis, the Iranians, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It’s hard to follow whether Israel is supposedly attacking Islam or attacking liberalism; in Israel’s case, the two seem to be oddly interchangeable. When some Westerners see dozens of green Hamas flags in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, they seem to perceive a civil rights protest, and when a Hamas leader calls on his people to buy “five-shekel knives” to cut off Jewish heads, demonstrating with his finger exactly how this should be done, some hear a call for social justice that Israelis should try to accommodate.

It helps that plenty of Western activists, including many who identify as journalists, have spent the past decade or so rebranding this conflict to suit the ideological fantasy world in which they operate. That fantasy world has only expanded in detail and reach with the triumph of social media, which marries elite prejudices with activist fervor and the passion of the mob. Hamas rockets are no longer being fired at Israeli civilians, as they were 20 years ago. Now they’re being fired at “Israeli apartheid.”

Being an observer in Jerusalem always means gauging two opposing forces: the one pulling the city apart, and the glue keeping it together. The former gets plenty of attention from observers, and the latter almost none, but both are always in play in this city of nearly a million people. The glue is on display in malls and taxis and hospitals, the places of no interest to journalists or politicians, where Jews and Arabs of different ideological stripes interact carefully in their daily lives to a greater extent than ever before, moving things forward to a future that’s unknowable but could be better. That has been the trend here in the past few years. But it’s the other force, the destructive one, that we’re seeing now.

JPost Editorial: It's time to stand with Israel against Hamas rockets

Israel must now engage in a public relations campaign to present its case effectively to the world. It has done nothing wrong, except for allowing a terrorist organization to gain the upper hand. It must now prevent Hamas from gaining international sympathy in its hollow attempts to portray itself as the guardian of Palestinian rights in Jerusalem.

In addition, the Palestinian Authority, regional neighbor Jordan, and Arab citizens of Israel – as exemplified by the mob of protesters in Lod on Monday night – shouldn’t be spreading lies that Israel, without provocation, threatened Muslim holy sites on the Temple Mount.

Israel’s government is not blameless. Tensions had been mounting during Ramadan, which ends on Wednesday, with ongoing clashes between police and Palestinian protesters in Jerusalem’s Old City and elsewhere.

While Hamas does not need an excuse to attack Israel, the government should have done more to contain the situation and try to defuse it before the violence spiraled out of control. The perfect storm – Ramadan, Jerusalem Day, Sheikh Jarrah, and political instability in Israel – all contributed to the reality that the people of southern Israel now find themselves.

To help Israel find a way to end this and restore peace and security, world leaders need to convey clearly to Hamas that terrorism is not acceptable under any circumstances. If those leaders want to see peace in Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the region, they must side with Israel against these blatant unwarranted acts of terror. This is important so Hamas and the Palestinians learn that terrorism does not pay and does not work. Firing rockets into civilian areas cannot be rewarded. Instead, it needs to be punished.

Israel is not responsible for the current escalation, but it should try to end it as soon as possible. This can’t happen without the international community supporting Israel, rather than siding with the real culprits.

Until we assert ourselves, projecting actual power and deterrence, we will be picked apart

As Winston Churchill famously encountered in the 1930’s, there is an inherent reluctance of peace and freedom loving peoples to respond pro-actively to aggression. There are issues of disbelief, often predicated upon the inability of the peace lover to understand the mind set and intentions of the aggressor.

This leads to rationalizations of how the other side might feel and could be dealt with. From this point, it is just a hop, skip and a jump to wishful thinking about how to deal, or not deal, with an aggressor.

Finally, there is the reluctance that is born out of not wanting to disrupt one’s serenity, individually and collectively, in order to take the necessary and potentially costly steps to deal with aggression. Costly steps of course focus on risking the lives of soldiers, but also include risks to civilians, their lives, businesses, assets and lifestyle.

We look at other people as if they were extensions of ourselves. It is both unrealistic, and completely untrue. If all of this sounds uncomfortably familiar, that might be because it pretty well describes the state of affairs in Israel, now and in the past, when confronted with Palestinian Arab aggression.

We live with a functional absurdity. We have invested men, materiel, treasure and brainpower in creating the most advanced - in training, technique and equipment - armed forces in the Middle East, and one of the strongest in the entire world.

Yet, for reasons cited above, as well as the ever present fear of international opprobrium, we hamstring ourselves constantly.

This hamstringing takes at least two major forms: the unwillingness to react, not in equal measure, and not to mention more intensively, in the hope that the aggression can be managed; and second, allowing ourselves to be dictated to by legal advisers and arbiters who are not focused on deterrence, let alone victory, but rather, the sensibilities of our enemies, and most certainly the judgments of the international community.

The “just keep a lid on things” strategy defines much of what passes for geo-political policy vis-à-vis Judea and the Shomron, the Temple Mount, and all things related to Palestinian Arab and Israeli Bedouins. The thought is that, left to their own natural devices, conflicts will subside, as the aggressor will understand that its not in his interest to continue down this destructive, but also self-destructive path.

But this is solipsism, meaning that we look at other people as if they were extensions of ourselves. It is both unrealistic, and completely untrue.

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07/29 Links Pt2: Matti Friedman: Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion; Jonathan Tobin: On Tisha B'Av, it's time for Americans to step back from apocalyptic rhetoric

From Ian:

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Matti Friedman: Israel Was Ground Zero for the New Woke Religion

Western ideologies generally include a parable about villainous Jews. Because this is a set of ideas that sees itself as a political critique, the parable doesn’t come, as past versions have, from Scripture (in the case of Christianity), or from economic theory (as it did in Marxism), or pseudo-scientific racial doctrines (National Socialism). It comes from the news—specifically, from the mythology that I saw being constructed as a reporter a decade ago. A strange antagonism to something called “Israel” came up if you went to a Women’s March against Donald Trump in New York, or protested violence against African Americans in Ferguson, Missouri, or joined the Dyke March in Chicago, or presented an academic paper at the American Studies Association. It appears in the platform of Black Lives Matter from 2016, in left-wing politics in Britain and France, and in gender studies courses at California colleges.

These diverse applications are unique, if not entirely unprecedented, for a news story. But they make sense if we understand the Israel story as a kind of sacred template that can be used to explain many different situations. A good example became visible this spring in the wake of the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis: the myth that Israel trains American police officers in the same methods of brutality that killed Floyd, and which are deployed more generally against people of color. This conspiracy theory has been promoted as factual by (among many others) senior journalists, members of the British Labour Party, and, in early July, by the biggest Lutheran denomination in America.

That last detail supports the idea that new religions are never completely removed from the old ones. Indeed, the unique power of the Israel story is the way it takes the central preoccupation of the new thought system—the inequality of white Western power versus nonwhite Third World innocence—and projects it onto a setting already loaded with religious resonance. If you’re looking for a parable about human inequality, places called Jerusalem or Bethlehem are potent in ways that can’t be rivaled by Xinjiang or Laayoune, or Minneapolis.

A good illustration of this merger came in the form of a speech given to a convention of the Episcopal church in 2018 by a Massachusetts bishop who described atrocities she claimed to have personally witnessed in Israel. She described the murder of an innocent 15-year-old Palestinian by Jewish soldiers—“they shot him in the back four times, he fell on the ground and they shot him another six”—and the aggressive handcuffing by soldiers of a 3-year-old Palestinian boy whose ball rolled off the Temple Mount.

It later turned out that the bishop hadn’t seen any such thing, and she apologized profusely. But in a religious mindset, the question isn’t whether a story happened. The question is whether a story can mobilize believers to achieve good. If the answer is yes, the story is “true.”

This kind of thinking has now bled into newsrooms and university departments, precisely the bodies that are supposed to be engaged in observation and reasoned debate. If important parts of the press and the academy are beginning to sound like ministries, it’s happening at a time when religion and quasi-religion are on the rise everywhere—not just on the progressive left but also on the right, and not only in the West. Some of these trends are evident in Israel, too. As we speak, as if to symbolize the moment, the Hagia Sophia is being changed from a public museum back into a mosque—though in Istanbul, at least, the conversion is being done in the open.

Jonathan Tobin: On Tisha B'Av, it's time for Americans to step back from apocalyptic rhetoric

Americans are experiencing a summer of discontent in a way that exceeds any in living memory. The nation is divided not just along political lines but seems increasingly immersed in something much more dangerous – a culture war in which both sides truly believe that not only will a triumph by their opponents bring ruin, but that the very existence of the republic and American democracy is at stake.

That's why both Jews and non-Jews need to pause this week and consider the lessons that the observance of Tisha B'Av: the day on the Hebrew calendar that marks the destruction of both ancient holy temples in Jerusalem, as well as many other catastrophes of Jewish history. The day of fasting and reflection, which begins this year on the evening of July 29, is not observed by most non-Orthodox Jews and generally considered too depressing to have become part of secular American Jewish culture, which prefers holidays that follow a model that runs along the lines of "they tried to kill us, we won, let's eat."

But if there was ever a year when its lessons were needed by Americans of all faiths, it is 2020.

Tradition teaches us that the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE occurred because of "sinat hinam" – senseless or baseless hatred—that undermined Jewish resistance during the siege of Jerusalem and great revolt against the forces of the Roman Empire.

A war that pitted the forces of a small nation against the world's only superpower wasn't going to have a happy ending, no matter how united the defenders of Jerusalem had been. But the rabbis who subsequently reconstituted Jewish faith emphasized the way that the Jewish rebels were divided into competing factions within Jerusalem's walls. In the civil war that raged inside the doomed city, a Zealot faction destroyed food supplies that could have prolonged resistance. Their self-destructive behavior made the task of Roman conquest that much easier and provided Jewish history with a lesson of what not to do to survive in a hostile world.

It's an important lesson, but not one that most Jews – or non-Jews for that matter – find easy to follow.

The political lines dividing Americans are starker than at any moment in living memory. It's not just that Republicans and Democrats disagree about the issues. Most of the supporters of President Donald Trump and most of those who support his opponents seem unprepared to credit each other with good intentions, period.

The deafening silence of liberal Jewish leadership in the face of BLM anitsemitism

For those of us that are children of Holocaust survivors, we know well the hell our parents went through to survive.
They hid, had no food, no clothes, no medical attention, and no help.
They were cramped in hiding places with no fresh air and couldn' t make a sound or Nazis would kill them.
It lasted a lot longer than this will last, some for up to 4 or 5 years.
They lost their education, their souls, their youth.
There were no supermarkets,no cell phones, no radios and no outside interference.

What we can compare with deadly accuracy is 1933 Nazi Germany and the inaction of our Jewish leadership and the Stockholm Syndrome response of many liberal Jews in the face of rising, hateful antisemitism.

Just as then when the voices of the leadership might have made a difference, but was barely heard, today most liberal leaders and clergy prefer to be politically correct and support our enemies.

Had Hitler conquered America or the area that is now Israel but was then the British Mandate, no Jews would have been left alive. That means many of those reading this article would never have been born.

What is it that left liberal and progressive Jews do not understand? When I hear the rabid antisemitic lies on videos and social media, I sense that another Hitler is coming - while you are sleeping, not 'woke,' dreaming about meeting the demands of the antisemitic Black Lives Matter.

Cogwar 8 Years on: BLM BDS & the Wokeocracy

In 2012 Prof Richard Landes said "Its not every generation that gets to defend a civilisation" and he advised that silence is not an option. In view of the extraordinary events since January 2020 when he was last in London, Campaign4Truth asked him how we have done in these 8 years: Have we been silent?

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