Friday, February 07, 2025
From Ian:
Historical theft: A deliberate new antisemitism that erases Jews
Historical theft: A deliberate new antisemitism that erases Jews
In 2021, David Baddiel, a British Jewish comedian, screenwriter, and author, wrote a brilliant, incisive, and incredibly revealing book titled Jews Don’t Count.A suppressed voice for truth from within the United Nations
In it, Baddiel argues that Jews are treated differently from all other minorities, perceived as “too white” to warrant the same consideration as other victims of racism.
He posits that antisemitism is a “second-class racism,” one that is tolerated or even ignored by those who claim to fight against bigotry in all its forms.
When I first read the book – prior to the seismic events of the past sixteen months – I felt it should be required reading for everyone.
It explains, with remarkable clarity, the modern phenomenon of Jew-hatred, which persists even in supposedly progressive circles. For a more nuanced and historically expansive exploration of the topic, one need only turn to the writings of the late, great Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l.
Rabbi Sacks wrote extensively about the mutation of antisemitism across history. First, they hated us because of our God.
Then they hated us because we “killed their God.” Then they hated us because we were different. Then they hated us because we tried to be the same. Next, they reviled us as a subhuman race without a home of our own – culminating in the Holocaust.
And now, in a perverse historical irony, they hate us because we do have a home of our own, and because we dare to defend it. The latest mutation: Historical theft
Now, a new mutation of antisemitism has emerged – one that builds on Baddiel’s observation that “Jews don’t count” and which has reached an even more malignant level: historical theft.
This involves the deliberate alteration of history to erase Jews from their own narrative. It facilitates the grotesque inversion that we are “Johnny-come-latelies,” colonial usurpers attempting to displace an indigenous people.
This phenomenon is not new. It began decades ago with the Palestinians manufacturing their own “ancient” peoplehood while simultaneously denying ours.
With the help of the unashamedly anti-Israel, antisemitic, corrupt, and morally bankrupt United Nations, the biblical and historical reality of Jewish existence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years has been steadily eroded.
The world, largely ignorant and disinterested, has been conditioned to accept fiction as fact.
However, last week, this historical theft stooped to a level that even the most cynical, world-weary Jew could scarcely have believed.
When histories of the war in the Gaza Strip are written—a war triggered by the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—the name of Alice Nderitu probably won’t garner more than a footnote at best. That’s an enormous shame because Nderitu’s courage in confronting the institutionalized obsession of the United Nations with the Palestinians takes us to the heart of the great issues wrapped up in this conflict—its purpose, the manner in which it has been fought and the manner in which it has been presented to the outside world.Seth Mandel: It Was Never About a Cease-fire
The story of Nderitu’s ordeal as the U.N.’s Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide was the subject of an engaging piece by Johanna Berkman published last week by the online magazine Air Mail. Nderitu took over the unpaid position during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. She lasted for nearly four years in the post before U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres decided against renewing her commission last November following a sustained and often abusive campaign directed at Nderitu—a storied human-rights advocate from Kenya—for her refusal to label the fighting in Gaza as a “genocide.”
At the time, Guterres’s decision to effectively sever Nderitu was the subject of a scathing Wall Street Journal editorial that accused the international organization of a “new low” in its efforts to tarnish Israel as the worst offender among its member states, which include such human-rights luminaries as Russia, China and North Korea. But by and large, the scandal passed unnoticed among the chattering classes, despite their tendency to dip their toes into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with agonized appeals on behalf of the “people of Gaza” from time to time. The same was true for the Air Mail piece profiling her; while the Free Press republished it, everyone else pretty much ignored it.
One key reason why was identified by Nderitu herself in her interview with Berkman. For nearly three of the four years of her U.N. tenure, she was incredibly busy but also mostly unnoticed. Her work took her to refugee camps in Bangladesh and Iraq, to the Brazilian interior to monitor the fates of indigenous tribes, and to Chad, where she saw firsthand the impact of the burgeoning ethnic slaughter that has raged, largely outside the media’s view, in neighboring Sudan. “For these other situations,” she said, “nobody seems to bother with what I say.”
Familiarity with anti-Zionism breeds contempt. And also a justified cynicism.
After 16 months of “well maybe the protesters really do just want a cease-fire” and “let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that they aren’t just twisted pro-Hamas sickos,” we can now acknowledge what we all knew to be true from the beginning: They’re just twisted pro-Hamas sickos.
According to documents obtained by the Telegraph, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign contacted London police while the Hamas rampage of Oct. 7, 2023, was in full swing. Their request: Permission to hold a public rally.
“By the time the PSC spoke to the police, Hamas had taken hostages and killed hundreds of people across towns and villages next to the Gaza Strip,” the Telegraph reports. “Videos had also circulated on social media, showing terrorists taking Israeli hostages to Gaza on motorbikes.”
The PSC reached out to the police before 1 p.m. on the day of the attack. It was at a time when the public already knew the attack was under way and some of the gruesome details, but before Israel could even contemplate a military response. The attack and the search for infiltrators went on for two days. During that time the PSC was planning its event.
Let there now be no doubt: This was a celebration rally. Like other such demonstrations in the West, Londoners were joyously reveling in acts of barbarism against Jews that hadn’t been seen since the Nazis. The police confirmed the timing to the Telegraph with a statement: “The Met was contacted on Saturday Oct 7 at approximately 12.50pm via telephone call and informed of the intention to protest. The Met committed this to our systems on the same day and are satisfied being contacted by telephone was a sufficient means in which to notify the MPS as the event was taking place seven days after notification.”
It’s good to have confirmation, but we should remember that we already knew this about protests in the United States as well. Chicago saw hundreds march downtown on Oct. 8, the day after the attacks. No one would even bother to try and claim that such an event was spontaneous, right? That march was in the pipeline as soon as it became clear what Hamas was doing.
Oct. 8 also saw an “all out for Palestine” rally in Dallas and a demonstration in Athens, Georgia, which organizers said was to mark the fact that “the Palestinian people, yesterday, fought back successfully against Israeli occupation.”
The lesson: Some were honest, some weren’t—but the protest movement that began that hellish weekend was a movement celebrating the massacre and sexual torture of Jewish men, women, and children.
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