Tuesday, August 19, 2025
From Ian:
Soviet twins: Anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism
Soviet twins: Anti-Israelism and anti-Judaism
Modern anti-Judaism and anti-Israelism are twins. The womb from which they awakened to life was Soviet, which soon denied Jewish and Israeli individuals and groups even the smallest merit and strength of their reasons. Even today, Soviet-inspired political societies do not value an Israeli winner or a traditional Jew with a synagogue, culture, science, business and so forth. They are silenced; when they cannot be, lies are fabricated about everything they do. The focus falls on an alleged standard of living. The flag of privilege and injustice toward others is held aloft. Which others? Everyone.How popular culture erases the Jews from the Holocaust
Unquestionably, each nation-state can choose its elites and philosophies through its internal struggles, as a rule made up of betrayals and not of love for the people. But with such a reddish light, Israel makes no sense and nor do the Jews. There is no other example in history of a people returning home after two millennia, much less when this had long been predicted by their prophets. In that sand, where a few decades ago poor people rode on camels, there is now a scientific power that drinks from the sea, thrives in agriculture and exports food, medicine, security and technology.
Surrounded by enemies since its foundation, trampled by noisy majorities on the stages of supranational political organizations, the permanent target of delegitimization, dehumanization and application of double standards, condemned by celebrities and boycotted in all forms, this small nation without natural resources continues on its way without fearing anything or anyone. Many empires have disappeared before their eyes; Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans and all those that history has recorded up to the Nazis and the Soviets.
This is something that does not make sense, according to materialistic philosophies. Perhaps there is a people with an existence that makes sense. Influence, settlements and bellicism cannot explain everything. Israel and the individual and collective Jew should have disappeared if only matter counted. But no. The Jew exists, lives, suffers, dies and rises, sustained in tradition and bringing their dead back to life—in memory, in identity, in strength, in prosperity and courage.
The same is true of Israeli Jews. If the current logic prevailed, the nation would not be as strong as it is—nor would it be able to blow up enemy missiles in midair, monitor in real time the security of the Jewish Diaspora, create the most unbelievable devices or seek out Nazis thousands of miles away to bring them to justice. It does all this, and is still evaluating producing legislation with extraterritorial application to combat global antisemitism, which is practiced freely, and often in the most blatant way by the elites themselves.
The main cause of the Jewish and Israeli question was always spiritual. The very symbolism of the State of Israel reveals the shield of David’s kingship and the candelabra that once stood in the Holy Temple of Jerusalem. The materialist may think well and write better, but his bases are all wrong. He dreams of the boulders in space and attributes no logic or meaning to them. The materialist denies the rationality that surrounds the universe, its meaning and its destiny. Everything is reduced to weak assumptions about energy, history, ego, power and justice. This is the creeping intelligentsia in which we live. This is the moral compass that tries to define reality in its own way. This is the amorphous mass that meditates on national interest in multiple countries. At no time does divinity cease to be a myth, and Jewish success escapes indifference.
The Kabbalistic sap of the Hebrew alphabet leaves bold marks in all civilizations. Emet, the Hebrew word for “truth,” stands upright, since it is written with two-legged Hebrew letters, and it is enough to exist. Sheker, the Hebrew word for “lie,” loses its balance because it is composed of letters with only one leg and requires constant balance and maintenance, obsessive insistence, theatricality, unfolding in the emotion of hatred; and matará, the word “intention,” reveals how and to whom the last fruit will be served.
Other societies come and go, but the Jews remain with Israel as their homeland.
Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas combines Keneally’s and Styron’s elisions – non-Jewish rescuer, non-Jewish victim – to invent a non-Jewish rescuer and victim in the form of one child: Bruno, the son of the commandant of Auschwitz. It is a novel of stunning omission.Subliminal Blood Libels: The Hamas Campaign to Destroy Christian Zionism
Boyne writes about two nine-year-old boys, German Bruno and Jewish Shmuel. At Auschwitz, Bruno meets Shmuel, the most un-Jewish Jewish child in fiction, and a prisoner. They realise they have the same birthday: “We’re like twins,” says Bruno. Shmuel agrees: “A little bit.” Boyne’s conceit is this: their fates might have been reversed. The German child could have been the victim; perhaps the Jew could have been the perpetrator. (When I am cynical, I wonder if this is a cautionary tale about being friends with a Jew. When I am yet more cynical, I wonder if Shmuel planned the whole thing.) In any case, they are the same boy. Bruno climbs under the fence to help Shmuel find his (presumably dead) father, puts on a pair of striped pyjamas, and is gassed to death with Shmuel.
The reader accepts Shmuel’s fate: he is already dead. (Another Jewish inmate mirrors this: when Bruno asks how long he has lived in Auschwitz, he says, “I think I’ve always been here.” He is one of Spielberg’s fated dead.) But we cannot accept Bruno’s death, because Boyne has used his skill to make us love him. You feel grief for him, because his fate is awry: he is not meant to be dead.
Shmuel is alive to nothing. He feels no anger, just placidity, and the reader feels no sadness, or guilt. Speech itself has been removed from Shmuel: his description of living in Auschwitz is: “It’s not very nice.” When Bruno causes him to be beaten, he says, “It’s alright, I don’t feel it anymore, I don’t feel anything anymore.” Bruno thinks the name Shmuel “sounds like the wind blowing”. I gagged at this: dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.
The novel – and the story of popular Shoah culture - can be told in one scene. “I came home one day,” Shmuel says, “and Mama said we couldn’t live in our house anymore.” “That happened to me too!” shouts Bruno.
The more contemporary novels treat Auschwitz as a painted curtain, or Oz. Little Dorothy could always go home, she just didn’t know it. They are mindless.
John Donoghue’s The Death’s Head Chess Club (2015) has a Jewish chess player in Auschwitz play for his life. At the end, he says Kaddish for the SS because – well, they suffered too. Sophie’s Choice, the film The Zone of Interest (2023), and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas all discuss the anguish of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. It wasn’t easy being in Auschwitz in 1942 – for anyone! Heather Morris’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2018) should have been a musical comedy. “I’m just a number,” the tattooist’s lover tells him. “You should know that. You gave it to me.” It is also, entirely accidentally, funny. At one point someone says: “Where is everybody?” Well, quite. Morris wonders why a Sonderkommando elects to live: “He too has chosen to stay alive for as long as he can, by performing an act of defilement on people of his own faith.” As in – one less life?
Ellie Midwood’s The Girl in the Striped Dress (2021) is “mostly based on a true story”: how the Slovakian Jew Helena Citrónová was beloved by the Waffen-SS soldier, Franz Wunsch, who protected her. In the novel the leading villain is a Jewish Sonderkommando, and Midwood has Helena marry Franz. In reality, Helena refused to speak to him after the war, moved to Israel, and married an IDF soldier.
This is only a small part of it, of course: it is an overwhelming glut, and it mirrors Primo Levi’s dream in Auschwitz, “varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they [survivors] had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to”.
The dreams were true. The glut exists because it is easy: in the end I think people are just too afraid to hear the truth. But you cannot love Jews if you refuse to understand what happened to them, and why; if you write myths around them and call it art. Still, it is what happened. We are everywhere and nowhere; we are fictional and real.
This is an extract from Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust, Tanya Gold’s essay for the Jewish Quarterly, out August 22.
Since Israel’s latest war began, Hamas and the global forces of anti-Semitism have engaged in a three-pronged propaganda campaign to cripple the Jews and Israel: (1) fool gullible leftists into supporting the victims of “genocide”; (2) rally Muslims throughout the West to terrorize Jews while pressuring supine governments; and (3) encourage Christians to withdraw their support for Zionism.
While many secularists have long ago discarded any sympathy for Jews or Israel—partly thanks to disinformation from the KGB in the last century and from the legacy media today—Hamas’s propagandists and their allies at The New York Times are well aware that the last major bastion of Western philo-Semitism is Christian Zionism. Therefore, they have embarked on a campaign to convince Christians that the Jews are the aggressors—even the persecutors of Christians themselves—in the cause of breaking the Christian-Jewish alliance.
In order to accomplish this rupture, Hamas propagandists and their mainstream media messengers have weaponized historical Christian prejudices, iconographic motifs, and sensitivities, some nearly 2,000-years-old. With many Western Christians on high alert against leftist assaults on their faith, especially since 2020, there has never been a more opportune time for Hamas-affiliated anti-Semites to plant seeds of doubt about Christian sympathy for Jews. And the enemies of Jews and Israel have had decades of practice, and success, on which to bank.
Pallywood
Nearly 25 years ago, arguably the most famous child on the planet was Muhammad al-Durah, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy reportedly shot to death by a hail of Israeli bullets in a cross-street gun battle on September 30, 2000. The riveting video, narrated by Charles Enderlin of France2, depicted a firefight near Netzarim Junction in Gaza, culminating in the child’s death, huddled behind his father Jamal. “Here Jamal and his son Muhammad are targets of gunfire from the Israeli position,” narrated Enderlin. “Muhammad is dead, and his father grievously wounded.”
The result was a rabid, international wildfire of anti-Semitism, producing some of the first riots in which “Death to the Jews!” could be heard shouted in the streets of post-war Europe—all with Muhammad al-Durah as their sacrilegious saint. Only 12 days after the incident, two Israeli reservists who had accidentally wandered into Ramallah were brutally lynched and ripped into pieces to chants of “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al-Durah!” Usamah bin Laden even produced a recruiting video calling Muslims worldwide to jihad on behalf of the boy who “died at the hands of the Jews.” The infamous (staged) image of Muhammad al-Durah. (Talal Abu Rahma / France2 via Al Jazeera)
Only later was it revealed that the video of Muhammad and his father, indeed much of the footage shot that day, was fake. Meticulous analysis of the raw tapes showed instance after instance of men spontaneously falling down “wounded” and then being hurled into waiting ambulances; likely uninjured youths dripping in fake blood; nonchalant bystanders watching the action—even a “dead” man lying in the gutter talking on his cellphone—just yards from where Muhammad was “killed.”
Historian Richard Landes, then a professor of medieval history at Boston University, coined the term “Pallywood” as a result of his groundbreaking investigations. His 2005 short film Muhammad al-Durah: Birth of an Icon makes clear what was again confirmed years later in a French court: that the tape not included in the France2 broadcast was indeed staged and showed a living child pretending to be dead. Landes later called the contrived image “the first blood(less) libel of the 21st century.”
“Israel is losing me”
The al-Durah hoax was probably the most successful single piece of international war-time disinformation in history; but, outside the Muslim world and its immigrant enclaves abroad, especially in Europe, it mostly evoked anti-Jewish hatred from Western socialists keen on erasing generational shame over the Holocaust by replacing the Nazis with the Jews. It did not engender comparable Christian fury, and American Christian Zionism largely held steady throughout the first decade of the new century.
This war, however—the longest in Israel’s history, and with Arab Christian communities constantly in danger from Hamas using them as human shields during Israeli incursions—has proven different. On multiple occasions, Hamas operating in areas of Gaza containing churches has resulted in structural damage and the accidental deaths of Christian bystanders, beckoning medieval blood libel archetypes back into the open.
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