Anti-Jewish attacks: another reason why a strong Israel is vital
Last night, I watched Spielberg's 1993 movie Schindler's List about Oskar Schindler, a real historical figure and a German-speaking industrialist born in Svitavy, Moravia, one of the Czech lands (then Austria-Hungary), who was wealthy, an NSDAP member, and well connected, but who used all these virtues to turn his factories into shields for Jews against the Holocaust. He has saved about 1,000 lives.
Pilsen's Great Synagogue is the third largest synagogue in the world, after one in Jerusalem and another one in Budapest. Prague has had over 20 synagogues throughout the years.
It wasn't the only movie about these issues that I recently watched; the Pianist (2002) was another one. These stories about the treatment of the Jews by the Nazi society are heartbreaking. And every society making average and subpar members proud that they belong to the "right" 90% or 95% or 97% or 99% of the society annoys me, scares me, and disgusts me (yes, the number included the figures for the climate alarmists and the Occupy movement, too).
Meanwhile, in the real world, two innocent people were killed in Copenhagen yesterday: one Danish film director and one Jewish guard of the local Jewish community. The apparently Arab perpetrator, Omar El-Hussein, one inspired by the Charlie Hebdo attackers was shot dead later.
You should agree that the Jews are highly overrepresented among the victims. France has the largest Jewish population in Europe but it's just 1% of the population. Nevertheless, (two) Jews made 17% of the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. France's Muslim population is 5-10% and they're obviously overrepresented among the perpetrators of the religiously inspired assaults.
The counting is even more extreme in Denmark. 5% of Denmark are Muslims but the number of Jews is really tiny, at most thousands. Nevertheless, 1 Jew made 50% of the innocent victims yesterday. It is not too large a statistical ensemble but in combination with other data, the pattern is rather clear. There is huge evidence that the anti-Semites can't tolerate even the tiniest numbers of Jews in their environment.
A question arises: Are these attacks something that occurs "outside" the mainstream society of the Western nations? Should a non-Semitic citizen ignore these things? It's just what the Muslims and Jews are doing to each other, isn't it?
Well, I don't think so. The Jews and the Muslims are almost universally citizens of the countries and the countries should simply be able to guarantee some basic safety, enforce the laws, and restore justice if something bad happens.
A repeated or growing failure to enforce the law is a problem – a problem that may gradually affect everyone else. So it is a responsibility of the government institutions – and indirectly of the voters – to make sure that the law may be enforced and the basic safety and justice may be protected.
Regulation of the immigration and of the growth of the institutions connected with "other cultures" may be needed to defend the rule of law in the future, and this defense is more important, I believe. If one may argue that indifference in immigration and naturalization matters has helped similar attacks, it means that mistakes have taken place and they shouldn't be repeated.
We should note that these problems aren't seen in the U.S. I don't think that the attitude of analogous people and analogous institutions differ from the European ones. Instead, it's the numbers that are different: about 2% of Americans are Jews and only 0.6% of Americans are Muslims. So the counting is reverted.
In Czechia, Muslims beat Jews 2-to-1 but both groups are tiny these days – 0.1% and 0.05%, respectively. In 1930, there were over 350,000 Jews living in Czechoslovakia, over 2.5%. The impact of Nazism on the demographics was stunning – even before we consider the expulsion of Germans.
But back to the present. Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has commented on the new attacks. Aside from condolences, he called for "Aliyah" which translates as "the upgrade of a Jew" (OK, that's how I translate the Hebrew word), meaning that they move back from disaspora to Israel i.e. closer to Jerusalem again.
Denmark's chief rabbi disagreed and claimed that "terror is not a reason to move to Israel". As far as I can see, Jair Melchior hasn't justified his opinion in any way but I will.
So let me say that I disagree with his statement. Terror selectively targeting a rather small ethnic or religious group is a pretty good reason to move to a safer place simply because all the people including Jews have the survival instinct! And yes, similar terror was one of the top reasons why many great (Jewish and non-Jewish) Zionist souls – like the Czechoslovak politicians in the late 1940s – actively supported the creation of the State of Israel itself, partly with the fresh memories from the Nazi era in mind.
The long-lasting non-existence of a Jewish national state has been one of the craziest anomalies in the world geography for thousands of years – despite the fact that this special status was later rationalized even by some Jewish teachings. I think that no other nation of comparable importance failed to have its own national state sometime between 1 AD and 1948 AD. Such an absence of a natural homeland would weaken any nation.
To remind you, diaspora (Jewish emigration from the old lands surrounding the current territory of Israel; not to be confused with exodus, the earlier emigration of Jews from Egypt) began sometime in the middle of the period 900 BC – 600 BC. In that period, Neo-Assyria was the most powerful country in the world and they just conquered many Jewish lands, too. Note that the Assyrian empire largely spoke Aramaic, probably the #1 favorite tongue of Jesus Christ (centuries later), which is a Semitic language closer to Hebrew and Phoenician than to Arabic. And the expulsion continued later thanks to the Babylonians, Romans, and others.
Of course, I am not joining Netanyahu's invitation for the Jews to emigrate to Israel. They may also want to move to Czechia where things are OK, I think. But I surely think that what Netanyahu says has a logic. And because there are over 1 million Jews living in Europe (almost 1/2 of them live in France) and a significant fraction of them could conceivably find out that Europe is (will be) no longer safe (again) thanks to the "uncontrollable" influence of the large Muslim populations, it may make sense to think that the number of Jewish people arriving to Israel could possibly become substantial in the future which is a reason to think that Israel shouldn't be planning some generous donation of its territory or settlements to the Palestinians.
The world is full of conflicting interests and it is impossible to make "everyone" happy. But I do find it obvious that the existence of (at least) one robust, self-confident, defensible Jewish national state is much more important than the creation (or expansion) of another, the 23rd Arab state in the world. The division of the current Arab world to 22 countries is a curiosity of a sort. These countries may very well be considered provinces of one "real country" and this "real country" with its 13 million squared kilometers (almost 140% of the U.S.) seems large enough to me and it's hard to sensibly defend the assertion that they really need a big portion (or all) of Greater Israel's 28,000 squared kilometers.
I think it's fair to say that those French politicians who are incapable of providing the Jewish French citizens with a decent level of safety in their country but who refuse to clearly support the state of Israel against the Palestinian (and other Muslim) efforts to erase the Jewish state from the map are effectively behaving just like the German folks I watched in Schindler's List last night simply because the gradual or abrupt erasure of the Jews is the only possible outcome that is compatible with their attitudes.
Incidentally, I am also sort of shocked by the behavior of much of the U.S. Democrat Party when it comes to Netanyahu's visit to the U.S. next month. The Israeli prime minister was totally legitimately invited as a speaker in the U.S. Congress. Tons of Democrats are working hard to either cancel the event or boycott it or something like that. Have you completely lost your mind, leftists? Israel has been a key ally of the U.S. for decades, Netanyahu is its most important politician, and this is a rather special time when he has some important things to say, including those about Iran.
What's your justification of this anti-Israel political terror? That there will be elections in Israel in the future? In every democracy, there are some elections in the future. That's how democracy is defined and the existence of the elections (i.e. democracy) should make it more likely, and not less likely, for a leader to speak in the U.S. Congress. Or that Netanyahu is a member of a party? Almost every politician is a member of a party. Or is your reason for the boycott that Obama and Netanyahu don't quite agree about the question whether one should allow Iran to do pretty much anything with the nukes and possible maneuvers against Israel? Have you considered the idea that it's Obama and not Netanyahu who is wrong? Netanyahu may very well decide to bomb Iran, anyway (it's ultimately Israel, and not the U.S., who must care because it's threatened by Iran's new technologies), and a big portion of the Americans would understand it, too. How could it hurt if he were allowed to explain his thinking?
It seems obvious that the real partisans in this controversy are the Democrats. Their goal is nothing else than to meddle with the internal politics of Israel – most Israeli see it, too. And that's just too bad. It's too bad even if Obama is not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda's parent organization and the umbrella organization for the global Islamic terrorism, as the Czech and Emiratian leaders described it.
http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/02/anti-jewish-attacks-another-reason-why.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LuboMotlsReferenceFrame+%28Lubos+Motl%27s+reference+frame%29 |
