Antisemitism

October 16, 2020 By Olivier Melnick Leave a Comment

80 Years After the Warsaw Ghetto…Danger Will Robinson!

In a recent article that I wrote, I went over the results of a US survey made with the millennials and Gen Z community. The results were terrifying. One of the questions posed had to do with the ability to name a death camp or a ghetto. Incredibly, 48% of all respondents were unable to name anything, and in some states, it was as high as 60%. Historically, Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto are the most known names within that category, and yet half the people didn’t have a clue at all.

This month we remember that eighty years ago in October 1940, in Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto was established. But what is it exactly that we remember, for those of us who do remember? So much can be said about the Warsaw Ghetto, and so much can be learned from what happened there and how it happened. To be sure, the concept of the ghetto didn’t get invented by the Nazis to control the Jewish population, but it was simply re-introduced and “put on steroids” so to speak!

The word ghetto or geto is Italian for “foundry” which is the area where the first ghetto was organized in Venice, Italy in 1516 in the district known then as Gheto Vechio, some four hundred years before the Warsaw ghetto. The large Jewish community that had been expelled from Spain in 1492 was moving to Italy to relocate, and the Venetian community decided to keep things separated for better control. You can still visit the Venetian ghetto area to this day.

Fast forward to 1940. The Nazi Party is struggling to control the Jews. Holocaust historian and author Raul Hilberg explained that there was a progression in how the world got organized to first control and eventually get rid of its Jews, “Since the fourth century after Christ there have been three anti-Jewish policies: conversion, expulsion and annihilation. The second appeared as an alternative to the first, and the third emerged as an alternative to the second.”

While the final solution concentrated on the complete eradication of European Jewry, the institutionalization of the ghetto paved the way and helped to organize that step. Forced conversions and forced baptisms of the Jews to Christianity had been attempted for centuries and had resulted in the loss of many lives. Expulsion seemed to be a good option for those who wanted to get rid of the Jews. It had occurred in Europe on many occasions (England in 1290, Hungary in 1349 and 1360, France in 1394, Austria in 1421, Spain and Sicily in 1492, Portugal in 1497, Nuremberg in 1499, Naples in 1510 and Milan in 1597.)

But for Hitler and his Nazi murderers, expulsion didn’t yield the results expected. Things had to move further along and much faster. Ghettos started to get organized by the Nazis all over Europe as early as 1939. Jews were rounded up and sent to controlled and enclosed areas. Many smaller ghettos were started across Europe, with the first large metropolitan ghetto in Lodz in April of 1940, closely followed by the Warsaw ghetto in October of 1940. Erected brick walls and barbed wires formed new boundaries for various Jewish communities that would have to survive in their new communal prisons.

The ghettos were somewhat organized with occasional, Jewish traffic in and out of their limits, with special authorizations from the Nazis. The Jewish people did their best to maintain a semblance of communal life. Schools were organized and even synagogue services took place. But things started to deteriorate very rapidly. Food became scarce, living conditions were extremely crowded and sanitation was insufficient at best. Typhus and other infectious diseases started to plague the ghettos, and the death toll became very high. Over 43,000 people died inside the Lodz ghetto, and 76,000 within the Warsaw ghetto before the summer of 1942.

In a sense, the ghettos became clearing houses for the “final solution to the Jewish question”, a euphemism for the total destruction of the Jews of Europe. Since the Jews were not leaving fast enough and the ghettos were bulging at their seams, something else had to be done to rid the world of the “Jewish virus.” Slowly but steadily, the Nazis started to deport the Jews out of the ghettos to the death camp of Treblinka, only 50 miles away.

Two heroes of the Warsaw ghetto are worth remembering. The first one was Mordekhai Anielewicz, the young leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB) who led the Warsaw ghetto uprising. This was the largest Jewish revolt during World War Two, which inspired others of the sort in various ghettos and camps. He is remembered as the symbol of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.

The other hero was a Polish-Jewish historian named Emanuel Ringelblum. He managed to chronicle Jewish deportation and ghetto life. His records were preserved inside tin boxes and large metal milk cans. They were respectively recovered in 1946 and 1950 and have provided the world with over 25,000 artifacts documenting the Holocaust and life in the Warsaw ghetto. This was a priceless find made possible by the selfless desire of a Jewish man to document the horrors he had to live through. Such courage!

What will happen to this crucial part of history if the proponents of the “Cancel Culture” movement had their way? I can only imagine! But there is something that we need to come to grips with even today. I believe that even though we are not seeing the brick and mortar walls being erected with barbed wires around Jewish communities, ghetto life is lurking again. The purpose of a ghetto is to separate, ostracize and control a group of people. Could it be that the global Jewish community is being rounded-up into a virtual ghetto?

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is working hard at accusing Israel of apartheid, colonization and human rights abuse in an effort to ostracize the Jewish people. No physical walls are necessary, just paint the Jews into the unwanted camp.

The Campus Intifadas are indoctrinating our young people into believing that Israel murders Palestinians every day and inviting pro-Palestinian apologists to lecture on US campuses. Jews are excluded from the marketplace of ideas, ironically enough, under the guise of freedom of speech. No physical walls are necessary, just paint the Jews as the oppressor and the rest of the student body will gladly denigrate them.

The myriads of antisemitic acts all over the world are a constant reminder of the danger that Jewish people run, simply for “being Jewish” Cemeteries are being desecrated, synagogues set on fire, diatribes and libels are posted online on all social networks (even though Facebook and Twitter finally agreed to block and cancel Holocaust deniers on their platforms.) No physical walls are necessary, just accuse the Jews of the ills of the world, and the world will gladly pass judgment and inflict the verdict.

When the ghettos proved not to be enough for those who hated the Jews with every fiber of their beings, Jewish extermination became the next logical step. No “Cancel Culture” demagogue will be able to prove otherwise. Today, the Jewish people are no longer in a ghetto between four walls topped by barbed wire, but it can easily be argued that we are being ghettoized by the media, politicians, the entertainment industry and even some of the churches. I dare not imagine what’s next if indeed we do cancel culture and we let history repeat itself!

“Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, and in a free society,
some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
Abraham Joshua Heschel

October 5, 2020 By Olivier Melnick Leave a Comment

PODCAST S1 E18 – There is Peace, and then there is PEACE!

October 2, 2020 By Olivier Melnick 2 Comments

We Must Work Together to Stop the Tragic Decline of Holocaust Awareness!

I have written many articles on this topic over the last two decades, and if I am again compelled to write another one, it is because of the importance of the topic, especially at this time in our history. What really compelled me to sound the alarm one more time, is the recent publishing of a survey by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. The U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey, which is the first-ever 50-state survey on Holocaust knowledge among Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z. (born between 1997 and 2012), yielded some terrifying results. Additionally, that same survey gave us some insight on the rest of the adult generation.

This is the very first survey that was done for all 50 states of the union and as such, is much more comprehensive that the previous ones. Frankly, I was hoping for results that would show some hope as to the knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust, since I, along with many other organizations have worked tirelessly at exposing the gruesome details of this somber part of human history. I was shocked with exactly the opposite…things are getting much worse. To be sure, historical revisionism and Holocaust denial have been very problematic way before the “Cancel Culture” movement was a thing. We all should remember the 1996 law suit filed against historian and Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt by David Irving. She “dared” to call him [rightfully] a Holocaust denier who among other things, claimed that Auschwitz did not have any gas chambers. She and her publisher won the case, but the battle was far from over!

The remaining generation of Holocaust survivors is rapidly dying off, leaving behind them whatever testimony they can. Much has been put on audio and video tapes by the Steven Spielberg “ USC Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.” It includes my father’s testimony recorded in 1997. Then, there is the powerful and visually stunning, on-going work of the “Holocaust and Antisemitism Foundation” based in New Zealand. That is just two of the great organizations dedicating time and resources to educate their audience about this part of history that we all wish we could forget but absolutely cannot afford to. We must also acknowledge groups like Maccabee Task Force and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, dedicated on exposing the lies of the BDS (Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions) movement.

So, now we need to take a look at the results of that survey. According to their website, “The Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Study was commissioned by the Claims Conference. Data was collected in the United States and analyzed by Schoen Cooperman Research, with a representative sample of 1,000 interviews nationwide and 200 interviews in each state with adults ages 18 to 39 via landline, cell phone and online interviews. Respondents were selected at random and constituted a demographically representative sample of the Millennial population across each state. ” Their website provides a lot of details about the survey state by state with answers to several related questions. Here are some of the questions that were asked to an audience of mostly millennials and Gen. Z, making the group 39 years of age or younger. The results are extremely alarming.

• Can you name one concentration camp or one ghetto?
Nationally, 48% couldn’t name one camp or ghetto out of 40,000 of them in Europe and North Africa. In some states the number was as high as 60%.

• What is Auschwitz?
56% of all millennials were unable to identify the most known death camp: Auschwitz-Birkenau. As to the other less known but still historically relevant such as Dachau, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, only 1-3% could identify them.

• How many Jews died in the Holocaust?
It is important to remember that overall, a total of 12 million people died in the Holocaust. Additionally, the number of millennials who didn’t know that six million Jews died in the Holocaust was a scary 63% nationally, as high as 67% in some states. Most respondents thought that two million or less died.

• Jews caused the Holocaust?
I cannot fathom why such a question would even be on the survey, and yet, 10%-19% of respondent believed that the Jews were responsible for the Holocaust.

• Should we continue teaching about the Holocaust?
64% of all millennials and Gen. Z believed that Holocaust education should be mandatory in school and 80% believed that the Holocaust should still be taught to prevent it from happening again.

• Have you noticed Holocaust denial on the social networks?
While most respondents didn’t blatantly deny the Holocaust, many of them (49%) have witnessed it on the social networks. As high as 70% have also seen Nazi symbols on the networks and in their own communities.

These statistics are frightening! But, at the end of the day, if nothing is said or done about them, they remain numbers. Even the six million Jews murdered in the camps have been transformed into an impersonal large number of casualties with no names. That is a contributing factor in the “Holocaust fatigue” and the indifference shown by many.

If a global catastrophe such as the Holocaust can become such a parenthetical event in the chronicles of human history, what is to happen to all other important events of the modern era? If such an indelible stain on the human psyche can be slowly but increasingly erased from history, what is to happen to other negative milestones on the spectrum of the human race? When you compound ignorance of the Holocaust and its peripheral history with the current push for denial, revisionism and antisemitism, the damage is much greater. Think about it, how can one debunk a lie or defend factual truth if one has very little if any, knowledge of what really happened?

As I already mentioned, Holocaust survivors are dwindling down. Today, they are in their eighties and nineties, many of them not in very good health. Within the next decade, survivors will be hard to find, and at the rate of disinformation and denial, the Holocaust will have become a myth. How tragic! But when it comes to education, it is never too late. Here are some ways it can be accomplished.

• Visit a Holocaust memorial/museum
The most comprehensive is probably Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. But, even in the United Sates, many major cities have their own Holocaust museum. The one in Washington D.C. is undoubtedly the most comprehensive of the US based ones. You can find one to visit in 31 of the 50 US states. You can also visit one in many other countries besides Israel.

• Visit a Camp
While this involves traveling is will be a bit more costly, but I recommend that people visit a camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland or Dachau in Germany. I went to Auschwitz in the winter of 2010. This is where my grandfather died. I was a defining moment for me. The place is eerily quiet, and the air is thick with memories and visual clues of so much unnecessary death. A visit to the remains of a camp will sear the truth and the dark legacy of the Holocaust into your memory for the rest of your life.

• Watch a movie or program
Many movies have been produced in the last 75 years on the topic of the Holocaust. Those that are well researched, documented and narrated are well worth your time and will powerfully supplement or replace your visit to a camp or museum. . Schindler’s List (1993), remains a solid and well researched piece of work that many people should watch. Another less known worthy documentary is the 1955 work by French Director Alain Resnais, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard), powerfully documenting the horrors of the Nazi murder factories. It was made only 10 years after the Holocaust and should be required viewing in American schools.

• Read a book
Even more books have been written on the topic, and many of them have become classics that should also be required reading in schools. An absolute must read is Night, the autobiographical book by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Additionally, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” also sheds great light on the horrors of that era. I would also recommend the classic scholarly work by Lucy Dawidowicz The War Against the Jews: 1933-1945, documenting Hitler’s obsession with the complete destruction of European Jewry. For a more in depth overview of antisemitism with great insight on the Holocaust, few have surpassed Robert Wistrich massive volume A Lethal Obsession.

None of us can do it all, but all of us can do something. We must educate ourselves and share what we learn with our younger generation. Most of them have no frame of reference by which to gauge the information they are being fed on campuses, in the media and on the social networks. Millennials great hunger for social justice often blinds them to the facts. At the end of the day, the best platform for unbiased education is in the home. Holocaust awareness starts as a family unit discusses the horrors of that era and exposes their children to the truth as graphic and disturbing as it maybe, with respect to various age groups, evidently. By the way, this is a fight that Jews and Evangelicals need too fight together against a common enemy.

One of the main reasons for such frightening statistics on the Holocaust and the Jewish people is because the topic is avoided or greatly watered down. But it is not just about the Holocaust, it is about human nature and our propensity to inflict pain and suffering to others if it can further our own selfish agendas. Not everybody will support this kind of violent hatred of other people, but by ignoring its power and its reach, we all are paving the way for history to repeat itself. My commentaries on the Holocaust might sound like a broken record to some, but as long as we get statistics like these, you will keep hearing my concerned voice.

September 25, 2020 By Olivier Melnick Leave a Comment

If Trump is the “New Hitler”, Israel and the Jews Are Very Safe!

In my 35 years in this country, I have never seen so much hatred for an American president in office as we are witnessing against President Trump. My desire is not to blindly come to his defense simply because I agree with his policies, but I feel compelled to respond to an accusation that was made recently. I am still having a hard time acknowledging that such an accusation was made against Donald Trump, but since when it comes to faulting him, anything goes, we shouldn’t be surprised.

MSNBC host Donny Deutsch recently compared President Trump to Adolf Hitler, warning Jewish people that they shouldn’t vote for him in the next elections. Mr. Deutsch who is “conveniently” Jewish when he needs to promote a selfish agenda of “Trump-hatred” said, “But what was going on in the early ’30s Germany? Basically you had a destruction of belief in the free press, you had blurring between the executive branch and the Justice Department, you have creating an other, whether it’s Muslims, whether it’s Mexicans, whether it’s congressmen who weren’t born in this country, and then you have the destruction of free elections. And we’re here and what is the difference between Adolph Hitler and Donald Trump? I’m not saying there is a Holocaust but when you look at the tactics, that is where we are right now,” Deutsch said before attacking Jewish people who plan to vote for Trump.”

As if this wasn’t enough of a stab, he continued, “With what our people have gone through in history, and you see a man who is a dictator, and once you give a man absolute power he’s possible of anything, and if you are a Jew in this country and you are supporting Donald Trump, you are not looking back at our history and you are blind and you are walking like a lemming off a cliff…. it’s “time to wake up because there is no difference from Trump’s rhetoric and what Hitler preached in the early 1930s.”

So, according to Mr. Deutsch, “there is no difference from Trump’s rhetoric and what Hitler preached in the early 1930s.” Incidentally, if such an accusation was made in France or Germany, the accusing party would be sued for defamation. American freedom of press and freedom of speech are such that comparing one to Hitler is acceptable. Hitler was a dictator; a mass murderer and he was evil. We absolutely shouldn’t say that Hitler was insane because insanity is a mental state that mandates acceptance if not forgiveness. Hitler was evil, period! To compare President Trump to Hitler in 2020 is unfortunately pretty safe because people are so far removed from World War Two and the Holocaust that the stigma remaining attached to Hitler’s name is enough to make them hate Donald Trump without checking any of the facts. According to Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw, “Never in history has such ruination – physical and moral – been associated with the name of one man.”

Donny Deutsch is banking on the shock value of his statement and he is also counting on the ignorance of his audience to be able to buy such an outrageous claim. It is terrifying to hear that a 2018 study determined that 66% of millennials and 41% of adults didn’t know what Auschwitz was. So, Mr Deutsch has a captive, uneducated audience. His goal is to convince 2020 Jews that voting for President Trump is akin to keeping the new Hitler in office.

It is time to see if that comparison is valid on any level. While most people will agree that Hitler was a mass murderer and a dictator, they might not be aware of the extant of his evil deeds. He started to develop his plan to eliminate the unwanted when he was in prison after the failed coup in Munich in 1923. There, he wrote Mein Kampf in which he clearly explained his plan to bring Germany to the top, at the expense of other countries and people groups. Nothing and no one would stop him. But Hitler didn’t just go after the Jews, he wanted to eradicate anyone who didn’t fit the Aryan mold of the perfect Germanic race. Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, retarded people and Gypsies were among the groups that he first targeted. His racial obsession was based on the science of Eugenics that aimed to improve the genetic quality of people by eliminating people and/or groups deemed to be inferior. That “pseudo” science was debunked very quickly, giving Hitler no scientific leg to stand on, but that didn’t stop him, did it?

As to the Jews, he was obsessed with their annihilation. In 1933, the German Reichstag voted and passed the “Enabling Act” and as a result, the Weimar Republic gradually morphed into Nazi Germany; a totalitarian dictatorship anchored in the ideology of National Socialism. He was now in charge of making all decisions. Soon after, Hitler declared a national boycott of all Jewish businesses. Within two years, in September 1935, the “Nuremberg Laws” were enacted, and almost overnight, all Jews became untermenschen, or “subhuman.” They became like vermin to the Nazi Party and they had to be exterminated. More laws came, more restrictions were put in place, and keeping Jews contained became a necessity for Hitler. The Ghetto (born in Venice, Italy in 1516) was reintroduced. For a short while, and under extremely unhealthy conditions, Jews were contained in ghettos all over Eastern Europe like Lodz and Warsaw. Death by disease was running rampant. But containment didn’t suffice. All along, Hitler was seeking Lebensraum (living space) for the German people. The Jews either had to leave if they could, but many couldn’t, or simply didn’t know where to go as many countries refused them entry. Extermination of the Jews and all other unwanted people became the only viable solution for the Führer. Over 12 million people died in Hitler’s camps (6,000,000 of them Jewish), but enough about Hitler.

Let’s examine Donald Trump’s record for the last four years. He said that he was going to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and he did. He fulfilled an empty promise made by many previous presidents from both sides of the aisle. He also has members of his own family who are Jewish, and he is very proud of that. Soon after coming into office, he stopped sending money to the Palestinian Authority because of the terrorism agenda that they kept and their unwillingness to negotiate with Israel. He also removed the Palestinian presence from Washington, DC. He officially recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan. He defunded the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), and of course recently, he was instrumental in bringing about the first Middle East peace treaty between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel since Israel and Jordan signed theirs in 1994. So, if Trump is the new Hitler, Israel and the Jews are very safe!

In the meantime, the neo-democrats are teaming-up against the Jews with all they’ve got. They are promoting and supporting BDS, terrorism and antisemitism. The antisemitism spewed by Congresswomen Ilhan Omar (voted worst antisemite of 2019 over Louis Farrakhan) and Rashida Tlaib should be more than enough to force them to resign from their US government positions. The BLM movement has attracted people in search of a way to express their support for the injustice against George Floyd. In the process, they are ignoring the fact that BLM is laced with antisemitic ideology.

The attraction to support social justice and the underdog has led Jewish people in America to vote Democrat for decades. In American Thinker Alexander Markovsky and Ted Belman explain, “The idea of social justice, in terms of helping the sick and the poor, is deeply embedded in Judaism. Living in ghettos and being persecuted for two millennia, the Jewish people have been struggling to reconcile their tragic history with contemporary reality. The experience has led them to take on and support the cause of every underdog and liberal movement in sight, no matter how unworthy, no matter how illogical or no matter how it imperiled their own interests or safety…The social justice crowd is not motivated by concerns for Israel and they are not motivated by the interests of the United States. Their obsession is social justice which they believe is not currently available. They believe that this can best be achieved through socialism and wealth redistribution.” As a Jew myself, I understand the attraction to vote Democrat in the hope to find social justice, but maybe 30 years ago or even more, when the vast majority of Democrats actually cared about Israel and the Jews.

Additionally, the fear of the Jewish community to vote Republican rests on the false premise that the Right comprises fascists, bigots, racists and antisemites. While I am sure that you can find some of these people in the Republican Party, ideologically, this might have been truer half a century ago. The real danger for Jews today is the party that they blindly support. The one that doesn’t want to recognize Israel’s right to the land, supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) without checking the facts and continues to accuse the Jews with the same antisemitic tropes going back to the Middle Ages. The Left in America today has morphed into an extreme Left that is very toxic for all people who cherish freedom of speech, religion, the press and free enterprise.

Wake up Jewish community! The 2020 Left isn’t the Left of JFK anymore, and I dare you to find a 21st Century version of Reverend Martin Luther King and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel locking arms and marching against racism and injustice. Marxism in America or anywhere else isn’t good for anybody in general and the Jewish community in particular. So, again, as odd as some might think, if Trump is the “New Hitler”, Israel and the Jews are very safe. Hitler and Trump have nothing in common. They are opposite in their ideologies. The fact that I even have to defend President Trump from that accusation shows you how far the Left is willing to go in 2020!

September 11, 2020 By Olivier Melnick Leave a Comment

The Danger of Antisemitism by Omission!

Too often, people have a propensity to ignore issues if they feel that they are not directly concerned or if the issues are far enough from them geographically or otherwise. People might think, ” the riots and protests are not my neighborhood, so I am ok!” or ” the fires are not putting my house in danger, they are too far, we are safe.” Unfortunately, apathy can be part of human nature to the point where we ignore the obvious if the obvious doesn’t affect us at a critical level. At least critical to us.

So, many people will reason with themselves and think, “I am NOT antisemitic, but I am also NOT Jewish!” People will quickly claim that they don’t hate the Jews, that they don’t wish them any harm at all. They will also agree that antisemitism is wrong, and yet they will not hesitate to look the other way when acts of antisemitism are committed. Hurting Jewish people directly, verbally, or physically is antisemitism by commission while ignoring their troubles is antisemitism by omission. They are both wrong!

In the early 1940s, Maurice Weinzveig, my Russian maternal grandfather was hiding in the cellar of our Paris residence. He knew that Paris had become very dangerous for a Jew without naturalization papers. He had to keep quiet and hidden for a while to protect his life and that of his wife and daughter (my mother.) Unbeknownst to Maurice, a gentile neighbor who worked for the French police and who was secretly in love with my grandmother, wanted to get rid of her husband, “the Jew.” He called the Gestapo and let them know that there was a Jew hiding in his building. They came, they took him, they sent him to Auschwitz, and he perished in the smokestacks of the Nazi factory of death.

When the Gestapo showed up at our residence, the guilty neighbor stayed home behind closed doors. Incidentally, he lived long enough so that I would meet him as a young kid. Nobody could prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that he had called the Gestapo, but the whole building knew that it was him, so he never paid for his crimes. He even had me sit on his lap a few times as a little boy. I get chills down my spine when I recall those moments. He was guilty of antisemitism by commission.

But what about the numerous neighbors in the same building who witnessed all the raucous movement up and down their building? They chose to remain silent, discreetly observing behind the privacy of their window blinders, as if they couldn’t do one thing to prevent the two Gestapo officers from apprehending my grandfather. Some feared for their lives and that of their own families; others felt powerless against the Nazi regime. How many were thinking, “I am not Jewish; this is none of my business?” Hard to say. The truth is that they became apathetic bystanders, and a bystander who does nothing only facilitates the crimes of the perpetrator. See something and say or do nothing… and that my friend, is antisemitism by omission.

So, how does that concept translate to 2020 and the current multifaceted crisis that we are all in? In other words, what does this have to do with the virus, the riots, the economy, or any other crises we are dealing with as a society? Once again, and very sadly, the thread is Israel and the Jews:

Covid-19: The Jewish people have been accused of creating, causing and even spreading the virus to the world for two reasons: To “take over the world’ and to “monetize” the vaccine/cure that they have developed. This hardly explains how Israel is currently suffering from a huge spike of new cases of Covid-19. One response from antisemites has been to encourage people to infect Jewish people by coughing on them. As early as last Spring, coining the new word “Holocough” made of the two words “Holocaust” and “cough,” antisemites flooded the social networks with the idea. People might say: “But I am not Jewish, so how does that concern me?”

The Protests/Riots: The tragic death of George Floyd precipitated America into regional protests that quickly became uncontrollable riots like those seen in Portland, Oregon for the last three months. Some people found it interesting to spread the rumor that American police officers were being trained by IDF officers in using methods that include the way George Floyd was chocked to death. The group known as US Campaign for Palestinian Rights came up with that unfounded accusation. Additionally, the DOJ is investigating the possibility of ties between the BLM movement and terrorist organizations. Terminology like “intifada” or “from Minneapolis to Palestine, Racism is a crime” are showing up on street signs, graffiti and social networks. Once again, the Jews and Israel are being blamed for the racial unrest, either directly or indirectly. People might say: “Black lives matter, and I am not Jewish, so how does the other stuff concern me?”

QAnon: The strange attraction that people have for the mysterious group known as QAnon is also leading people to blame the Jews. QAnon is some sort of conspiracy theory from an alt-right ideology. It is supposed to ANONymously expose the international Jewish cabal to destroy Donald Trump and take over the world. The fact that it is based on a hoax from 1904–The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion- that has been debunked over and over, doesn’t seem to stop QAnon adherents. They claim that the Rothschilds are behind the whole agenda of controlling the USA behind the scenes. Sadly, they haven’t been denounced more forcefully by the current administration. People might say: “QAnon is just a conspiracy theory and I am not Jewish, so how does that concern me?”

The easiest scapegoat for humanity has been the Jews for the last 2,000 years. Irrational behavior against the chosen people of God has gone uninterrupted for a very long time. The enemy of God and the Jewish people, Satan himself, is turning the irrational into the rational, acceptable and even the expected. But we do not have to accept the irrational blindly. Rabbi, philosopher and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Martin Luther King during the Civil Rights Movement said: “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.” I would like to add to that that we can become guilty because of apathy. Jews and Blacks marching together against racism…Those days are gone!

Antisemitism by omission is still antisemitism. It might be watered down because people do not carry the guilt of being the main players in the longest hatred, but it is still dangerous, nonetheless. We cannot afford to remain silent about any form of injustice, period! For some reason, people will fight for various causes when they can be convinced that their voices and actions count for something. When people don’t feel concerned or in danger for their safety or even just for their comfort, they become apathetic. They feel like it is not their fight. But sitting on the fence of Jew-hatred is not an option. Indifference becomes our guilt.

Everything seems to indicate that the biblical predictions about the world going against Israel and the Jews are coming to fruition in our lifetime and rapidly (Zechariah 12:1-8; Daniel 9:27; Revelation 12.) Soon, we will all answer to a higher authority, and the God of Israel who calls the Jewish people the “Apple of my Eye” will not say to us, “don’t worry, you were not Jewish, so, this didn’t concern you!” While salvation cannot be lost, heavenly rewards can. We have a choice!

“If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity.” Albert Einstein

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