One of the things that is fascinating about this particular political moment is watching the revival of the kind of medieval slander against the Jewish people which sometimes led Christians in Europe to fling Jewish families down wells.
In every generation we are told just why it is that we deserve a good beating. Before Germans came into my family's village in the Ukraine and killed them, they told one another just why it is that Jews are in need of murder.
Today the enlightened west acknowledges that our past persecution was unjust. Your average good-hearted, left-leaning westerner agrees that the persecution of Jews for all those centuries for the alleged killing of a Jewish rabbi in Israel a long time ago was wrong and they will not hesitate to tell you so.
They will also likely agree that blaming capitalism on Jews is probably not fair and that any pogroms or violence due to this particular slander in the past was unjust. They will also agree that blaming Jews for the rise of socialism was not entirely fair, either.
We all agree, for the most part, that the Jews in the past were largely innocent of the malicious allegations against them and we almost kind of feel bad, maybe, about the historical persecution of the Jewish people.
Today, however, things are different.
As it turns out - Surprise! Suprise! - in this generation the Jews actually do have it coming due their mistreatment of the innocent, indigenous Ewoks who live around them.
This is what our friend Nagaura says in a comment on this blog:
Don't worry the IDF will shell hospitals,schools and homes all in the name of protecting Israel. It won't matter to you or any other pro Israel supporter how many innocents are killed they are after all the enemy population.It is always important not just to spit back at hatred, but to look at it and discuss it.
You'll come back with they are warned by the IDF to evacuate but where are they to evacuate to? The Mediterranean sea or perhaps they can be beamed up by the Starship Enterprise.
I actually like Nagaura because she has the guts to step into what she presumably considers to be enemy territory. It takes a certain degree of steel in the spine, I suppose, to walk onto unfriendly ground and insist upon your say.
Let us now dissect:
Don't worry the IDF will shell hospitals,schools and homes all in the name of protecting Israel.I like this kind of thing because it neatly demonstrates the anti-Semitic anti-Zionist bias embedded tightly within the discourse.
The first thing to notice is Nagaura's malicious assumption that the IDF acts merely in the name of protecting Israel. The obvious implication, of course, is that the IDF does not actually act in a manner to protect Israel, but only seems to do so "in name" as an insidious pretense for persecuting Arabs... simply for the hell of it.
Also notice the blood libel embedded in the sentence.
Nagaura not only thinks that the Jews of Israel want to bomb hospitals and schools, which is to say, murder sick people and children, but she informs us not to worry about it, with the clear implication that this is what the Jewish people, in general, who tend to be supporters of Israel, want.
In a mere seventeen words she encapsulates so much of the kind of anti-Semitic anti-Zionist discourse that leads to violence against Jews and the justification for that violence among western progressives.
It won't matter to you or any other pro Israel supporter how many innocents are killed they are after all the enemy population.Here the obvious implication is the pro-Israel supporters are immoral which, needless to say, would make the vast majority of Jews immoral. So, essentially, Nagaura is telling the world that the Jews are immoral.
Others in the past have made similar claims... including You Know Who.
You'll come back with they are warned by the IDF to evacuate but where are they to evacuate to?This is a particularly interesting question. The IDF is the only army in human history that actually warns enemies that their house is going to get bombed and that it might be a good idea to evacuate the family to, say, across the street.
Nagaura presumably thinks that the Jews of Israel just choose houses at random to hit because Arabs live in them. This is false. In fact, the very notion is an insult to all Jews, everywhere. Due to the fact that the Arabs of the Middle East are conducting an ongoing war against the Jewish people, we sometimes blow shit up in our own self-defense.
Such is the nature of war, but it is not a war that we ever wanted.
What vicious leftists like Nagaura refuse to acknowledge is thirteen hundred years of Jewish submission under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperial rule.
She does not care about social justice.
If she cared about social justice she would acknowledge that the Jews in the Middle East are a tiny minority doing their best to survive under intense conditions of religious hatred by a much larger surrounding majority.
Until she grasps that fundamental fact, then she really has nothing of value to say.
What I say is that Jewish self-defense is imperative and that Israel cannot afford to worry too much about the opinions of the Nagaura's of the world. Nagaura will hate Israel no matter what it does, or does not, do. That being the case, Israel's first objective should be to secure the safety of its citizenry.
And if Nagaura does not like it, she can go pound sand.
We apologize for nothing.