From Whence Cometh Jew-hatred?
One year on from the atrocities of October 7, anti-Semitism reigns supreme.
That’s King James English in the caption to today’s essay — chosen deliberately, because it’s the English of the Bible with which I was intimately familiar in my youth. And this piece deals with Biblical proportions — as in, Biblical proportions of hatred.
Tomorrow marks one year since the indescribable savagery of the October 7th massacre in which Hamas terrorists erased the lives of more than 1200 Jewish citizens. Roughly one hundred Jews remain hostages amidst the rubble and tunnels of Gaza.
Last fall, like many observers deeply shaken by footage of the naked evil on display that apocalyptic day, I borrowed from William Butler Yeats’ Second Coming to express my horror. “The powder keg of the Middle East is once again fully lit,” I wrote then.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed.
Can that awful tide be stemmed? Perhaps. But for that to happen we need the multitudes of Arabs and Muslims on the sidelines to stand up and to speak openly against the naked evil infecting their ranks. And we need the “progressives” of the world to wake up, to grow up, to stop being enablers of anti-Semitism, to stop being apologists for terrorism.
Alas and instead, much of the world is shaking hands with the devil. Worse, they’re embracing him with unbridled enthusiasm.
More than a thousand Jewish civilians murdered by Hamas last week will never dance again upon this earth. The same is true of the Palestinians killed by Israel’s retaliation, and for the thousands who will surely die in the brutal days and weeks of the war ahead.
And that has Satan and his minions dancing with glee.”
One year on, the blood-dimmed tide shows no sign of receding. Instead, with open conflict now erupting between Israel and Hezbollah and between Israel and Iran (the diabolical sponsor of both Hamas and Hezbollah) — it threatens to become a tsunami.
And the world’s embrace of the devil has tightened into a giant, ghoulish bear hug. Every gathering of the United Nations births fresh condemnations of Israel as world leaders miss no opportunity to take the side of those who wish, with rabid intensity, for the Jewish people to be exterminated once and for all.
Only the United States stands on the side of Israel. And even that support is tepid, contaminated by continual haranguing of Benjamin Netanyahu and his military for their “disproportionate” response to being attacked and by relentless calls for a ceasefire — as if a “proportionate” response to being attacked by fanatics who want to erase you from the face of the earth is even possible; as if a ceasefire on the part of Israel wouldn’t simply be a prelude to Israel ceasing to exist; and as if the war wouldn’t be over today if Hamas and Hezbollah laid down their arms and surrendered and if Iran desisted from both sponsoring and carrying out attacks on Israel.
As for the “progressives” of the world: their support of Israel-despising terrorists hasn’t abated. On the contrary, it has swelled into a continuous, full-throated roar of Jew-hatred, aided and abetted by the leadership of countries like Canada, which pathetically abstains from United Nations votes condemning Israel, as if “abstaining” is anything other than taking the side of terrorists.
And thousands upon thousands of young people in the West continue to shriek their support for Hamas and Hezbollah at rallies and encampments in our cities and on university campuses — young people who remain utterly ignorant of the long and complicated history of the Middle East; young people who are completely devoid of any understanding of the misogyny, cruelty and homophobia of radical Islam (“queers for Palestine!”); young people who are bereft of any empathy for, or indeed any knowledge of, the murderous hatred endured by Jews throughout the centuries; young people who have, at best, passing acquaintance with of the horrors of the Holocaust in which, in the words of Professor David Mikics , “the wicked swallowed the righteous, and evil prevailed over innocence”.
The forces that wish to see Israel wiped off the map have gleefully recruited these deeply foolish Western youngsters as “useful idiots” — although labelling them useful idiots is like calling Moby Dick a minnow.
Needless to say, Satan and his minions have danced themselves into a frenzy.
I’ve long been perplexed by the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, by the perpetual drumbeat of Jew-hatred, currently deafening but never wholly muted, not even in the direct aftermath of the Holocaust.
My wife and I have been deeply privileged to count many Jews among our friends and acquaintances; and as physicians, we have many Jewish colleagues, because a disproportionate number of Jews are doctors. And I can say, without hyperbole, that our universal apprehension is of a people amply endowed with kindness, generosity, intelligence, and industriousness.
Perhaps our experience is an outlier. But I doubt it.
And so from whence comes the Jew hatred?
Perhaps it’s envy, arguably the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. As Victor Hugo once said,
“The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.”
Jewish people are, as a people, astonishingly successful. Not only are they over-represented in medicine, they excel as lawyers, financiers, entrepreneurs, and inventors. Twenty-two percent of all Nobel Prizes ever awarded have been bestowed on Jews, who make up only 0.2 per cent of the world’s population.
(Iran is desperately trying to strengthen its military position by becoming a nuclear power, a goal it may be on the cusp of achieving. One wonders whether its leaders grasp the irony in the fact that the atomic bomb became reality because of the ingenuity of Robert Oppenheimer — a Jew.)
After the establishment in 1948 of the State of Israel on a dusty strip of desert granted them by the United Nations, Jews transformed that barren land into a gleaming, fertile oasis of democracy and innovation. (And it’s the only Middle Eastern country, by the way, in which Arabs and Jews are integrated — more than twenty per cent of Israel’s population is Arab, and many serve in government).
So maybe it’s envy that drives the perennial, deep-seated animosity toward Jews; maybe people simply can’t abide their successes, and that jealousy is funnelled into hatred.
Or perhaps the Biblical level of hatred toward Jews is, well, Biblical. That’s certainly the view of many theologians who point to the Genesis story of Abraham’s two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, as the foundation of enmity between Arabs and Jews. I’ll leave you to read the account for yourself (it won’t hurt you to read the Bible, I promise); the text clearly forecasts eternal strife between the descendants of Ishmael (Arabs) and the descendants of Isaac (Jews).
If that’s the case — if Biblical prophecy is working itself out — then the unholy zeal for Jew-extermination that burns within the breasts of radical Muslims will never be extinguished. Anti-Semitism will never go away. There’ll never be a workable “two-state solution”; how could there be, if one side will never shrink from its goal of eliminating the other?
Regardless of its roots, those of us who care about justice and morality and honour must remain eternally vigilant against anti-Semitism. We must never stand down in the face of hatred.
We need to stand firm alongside our Jewish brothers and sisters. We can’t afford to “abstain”; we can’t afford to be silent; we mustn’t allow the wicked to swallow the righteous.
The words of Edmund Burke can’t be repeated often enough:
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Excellent, I agree. Because I grew up in Montreal by the time I was 30 about 1/2 of all my friends were Jewish and I feel very close to the Jewish people. I just cant believe what we are seeing in Canada, this has to be stopped.
It's sad that the UN had devolved into a woke joke. They promote initiatives like UNDRIP, never thinking about what that would mean in Britain. They support "trans rights" at the expense of women's rights. And on and on. In my youth I thought of the UN as a force for good. Now I see them as sinister.
One of the things I have been upset to see is how some Hamas apologists, who decry globalist orgs like the WHO and UN in most cases, suddenly start using the UN support of Hamas as proof that Israelis are in the wrong side of history.