What I Like About Antisemitism

Peloni:  A fascinating analysis!

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

Image by BlalckPestKommander – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikipedia

It is, first, a fascinating sociological phenomenon, like a virus, if not biological then spiritual, whose etiology and transmission between people remains a mystery.

Consider the peculiar behavior of the BBC this January 27 that reported it was the annual United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day but said nothing of its Jewish victims and their tormentors. It seems to have been a mutation of the known mental disorder of Holocaust denial, which in some jurisdictions is even a crime.

It is a day since instituted in 2005 when scores of foreign ministries issue statements noting the UN-invented day, with all of them exhibiting the same inability to focus exclusively on what was done to the Jews. Yes, these official government statements condemn antisemitism but tack on all kinds of other hatreds and alleged bigotry, e.g. Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, prejudice of all kinds.

What is so uncanny is the uniformity of this behavior. It is almost as if all these foreign countries had coordinated with one another to do this, when surely that never happened.

Indignant American politicians no less are known to “condemn antisemitism and all kinds of discrimination!”

In 1960s America, a major social cause was the struggle for equal rights for Negroes, with no nod whatsoever to other victims of injustice; like Native Americans, Japanese interred during WWII. Just the civil right of Negroes was the focus, oppressed by segregation in the American South.

But when it comes to the Jews, there is this wide-spread discomfort in singling them out, accompanied, oddly, by a contrary appropriation and even “stealing” from them. Islam, for one example, is nothing but the theft of the Jewish religion and Jewish history, and at the same time Muslims hate Jews as the most horrible people on earth. Consider the word “Islamophobia.” The Muslims covet everything the Jews have and see in antisemitism a weapon the Jews wield to guilt-monger the world into getting their way. They say Jews made up the fiction of the Holocaust, got the UN to feel guilty and license them to barge in and steal Palestine from the Palestinians.

So, the Muslims, envious of the power of antisemitism, came up with their imitative Islamophobia, which is a profoundly dishonest neologism. “Phobia” is a Greek word for fear chosen by Dr. Freud to describe baseless fears, so Islamophobia purports to describe fear of Islam as baseless, which is simply evidence of a cracked-brain reality-testing.

Since 9-11, it has not been irrational to fear Islam. Neither has it been since the slaughter of more than a hundred people in the Bataclan club in Paris; or after the murder-bombing of more than twenty young people at a rock concert in Manchester, England, or the seasonal driving of trucks into European Christmas markets.

Hostility to Islam may also derive from the modern inconvenience for billions of people who fly commercially of coming to the airport early to endure the security hassle. A non-Muslim may enter a mosque but must remove his shoes as others do, and in this modern annoyance, Muslims have gotten billions of people to remove their shoes.

The word “genocide” has also been stolen and corrupted. Samantha Power was Obama’s choice for UN ambassador because she wrote a book deflating the uniqueness of the Holocaust. It contains nine chapters, each one a “genocide” in her mind, with only the Jewish Holocaust authentically one. Hers was an exercise in deflating the unique mass extermination of this people. The German genocide was a war to conquer the whole world to find and murder every Jew in it so that there would be no more Jews in the future.

President Trump no less recently condemned the murders of more than one hundred white farmers in South Africa as “genocide,” and of course Israel itself is now smeared with that lie.

“Holocaust” as a word has also been uniquely abused considering its eerie and special connection to human sacrifice and the Jews’ rebellion against that ancient practice.

If it were possible for the Jewish nations to copyright the term, that might help. Via Greek and Latin versions of the Torah, the word was invented to translate the Hebrew olah, meaning the “whole burnt sacrifice” of an animal. This is what Abraham was commanded to do to his son Isaac, when a major lesson of that drama was to portray the God of the Jews opposed to human sacrifice.

That religious psychodrama unfolded at the top of the hills inhabited down below east and west by Canaanites who engaged in every imaginable human perversion including human and child immolation.

The Aztec too were practitioners of human sacrifice and not coincidentally the anti-Jew actor Mel Gibson made a Hollywood film glorifying them.

The Binding of Isaac (Jews don’t call it the Sacrifice of Isaac as Christians do; Muslims too call it a sacrifice too. Jews do not because there was no sacrifice; that was the whole point). The episode was G-d’s way of acting out the message that unlike the gods in earlier generations, whose religions called for this, the G-d of Avraham wanted it to vanish from His world.

“Holocaust,” is composed of two Greek words: holo, forerunner of the word in English “whole,” and the Greek caustios meaning “capable of burning.” Ergo, the very term has a special relationship to the Jewish religion’s opposition to human sacrifice and what was done to the Jewish people in 20th century Europe.

The Holocaust was arguably the greatest human sacrifice in history, ironically acted out upon the Jews who gave the polytheistic world the very idea of only One G-d Who opposed this religious ritual.

The Jewish religion gave the world this soul-rattling story of G-d calling Abraham to kill his own beloved son — but of course G-d never had any intention of seeing Abraham do that; the denouement of the episode reveals that.

Fast forward now thousands of years to our time’s annual United Nations International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It should be a day that in the future that official Israel ignores for its corruption in the spirit of the BBC. It leads to the inability of peoples to peer into the abyss of what mankind did to the Jews. This memorial day was conceived inside the UN twenty years ago, that coliseum in which Jews daily in their born-again state are verbally crucified.

This, then, is why I “like” antisemitism, a societal distemper affecting the minds of millions that percolate with fantasies of Jews committing horrible atrocities that have no basis in truth. Like “Israel committing genocide;” like calling Israel an “apartheid” society; like accusing the Jews of stealing Palestine from the putatively primeval Palestinian people “from the river to the sea.”

It is all so bizarre. Israel is accused of apartheid when that social injustice in white-run south Africa was all about the color of a person’s skin; and if it was not white, one’s life was constricted. Everybody in apartheid southern Africa had a national identity card imprinted with his skin color, “white,’ “black” or “mixed race.”

Versus Israel, where there are no laws about anyone’s skin color. On the contrary, this tiny state is reasonably the most racially, genetically, integrated citizenry in the world. In pre-Zionist Eretz Yisrael, the land was, in the image of 1857’s novelist pilgrim Herman Melville, a “caked…depopulated Hell.” But then came the Zionists forty years later and in their wake Jews from over 100 countries who rose to the Land to restore it to Jewish habitability, leaving countries where they had lived for generations, accepted converts and married them. Israelis come in all the skin colors of man, all the hair textures and shapes of the eye. And they marry one another. To call Israel a racist, apartheid society is simply insane.

Antisemitism is a behavior peculiar to the Jews, a kind of societal distemper. What other religion does this to some people’s minds?

Which is why I like it; evidence of the unique truth and power of Jewishness — which is a better translation of yahadus than Judaism because isms are commonly man-made ideologies when the Jewish religion is no man-made ideology. Man-made isms commonly have a lifespan like the humans who invent them. No serious mind any more takes seriously Communism which had a run in the 20th century in the Soviet Union, Red China and still has a hold there in Korea and elsewhere, but no serious person takes Marxism seriously anymore.

In the 1950s in the post-war West, the philosophy of Existentialism was all the rage. Not anymore. Where are the Existentalists today and the American Transcendentalists of the 19th century?

In ancient times, the Jews suffered under the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans too. Only today, those societies are gone. No one speaks their languages, no one practices their religions.

Only the Jews survive, speaking the same language as their ancestors in the same country, and practicing the same religion as they did. And that fact, I believe, is a major instigator of antisemitism because it is evidence that the Jewish religion is onto something; that the Jews’ very existence is evidence of the G-d that Jew-haters don’t want to know exists because the Jews’ G-d wants people to choose good over evil, when doing evil is frequently pleasurable.

Antisemitism is a fascinating societal malady, a kind of psycho-spiritual malaria that lies dormant in the body politic for unknown periods then re-emerges to infect the body politic anew.

That the BBC would do something so obviously wrong as to deny the Holocaust of the Jews, only makes this Jew smile. Only the Jews do this to the minds of millions.

Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.