National Post (National Edition)
A test for all fair minds
Hatred for Israel the great moral disorder
It is the great moral disorder of our time. Dear Israel is but a spit of earth on a huge globe. Three years after six million Jews were put to torture, humiliation, whippings, rape, medical experiment, starvation, and vile death, was it not surely time — time for all the nations of the Earth who had reached some moral understanding of life and government — to allow Jewish people time to rest, time to mourn, time to see what and who might be left of them?
To find just one period, just one time, just one place where and when they did not have to start up in the middle of the night when unfamiliar sounds disturbed, did not have to hear demagogues howling at them from street corners, or put up with the trendy, ignorant western pseudo-radicals shouting in bullhorns from library steps. To not see their shops and homes targets of mobs and slanders, their synagogues battered.
A time when they might gather on a bit of land where dogs were not set upon them; where children did not mock them; where passerby thugs did not attack their elders in the street; where Jews unique in their sorrow and pain could meet with some of their tormented doubles, if for nothing else but to share laments and profound griefs, generate solace by shared company and memory.
Ah, Jews. Ah, Israel.
Poor Jews. It was not enough that Europe built a hecatomb of your kind because a madman and his mad country hated you. When you were nearly ripped out of history altogether, your spectacular survival over centuries and millennia genuinely threatened, averted as much by the chances of a war in which one side ignored you while the other industrialized your killing.
A guilty world — no, only a part of what should be a guilty world — offered you a spit of land: dust, bush, waterless (the former B.C. cabinet minister was correct in her description). I believe it's called a desert.
It was “presented” as the homeland for Jews in 1947. For (wrung with accents of burning pity whenever the word was said in this context) the “survivors.”
This was when “survivors” meant people — men, women, children, infants — who had been rounded up, packed into railway cars, families ripped asunder, thrown into hideous camps with sadistic guards and vicious dogs, worked to death, starved, and for days, weeks or (some few) for years, spat upon, beaten, treated like less than dogs — hollowed out from torture, starvation and hopelessness.
To still be breathing after that! That's a survivor.
(One of the heresies of our careless times is how we have let moralizing idiots, fat and comfortable woke types, haul out this word — “survivor” — to describe their own ignorant obsessions, their hypertrophic sense of privilege, to claim our attention.)
They survived Dachau, Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Pictures from 1945 tell what that word “survivor” really means. It had its signatures: the terrible signatures of broken, starved, nearly fleshless bodies, the terrible eyes of people who were dragged to hell. This was trauma. These were survivors. This was the meaning of the word when it had its terrible meaning.
It was a real trauma for battle-steeled soldiers merely to look at the victims of the camps. Trauma for the toughest men on Earth after the terrific clashes of a world war — witnessing the concentration camp victims broke some of them.
JEWS, ONLY, ARE HISTORY'S PERPETUALLY BRUTALIZED AND HUNTED PEOPLE.
I used to think of Israel as a sanctuary state, the only one of its kind in the world because (1) it was the only one needed — Jews, only, are history's perpetually brutalized and hunted people; and (2) because that part of the world that pretended to have a conscience and had been so numb and indifferent from 1935 on, would — at least for its own moral rehabilitation (or pretences) — allow those Jewish people still alive, and those persecuted in other nations, to gather finally, finally, finally in a place of their own.
The Jews by right of suffering immeasurable, persecution without relent, an attempt at their full extermination, deserved their own place — the place of their birth, where they had been for millenniums, the land of their history, and the land promised to them in the incomparable record and exaltation, the Torah.
And so, to today.
It cannot be otherwise that the hearts and souls of those who wisely love Israel are today so troubled when the enemies of Israel, those in the Middle East, those in North America and Europe — all those everywhere who root their very being in hatred of Israel — flood the streets and higher universities (irony, sarcasm, misattribution that word “higher”) with their Hamas flags, and blasphemously scream that exposed, tiny, embattled and peaceful Israel is a “genocide state.”
The cruelty of that charge after 1939–1945 is hideous; its fallaciousness obvious to a stone. That Israel should not even exist is the other charge of those that totally, mercilessly, ignorantly, deviously pass by the slaughter, terror, murder, rape and kidnappings of October 7. They clog our streets with hate signs and flags of another place, and cry “genocide” at any shop or store perceived as owned by a Jew.
That the red-ignorant core of this iniquity is centred on the campuses of Yale, Princeton, and that one in Toronto with the new woke name is much more a fading grief than a surprise. Ignorance and Arrogance should be the banner of these institutions. They bend to BLM, they bow to “from the river to the sea,” and they let slide the vile lies and insinuations of the true antisemitic protesters in every one of these crowds.
Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time.
Support for Israel is the moral test of democratic leaders and all people with thinking and fair minds.
More to follow in my next column.