Author: Judith Bergman

Judith Bergman is a writer and political analyst living in Israel.
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Europe is More Than Western Europe

(Originally published on Israel Hayom)

The rift in the European Union between the older, mostly Western European, members and the newer ones from Eastern Europe has become increasingly clear lately over the refusal of most Eastern European countries to receive migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

The European Commission has proposed reforms to EU asylum rules that would see financial penalties imposed on members refusing to take in what it deems a sufficient number of asylum seekers, amounting to $290,000 for every migrant. The penalties, if passed, are particularly aimed at the newest EU countries, such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, since these are countries who have closed their borders to migrants or are in the process of doing so.

Disagreement over how to respond to the migrant crisis in Europe, however, is not the only issue dividing the Eastern European members of the EU from Western European ones. Israel is another such contentious issue.

Several Eastern European countries, while having pasts rife with virulent anti-Semitism and atrocious records of behavior toward Jews during the Second World War, differ greatly in their policies toward Israel compared to their Western European counterparts. That does not mean that everything they do is in favor of Israel, far from it. The entire EU, including those Eastern European countries, voted in favor of the latest U.N. resolution to slander Israel, when they voted that Israel was the world’s only health violator. There must be some diplomats sitting around with very bad tastes in their mouths.

Nevertheless, Eastern European countries today represent the only part of Europe that, out of national interest or a genuine sense of solidarity, stands with Israel in one form or another. This is already saying much on a continent where, for example, Dutch Foreign Minister Bert Koenders only recently declared that calls to boycott, divest and sanction Israel are considered by the Netherlands to be “freedom of speech” and therefore legal. (It would appear that there are some serious cognitive issues in the Dutch government: What happens when the calls actually lead to real action, such as municipalities refusing to do business with Israel or refusing to buy Israeli goods and services? Would that be legal, too, according to the foreign minister? As discussed previously in this column, a Spanish court recently declared such municipal boycotts of Israel to be in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights, the same convention that Koenders invokes in his condoning of BDS as “free speech.”)

In December, Czech lawmakers passed resolutions criticizing the decision by the European Union to label Israeli goods from Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights, and urged the Czech government not to abide by it. Characteristically, all Czech political parties supported the resolutions, even those on the Left, save for the Communists, who in keeping with their Soviet legacy, claimed that the Czech Republic was too complacent towards Israel. In a country like the Czech Republic, which paid a high price for the experiments of Communism for over 50 years, such slogans make a negligible impression.

Czech Culture Minister Daniel Herman also praised the resolution, saying that the vote “aligned the Czech Republic with democratic countries that fully respect human rights and reject any form of discrimination.” Close your eyes and picture any Western European politician uttering those words. Perhaps Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom? No, it is impossible even to imagine such a thing.

The Czech Republic’s friendship with Israel extends back to the 1948 war, when the Czechs sold weapons to the fledgling Jewish state when very few others, wanted to do so. It would be sobering to remember at this point that the United States at that time enforced a weapons embargo on the entire region, whereas the British were in fact supplying both weapons and leadership to Arab militaries out to extinguish the Jewish state. During Soviet occupation, this friendship naturally went into a half-century long hiatus, but was rekindled after the end of the Cold War.

Most recently, the Slovak and Lithuanian parliaments have decided to form pro-Israeli caucuses, a result of an initiative from the Knesset Christian Allies Caucus, the World Jewish Congress and the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem.

“As Western European countries continue to turn their backs on the Jewish state, we see that Eastern European countries are more supportive than ever of the only democracy in the Middle East — Israel,” Knesset Christian Allies Caucus director Josh Reinstein said.

This may also be because these countries still retain a sense of logic and pride in their heritage and do not harbor any secret wish for national suicide. After living under totalitarianism for over half a century, while Western Europe was harvesting the peace dividend of being under the American protective wing and growing increasingly more wealthy and materialistic, forgetting completely what it means to be terrorized, those countries who used to be under the Soviet boot see very clearly that Israel’s fight against Islamic terrorism is their fight, too.

Dismissing Europe entirely as a place where support for Israel can be found is a fallacy, even if it is admittedly one that is easy to make in the current circumstances. There are friends of Israel in Eastern and Central Europe, even if their membership of the European Union frequently renders their scope of action limited. This is very important to keep in mind. Too many observers in Israel and elsewhere forget that Europe consists of more than just Western Europe.

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Hatred With and Without Algorithms

If you have ever found it profoundly disturbing that so much political debate centers on an online ‎platform, Facebook, which was originally about social interaction, but has by now metamorphosed into a ‎grotesque, many-headed monster that actively encourages (more about that later) and whips into a ‎frenzy existing hatred against Israel and Jews, your intuition was correct. The latest journalistic ‎experiment, in what can only be described as the dark underbelly of Facebook, confirms it. ‎

While the fact that Facebook is rife with anti-Semitic hatred is not news to anyone with even a fleeting ‎familiarity with the platform, the following is bound to disturb even the most hardened cynic.‎

A journalist from the British online newspaper Jewish News went undercover on Facebook, creating ‎fake anti-Israel internet profiles in order to infiltrate the anti-Semitic hate groups that proliferate on the ‎social platform. What he discovered were groups resembling “a lynch mob from the Middle Ages, its ‎members winding each other up until the entire group is burning with an anger that is desperate for an ‎outlet.” He mentions how one highly active group, “Israel is a War Criminal,” has more than 250,000 likes. ‎Browsing its timeline regularly, he says, “is a horrifying and deeply disturbing influence. … It is a ‎cesspit of vile and extreme political activism.”‎

What is of most concern, however, is not even the virtual cesspit of violent language and hatred, or the ‎sewer-like fabricated memes created, Goebbels-style, merely to elicit the most primitive ‎response against Israel and Jews. The most disturbing part in all this is that Facebook actively participates ‎in the hate fest, egging the participants on until hate is everywhere: “As the website builds a profile of ‎what you like and what you do not, it begins to form a unique bubble around your online existence … which means when I search for ‘Israel,’ I receive groups that are inherently pro-Israeli, but when ‘Mr. X’ ‎does, he sees a completely different list. … The truly disturbing element of the search results is that they ‎produce a list that is almost hermetically sealed in one direction. They give the appearance that the other ‎side doesn’t exist.”‎

In other words, Facebook’s algorithms ensure that users only see more of what they have already liked ‎and seen. Therefore, if you are an anti-Semitic or anti-Israel Facebook user, Facebook ‎aims to please by showing you anti-Semitic or anti-Israel Facebook posts, even if you just put in ‎‎”Israel” in the search field. In this way, those Facebook users “learn” that their warped reality is “true,” repeatedly ‎confirming their prejudices until the hatred has become all-pervasive. ‎

The Jewish News journalist’s observation regarding Facebook’s algorithms aptly confirms what Shurat‎ Hadin concluded in October, when the Israeli organization filed a lawsuit against Facebook: “Facebook ‎actively assists the inciters to find people who are interested in acting on their hateful messages by ‎offering friend, group and event suggestions and targeting advertising based on people’s online ‘likes’ and internet browsing history.”‎

In other words, Facebook actively works to create hate-filled, anti-Semitic echo chambers — a sobering ‎and truly horrific thought that everyone ought to consider, whenever they enter the virtual meeting ‎place.‎

The trouble with the online echo chambers is, of course, that they do not remain online. The ‎incitement makes its way into the real world, where it may manifest itself in stabbings and murders in ‎Israel and anti-Semitic hate crimes and terrorism elsewhere.‎

Let’s take a step back from the virtual world for a moment and contemplate whether we see the disturbing Facebook trend in real life as well. Echo chambers are not unique to the ‎virtual world of social media. It is a growing phenomenon in real life, as well — a particular version of “reality” ‎regarding Israel is promulgated, circulated and reinforced endlessly, until it becomes the only “truth.” ‎

The United Nations is one such echo chamber, where the very language applied about Israel is coded in ‎phrases that denote a reality that does not exist outside this disaster of an international organization. ‎Nevertheless, most of the diplomats involved in the U.N., whether they agree with this language or not in ‎private, uniformly employ it as if it were true, leading to the establishment of a false reality that has dire ‎consequences on the decisions and votes made against Israel. One recent and striking example was the yearly vote on Israel in the World Health Organization, where the Jewish state was again ‎denounced as the world’s only health violator. The absurdity of this decision is extreme, yet grown men ‎and women, highly educated diplomats from supposedly civilized nations such as the U.K., France and ‎Germany, supported the resolution. By doing this, they not only betrayed all logic and ‎the justice they purport to support, but they clearly demonstrated that there exists in the U.N. ‎an alternate reality similar to the alternate reality that Jew-haters inhabit online ‎in the seedy underbelly of Facebook.‎

Western academia and university campuses represent another echo chamber where the established ‎‎”truths” abut Israel may not be challenged according to the reigning rules of political correctness, and ‎where professors and social justice warriors reinforce each other’s deep-seated anti-Semitic prejudices ‎in a way that creates an alternate reality similar to those mentioned above. ‎

This is not, however, limited to university education. In Britain, a schoolgirl from Wanstead High ‎School was met with frenzied jubilation and won the regional final in a speaker’s competition, the Jack ‎Petchey Speak Out” Challenge, after giving a virulent anti-Israel speech.The speech was a primitive ‎variation of the most commonly spewed diatribes against Israel, yet she was applauded by the school’s ‎teachers and pupils, as well as the local authorities, and rewarded accordingly. ‎

This is the result of yet another echo chamber, which now exists in British primary education. The British ‎National Union of Teachers, aptly named NUT, actively condones similar propaganda to that which is ‎found on Facebook’s hate sites, in the U.N. and in academia, thus supporting from an early age the ‎imbibing of British children with hatred toward Israel and furthering the dissemination of Palestinian ‎propaganda. As an example of this, NUT recently supported a conference, “Nakba: Then and Now” in ‎London, organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. At this conference, ex-NUT President Philippa ‎Harvey, speaking on behalf of the union, described a new project called “Beyond the Wall,” which intends ‎to engage U.K. schools in learning about schooling in conflict zones. The project intends to show films to the ‎young Britons that illustrate “the daily struggles experienced by Palestinian children as they try to gain ‎an education.” One hardly dares to imagine the kind of untruths and propaganda running rampant in ‎those films.‎

Whereas it is important to fight the virtual cesspool of hatred, which serves as its own brainwasher and ‎echo chamber, as it were, on Facebook, we must not lose sight of the fact that the exact same ‎mechanisms at work on Facebook are very much at play in the way that anti-Semites and Israel haters ‎operate in the real world. There they create their own nonvirtual echo chambers, which are equally or ‎even more dangerous, because they have a much further reach than just the haters and trolls prowling ‎the internet. ‎

By surrounding themselves with like-minded haters and creating alternate realities and ways of ‎speaking about those realities, in schools, on campus, in academic circles and among diplomats in the U.N., ‎they ultimately become blind to any kind of objective facts, and they even lose the language needed for rational discourse about Israel. And they don’t even need computer algorithms to ‎do it.

(Originally published on Israel Hayom)

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‘Disproportionate’ Response to New York Stabber Highlights Hypocrisy Over Israel

“Knife-wielding man shot dead in midtown Manhattan” was the headline making the rounds on the internet on Wednesday. The man with the knife had not shouted “Allahu Akbar,” nor was he attempting to commit a terror attack. He was simply an apparently inebriated individual, identified as Gary Conrad, who went into a Food Emporium, where he allegedly became “aggressive and belligerent.”

According to NYPD Chief of Department James O’Neill, “he was swearing at the people in the store, swearing at the workers in the store.” Swearing, imagine that. What a lethal menace!

A police officer called to the scene began struggling with Conrad, who pulled out a knife. Police officers ordered him to drop the knife, but he continued to approach them with the knife in his hand. At that point, O’Neill said, an officer and a sergeant opened fire on Conrad.

They did not shoot him once. They did not merely aim to neutralize him by shooting him in the legs or his arms. They shot him an incredible nine times. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

Conrad had displayed “aggressive and belligerent” behavior at a food store by “swearing” and he had threatened police with a knife. For that he was shot nine times. Could this incident possibly be characterized as “disproportionate”?

Had this taken place in Israel, and had this man not been called Gary Conrad, but Mohammed, and had he not been merely an inebriated loon but a terrorist out to slash Jews, international outrage would have poured forth in torrents from the front page of every single news outlet and the mouth of every opinion maker worth his salt. The “disproportionate force” claim would have been thrown about and every self-respecting journalist would have asked why Israel had to kill the man — shooting him no fewer than nine times — instead of simply neutralizing him by shooting him in the legs or the arms and then taking him to hospital.

So far, not a single news report has questioned the judgment of the NYPD. No American liberal has come forth in self-righteous indignation, asking whether killing this man, who, after all, was not threatening to blow up the Food Emporium or stab anyone, may have been slightly on the disproportionate side. But those same liberals lie awake at night and pen heartfelt, emotional diatribes against Israeli “brutality” when Israeli soldiers kill certified terrorists and would-be suicide bombers as a last resort, to protect themselves and Israeli civilians.

Somehow, however, these liberals’ hearts do not bleed for a fellow New Yorker like Gary Conrad. Why might that be? My guess is that liberals, much like everybody else, do not like it when knife-wielding men roam their neighborhoods. It is one thing to sit safely behind your screen thousands of miles away from the Middle East, but it is something else entirely to have someone waving a knife at your neighborhood store, whether that person is a terrorist or just a criminal. Apparently, threatening Israelis with stabbings or blowing them up on the streets of Tel Aviv or Jerusalem is acceptable, but acting “aggressively and belligerently” by swearing inside a Food Emporium warrants death.

I am pointing this out because a knife-wielding man poses the same threat whether he wields his knife in the name of Allah or because his beer was not served fast enough. A killing is a killing. If anything, the response should be far more mild to someone who is merely displaying drunken aggressiveness than the response to someone who is intent on deliberately stabbing as many people as possible. Predictably, however, the press has not made that connection.

CBS news has derived some of the most blatantly biased and incompetent reporting from the terror wave in Israel. Most famously, CBS graced us with the atrocious headline “Three Palestinians killed as daily violence grinds on” after ‎three Arab terrorists armed with guns, knives and bombs attacked two border policewomen at Damascus Gate in Jerusalem in February. One of the police officers, 19-year-old Cpl. Hadar Cohen, ‎was killed in the attack.

So how did CBS news react to the killing of Gary Conrad? In the most matter of fact way possible. In fact, they even dramatized it by quoting the terrified witnesses, implicitly making it sound like a valiant rescue operation by the police, never questioning the legality of this “extra-judicial killing.”

According to some witnesses quoted in other news outlets, Conrad had blood pouring out of his head, which would strongly indicate that he had been shot there. Apparently, that is an appropriate response to someone being aggressive and belligerent and swearing in a Manhattan food store, disturbing busy New Yorkers. Real belligerence against Israelis? Now that is an entirely different matter.

(Originally published on Israel Hayom)

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Did France Get The Memo?

Imagine this news story:

“Last week, Israel convened representatives of 20 countries from across the world for an international conference to discuss what to do about the escalating security situation in France.

“‘Israel has no vested interest but is deeply convinced that if we don’t want to let the ideas of the Islamic State group prosper in this region, we must do something,’ Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said when asked why he was pushing for the conference despite France’s vehement protests. Netanyahu put special emphasis on the fact that ‘the international community feels there is an urgent need to find a solution to the spread of Islamic State in Europe, especially in France, which has the largest Jewish population on the continent.’

“‘We are not giving up, and neither are our partners,’ said the Israeli prime minister.

“Discussions at the meeting will be based on a new groundbreaking peace proposal under which France will give up large swathes of the south of France as well as the entire Ile-de-France in return for a permanent peace agreement with Islamic State in order to create ‘a just solution’ to the conflict. An Islamic State spokesman told reporters that unlike the French, they welcome the Israeli initiative.

“‘We wish Israel and its efforts success because the Israeli efforts are the only ones on the ground now, and could eventually result in giving the political process a good push forward at this stage,’ the Islamic State spokesman said.

“‘The aim of the conference is to prepare an international summit in the second half of 2016, which would include French leaders and leaders of Islamic State. The second conference would take place ‘sometime in the fall,’ said a spokesman for Netanyahu.”

Of course, the above scenario is fake. I have produced it here merely to make a point. Israel is not convening any conferences on the future of France, nor is it meddling in its affairs. There is a principle of international law called sovereignty, but in France and the rest of the European Union, that principle has been gradually usurped by a new principle, that of supra-nationalism.

Unfortunately, and despite the fact that Israel is not a member of the European Union, France and company appear to be unrelenting believers in the extension of this principle all the way across the Mediterranean to the Middle East.

What is not fake, however, is that this exact scenario is indeed taking place, but instead of Israel hosting a conference about France’s out-of-control problems with Islamist terrorism, which are indeed affecting French Jews in the most appalling ways, France is hosting a conference about the future of Israel’s territorial borders.

Thus, despite Israel’s protests, France has convened an international conference for May 30, consisting of ministers from 20 different countries who will presume to lord it over Israel’s future. Clearly, France and company did not get the memo about decolonization, or rather France and company seem just fine with exhibiting colonial behavior toward only one nation in the entire world, namely obstinate Israel, which still refuses to dance to the tune of the Europeans.

While the aim of the French initiative is to “encourage” bilateral negotiations, let no one be fooled: This is really about pushing an agenda down Israel’s throat, namely that of the 2002 Saudi peace initiative, which asks nothing less than Israel’s withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines and a “just” solution to the refugee issue without specifying what that means.

In other words, the initiative makes very serious demands on Israel concerning its existential issues, while being extremely shady on what Israel is supposed to receive in return. Also why drag this long-dead rabbit out of the old hat now, when the Palestinians have shown no sign whatsoever of letting up in the terror war against Israeli civilians and soldiers through ramming, stabbing and shooting attacks? All this conference does is reward terrorism.

What is, of course, conspicuous, is the timing. It is scheduled at a time when Europe is coming apart at the seams with the terror threat from Islamic State and the infighting in the European Union between the European Commission and the central and Eastern European members of the EU, whom the EU’s executive branch is threatening with huge fines for each migrant that these countries refuse to receive.

One cannot help but think that Israel, once more, is proving to be a very useful diversion (and scapegoat) for all the unrelated problems of the Western world.

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Telling the Truth About Humanitarian Israel

In December 2015, the British Daily Mail reported that Israel had saved more than 2,000 Syrians since 2013, at a cost of 50 million shekels ($13 million). Many of those saved were Islamic militants and sworn enemies of Israel, while only around 20 percent were civilians, according to the report.

These humanitarian rescue missions are very controversial. Why should Israel risk its soldiers and spend money to rescue Salafists who have a burning wish to destroy Israel? But it does, and this attests yet again to the under-reporting of facts about Israel in the international media. Compared to Israel’s size and the magnitude of Israel’s own security issues in the region, it is remarkable how Israel manages to be there for so many people in need around the world. When detractors whine about Israel not carrying its share of humanitarian outreach in the region, they are of course conveniently overlooking the fact that Israel is carrying infinitely more than what should be expected of a nation of Israel’s size, especially when that nation is actually treating and caring for its own enemies.

In just one development, Israel saved a 5-year old girl after she was seriously wounded in a firefight between rival militias in Syria. But that was not all. Israel is now also saving her from the cancer Israeli doctors discovered she was suffering while she was hospitalized in Haifa’s Rambam Hospital.

The story reads like something out of a thriller that could only take place in Israel: The hospital refused to release the girl after doctors discovered that she had cancer and security officials agreed. A bone marrow donor had to be found, and was — a relative living in an unnamed country that is an enemy of Israel’s, rendering it impossible for the relative to travel openly to Israel. Instead, a secret operation by Israel’s security services was launched to smuggle the relative out of that country and into Israel. The relative arrived on Monday and is now quarantined at the hospital with the girl, awaiting for the first round of treatment.

All the characteristics of the typical Israeli approach to life make up the ingredients of this story: the feeling of extreme responsibility of the doctors, refusing to let the girl go after saving her life once, and the almost unbelievable willingness of the security forces to risk their own soldiers to save her. This is Israel at its best and it is not a rare occurrence in this country, even if this particular example is of course extraordinary.

This is the ethos of Judaism and it is the ethos of Israel. But the world will never acknowledge this, because it refuses to see and hear the truth about Israel with a savage stubbornness that is reserved only for Israel. Appreciating that Israel values life above all else — all life, not just Jewish life — would make the anti-Israeli hatred, the anti-Jewish tropes and caricatures, the howls of “apartheid” and “injustice” melt away in an instant.

In an age where facts have long ceased to matter, however, all that the haters, especially those in the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, have to do is ignore those facts. The world is overflowing with naked emperors prancing about, peddling their lies and delusions to uncritical and impressionable audiences, who are much too willing to subscribe to them.

Thankfully, however, those lies and delusions are not having much of an impact on Israel itself. They are, however, having a detrimental effect on especially Diaspora Jewry around the world, notably on young Jewish students on college and university campuses in the West, where the anti-Israeli narratives are strong and thriving, not only in the BDS movement, but even among college and university staff to whom these narratives are almost as natural as breathing.

It is only persistence and proud stubbornness that will ultimately make the truth about Israel prevail in those dark corners, where the prejudiced hatred against Israel is allowed to fester. It is a supreme irony, of course, that Western universities have become feeding grounds for this hatred, considering that they are the rightful inheritors of the tradition of Enlightenment. This irony, however, is lost on most college students today, but it ought not to be lost on those who still believe in the value of truth and getting that truth out there. The story of Israel’s rescue of Syrians would be a good place to start.

(Originally published on Israel Hayom)

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When Jew Hatred Trumps European National Security

What is perhaps most conspicuous about the growth of anti-Semitism on the European Left, as exemplified by the current crisis in the British Labour Party, is that it is rising at a time when Europe should be busy with much more pressing issues, such as national security — particularly in London, where the terrorist threat keeps growing and security officials can barely keep up.

It has been less than two months since Islamic terrorists successfully targeted the Brussels airport and the Maelbeek metro station, killing 32 people and wounding many more. And it has been only half a year since the Paris attacks, in which Islamic terrorists killed 130 people and wounded nearly 400. These were groundbreaking, shocking events in the history of Islamic terrorism on European soil, so one would naturally assume that Israel and Jews in general, who make up such a marginal demographic group, constituting less than half a percent of the population of the EU, would be the last thing on European politicians’ minds. Another enormous immigration crisis looms, as 800,000 migrants, according to French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, are currently in Libyan territory waiting to cross the Mediterranean Sea. This means that Europe will most likely be facing even more chaos than it did last summer.

However, European politicians, instead of busying themselves with protecting their citizens from future terrorist attacks — as well as preventing another chaotic summer of migration chaos — incredibly find time to get mired in sordid squabbles about insane ideas of transferring Israeli Jews to the United States and claiming Hitler was a Zionist — as we saw in the U.K. — or composing elaborate peace conference initiatives to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — as we saw in France. If I were a European citizen, I would wonder why my government was occupying itself with these issues, which have no vital meaning to any Europeans, at a time when Europe is facing unprecedented security threats.

As I mentioned in a past column, one example of this preposterous mindset was France’s rejection of Israeli terrorism tracking technology, which might have possibly prevented the terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels — a clear example of Jew hatred trumping national security concerns, especially at a time when national security should be the top priority of every single European government.

In the wake of the anti-Semitism debacle in the British Labour Party, the obligatory inquiries will be made, solemn reports will be written and the culprits will be reprimanded, rebuked or excluded, upon which all will be forgotten and everyone will carry on as usual. It will change nothing, least of all the influence of the radical Left on mainstream leftist parties.

While the sordid ideas that are entertained by some in the European Left came out in the open in Britain on this occasion, this is most certainly not the last time we will see such a “crisis” revolving around the airing of some of these ideas, as the radical Left’s influence becomes more and more apparent, not only in Britain, but across the European Union. No one should harbor any doubts as to whether this is a British phenomenon — it most certainly is not, as anyone who follows Scandinavian politics can ascertain.

At any rate, whatever the outcome, for British Jews it is all too little and too late and the Labour debacle is only a political symptom of what has already become an undeniable fact on the street: Hate crimes against British Jews are at an all-time high. A report released on Sunday showed that there has been an increase of 50 percent in violent crimes against British Jews in the past two years and 1,000 anti-Semitic incidents in 2015 compared to 938 in 2014. Violent crimes constituted 196 incidents in 2015 compared to 126 incidents in 2014.

In other parts of the U.K., Jews are not faring any better. Almost 20 percent of Jews in Scotland have said that they have been victims of hate crimes. In Glasgow, home to the majority of Scottish Jews, more Jews are leaving or fearing to identify as Jews in a city, which has become increasingly hostile, something that culminated in 2014, when the Glasgow City Council decided to fly the Palestinian flag in what it said was a show of solidarity with the people of Gaza.

Just as elsewhere in Europe, these developments are more likely than not to result in an even greater exodus of Jews from the European continent. Israel will be the richer for that and Europe the poorer. This leaves the Europeans with nowhere to escape from their irresponsible politicians. But they should ask why Israel and the Jews continue to be an almost clinical obsession to the point where Jew-hatred trumps national security. It would be very interesting to hear the answer.

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Blame the Jews, Not the Terrorists?

A disturbingly clear pattern has emerged in the wake of the increase in terrorism around the world, especially in the West. Whenever there is a terrorist attack, the parents, friends and families of the perpetrators are always in “deep shock.” They cannot fathom from where their terrorist offspring, who had always been so “normal and good,” got their inspiration. The parents have absolutely “no idea” what could possibly have prompted the attacks.

It is conspicuous — and pathetic — how uniform these parents of Muslim radicals are in their frantic denial of knowledge and responsibility for raising monsters that go out and commit such atrocities. But the politically correct mainstream international press never probes deeper and lets the parents off the hook easily. After all, the international mainstream media pushes and encourages the very victimhood narratives that the parents’ denials and feigned “shock” feed into in order to escape further scrutiny. It is astounding that no one in the media seriously questions these uniform denials.

Among all these stories of feigned shock and surprise, that of the parents of the Hamas terrorist who bombed the Jerusalem bus recently (wounding 20 people and killing himself) takes the prize. Not only do the parents insist they had “no idea” their son had been involved with the Hamas, they feel no remorse for his actions and astoundingly blame Israel and the Jews for his actions: “You Jews have to understand something: Abed al-Hamid did not come from a poor family; he came from an affluent one. He had his own car. A family with property and money … a cultured household — with manners, respect, education — which opposes violence. You Israelis have to ask yourselves what causes a boy like ours to want to do such a thing. And I am telling you: Israel is responsible. Israel caused this generation to act this way. This generation has no future. No work. You pressure them and hurt them and create a hopeless situation for them. You are turning the young generation into what it is. The next generation, the young children, will be even more dangerous.”

So while their terrorist son had everything he could wish for in material wealth and came from a “cultured household,” he still had “no future” because of the Jews. What else is new?

But perhaps his parents were not so innocent. As his mother says, in what is difficult to characterize as anything other than a defense of her son’s actions, “It was an act of self-defense. As an enlightened person, I would find it hard to do something like [blowing up a bus]. Perhaps I would have done things differently, maybe through writing. But everyone has his own way of [taking part in] resistance.”

Her son was merely taking part in the “resistance” in his “own way.” Perhaps his mother’s “peaceful” idealization of the “resistance” (against what exactly? This is never clarified — the “resistance” according to Abbas and Hamas is very simply the resistance against the existence of every last Jew on Israeli soil) gave her son an idea or two.

The hatred emanating from the words of these affluent, “cultured” parents and their unremorseful threats against Israeli society of a future, even more dangerous, generation, speak for themselves.

However, they are right about their son’s generation. It is indeed dangerous, because it is steeped in unmitigated hatred, not only at home but at every turn it takes: in kindergarten, in school, on TV, in the mosques and on the streets — in all these places, this generation is taught that killing Jews is a good thing. As their son watched one terrorist after another celebrated as a martyr of Allah, having streets and squares named after them and their families richly rewarded by the PA, this son of “cultured” parents drew the logical conclusions of what he had been taught to worship and revere all his life, and went out and killed Jews. Who — least of all his parents — could possibly be surprised about that?

Ironically, the parents inadvertently made a big propaganda mistake by emphasizing that the terrorist had come from a financially comfortable, “cultured” household — putting to rest, finally, the idea that terrorists become terrorists out of grievances, for lack of jobs, poverty and so on.

The answer to the question of what causes “a boy like ours to want to do such a thing” is not difficult: It is unadulterated hatred of the Jews, as taught to and inculcated in children all over the Muslim world, along with the accompanying refusal to accept a Jewish state in Israel. It is about the Islamic injunction to perform jihad against infidels and the ethics stemming from that injunction. When Arabs massacred Jews in the Hebron pogrom in 1929 there was no “occupation” to “resist.” There were just Jews to hate. Nothing has changed, apart from the rhetoric.

(Originally published in Israel Hayom)

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Opting Out of Freedom

During the occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany, a young woman found herself traveling on a packed tram. She was Jewish but living in hiding and pretending to be a non-Jew so as to save herself and the few people in her family who were still alive. The tram was not only packed to the brim, but also filled with German officers, raising the risk of her being caught.

The woman was sitting next to a Polish peasant woman who was in town to sell produce. At one point during the ride, an insane impulse grabbed hold of the woman, and she suddenly reached out and pinched the peasant’s leg, right there, in the middle of the packed tram, crawling with Germans.

This could have been the end of her. The Nazis could have grabbed her and snuffed out her life, as they did with millions of others. The reason I know she did not meet her end is that I would not be here to tell the story if she had: The young woman was my grandmother.

What happened? The peasant woman did not scream out in pain or curse my grandmother. She kept still, quiet and unresponsive to my grandmother’s unprovoked violence. The tram continued on its bumbling way, and my grandmother, perhaps drawing a long breath, was saved by the peasant woman’s grace.

I have thought about this story countless times over the years. My grandmother never gave a straight answer to why she acted in this manner, putting her life at risk on a whim. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to realize that my grandmother’s act was not necessarily meaningless, even if it was extremely reckless.

I have come to believe that her act — a rather reprehensible act of violence — was an impulsive act of defiance. It was a way of punching fate in the face, as it were, and challenging it to a fight at a time of extreme oppression and total absence of freedom. Showing her hostile and ruthless surroundings that she was there, too, not just a shadow hiding from extinction, but a living being forced to spend her every breathing moment guarding her life from extinction.

But why did the peasant woman keep quiet? She did not know my grandmother and she could have screamed and cursed her, drawing the attention of the German officers. My guess is that this rare woman, stoic as she was, instinctively realized that any pinch from my grandmother was a caress compared to the pain that the Germans would have unleashed and she would have no part of it. She saved herself, most likely, along with my grandmother.

After the war, the occupier’s flag changed and instead of the swastika came the hammer and sickle as the Soviets mercilessly snuffed out any brief euphoria. Eastern Europe was a place bereft of freedom, where the thought police controlled all avenues of communication and the only accepted speech was that parroting the communist slogans of the Soviet politburo.

My grandmother continued her life in this “communist paradise,” where there was no freedom from communist orthodoxy — although conditions in Poland were far from being the worst among the countries behind the Iron Curtain — and where, in the words of George Orwell, if you wanted to keep a secret, it was best to keep it hidden even from yourself.

Having been inoculated against any and all versions of communism and socialism from a very early age — a natural consequence of having felt the effects of those ideologies in real life and not just as “beautiful” theories — I often marvel at the speed with which history is forgotten.

It has only been a quarter of a century since the United States conclusively won the Cold War against the Soviets, yet I often ask myself whether the Soviets aren’t metaphorically jumping for joy from their place in hell, considering how political correctness has permeated public discourse in the United States and Western Europe.

After all — and tragically very few people know this — the standard tropes of political correctness, especially in Israel-related discourse, were conceived by the Soviets. When young people think they are fighting for social justice and freedom, they are often repeating Soviet tropes that would have made Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev proud. It was he who, after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, told Yasser Arafat that the invasion amounted to “the same genocide against Palestinians that the Nazis committed against other people during World War II.”

The terrible accusation that Israel is an apartheid state is also a Soviet invention, which has refused to die even after the demise of its inventors. There is a certain irony in the fact that young college-age Americans, who in the old days would have been fighting the Soviets, are now reciting Soviet slogans.

I wonder at the ease with which perfectly free people throw away their freedom of speech in favor of living up to the expectations of political correctness, rigid as they are in all their reductionist groupthink. Living in free societies, they are seemingly incapable of appreciating how precious that freedom is, and how easily it can be snuffed out. Not by invading armies of the totalitarian kind, but by the equally totalitarian impulse to adhere to a particular rendition of reality.

Current generations living in the West have never gone through the experience of being reduced to complete silence, desperately communicating their anger by pinching total strangers on trams. They have the entire world at their feet and still they choose to narrow it to its smallest components, censoring themselves and others who disagree with them, until all that is left is the embarrassing sight of shrunken, small minds, fearful of sticking out in the crowd.

“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better,” George Orwell wrote in his satirical book “1984.” Political correctness, and all the ills of intellectual dishonesty and moral cowardice that flow from it, can only become as pervasive as it is when the majority prefers happiness over freedom.

This article was originally published by Israel Hayom. 

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Israel Moves Beyond Europe by Signing China Agreements

While Israel continues to be vilified around the world, most recently by the U.N. Human Rights Council (which puts on the same circus every year at its month-long session, when it singles out only Israel for condemnation), Israel continues to build and strengthen diplomatic and trade relationships.

The second annual meeting of the Israel-China Committee for Cooperation in Innovation was held on Tuesday at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, hosting an 80-member Chinese delegation, led by Chinese Vice Premier Liu Yandong, and including three ministers, nine deputy ministers and 14 university heads. Israel and China signed 13 bilateral agreements, one of them a 10-year multi-visit visa that will facilitate business and tourist travel between Israel and China. The only other countries that China has such an arrangement with are the U.S. and Canada, which shows just how highly China values its cooperation with Israel.

Furthermore, a delegation of that magnitude, both in size and seniority, clearly shows that China considers Israel to be an important partner and that all the condemnations mean very little once you are outside the U.N. building in Geneva. Those who realize that it is in their own interest to cultivate relations with Israel look past the ritual denunciations and relate to Israel on a bilateral basis.

One important outcome of Tuesday’s meeting, which can hardly be overestimated, is that Beijing has shown interest in beginning free trade negotiations with Israel. Such an agreement could potentially double bilateral trade from $8 billion to $16 billion.

“I was delighted to hear today from Vice Premier Liu that China is prepared to begin free trade agreement negotiations with Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters at a joint press conference. “This is a momentous development and we are ready to do so right away.”

The closer trade ties Israel cultivates with countries such as China and India, with whom Israel also enjoys very good relations, the less Israel will have to rely on trade with the European Union with its cognitive war, boycotts and deeply anti-Israeli sentiments. However, the European Union is still Israel’s primary trade partner, with trade in 2014 amounting to over $30 billion.

When it comes to the EU, the problem is not just the anti-Israel sentiment. The EU is caught in an economic downward spiral, which is only going to worsen in light of the current migrant crisis and problems with Islamic terrorism — problems that, as the recent attacks in Brussels clearly demonstrated, the continent is ill equipped to deal with. This means that with time, the European Union will very likely become a much less interesting partner.

Also, very importantly, the highly anticipated increase in flights between China and Israel will commence next month, as China’s Hainan Airlines begin operating three weekly flights between Beijing and Tel Aviv. Israel’s El Al Airlines already operates three weekly flights on the same route. There is a huge untapped market for tourism in China, with Chinese travel abroad booming. One can find Chinese tourists in even the smallest European outpost, but Israel has so far not tapped the potential of Chinese globetrotters.

“To say that not much has been done to bring Chinese tourists to Israel is not true. It would be more correct to say that almost nothing has been done,” Tourism Minister Yariv Levin said last July.

According to a report in Haaretz, in 2014 about 32,000 Chinese nationals visited Israel, up 29% from 2013. The upward trend continued in 2015. During the first five months of 2015, 18,700 Chinese tourists visited Israel, a 35% increase over the same period in 2014. However, considering the existence of 107 million Chinese tourists, Israel is benefiting from a very small piece of the pie. This is now likely to change dramatically with the new visa agreement and the increased flights from Beijing.

More than ever, Israelis should start learning Chinese in order to facilitate the growth in both trade and tourism that these new agreements in tourism and trade are likely to bring. There is much to be said for moving beyond Europe.

(Originally published on Israel Hayom)

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Shame On You Poland

The Polish national anthem, in a glass-half-full kind of way, solemnly declares, “Poland is not yet lost.” These optimistic words, which do not actually sound very cheerful, especially when performed to the anthem’s depressing tune, were written by Jozef Wybicki in 1797, two years after the third and last partition of Poland between the great powers of the day: czarist Russia, Prussia, and Austria.

Poland, once an empire in its own right, never recovered. It did not become an independent state again until 1918, and then enjoyed independence only briefly, until Nazi Germany invaded it on Sept. 1, 1939, and proceeded to occupy and destroy it, aided by the Soviet Union. After the war, Poland, which had been reduced to rubble by the Germans, was once again devoured, when the Soviet Union occupied it and made it a satellite state, cut off from the non-communist world by the Iron Curtain. Only after the end of the Cold War did Poland re-emerge as a self-determining state.

As reported by Israel Hayom, the governing Law and Justice party in Poland has embarked on a strategy to promote certain glamorous episodes in Poland’s history, such as the anti-communist resistance after World War II, while aiming to suppress the discussion and research into less convenient topics, particularly how Poles helped massacre their Jewish compatriots during the Nazi occupation. The current nationalist government’s revisionist historical policies should be viewed in the light of the above history, which has informed how Poles have seen themselves and others throughout the centuries.

One obvious aspect of Polish history, which cannot be emphasized enough, is the prevalence of a virulent antisemitism that continues to haunt the country today. After World War II, the few Jews who had been left alive out of a pre-war Jewish population of over 3 million were met by Poles who had moved into their houses and overtaken their valuable possessions — many of which have not been repatriated to their rightful owners to this day, since communist Poland subsequently expropriated many of them. On top of all that, the Poles rained fresh pogroms on the heads of the Jewish concentration camp survivors, such as the terrible pogrom in Kielce in 1946.

Jan Tomasz Gross, the historian who more than anyone has revealed the extent of Polish war crimes against Jewish neighbors during the Nazi occupation, is being demonized by the current Polish government, with the president even threatening to strip him of a national honor bestowed upon him 20 years ago. The truth hurts, no doubt, but Gross has not relented, claiming that Poles killed more Jews than they killed Germans during the war, which is not an unreasonable claim at all, given the speed and ease with which Germany occupied Poland and the zest with which Poles threw themselves into killing Polish Jews, as documented by Gross in his book, Neighbors.

Antisemitism flared up again after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Poland decided to take the Soviet dissatisfaction with Israel out on the country’s remaining Jews — around 13,000 of them — by firing them from jobs, denying them the right to study at university, and various other forms of harassment. Consequently, nearly all the remaining Polish Jews left Poland between 1968 and 1972.

Yet, even in a country largely bereft of Jews — albeit with a burgeoning Jewish cultural industry, which profits from the country’s wealth of Jewish history — antisemitism persists like a plague for which there is no cure. In November 2015, a protest against taking in Muslim refugees at the western city of Wroclaw ended with the burning of an effigy of an ultra-Orthodox Jew holding the flag of the European Union. Antisemitic graffiti is not uncommon and even the Polish language has traces of it with some Poles using the expression “to Jew” as a way to communicate all things unsavory.

Polish society is very formal, and communication is always polite, with men being addressed as “sir” and women as “madam.” Not that long ago, it was still common for men in polite society to greet women with a symbolic kiss on the hand in the old-fashioned French way, from where Polish culture has traditionally taken many of its cues. So much more disturbing is the primitive undercurrent of antisemitism, which exists just under the polished veneer, as it has indeed done throughout history in all European societies.

Before embarking further upon the jingoistic course of historical enhancement, the Polish government might want to reflect on the tremendous debt it owes to the Polish Jews, for everything they brought into Polish culture and for the murderous way in which the Poles ultimately repaid them. They ought also to ask themselves if Poland itself is served well by glossing over the crimes that were committed in order to communicate a picture post card to the younger Polish generations. Viewed from Israel, the question that inevitably comes to mind is this: How dare they?

This article was originally published by Israel Hayom.