As an atheist,
I do not regard Judaism as any more rational than any
other religions,
so why is this page almost entirely in defence of Jews?
The reason is that
Judaism itself has a benign
(indeed very impressive)
history,
but other religions have an appalling history of
inexplicable violence towards Jews.
This page is really about those other religions.
Criticising religion is an important right.
But what is the difference between criticism and hatred?
What is the difference between
criticising Judaism as yet another supernatural meme
and simple anti-semitism?
Or criticising Catholicism and
hatred of Catholics?
Or criticising Islam and hatred of Muslims?
Passover
- The Jews smear blood on their doorposts
and God does not kill their first born.
But he kills the first born in all the other houses that do not do this.
And people would worship a God that does this??
Such a God is clearly evil.
Religious
circumcision of male infants,
while not the end of the world,
does display astonishing arrogance on the part of the religion,
that it is willing to permanently "brand" the bodies of people too young to know what is happening to them.
The Jews (and Romans) murdered the preacher Jesus
in the 1st century.
This noble martyrdom for his beliefs is rather spoilt by the fact
that his followers have
murdered millions of innocent Jewish men,
women and little children in revenge -
centuries of European anti-semitic killings
culminating in the bloodlust of the mid-20th century.
Now granted, Jesus could hardly have known this was going to happen.
But it still makes it hard to admire him -
or see his life as a simple tale of suffering and martyrdom.
The church canonised many "saints" who were supposedly "martyred" by the Jews
in "ritual murder"
(to obtain Christian blood for their cakes, or something).
Huge numbers of innocent Jewish men, women and little children were killed in response,
often by being burnt alive.
Embarrassingly, the church
has since discovered that these supposed "ritual murders" never happened.
William of Norwich,
the supposed victim of a "ritual murder" by Jews in 1144.
St. Dominguito del Val,
the supposed victim of a "ritual murder" by Jews, c.1250.
All the Jews of Saragossa were hanged (presumably including children).
Little St. Hugh of Lincoln,
the supposed victim of a "ritual murder" by Jews in 1255.
18 Jews were hanged.
St. Simon of Trent,
the supposed victim of a "ritual murder" by Jews in 1475.
15 Jews were burned alive.
The Holy Child of La Guardia,
the supposed victim of a "ritual murder" by Jews in 1491.
All the Jews of Spain were ethnically cleansed.
Decanonized saints
- If the church can actually name a saint, and get it wrong,
how can it possibly claim to be guided by God?
The Reformation may have been a great step forward to the modern secular world,
but Martin Luther
was a vile anti-semite.
About the Jews, Luther urged:
"First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt
whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them ...
Second, I advise that their houses also be razed and destroyed"
John Calvin
was a killer too of course.
He burnt the thinker
Servetus
alive in 1553
because his ideas differed with Calvin's own superstitious beliefs.
Calvin said:
"Whoever shall maintain that wrong is done to heretics and blasphemers in punishing them makes himself an accomplice in their crime and guilty as they are."
In the 16th century,
Pope Paul IV
first forced the Jews of Rome to live in a ghetto.
There is of course a direct line traceable from the medieval Jew burning
through to the modern Holocaust.
In no way can we say that the Holocaust
can be entirely divorced and separated from Christianity.
National Socialism and Anti-Semitism in the Arab World,
Matthias Küntzel, Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2005.
- "Anti-Semitism based on the notion of a Jewish world conspiracy is not rooted in Islamic tradition but, rather, in European ideological models. The decisive transfer of this ideology to the Muslim world took place between 1937 and 1945 under the impact of Nazi propaganda."
MEMRI
- Extracts from the Arab press translated into English.
Read their appalling ideas for yourself -
their hatred of the Jews,
their support for the killing of
Israeli and Western civilians,
their fundamental immorality,
their ignorance,
their conspiracy theories,
their hatred of western human rights and human freedom.
Why they deny the Holocaust, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, December 16, 2006
- "On top of nearly constant anti-Semitic propaganda,
much of the Muslim world hasn't even heard of it."
Ayaan Hirsi Ali herself never even heard of it until she was age 24
and got asylum in Holland.
"As a child growing up in Saudi Arabia, I remember my teachers, my mom and our neighbors telling us practically on a daily basis that Jews are evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims, and that their only goal was to destroy Islam. We were never informed about the Holocaust."
As she points out about the sick freak show of the
International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust
in Iran,
"What's striking about Ahmadinejad's conference is the (silent) acquiescence of mainstream Muslims. I cannot help but wonder: Why is there no counter-conference in Riyadh, Cairo, Lahore, Khartoum or Jakarta condemning Ahmadinejad? Why are the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference silent on this?"
Again, as before, as always, "moderate" Muslims are silent.
Mumbai terror attacks, Nov 2008
- Pakistani jihadis go out of their way to find Jews in Mumbai and kill them, because they, like all jihadis, are racists.
2 year old
Moshe Holtzberg
has his mummy and daddy killed in front of him,
for no reason other than they are Jews and the jihadi killers are racists.
The Rabbi and the Terrorists, Dennis Prager, December 02, 2008.
"The question is why?
Why would a terrorist group of Islamists from Pakistan whose primary goal is to have Pakistan gain control of the third of Kashmir that belongs to India ... devote so much of its efforts - 20 percent of its force of 10 gunmen ... - to killing a rabbi and any Jews with him?
The question echoes one from World War II: Why did Hitler devote so much time, money, and manpower in order to murder every Jewish man, woman, and child in every country the Nazis occupied? Why did Hitler ... weaken the Nazi war effort by diverting money, troops, and military vehicles from fighting the Allies to rounding up Jews and shipping them to death camps?"
The UN allows
countries that are not democracies
to vote in its decisions.
By doing so it forfeits all credibility.
No one should give a damn what the UN says about Israel (or indeed any issue).
In 1976, after Israel's brilliant
raid on Entebbe Airport
in Idi Amin's Uganda,
Kurt Waldheim
described the raid as "a serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state".
Idi Amin killed 300,000 people
in a reign of terror from 1971 to 1979.
Kurt Waldheim fought for Nazi Germany in WW2.
Richard Falk,
UN "Human Rights" Council
"Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories".
Falk defended Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979:
"the depiction of Khomeini as fanatical, reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false ... To suppose that Ayatollah Khomeini is dissembling seems almost beyond belief. ... Having created a new model of popular revolution based, for the most part, on nonviolent tactics, Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane governance for a third-world country."
The UN and the Jews
by Anne Bayefsky, February 2004,
notes that
over the past 40 years, almost 30 percent of the resolutions
passed by the UN Commission on Human Rights
to condemn specific states
have been directed at Israel.
No resolution has ever been directed at
the non-democracies of
China, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan or Zimbabwe.
This is because Israel has been refused admittance to the
Asian regional group
because of the bigotry of the Islamic countries in the group.
There are now attempts to resolve this
by giving Israel membership of the
"Western European and Others" group.
But it is still not a full member.
Simple graphic showing how the UN has no credibility.
Incredibly, this graphic is used by
Israel's enemies
to claim there is something wrong with Israel, not with the UN!
The Arab world
is openly anti-semitic,
and is not ashamed of it.
Europe hates Israel too, but claims
that this is different.
Europe has a long history of Jew-hatred,
culminating in the Holocaust.
In living memory, Germany, with the collaboration of France and other European countries,
and the support of many intellectuals,
rounded up millions of Jews for extermination.
Today, Europe, the mainstream left, and the far right
hate Israel.
They claim this is different from the past.
They claim this is not anti-semitic,
but they support
openly anti-semitic people like
Fatah, Hamas and Hezbollah,
and other Islamists.
It is true that not all
modern leftists and intellectuals who hate Israel
are anti-semitic.
There are
a range of trendy reasons why they hate Israel.
But they are on the wrong side of history again.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
expresses well the point that anti-semitism has always
been "hallucinatory".
It is not about what the Jews do.
It is about imaginary things.
Hitler's fantastical complaints about the Jews
were no more
based on reality
than the medieval complaints about the Jews
"causing" the Black Death.
Almost all complaints about Israel today are of the same
hallucinatory quality.
What Israel does and does not do
is simply irrelevant
to the lives of almost everyone in the Arab world.
And yet it consumes so much of their attention,
as if Israel and the Jews are
to blame for the fact that they are poor, unfree
and backward.
The entire Arab world is in the grip of a
hallucinatory anti-semitism
that achieves nothing.
The best thing Arabs can do is simply forget about Israel.
Q. "Do you mean to say that if Israel did not exist, there would suddenly be democracy in Egypt, that the schools in Morocco would be better,
that the public clinics in Jordan would function better?"
And in Europe,
Israel, rather than money-lending or Christ-killing,
is now the main "reason" given for European anti-semitism,
and the left is now the centre of Jew-hating, rather than the right.
Alan M. Dershowitz
- One can criticise Israel (or America)
- "But to single out the
Jewish state of Israel, as if it were the worst human rights
offender, is bigotry pure and simple."
Yes, of course
one can criticise Israel without being anti-semitic.
As many Israelis do - there is a vibrant democracy
with furious internal debate.
But among non-Jews,
I would say that
more than 95 percent of criticism of Israel
is anti-semitic.
Ironically, Martin Luther King Jr.
is named ultimately after
Martin Luther,
the vicious anti-semite.
Put it this way.
If you're a westerner, and Israel is one of the main countries
you criticise, then you're an anti-semite.
As a westerner, your main targets should be places
like Sudan and North Korea.
If Israel is just one of at least 60 states
that you criticise,
and your worst criticism is of non-democracies,
then you may not be an anti-semite,
and your criticisms may even make some sense.
The Left's Anti-Semitic Chic
by George F. Will, Feb 25, 2004.
"The appallingly brief eclipse of anti-Semitism after Auschwitz demonstrates how beguiling
is the simplicity of pure stupidity."
"hostility to Jews is strongest among those on
the Left who claim to be fighting racism"
She notes the deep need Europe has to get over its guilt about the Holocaust:
"Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the
Jews for their own destruction.
So instead of sounding the alarm over
genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred,
Europeans have eagerly embraced the
Nazification of the Jews"
Left-wing Holocaust denial: Comparing free societies to the Nazis. Comparing trivial things to the Nazis.
Comparing a western democratic government to the Nazis,
or their police to the Nazis,
or your teachers to the Nazis,
is a form of Holocaust denial.
It says that killing millions of innocent women and
children by shooting them in pits
or putting them in ovens
is "just like" telling some spoilt young person
that he can't stay up late, or demonstrate
on certain streets.
"Bush equals Hitler" adds up to holocaust denial
by Jonah Goldberg
- "If your son is murdered and I claim that it never
happened, I am denying the existence of a crime.
But if your son is murdered and I compare that
tragedy to losing your car keys, that is a form of
denial, too."
It is not just
moronic youth
that engage in this
left-wing trivialisation of the Holocaust.
It is a firmly established part of left-wing politics
and demonstrations to compare free countries like
America and Britain
- and, most unforgivably,
Israel
- to Nazi Germany.
Bigotry outside Faneuil Hall
by Alan Dershowitz,
on leftist anti-semites
screaming that he is just like Hitler.
See
call for protest.
"The sin that, in the opinion of the
screamers, warranted this comparison between me and the man
who murdered dozens of my family members was my support for
Israel."
A vile cartoon,
November 14, 2008,
in the
Emory Wheel
student newspaper, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA,
compares Jews to Nazis.
See controversy.
Obviously, being prevented from killing Jews
is the same kind of thing as being herded into a ghetto for extermination.
What kind of mind can regard the life-saving Israeli wall,
which has led to a massive drop in suicide bombings,
as similar to Nazi walls?
I don't remember the Jews of 1940 suicide-bombing German civilians in coffee shops.
I don't recall that the Germans herded them into ghettos in order to
protect the German people.
What Israel is up against:
Islamists protesting about Gaza, 10 Jan 2009, in Canada (of all places!) call for the extermination of the Jews of Israel.
"Jewish child, you are gonna fuckin' die!"
What are these people doing in the West?
Why were they allowed in?
Why are they not all deported?
From here.
Instead of the simple, true headline:
"Hamas shoot Palestinian protesters, killing one",
Reuters title their story:
"Palestinian youth killed in protest at Gaza border".
Why?
We all know why.
Reuters say the dead protester
"was accidentally hit by a bullet fired by Hamas Executive Force officers trying to keep the crowd under control."
Accidentally?
As the once-great
Charles Johnson said:
"When was the last time you saw Reuters give Israel the presumption of innocence like this?"
The BBC's West Bank correspondent
Barbara Plett
actually wept for the butcher of Jews
Yasser Arafat:
"when the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound,
I started to cry ... without warning."
"In 63% of the stories about Israeli operations, Israel or the IDF were named directly. Typical headlines were: 'Israelis kill militants in Gaza', ...
and 'Israeli strike kills four in Gaza.'"
"On the other hand, of the 7 stories concerning Palestinian attacks, none were written in the same style. The headlines took the responsibility for the attacks away from those who instigated them. ... typical headlines such as: 'Rocket injures dozens in Israel,' 'Gaza explosion kills two children', ... 'Two killed in clash in Gaza Strip,' and 'West Bank clash leaves three dead.' ... Since terrorist groups took responsibility for the attacks, why weren't they named in the headline?"
BBC's biased headlines almost never mention that the Palestinians
carried out the violence.
Israel just gets hit by "attacks" from somewhere:
"The Huffington Post: Bias In Pictures."
graphically
shows the kind of bias in reporting on Israel that is found throughout the western media.
From Huffington Post Monitor.
See also
Huff-Watch.
- monitoring media anti-Israel bias.
Since 1995.
