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?
Most atheists, for obvious reasons, are not bothered criticising Judaism.
Instead,
Christianity and Islam are their main targets.
Unfortunately, there is a world of anti-semites who do criticise Judaism,
often with
fake Talmud quotes.
So while a quick Internet search will find you lots of healthy liberal criticism of Christianity and Islam,
the same is not true of Judaism.
A search is likely to turn up anti-semitic sites.
One needs to be very careful with sources.
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 the 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 Holocaust
of the 20th century.
Now granted, Jesus could hardly have known this was going to happen.
But it still makes it hard to see his life as a simple tale of suffering and martyrdom.
When millions of innocent people are killed in revenge for your suffering,
your suffering becomes rather uninteresting.
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."
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.
The Mayor of Limerick in 1970,
Steve Coughlan
(Labour)
makes a speech defending the
1904-06 Limerick pogrom against the Jews.
He refers to the alleged existence of Jewish money-lenders,
who he calls
"warble fly bloodsuckers".
From Limerick Leader,
20 April 1970.
From here.
The ADL has done historic good work. But it seems to have lost its way recently.
It has gone beyond monitoring antisemitism
to monitor "hatred" in other areas, such as Islam and trans ideology.
As such, it becomes just another left-wing pressure group.
In 2023 it emerged that the ADL had
hired an antisemite
who was discovered ripping up posters of missing Israeli children.
The fact that the ADL
actually hired an antisemite shows there is something rotten with the organisation.
The ADL needs new leadership and to clean house.
Hiring an antisemite must be the greatest disgrace in the history of the ADL.
Anti-Israel guy called
Conor Madden
attacks me for linking to the ADL survey of global anti-semitism.
Why? I am not sure.
In this thread, he was disputing that the Palestinians are anti-semitic.
I linked to the ADL survey showing they are the most anti-semitic people on earth.
He attacked me for linking to the ADL.
His motives are unclear.
He never explained.
I wonder if he confused it with the EDL.
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?"
It's important to know the difference between Antisemitism and Antizionism.
See full size.
From Likud UK.
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.
But worldwide, among non-Jews,
probably the majority of criticism of Israel
is anti-semitic.
Alan M. Dershowitz, September 23, 2002,
says one can criticise Israel,
"But to single out the
Jewish state of Israel, as if it were the worst human rights
offender, is bigotry pure and simple."
Put it this way.
If you're a westerner, and Israel is one of the main countries
you criticise, you are deranged, and maybe an anti-semite.
As a westerner, your main targets should be places
like Sudan, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia 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 are not an anti-semite,
and your criticisms may even make 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"
It is possible to be anti-Israel without being a racist antisemite
or supporting racist antisemites.
Possible but, on a global level, unlikely.
From Elder of Ziyon.
A Belfast man (*) called Drew Blake
supports killing random Jews, 1 Feb 2023.
On 27 Jan 2023, a terrorist (in fact age 21, not age 15) killed
seven random Jews
in Jerusalem, including a child.
It was the worst terrorist attack on Israel since 2011.
Drew Blake does not even live in the Middle East, and he is not even Arab or Muslim,
but he still applauds the killing of random Jews.
He says the killer is:
"A young man Fighting for his own country".
(*) He puts "Glasgow / Belfast" on his profile,
but gets angry if you think he is Glasgow.
There are a number of real pro-Jewish
and pro-Israel quotes from MLK however.
He is quoted
as saying in private conversation in
1967:
"Don't talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism!"
Some people dispute this, but it was published in 1969
and no one disputed it until
2004.
The people disputing it are not credible.
MLK said in 1968:
"I see Israel, and never mind saying it, as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land almost can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy."
Comparing a western democratic government like the US or Israel to the Nazis,
or their police to the Nazis,
is a form of Holocaust denial.
It is a way of saying that the Nazis were not so bad.
That the things they did were like the things that modern liberal democracies do.
Comparing trivial things
- like restrictions on young people from the police or teachers
- to the Nazis
is also a form of Holocaust denial.
It makes one imagine that the person doing it has no idea what the Nazis were like.
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 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."
Me arguing
with some
US and Israel hater
who compares them to the Nazis.
It is a form of Holocaust denial.
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.
Israel is just like the Nazis!
In Nazi-occupied Europe, people were always holding demos like this, holding up posters
and screaming in the faces of Nazi troops.
That was always happening.
From here.
Anti-Zionism versus Anti-semitism explained. Totally different!
See full size.
From here.
