Jews are hated up to a point. Past that point, more than tolerated, they are venerated. To memorialize dead Jews – the more the better – the vilest anti-Semite will go the extra mile. Among the many egregious examples of such ghoulish behaviour two stand out.
The visage of Linda Sarsour, an American Muslim icon who led the “million women march” and that kind of thing, could be the Feminist trademark. As for Muslim women, can it be that where Jews rush in where angels fear to tread, Muslims are ambivalent about the wrapped up darling of progressives gushing about the modern benefit of Sharia law?
Woke Rabbis on the other hand take to Linda Sarsour, bigotry and all.
“I don’t feel at all uncomfortable about her,” said Rabbi Sharon Brous of LA when her alliance with Sarsour on BLM, anti-Israel and refugee protests came under scrutiny. It seemed to imbue Sarsour with the confidence of unfettered license to tell Zionist Jews exactly what she thinks of them.
“Israel,” she said, “is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else”. And, “Nothing is creepier than Zionism”.
Nothing is creepier too than Sarsour’s dedication to a Palestinian Arab compatriot who put a bomb in a Tel Aviv supermarket, cutting short the lives of young Israelis. Sarsour campaigned to dissuade the US government from deporting the convicted terrorist; yet – and here the personality does a summersault – Sarsour displays a deep respect for American Jewish dead. Her fundraising to repair Jewish graves in St Louis made headlines,. And her commemorating the Holocaust with correct solemnity is another act in her favour – at least for Jewish progressives whose identity as Jews depends on – other than consuming bagels and lokshen soup – the Holocaust of course.
A second weird anomaly is Navi Pillay, at one time the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. In that capacity Pillay always kept the prescribed bad eye on Israelis and the good eye on their killers. Pillay exemplifies the United Nations’ creed that Israelis can do no right and Palestinian Arabs no wrong. And how far she bends to the creed! The wife-beating so rife in Palestinian society can’t even upset her beliefs. Pillay turned the compulsory bad eye on Israel: the occupation, she said, drove Palestinian Arab men nuts.
None of it stopped Pillay from holding a seminar on Holocaust victims. She eulogized a Prague boy named Petr Ginz who was gassed to death. In the august hall of the UN Human Rights Commission Pillay held up his photograph. The customary silent minute was observed to honour the six million.
Clearly commemorating the Shoah is a virtue signal no public figure can afford to miss. There may however be a force at work deeper than political correctness. A bizarre psychosis could be playing out.
Jean-Paul Sartre writes of a wartime friend who had no problem with Nazi death camps,, yet on his mantelpiece he kept a photo of a Jewish friend shot by the Gestapo. Anti-Semitism, he explains in a wartime classic, “Anti-Semite and Jew” is not a bad opinion of Jews ,it’s a warped personality. The anti-Semite sees nothing amiss in combining hatred for the living Jew with reverence for the dead.
Today we would have to qualify the rule by, ‘unless an Israeli was killed by a Palestinian Arab. Then not only is no reverence shown for the dead Jew, a blatant smugness comes upon the Sarsour and Pillay type hinting that the Jew got her or his come-uppance. Jewish graves in the Diaspora earn respect but the attitude to graves in Israel is ‘hard cheese’ to the victims. of terror. It could be a law of nature that when Jews offend the notion of where they may and may not live they forego compassion. The media catchphrase, ‘cycle of violence’ means that Jews got their just deserts.
Weirder and weirder: Jews themselves manifest the psychosis. We find them active in the walks of life Wokes follow: BLM, LGBTQ, refugees, BDS and so on. Among the most influential Jewish clergy in America, Sharon Brous again (she conducted the Passover seder for Obama’s White House) won’t accept that a ‘settler’ Jew has a right to life. "There’s no such thing as decoupling religion and politics," she explains. She “believes that our tradition calls on Jews to stand with the poor, the vulnerable and the stranger.”
About her alignment with Sarsour, a supporter of genital mutilation for Muslim women, Brous bites her active tongue. She picks on Jews but never on Muslims. They fall into Woke victim groups of the poor and the stranger immigrant.
For all that, regular Jews are confronted by their own troubled genie. The Holocaust has taken an all-consuming hold on the Jewish world. Pursuing truth works both ways; there are times when what we find is not what we wanted to find. The Holocaust can be and is milked, not just because it may be hard to let go, but because it may be costly to let go.
Norman Finklestein leaves a bad taste in the mouth; still his books on the “Holocaust industry” have grains of truth. There’s no denying that the Holocaust means big business.
There seems hardly a capital city without a Holocaust center.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has really gone overboard. The monolith had the great survivor’s blessing but not his involvement. It has grown into a multinational enterprise. The Forward newspaper ranked Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the SWC, as Jewry’s highest paid ‘non-profit’ leader. Back in 2017 Rabbi Hier was already taking home $818,000, not to speak of family members getting $600,000 out of making sure the world would not forget the Holocaust.
And there is no evading the ubiquitous Holocaust centres being honey and career traps. For all we know they do some good,, though growing anti-Semitism is not a good witness for them. Besides, Holocaust ‘experts’ make lucrative careers from genocide. And there’s something wrong when tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors are institutionalized and reliant on charity.
What else can we conclude? Commemorating evil is a honey trap for every type of rent seeker.
An essay that will be in Apfel’s book, “Hitlers at Heart. Anti-Zionism and its believers.”