People dislike Jews up to a point. Beyond that point Jews not only are tolerated they are venerated. Of course we’re talking of dead Jews. The mere name, ‘Israel’ can make anti-Semites want to vomit, but to memorialize the dead and the martyred they will go the extra mile.
Among egregious examples two stand out. Linda Sarsour, a brazen hater: (“Israel is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else”; “nothing is creepier than Zionism”; fundraising for a Palestinian murderer convicted for planting a bomb in a Tel-Aviv store), and yet has a deep respect for dead Jews. The scarf clad woman made headlines, for helping repair a Jewish cemetery. Next to her Jewish President of choice, Bernie Sanders, Sarsour will observe her minute of quiet for Jews butchered on a factory scale.
Another stand out is South African Nava Pillay an ex UN High Commissioner. Throughout her term Pillay kept the bad eye on Israelis and her good eye on their killers. Israelis could do no right and Muslims no wrong: infamously for the wife-beating rife in Palestinian Arab society, Pillay blamed Israel. None of this stopped her conducting a seminar on Holocaust victims, of eulogising a boy from Prague named Petr Ginz who died in the gas chambers. She held up his photograph. At the end of her presentation Pillay called for a minute of silence.
Of course commemorating the Shoah is a virtue signaller for countless celebs. But for greater interest we must go to the psychosis of commemoration. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of a wartime friend who had no problem with the Nazi death camps, yet on his mantelpiece stood a photo of a Jewish friend shot by the Gestapo. No one better than Sartre has picked out the sadistic fascination for dead Jews.
Anti-Semites combine hatred for the living Jew with reverence for the dead – unless they were killed by Palestinian Arabs. Linda Sarsour respects Jewish graves in a St Louis cemetery but says ‘hard cheese’ to Israeli victims of terror. It could be a natural law that when Jews offend the correct notion of where Israelis may and may not live, they forego the right to life. We’ve heard or read the catchphrase, ‘cycle of violence’. In the media, on CNN or Time Magazine or the New York Times or Guardian or the BBC the ‘violent cycle’ means that Jews got their just deserts.
‘Death to Jews’ is a war cry common to jihadists and to educated Wokes. The one shouts aloud while the other internalizes the cry. The idea of Jewish death excites and satisfies your professor, news caster or politician as much as your ISIS decapitator. Not enough Jewish death maddens them both.
Take the documentary maker John Pilger and the writer Robert Fisk. Both openly begrudge Israel being more than a match for the warlords of Gaza, Ramallah and Beirut. With bitterness they harp on a death toll skewed in favour of the Jews, and complain about the imbalance. A higher number of Israelis, they believe, ought to have died in the fighting. This is nothing we didn’t know. Again the Holocaust generation philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, made it clear: anti-Semitism is not a bad opinion of Jews but a warped personality.
Problem is, Jews can also have it, that ghoulish fixation with dead Jews. In the main we find Jews with that sick mind active in Woke movements: BLM, LGBTQ, open border wackose, BDS cultists and academia. Even progressive 'rabbis' can be knee deep denying Jews the right to live. One such member of the clergy conducted the Passover seder for the White House – a Sharon Brous from LA whom Joe Biden picked to do the business.
The same Brous once said that she felt comfortable about her alignment with anti-Zionists. About her alignment with apologists for wife beaters and genital mutilators, Brous said nothing. The 'rabbi' will pick out Jews but Muslims, never.
To value truth is to accept that there will be times when truth is not very likeable. In truth Jews may have entirely proper feelings about the Shoah yet be willing to exploit it for gain. As much as we find Israel-hating Norman Finklestein distasteful, he correctly in his books calls out the Holocaust industry. On the evidence there’s no denying the big money to be made on the back of Holocaust memory and study.
Look at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a monolith which had the great survivor’s blessing but not his involvement. The SWC is a full global enterprise. The Forward ranked its head, Rabbi Marvin Hier as Jewry’s highest paid ‘non-profit’ leader. Back in 2017 Rabbi Hier was taking home $818,000, not to speak of family members getting $600,000 out of making sure the world would not forget the Holocaust.
There’s no getting away from ubiquitous Holocaust museums and centres being a honey trap. For all one knows they do some good, but Holocaust experts and the like make glamorous careers from genocide. There is something wrong when tens of thousands of the survivors are institutionalized and have to limp along on handouts.
Steve Apfel is an economist and a cost accountant, but most of all a prolific author of non-fiction and fiction, published in many journals and sites. His books include: ‘The Paymaster’ (Fiction); Hadrian’s Echo (Non-fiction); ‘A bias thicker than faith’ (non-fiction, for publication during 2020), and ‘Balaam’s curse’ a WIP biblical novel