The following article was published yesterday at Dispatch International, but was only up briefly before the latest hacker attack took down the site. At the request of DI’s editors, Gates of Vienna is pleased to republish it here.
Jew, know your enemy
by Jeppe Samuel Cholewa Juhl
“When two Jews are gathered in a room, there will be at least three opinions.” So goes the saying that we used to laugh at in my youth when we were sitting around the dinner table.
Essentially the saying is very positive. It reflects Judaism’s taste for discussion and its willingness and ability to change. Jewish intellectual curiosity, joie de vivre and taste for innovation are legendary and have contributed mightily to mankind’s advancement within practically every imaginable field. The world would have been a poorer place without the Jewish people.
Therefore the kind of pluralism that springs from debate, disagreement and curiosity must of course be preserved. We must continue debating. We must continue constructively, even aggressively, challenging each other. All the time. Any time.
But there is one thing we Jews should not be arguing about in this day and age. This encompasses all Jews — especially in Europe. Whether we are religious or secular. Whether we regard ourselves as belonging to the Left or the Right. And that is that Islam is Judaism’s mortal enemy. To believe otherwise is to deny an overwhelmingly documented reality.
And by Islam I mean all of Islam. The entire system of thought. The religious as well as the (dominant) political and cultural aspects of the Muslim world are so thoroughly infested with vitriolic anti-Semitism that it would be suicidal for us Jews to underestimate the hatred and the ignorance with which today’s Muslims are brought up.
The problem is that many Western Jews deny this hatred. We are nice and peaceful people. We have minded our own business. We have gratefully and diligently accommodated to the countries that have accepted us and never demanded special treatment nor displayed a victim mentality.
Orthodox Jews in Europe are integrated and secular Jews are assimilated to a degree where Jewishness is close to disappearing. We have ascribed the best of motives to our fellow men and naïvely projected our values on others. Many Jews — like most Europeans — are moral and cultural relativists who believe that all people have the best of intentions.
It is nice, naïve and suicidal. Particularly for us European Jews, whose parents and grandparents survived the Holocaust. We are now witnessing a new form of fascism. The Islamic one. And precisely as was the case with Nazism, the Jew is the biggest villain.
Islamists — I prefer to use the word scriptural Muslims — have no problem using the word “Jew” when declaring their hatred. They find their rationale in the Koran. They heil and shout their inarticulate hatred all over Europe’s streets.
These poor ill-educated and ignorant people are actively supported by Islam’s apologists and relativists, practically all of whom are socialists or belong to the ideological Left. The latter have, however, replaced the word “Jew” by “Israel”. Criticism of Israel — the kind of criticism that is based on double standards, as opposed to reasonable criticism of the pluralistic and modern democratic state — is the anti-Semitism of our time.
Unfortunately, the anti-Semites receive indirect support from European Jews. And here we have the dark side of the saying we quoted earlier. For every time we encounter three Jewish opinions on the problem of Islam in Europe, two of them will be apologetic or strongly defensive of Islam. The leading Jews in Europe, the intellectuals as well as the religious, have their heads turned the wrong way. They look to the left and not to the right. And to the extent they don’t look to the left, they fix their gaze on the ground.
The reasons for this unfortunate paradox are multifaceted. Part of the explanation is that for two thousand years the DNA of the Jewish Diaspora has been programmed with the belief that whoever lives unseen lives well. If they don’t know my name or address, probably nothing will happen to me. Another part is that historically many European Jews have been firmly rooted in socialism and are therefore among the most ardent cultural relativists.
Beyond that it is sadly obvious that religious Jews have been caught in a trap due to Islam’s expansion in Europe. Islam and Judaism are both outwardly religions of law, with much in common. Orthodox Jews eat kosher meat butchered like halal meat. Jewish women and men are separated in the synagogue, although not in reform congregations. Strongly orthodox Jewish women have their heads covered, albeit usually with a wig. And all Jewish boys are circumcised.
The impact of all this is that many European rabbis wrongly (!) feel that is it difficult to join the fight against Islamism. In addition, particularly elderly Jews fear nationalism and the political Right due to the Holocaust.
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In my next columns here in Dispatch International I intend to document and give examples of anti-Semitism, a hatred that has grown in Western Europe as a result of the irresponsible immigration and asylum policies carried out by a political elite without asking the affected populations. In the final analysis this policy is bound to drive the vast majority of the continent’s Jews to emigrate to the only country where they can be certain of being welcome: Israel.
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