Life & Death

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Antisemitism and Islamophobia

What is antisemitism? What is Islamophobia? Or, to turn it on its head: can opposition to Jews or Muslims ever be ethical?

To my mind the best place to start is Dr.Martin Luther King Jr’s most famous phrase: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Too often the second half of this is forgotten. We have rightly given up judging people by that which is no fault of their own, or even no fault at all – skin colour, parentage, looks, disability, sexual orientation – but, it seems, at the price of abandoning the essential human faculty of judgment altogether.

9/11, the Bali bombings, the Madrid train bombings, Beslan, the Tube & bus bombings, Sharm-el-Sheikh, the Mumbai bombings of 2005 and 2008, Westgate mall, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Orlando, Nice, Tanta, Manchester Arena, Barcelona, Sri Lanka. In each case the mass-murderers have expressly claimed that they were killing in the name of Islam. Should this not be abhorred and opposed? If we pointed to such acts and said that they are essential to Islam and that all Muslims would like to commit similar given the opportunity, that would indeed be bigoted, wrong and worthy of the epithet Islamophobic. The way is open for peaceful Muslims to condemn them and assure us that is no part of their interpretation of Islam: and indeed the Ahmadiyyas, Sufis, Baha’is, Ismailis, Balochis, Azeris and Kurds do just that. But jihad bil saif – religious killing – is alas integral to Wahhabi, Salafi and Deobandi Islam. And those branches applaud this killing.

We should never forget the Muslims killed by Da’esh, Boko Haram, Al-Qaeda, the Taleban and many other Islamist groups throughout Asia and Africa. The numbers are hard to establish, but around 1,000,000 over the past 20 years is not an over-estimate. As my friend, the scholar David Hirsh wrote in 2017: “This is not a fight against Islam, it is a fight against a specific political movement which claims to be the sole authentic practice of Islam… Jihadi totalitarianism is a form of Islam, but it is only one form; there are other traditions, there are better ones; and they are much more widespread. Most Muslims hate and fear the Jihadis.”

There is a small but real jihadist threat to Western civilisation, and it is made worse by the likes of Corbyn, Melenchon and Ocasio-Cortez whose anti-Zionist, anti-capitalist, anti-American Marxism disables integration

It is not antisemitic to judge individual Jews by their words and deeds. In the same way it is not Islamophobic to condemn Muslims who incite jihad bil saif. A definition of Islamophobia that would catch people like Michael Gove, a man who wants nothing but peace & prosperity for his fellow-citizens, is unjust and cannot be supported.

Most Jews are serenely unbothered by Richard Dawkins: “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” We have the moral maturity to realise that the bloodthirsty elements of the Tanakh were appropriate to their time, and 3,000 or more years later we have not just the right but the duty to lock them in their historical setting and be guided purely by the moral elements that chime, to use Steven Pinker’s phrase, with the better angels of our nature.  To fail to hold Islam – or indeed any other religion – to the same standard is the racism of low expectations. It is unworthy.

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A Different Yom Kippur

On October 6th 1973, while the country was occupied with the prayers of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year, the combined armies of nine Arab countries caught Israel napping with a devastating attack on all sides. The Arabs had learnt from their humiliation in the Six-Day War, and this time they were successful. The Israeli armed forces were overwhelmed by an army three times their size, and the country was quickly overrun. Estimates of the death toll in the chaos that followed cannot be verified, but by the end of the year the only Jews left in the country now partitioned between Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon had been forcibly converted to Islam.
About a million Israeli Jews had managed to flee, mainly by air and sea as any caught crossing the land borders were slaughtered out of hand. But where could they go? As in 1939 the face of the world was turned against them. Canada repeated Frederick Blair’s infamous decree: “None is too many”, and the whole of Europe and the Americas followed suit.
As in 1941, only one country opened its doors to the defenceless Jews. The Soviet Union, having emboldened the Arabs to destroy Israel, now invited the remnant of the Jewish people back to the country whose pogroms their grandparents had fled two generations before. But of course there was a catch. They had to prove themselves dedicated to International Communism: and for those whose dedication was found to be lacking the gulags of Siberia awaited.
Now the Jews of Israel were safely murdered, rendered dumb by conversion to Islam or imprisoned thousands of miles away in Siberia, needless to say the progressive social justice warriors of the West rose up as one to protest against their treatment, led by such principled luminaries as Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone, Desmond Tutu, Tariq Ali, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Roger Waters, and Jeremy Corbyn.
How they loved those wailing masses of tortured, helpless, impotent Jews. How right and proper their position seemed to be. And how furious they would have been if, against all the odds, those Jews of Israel had managed to turn the tables and, impossibly, had won that war in 1973?

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Lessons of the Holocaust

Does it make sense to say that we should learn lessons from the Holocaust? I believe it does – and they are clear.
For Jews, Menachem Begin, speaking in 1981, said it best:
“First, if an enemy of our people says he seeks to destroy us, believe him. Don’t doubt him for a moment. Don’t make light of it. Do all in your power to deny him the means of carrying out his satanic intent.

Murder of Jews in Ivangorod 1942

 

Second, when a Jew anywhere is threatened, or under attack, do all in your power to come to his aid. Never pause to wonder what the world will think or say. The world will never pity slaughtered Jews. The world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him.”

The last Jew in Vinnitsa shot at edge of pit 1941

 

In the 1930s the Jews of Germany, and much of Europe, thought that they belonged to the most advanced and progressive civilisation the world had ever seen. They could not believe that the people who had thrilled with them to Beethoven and Goethe, and together with them had probed the secrets of the universe and the heart of the atom, would unleash on them a merciless barbarism as murderous as that of Genghis Khan. But they did.

Partisan Brigade of Abba Kovner & Benjamin Levin at Vilna Liberation 1944

 

For Gentiles, it is even simpler. Because of our long history of being persecuted, Jews have the most acute antennae for it. So if a Jew calls out antisemitism, don’t question them. Believe them. If you can’t bring yourself to support them, at least don’t try to silence them.
If, however, you dismiss Jewish accusations of antisemitism as being in bad faith, and support anti-Jewish remarks as ‘fair comment’; if you tell Jews that after 75 years it’s high time they ‘got over’ the Holocaust; if you condemn the government and armed forces of Israel for preventing the murder of its citizens by any means necessary; and, most wickedly of all, if you try to demoralise young Jews by lying to them that “Israel is doing to the Palestinian Arabs what the Nazis did to the Jews”; then, deny it though you may, I am afraid you are committing acts of antisemitism.

Woman Soldiers of the Israeli Defence Force

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A Trip to Romantischer Rheinland in May 1952

 

In May 1952 my mother Anne Berns, then aged 25, persuaded my grandparents to take her on a touring holiday of Germany, centered on the ‘Romantischer Rheinland’. Many of her friends thought she had no business going for a holiday in a country which had so recently come within an ace of destroying our own, and which had committed such unspeakable crimes, above all the Holocaust: but as she said, she wanted to go there “to see if the Germans were human”.

        1952 May Frank & Fanny BERNS in Garmisch   1952 May Anne BERNS Mittelsburg

Frank & Fanny Berns                        Town Centre

 

They hired a car & driver and toured a great swathe of West Germany (as it was then): the capital Bonn, Cologne, Heidelberg, Neuschwanstein, Oberammergau, Wiesbaden, Dinkelsbühl, Rothenburg ob der Tauber. They ended up in the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen which their driver particularly recommended to them as an outstandingly beautiful spot.

So how were the Germans? As Churchill said in his speech to the US Congress in 1943: “The Hun is always either at your throat or at your feet”. With the exception of a one-legged veteran in the ruins of Cologne who spat at them – Cologne had been flattened utterly, except for the cathedral which had been spared, but the city was a neat & tidy ruin –  everybody in the shops, resorts and hotels fawned obsequiously over my mother and grandparents and couldn’t do enough for them.

Britain had been starving for years under rationing, and even my grandparents who were in the fortunate position of being shopkeepers had their work cut out to organise enough food for themselves & their daughter. What they saw in West Germany made their eyes pop out of their heads. In Garmisch-Partenkirchen there were the biggest cream cakes they’d ever seen. Every shop was stuffed full with first-rate produce. My mother particularly remarked upon the beautiful leather handbags. As for the locals, they were plump, smug and beautifully – and expensively – dressed. The war had only been over five years, and Britain was still on its knees recovering. But in West Germany the appearance of the people and the towns was as if there had never been a war. Or if it had, they looked like victors.

1952 May Anne BERNS Garmisch Lodge1952 May Anne BERNS Garmisch Fat_Happy Burgers

In Garmisch-Partenkirchen

 

The manner of the Germans – those who were not fawning in service – was uniformly self-satisfied. It did not appear that they gave a thought to what they and their families had done during the war. It seemed they did not consider themselves responsible for any wrongdoing, and the concept of repentance was utterly alien to them.

Yes, the Germans were human. But they were quite devoid of what we would call humanity.

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Farewell, Sylvester

We lost Sylvester today. Sylvester is a semi-feral tom cat who first appeared about 3 years ago. Initially he would just dart in through the cat-flap late at night and scarf down the food we’d left for Tigger and other visitors. You couldn’t touch him, but he seemed to like me sitting about six feet away and singing quietly to him. After two years or so of this I thought I’d try to tame him. I started getting closer to him and about six months ago stroked him for the first time. He liked it. After a few weeks of tentative handling he started to follow me & butt his head against my hand. One day I heard a rusty rumble: Sylvester, after perhaps a decade in the wild, had remembered from his kittenhood how to purr.

But all was not well. Toms get into fights: and about two years ago he lost an ear. After he had become tame – and he was a very affectionate cat, spending a long time each day stretched out with his face pushed into the palm of my hand or rolling over to have his tummy rubbed – Mum & I took turns trying to clean up the remains of his torn-off ear with warm salt water. But it just kept being re-infected. Unlike most cats he couldn’t jump up anywhere – I thought perhaps one back leg, held awkwardly, had broken and healed years ago. Then, a few weeks ago, a swelling started to appear beside the remains of the ear, and his back legs became very doddery. A visit to the vet was called for.

The news was very grim. Sylvester had diabetes. That would have needed two injections a day and an enforced restricted diet – very difficult when Smudge, our little ginger, is so fussy and needs to be coaxed with food. But for better or worse the decision was taken away from us when further investigation revealed a massively swollen kidney and at least one tumour.

Two days at the vet’s without me had turned Sylvester feral again: they said they could barely handle him. This morning I went down there and had a consultation with the vet. He took me into the kennels to see Sylvester. When the cage door was opened he hissed, cringed and spat, but within three minutes some Dreamies, some crooning and a few gentle strokes had reminded him of who I was, and once again he butted up to my hand and purred like a firehouse. I was crying and telling him how good and brave he was.

Andy the vet was very calm and sympathetic as I picked Sylvester up and cradled him in my arms. Sylvester is a big, muscular tom: the sedative took several minutes to take effect, but finally he lay still. Then came the second, lethal injection.

I am glad I had the courage to be with my Sylvester every moment of his final journey. No months of agony in a body resistant to all painkillers; no weeks of agony as nutrition is withdrawn; no days of agony while hydration is withdrawn. I hope to God someone does the same for me when my time comes.

Sylvester 1Sylvester 2Sylvester 3Sylvester 4