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Jews Won’t Be the World’s Scapegoats
By Lorraine Stone, Oceanside, NY
Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority, the Lying Legions and "Let's Ignore Inconvenient Truth" Brigades are out in force, aided by worldwide, and especially European, anti-Semitic press wringing their hypocritical hands at the alleged "humanitarian devastation" wrought by nasty Israeli Jews who dare protect themselves against a war brought to their pizza parlors, Passover Seders, schools and shopping malls.
Terrorists start a war, then whine to an avidly receptive world press when a nation under attack has the gall to defend itself. The Israeli-produced, inappropriately labeled "humanitarian catastrophe" is condemned, while "heroic" British resistance to buzzbombs and generalized European resistance during World War II is eternally extolled. Why is Israeli self-defense and resistance to human buzzbombs less "heroic"? Because the victims are Jewish and Jewish blood is fair game? It has been for millennia. Why change now? People should know their place.
Palestinian gunmen, flattering themselves as "freedom fighters," are medieval homicidal thugs in modem dress, led by a vicious, lying aged Egyptian—not Palestinian—psychopath masquerading as a leader. What leader dispatches teenagers, and now grade-schoolers, to kill themselves for his aggrandizement? George Washington didn't do that, nor Toussaint L'Ouverture. Arafat (nephew of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who spent much of World War II in Germany with his pal Adolph Hitler) has for decades sported Rolex watches and dressed himself in designer uniforms—though, careful for his own safety, he never saw a battle, while "his" people have been cooped up in refugee camps. This wasn't Israel's doing. It was done because their so-devoted Arab/ Moslem brethren, who shed crocodile tears and collect millions to pay off the families of homicide bombers, carefully prohibited them from emigrating to any of the 21—count 'em, 21!—surrounding corrupt, repressive, murdering, archaic dictatorships. All this bloodshed because a few greedy, venal criminals—titling themselves kings and presidents-for-life of absolute police-state dictatorships—wanted to continue bleeding their peoples and needed a diversionary scapegoat to keep themselves in power. They are no different from Russian czars and French absolute monarchs of unlamented memory.
Yasser Arafat keeps his wife and daughter living like a queen and a princess in a luxurious chateau outside Paris. Suha Arafat, a Christian-turned-Moslem for the unaccounted-for and uncountable billions of dollars poured into PLO coffers by misguided nations yearning to buy peace, is consumed with hatred. She said that had she had a son, she would have encouraged him to become a homicide bomber. Palestinian girls have now begun doing so. Why is the Arafats' daughter not among them?
If Europeans don't come to their senses quickly and realize they are only repeating pre-World War II history, there will be hell to pay before this is over. The European press, CNN and much of the American press are bending over backwards to show us all how terrible the Israelis are in protecting themselves and their society from the onslaughts of Palestinians who kill themselves for Allah (or for something like Allah, depending on the hatred and convenience of those interpreting—or misinterpreting—the Koran for their own benefit).
Yet the truth is plain and clear that if the Palestinians and the Islamic terrorists succeed in their efforts, heartened by their success, they will surely expand into other areas. Such success in the destruction of Israel would not end there; it would continue south into Africa and west into Europe, just as Hitler's armies did not stop at the Sudatenland but proceeded east into Poland and Russia and west to the coast of France and north to Norway and Denmark. The plague spread from the Thames to the Volga, from the Mediterranean to the fjords. It took years to destroy their threat to humanity and avoid a new dark age, at the cost of millions of lives. At the end, for its decision to ignore Hitler and Nazism and Mussolini and Fascism and the threat they clearly and early posed, Europe in particular, from London to Leningrad, and the rest of the world in general paid dearly. There is no reason to believe the cost this time around, administered by rabid anti-Semites, anti-Christians, anti-American, anti-Western fanatics, will be less.
As George Santayana noted decades ago, "Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it." The greatest fear is that there will be just such a repetition because of people who, having learned of history, choose to ignore history's lessons.
That choice to refuse to learn from history is plainly reflected in the daily force-feeding of tales of Israeli "massacres," while little or no comprehension (let alone noticeable compassion) is shown for the devastation wreaked on Israeli society by Palestinians. The crocodile tears shed nightly on CNN over the Palestinians in Jenin and elsewhere appear to be an altruistic expression. It would be were it a balanced altruistic expression. It is not; it is merely propaganda.
One can but wonder what world opinion of the Nazis in Germany circa 1944 would have been had they had CNN to broadcast the devastation visited upon German cities by the Allies. Would the world not have been force-fed pictures of Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin laid waste by the Royal Airforce and the American Army Air Corp? Wouldn't that be a "humanitarian disaster"? Wouldn't the world be invited to shed copious tears over the terrible fate—and it was terrible—of the poor German Volk? Of course. It would have been a master propaganda stroke.
Yet carefully kept hidden behind those pictures would still exist Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Sobibor, German child soldiers, impregnated early-adolescent girls inducted into the Lebensborn abomination, abducted "German-looking" Polish children, and the obscenely grotesque "medical" experiments of Dr. Mengele. That is the kind of slanted reportage proffered. So, the Joseph Goebbels Award for Misrepresentative Journalism (my own invention) is a tie: It goes to everybody stupid enough not to see the similarities. And I'm sure ol' Joe Goebbels would be thrilled.
But there is a difference in 2002 from the world of 1942. Times have changed and so have the Jews. For 2,000 years countries the world over used Jews as scapegoats to blame for their own incompetence. What Arafat does is old hat. Even now, Europe, guilty of pogroms, expulsions (read: "ethnic cleansings"), inquisitions and, ultimately, the Holocaust, struggles to blame Jews for everything, turning blind eyes to the truth of failed Arab societies and their criminalities. According to the old rules, only when the targets of attack are non-Jews is self-defense and retaliation acceptable. But the old rules no longer apply and Jews are no longer either vulnerable or willing to permit themselves and their children to be slaughtered or isolated in ghettos. Jews who fight back shock the world by such inconvenient, uncomfortable stereotype-busting. Old habits die hard.
Added to the grumbling at the scapegoats-become-warriors is the guilt plainly felt by Europeans at the Holocaust, and the visceral need to absolve themselves of abominations committed only 60 years ago. Seeking absolution, they side with Palestinian murderers, not the Palestinian people, rationalizing that the Jews are no better, telling themselves: "They 're doing the same things we did. Gee, we weren't so bad."
But it was Nazis who sent German children into battle at the end of World War II, as Arafat and the Islamic madmen, not Israelis, send bomb-laden babies to kill themselves and as many innocents as possible in hotels, discotheques and cafes. The Nazi propaganda machine that spewed hatred, and which lives anew in Arafat's and the Islamic extremists' deranged effort to blame Jews for their own atrocities, is exemplified by Arafat's feigned outrage at the surrounding of the Church of the Nativity by Israeli tanks. Arafat's cowards shot their way into the birthplace of Jesus and held the priests and nuns hostage. Tanks wouldn't have surrounded the church had the murderers not invaded it and were they not continuing to hold innocent clerics hostage. But these facts are "forgotten" in the rush to scapegoat Jews and Israel.
Get used to it, folks. Jews won't be the world's scapegoats any longer. This is unsettling for seekers of others to blame for their own failures, but prejudice will surely find vulnerable minorities to bully in Jews' place. But then Jews will help the afflicted, since Jews have long and compassionate memories, having "been there, suffered that." The hunt for victims by the narrow-minded, amoral and incompetent will be long, but persistent. Armed with hatred and ineptitude, it will surely continue indefinitely.
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