Encountering Antisemitism

By Max Musson:

Since the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the siege of the kosher supermarket in Paris, the authorities on both side of the Channel have gone into overdrive in pandering to Jewish sensibilities, as if the issue of security in the face of Islamic terrorism revolves solely around the security needs of Jews and so much so, that the needs of the rest of us don’t really warrant attention.

We have seen the Prime Minister, David Cameron; Home Secretary, Theresa May; Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, Eric Pickles; and the Leader of the House of Commons, William Hague, to name just four senior government spokespeople, rushing to implement new security measures and positively falling over themselves to reassure and lavish flattery upon the Jewish community lest Jews should all ‘up sticks’ and go to live in Israel, their beloved ethnic homeland.

In addition, our news media is currently awash with stories expressing Jewish angst regarding a perceived rise in anti-Jewish feeling, obsessing over memories of the Holocaust and asserting the continuing need for special measures to protect Jews from not just terrorism, but from criticism of any kind as well. There even appear to be moves afoot to make illegal, ‘discourse’ that could potentially lead to the expression of anti-Jewish sentiment, no matter how innocent the intent. What Jews appear to have overlooked however, is that when it comes to garnering public sympathy for perceived wrongs committed against them, sometimes ‘less’ is ‘more’.

Jews have traditionally been fond of what Jewish Professor Salo Wittmayer Baron once reportedly called, “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history and martyrology”, and what the one time writer for the Jewish Chronicle, Chaim Bermant once described as the “’Oy Vei is mir!’ school of writing”, however recognition of this common personality trait among their brethren does not yet seem to have led Jews to a moderation of this tendency, and so great is the current deluge of Jewish sob-stories in the media, they are in grave danger of provoking resentment among the public at large and of eliciting precisely the opposite reaction to that which they intend.

I am reminded of a story told by Chaim Bermant in his book ‘The Jews’ published in 1977, in which he tells of a Jew on a train who kept moaning: ‘Oy, have I got a pain … Oy, have I got a pain … Oy, have I got a pain … Oy …’  and finally one of the passengers who could stand it no longer , jumped to his feet , searched the length and breadth of the train and came back with a doctor, who gave the Jew a pill. Then all was quiet for a minute or two until the voice began again: ‘Oy, did I have a pain … Oy, did I have a pain …’ and this story illustrates most succinctly the point I wish to make, that Jews are often their own worst enemies when it comes to provoking anti-Jewish feeling among non-Jews.

The propensity to exaggerate the threat posed by each and every statement which is capable of being interpreted as an expression of anti-Jewish sentiment is also a factor in this same equation. The interpretation for example of the statements made recently by the owner of Oldham Athletic Football Club, Dave Whelan, as anti-Semitic was a case in point. It was clear from the very beginning that Dave Whelan was simply attempting to ‘pour oil on troubled waters’ regarding emails sent by the newly signed manager of his club, and had not intended to offend anyone. Yet every statement he made was seized upon by Jewish journalists and spokespeople and interpreted in the most extreme and alarmist way possible, despite Whelan’s profuse assertions that he harbours no ill-will towards Jews and despite his many grovelling apologies for any offence his remarks may have inadvertently caused.

To those who might argue that given the history of the Third Reich it is understandable that Jews are hypersensitive to criticism, I would say that hostility towards Jews during the Third Reich was not in reaction to Jewish attitudes regarding money, which was the main thrust of Dave Whelan’s remarks,   and neither have been the recent acts of aggression from Muslim groups in France and Belgium. These have been primarily in retaliation for recent Jewish aggression towards the Palestinians, in retaliation for Jewish involvement in the formation of military coalitions that have been sent to conquer Muslim countries and in retaliation for the publication of cartoons insulting the Prophet Mohammed.

Yesterday, on the Daily Telegraph website there was an article by Darren Richman about his grandfather who survived Auschwitz, entitled, ‘Auschwitz 70th anniversary: one survivor goes back to the camp’, and on the same page, seven further links to further Auschwitz and Holocaust related articles: Auschwitz 70th anniversary; Hitler in Lego; Nazi memorabilia auction; Swastikas, in pictures; Archive footage from Auschwitz and its liberation; David Cameron remembers victims of Holocaust in first ever visit to Auschwitz; and Watch: Holocaust survivor recalls life after Auschwitz.

On another page was another article entitled, ‘Alfred Hitchcock holocaust film to go on general release 70 years after suppression’ and seven further links to even more Holocaust related articles: Night Will Fall: ‘superb if harrowing’  ; Man, 93, charged over 300,000 Auschwitz murders ; We’re forgetting the warning of the Holocaust, Gove warns; Disabled victims of Nazi gas chambers to be commemorated with Berlin memorial; The man who revealed the horror of Auschwitz to the world; The man who shot Adolf Eichmann ; and The former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

On the home page of the Telegraph website was a link to yet another two Holocaust related articles entitled, Holocaust survivors’ 70 years of trauma: ‘I could cry nonstop, even now’  and Watch: Drone footage shows scale of Auschwitz. That’s a total of eighteen Holocaust related articles on just one day, on just one news website!

It is the “’Oy Vei is mir!’ school of writing” on steroids, and what Jews need to learn is that non-Jews are not really interested in wallowing in the suffering of others that took place seventy years ago. The words, ‘Enough, already!’ spring to mind. We are far more interested in what Jews bring to the table, so to speak, have to offer the nations of Europe now and in the future — and if all Jews are going to do is whine about their past suffering, we would rather they did it somewhere else.

We have been told that for several years now public money running to several millions has been channelled through the Jewish CST (Community Security Trust) to Jewish schools, in order that they may employ full-time security guards. We have also been told that henceforth armed police officers will also be patrolling Jewish schools and other important Jewish owned buildings and there has been established in London at least one private Jewish security firm, ‘Shomrim’, which has received police training and uniforms, including knife-proof vests, and which uses patrol cars with ‘Battenberg’ paint schemes, flashing lights and sirens, just like real police cars, aimed at providing dedicated security primarily for the Jewish community.

Therefore, we now have a private ‘police service’ just for Jews, on top of the ‘private security service’ they have in the form of the CST and there has even been established in London and the Greater Manchester area where most of Britain’s Jews live, a dedicated Jewish ambulance service called Hatzola. Anyone who has read George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, might be starting to wonder in this land of supposed equality, if ‘some animals’ might just be a little ‘more equal’ than ‘others’?

Can you imagine the outcry there would be if a British nationalist organisation announced that it will henceforth be conducting surveillance of the activities of other potentially threatening ethnic groups, and had organised its own Whites only private police force to guard White neighbourhoods and schools from incursion by potentially dangerous intruders? If that organisation began patrolling the streets in cars painted to look like police cars and manned by men in police uniform? Yet that is what the Jewish community is allowed to do with government approval.

There have even been calls recently from some Jewish leaders for Jews to be allowed to carry firearms for their own protection. On the Channel 4 website there is an article which states: “Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the director of the European Jewish Association (EJA), has called on the European governments to allow proprietors of synagogues, kosher shops and Jewish property to be allowed to train and carry guns in a bid to counter fears of rising anti-Semitism.

“Jewish people in Europe don’t feel secure. There is too much fear and threat,” Margolin told the BBC . “We ask the EU government to make it much easier for Jews who want to carry guns to be able to do so.”

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, recently spoke to a Jewish audience about security issues and a transcript of her speech, or as near to a transcript as exists in the public domain, is most revealing regarding her priorities. Here is what Theresa May had to say:

“The dreadful events in Paris are a reminder of the serious terrorist threat that we face. But the attack on a Jewish supermarket where four people were killed is a chilling reminder of anti-Semitism — not just in France, but the recent anti-Semitic prejudice that sadly we have seen in this country.

“And I know that many Jewish people in this country are feeling vulnerable and fearful, and you are saying you are anxious for your families your children and yourselves.

“I never thought I would see the day when members of the Jewish community in the United Kingdom would say that they were fearful of remaining here in the United Kingdom, and that means that we must all redouble our efforts to wipe out anti-Semitism here in the United Kingdom.

“In Europe, of course, we have seen large numbers of Jewish people emigrate and others are questioning their future.

“There have been other attacks as well, the like of which we never thought we’d see again in Europe – in Brussels, of course, where four people were shot and killed at a Jewish museum and in Toulouse, where three children and a teacher were murdered at a Jewish school.

“So I want to say this: Jewish people have long been an important and integral part of this country, we cherish the contribution you make, not just in the past but today and every day.

“Following those attacks in Paris we saw a tremendous expression of unity as people came together in solidarity with the victims and with France. People in countries all over the world repeated ‘Je suis Charlie’, ‘Je suis Ahmed’, ‘Je suis Juif’, but the most important quote I heard, I think was from the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who said, “If a hundred-thousand Jews leave, France will no longer be France, the French republic will be judged a failure”.

“It is a sentiment I well understand and one that holds true for Britain. Without its Jews, Britain would not be Britain, just as without its Muslims, Britain would not be Britain. Without its Sikhs, Hindus and Christians and people of other faiths, Britain would not be Britain.”

When one examines what Theresa May has said above, she appears to believe that Britain wasn’t Britain until the 1890s when Jews first started immigrating into this country in large numbers. Apparently, our nation was somehow woefully deficient for the entire 15,000 years since the last Ice Age and prior to the 1890s, when we indigenous British were here largely on our own.

Apparently, Britain isn’t Britain unless it’s multicultural and multiracial, because we British, the people these islands are named after, were somehow inadequate stewards of this nation and lived a hollow and unfulfilled existence until we were enriched by all the ethnic minorities. Ethnic minorities who it turns out are the main protagonists in this terrorist war in which they have now embroiled us.

Does anyone believe that we would have this terrorist issue if Muslims were not so aggrieved at the brutal treatment of the Palestinians by Israel and if the British Armed forces had not been deployed within US lead coalitions to fight Israel’s wars for her in the Middle East?

In Theresa May’s eyes, the ‘dreadful events in Paris’ were simply a ‘reminder’ of the serious terrorist threat that we all face, but with regard to the Jews they were a ‘chilling reminder’ of the threat of anti-Semitism . It would appear that the threat of imported Islamic terrorism that we all face doesn’t qualify as ‘chilling’ because that is a quality which only applies when such threats are experienced by ‘important’ people, the kind that Theresa May ‘cherishes’, like Jews, apparently.

Theresa May ‘never thought’ she’d ‘see the day when members of the Jewish community in the United Kingdom would say that they were fearful of remaining here in the United Kingdom’. It does not occur to her however, or if it does she isn’t concerned by it, that many indigenous British people are fearful about what is happening to our country, about the threat of Islamic terrorism, about uncontrolled mass immigration and creeping, politically correct, totalitarianism and are fearful of remaining here in this country.

The difference however is that Jews have somewhere else, an ethnic homeland, that they can escape to should conditions here in Britain get to bad, but for the rest of us, there is no such comfort. We have only Britain as all other once White countries that we might have sought refuge in have also been transformed by people like Theresa May into multicultural hell-holes.

There is of course nothing wrong with a Home Secretary making statements designed to reassure people that their safety is uppermost in the minds of government, especially if that section of the British public have been specifically targeted by terrorists, however in this country Jews have not been specifically targeted by Islamic terrorists. Islamic terrorism in the UK has been indiscriminate and we have only recently been told by the security services that the threat to Britain is likely to come in the form of a ‘spectacular, mass casualty’ attack, which again would tend to be indiscriminate.

So at this time of heightened threat, we have a situation in which Jews are allowed to organise what is in effect their own ‘private intelligence service’ (the CST) and their own ‘private police force’, and they receive additional government funding to provide full-time security guards at all their schools, and on top of this, they have special armed police patrols to make sure they stay safe, with none of these security measures available to the rest of us, because that would be ‘racist’!

It might appear to some that our government and the majority of Jewish leaders are oblivious to human nature and don’t realise what every mother knows, that if a parent shows blatant favouritism towards one of their children, and that child continually claims to be ‘special’ and to demand more generous treatment than is afforded their siblings, then their siblings will come to resent the spoilt child and inevitably animosity will result.

It might appear that this is the case, but this is not so. Government and Jewish leaders are well-aware of the animosity that is being aroused by the special treatment being afforded Jews, and instead of desisting in their offensive behaviour, they are rushing instead to implement Draconian measures to suppress all expression of justifiable resentment felt by the wider British public.

In the news recently, it was announced that European Jewish leaders, backed by a host of former EU heads of state and the government, are calling for new pan-European legislation to outlaw antisemitism “as well as criminalising a host of other activities deemed to be violating fundamental rights on ‘specious’ religious, cultural, ethnic and gender grounds”.

It is already illegal to make statements likely to incite religious or racial hatred in the UK and throughout the rest of Europe, but this new legislation proposed by Jewish leaders is calling for the banning of Holocaust denial and the creation of a new ‘hate’ crime of “group libel” – i.e. the public defamation of ethnic, cultural or religious groups, women and homosexuals. It is proposed that this new legislation should go further than any existing ‘hate-speech’ legislation and also criminalise anti-Semitic ‘discourse’ and “overt approval of a totalitarian ideology.”

Such legislation would of course bring British legislation into line with that which prevails in Germany and France, in which anyone questioning any aspect of the Holocaust or declaring support for the tenets of National Socialism, or displaying an emblem deemed to be offensive to ethnic minorities in public, will face a jail sentence of up to 8 years. This kind of legislation is invoked routinely in continental countries where it already applies and for example, when British historian David Irving was prosecuted in Austria for allegedly ‘denying the Holocaust’, his defence lawyer Sylvia Stolz was subsequently imprisoned also, for simply defending him in court and thereby lending credence to the belief that the established Holocaust narrative may not be entirely true.

It is ironic that blanket, Draconian and zero tolerance ‘hate speech’ legislation of the sort proposed, that is used to impose and enforce ‘harmony’, is by its very nature totalitarian and oppressive and this therefore makes a nonsense of its expressed aims.

It is also ironic when one realises that it doesn’t seem to have taken long for politicians across the continent to have forgotten their declarations of ‘Je suis Charlie’ in support of freedom of speech, and to have become diverted instead into declarations of ‘Je suis Juif’, in which freedom of speech is suppressed so that the actions and claims of individual Jews and Jewish groups can be immune from public scrutiny or criticism.

Like the other travellers on the train that Chaim Bermant told us about, we are it seems, to be forced to watch while Jews receive special treatment and to listen throughout eternity to their complaints of alleged past and present suffering, without ever complaining ourselves and without ever speaking up in our own defence. To do otherwise it seems is to be guilty of antisemitism in the eyes of those who represent organised Jewry.

The greatest irony of all however, is that it is not ‘antisemitic attitudes’ among Gentiles that are the root cause of animosity towards Jews, it is the attitude of certain Jewish leaders, dominant within organised Jewry and the attitude of establishment politicians that are in thrall to organised Jewry, that are the cause of the animosity, which in turn leads to the growth of antisemitism.

It is absurd that any group of people keeping themselves apart from the rest of society and practicing in-group loyalty should negotiate for themselves alone, privileged treatment and privileged protection from the government, and then expect everyone else to accept them without complaint and without animosity within what is supposedly an ‘inclusive’ society.

By Max Musson © 2015

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