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THE VIEW FROM HERE - Western civilization suffers recurrent bouts of this same illness. In fact, it is a chronic illness. Anti-Semitism is only a particular variant, like Covid has various variants.
The most dangerous notion in Western Civilization is the idea that one religion or one group has an exclusive lock on The Truth. . . When people see themselves has possessing The Truth, they tend to dichotomize the world between the Good Saved vs the Evil Damned Both Christianity and Islam believe that they alone know the word of God. Thus, it is easy to perceive that others are evil. The Turks felt this way about the Armenians so that genocide was not only good but essential. Hence, the Armenian Genocide . Nazism adopted this world view. On August 22, 1939, in his Obersalzberg Hitler Speech said, “our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. . . . Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
Today, Islamists Such as Hamas and US Wokers Adopt this Attitude
Hamas explicitly makes its goal the extermination of Jews, while American Wokeism supports Hamas by peddling its false defamations of Jews. CBS News acts as Hamas’ mouthpiece in America, spreading falsehoods about Netanyahu’s not accepting a ceasefire when it has been Hamas and not Israel who has rejected every proposal. Then, in order to further the false narrative, CBS presents a niece of one of the American hostages to criticize Netanyahu while ignoring the fact that Israelis overwhelmingly support Netanyahu’s coalition. The fact is that Hamas started the war by breaking a former cease fire, attacking 22 Israeli towns, murdering raping and burning alive 1,200 Jews and their friends. Since October 7th, Hamas has been continuously engaged in the war crimes of hostage taking and the use of its own citizens as human shields as well as shelling Israel from sites within Gaza next to and among civilian locations such as schools and apartment complexes. As the US Woke media is loath to mention, Hamas has used Gazan hospitals as military command centers – another war crime. These war crimes are relevant as they are poo-pooed by US Wokers, Hamas’ best ally, and used in the False Narrative that Jews are the evil oppressors.
For the Woke US media and Woke politicos, Hamas’ attempt to exterminate all the Jews from the River to the Sea has become a battle of the virtuous Hamas against the perfidious Jews. If we transported today’s Woke ideology back to 1940 Europe, the US media would be reporting on the valiant Nazis just seeking lebensraum in face of British atrocities.
Once the Good vs Evil paradigm begins, mindless group contagion takes over and the society becomes run by mob psychology. Truth, facts, rational analysis go out the window, while politicos grovel at the feet of the loudest and most stringent prevaricators of the False Narrative.
Why The Jews?
It is easy to understand why Jews are the group most often singled out as evil and targeted for extermination. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., the vast majority of Jews left Israel and lived throughout Diaspora. (BTW, the Jews are the surviving indigenous people in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.) For millennia, Jews, who were living throughout the Mediterranean Sea areas, were known as Sephardic, while the Jews who migrated north into Europe came to be called Ashkenazic. Both Christian and Islam doctrine held that Jews were evil, and both religions believed that it alone knew G-d’s intent. Because Jews were in all the major European countries, when times became hard, rulers – princes and priests – could blame the Jews.
In addition, Jews looked somewhat different and were better educated than the general population. When rulers needed to solidify control, the Jews were always there as scapegoats for whatever woes a nation suffered. If there was a plague, then the Jews poisoned the wells. If a child was missing, then the Jews killed her to use her blood to make matzah. If the king needed money, he could confiscate Jewish wealth. The simple fact that Jews were throughout Europe, they are always present whenever a ruler needed to focus the wrath of the masses on some evil entity – usually so that masses would not pay attention to what he was doing. If Jews had lived in only one or two countries, they would not have been available as the “universal scapegoat.”
Because Jews were omnipresent in Europe to be scapegoats, we overlook that this same dynamic of Good v Evil victimized others. Triskaidekaphobia is allegedly due to Philip IV of France’s October 13, 1307 launching of his persecution of the Knights Templar and the confiscation of their wealth. Over the centuries, the Knights Templar had come to be seen as The Other within Christianity, especially by those like France’s Philip IV who coveted their wealth. The year before in 1306, Philip IV had already confiscated the wealth of the Jews and expelled them. He used the same tactics against the Templars.
Thus, it should surprise no one that Islamists like Hamas US Wokers would agree in 2024 that Jews are the evil ones and the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel along with the removal of Jews from colleges and universities would be good. Hate and fear are excellent for political power mongers. That way Hamas and Wokeism have the same evil other, thereby uniting the terrorist Hamas with American college students. See Hate Money Stalks America
The Origins of US Wokeism
Just as the slow creep of Nazism to overtake German society had its unique events, so too does Wokeism have its particular history. While the ideology that all America’s problems are due to White Supremacy was around during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the current incarnation of this philosophy can be traced to Nancy Pelosi, former Speak of the House, and her Identity Politics which as has become mainstream Wokeism. In her desire to build a coalition on minorities within the Democrat Party, Pelosi devised a game plan that when the minorities became the majority of the voters, they would vote away the Whites. Pelosi’s Identity Politics was classic the Good vs the Evil narrative, and she cast Whites and Jews in the role of the evil ones.
Although Pelosi lifted the Oppressor vs Oppressed terminology from the Communist ideology, she structure her Wokeism along racist lines, whereas Communist doctrine was supposedly non-racist even if some of its practitioners were bigots. In retrospect, we can discern how Pelosi worked to marginalize and isolate American Jews as the enemies of both the Alt Right and the Left Wokers.
With the French publication in 2011 of the extremist book, The Great Replacement, arguing that Europe was being overrun by Muslims who sought to destroy the Europeans’ way of life, it was a short step to argue that in America Blacks would supplant Whites and that Jews were the masterminds of the grand replacement in America. Hence, the Charlottesville Tiki Torch marchers chanting, “Jews shall not replace us.”
The Woke media propagated the false narrative that the Unite the Right rally was the brainchild of White Supremacists when in reality it was the culmination of years of effort by Charlottesville’s Black Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy, who promised the disunited various right wing groups such as the American Nazis, remnant of the KKK philosophy, White Supremacists, etc. a huge counter demonstration by the Alt Left (Antifa), and hence national publicity. Bellamy’s focal point was the removal of Confederate statues. Bellamy’s first endeavor in 2016 was a flop as the Alt Right never showed up; so he intensified his efforts, focusing August 2017, primarily by personally attacking Alt Right leaders Richard Spence and Jason Kessler. Spurred on by Nancy Pelosi’s and other Democrats’ Identity Politics - Wokeism promise to replace Whites with Blacks and the general imputation of racism to all White People by the concepts of White Fragility and White Privilege, enough Whites felt threatened to attend the Unite the Right rally. In contrast, local leaders including the President of University of Virginia and the Charlottesville’s leading newspaper knew Bellamy’s background and urged him to stop his racist agitation. He refused.
After the Tiki Torch Parade and the death of Heather Heyer, neither Nancy Pelosi nor any other Democrat leader criticized Wes Bellamy, but rather they all piled on the False Narrative that it had been a 100% White Supremacy, KKK, Nazi undertaking. Pelosi never took one iota of responsibility for the subsequent murders of Jews in response to the Tikki Torch chant, “Jews shall not replace us.” The Tree of Life shooting on October 17, 2017, two months after Charlottesville, was one madman’s response to the “Jews shall not replace us” chant. At Saturday morning services, eleven Jews were murdered and six were wounded, making it the deadliest attack on Jews in the United States.
One year later, Pelosi’s statement about the Tree of Life shooting “"Disturbingly, anti-Semitic attacks in America are increasing at the highest rate on record, with at least 780 incidents reported in the first half of 2019 alone.” Not only was Pelosi still silent about Bellamy’s role in fomenting the attacks on Jews, but she did not mention how she had been promoting anti-Semites in the US Congress. Non-jihadist Muslims have been warning the rest of us of the rise of radical Islamists within the Democrats. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) recently donating $14,000 to Rep. Ilhan Omar's (D-MN) re-election campaign.” The Democrats featured radical Islamists, e.g. Wisconsin Imam Noman Hussain, who supported Texas based Qalam Institute, which advocated using women as sex slaves and that “that commands Muslims to be pure and hospitable so that they do not resemble the Jews." In 2012, DNC convention invited Islamist Siraj Wahhaj, knowing of his ties to terrorist networks and his “criminal past and violent, misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric.” see Newsweek In addition, Pelosi advanced the Equivalency Doctrine that one may not criticize any Muslim atrocity without also lodging some criticism of Jews and Israel – without regard to the truth.
The Woke Doctrine of Intersectionality
The advancement of the Woke Doctrine of Intersectionality has been on display with the pro-Hamas protestors carrying signs, “Queers for Palestine.” Woke Intersectionality means that each allegedly oppressed group must mindlessly support any other allegedly oppressed group with no regard for facts. Under Wokeism, all that matters is to which group someone is assigned. Under Wokeism, Jews are not a minority but rather part of the White oppressors, making Hamas’ pogrom good and all Jews evil. While the Woke deny that they are anti-Semitic their attacks on Israel have been legally recognized as anti-Semitic. Singling out Israel for alleged actions which never occurred or for ignoring similar and worse behavior by others has been deemed anti-Semitic. Unlike Pelosi’s Equivalency Doctrine, Wokers may condemn Israel, as the world sole Jewish state, but they may not mention that presently none of the Arab states have a Jewish population, while 20% of Israel is Arab with full and equal civil rights. Instead, a graduation speaker at USC who believes that Israel is an apartheid state should be allowed to have the commencement platform before 65,000 USC students, parents, and friends. When Pelosi and others pretend to be against anti-Semitism, Pelosi fails to mention that Syria’s al-Assad has murdered over 250,000 Arabs, the Houthis rebel war in Yemen has killed over 377,000 Arabs, that Jordan expelled the PLO from Jordan in 1970, and that similar to the Armenian Genocide, Turkey is waging war against the Arab Kurds. Although the Kurds were US allies during our occupation of Iraq, the US alternates between support and abandonment of the Kurds in its support of Iran and its terrorist proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis. The world remembers how the US abandoned Afghanis whom we promised to protect from the Taliban.
Within the US, Pelosi’s Identity Politics, aka Wokeism, definitely supports the Islamic terrorist over other Muslims. Although there are many Muslims, Arabs, and Gazans willing to present the nightmare of living under the rule of extremists, they are shunned by the US Woker politicians and the Woke US media in favor of the false narrative that evil Jews are murdering innocent Gazans. See And also see And Islamist Discloses Goal “Israel is only the first target; the entire world will be under our control.” Those who are familiar with Nazi propaganda in the 1930's, see the similarities with US Wokeism.
As the 1930's Germans and the world learned too late, state sponsored anti-Semitism is symptomatic of a diseased body politic.
(Richard Lee Abrams has been an attorney, a Realtor and community relations consultant as well as a CityWatch contributor. The views expressed are those of Richard Abrams and not necessarily of CityWatchLA.com. You may email him at [email protected].)
