Along with the fact that periodically some portion of the world seeks to destroy the Jews, is the reality that in every case, some portion of the Jews seeks to help them.
I don’t know how to explain the phenomenon, but I’ve read historical accounts of it in which the anomily has been given a name – conversos, kapos – and I’ve run into it in our own day.
I think the fact that there are Jews here and in Israel who align themselves with those who would just as soon see them killed or kill them themselves, tells us several things about the human psyche and the time of man.
The first and most important thing it reveals is that we are engaged in another sweeping anti-Semitic episode that will eventually rival and possibly surpass in ferocity and geography, any that has come before.
I’m not sure if the majority of the modern-day kapos think that by “showing” their enemieis they’re on their side, they will be spared, or if they just are unable to recognize an enemy when they encounter one.
I am sure some believe they are nobly standing up for “what’s right,” having swallowed whole the entire Arab revisionist historical narative, but it doesn’t matter. The outcome is the same.
Historians may one day come up with a name for the Jews who stood with the Islamo-Fascists and anti-Semites in these days. Jewslamists, maybe.
I’ll bet the Jews who converted or faked conversion to satisfy the Inquisitors found ways to justify doing that. And the ones who turned in their neighbors or collected their hair or eyeglasses or otherwise collaborated with their neighbor’s and familie’s executioners with the hope the Nazis would spare them – or even in the twisted belief that somehow the Nazis were right – justified that behavior, as well.
And today’s counterparts also feel justified in turning on their own people and aiding and abetting their own people’s sworn enemies, mostly by providing propaganda material.
To find a gentile anti-Semite who prefers the Arab lies to the truth, while unfortunate, is common and unsurprising.
To run into a Jewish one, while not surprising, is still shocking and terribly sad.
And, I’m not sure how to approach such a person, which is why I avoid the subject with anyone I wish to have in my life whose own predilictions on the issue are unknown to me.
It’s a cowardly approach, I know.
But sometimes, broaching the issue is unavoidable.
I have such a case now.
When I knew this woman, I was 10 and she was my 16-year-old guitar teacher, and I thought she was the coolest thing ever.
We “bumped into” each other on Facebook the other day, and she noticed some of what I’ve written on Israel and noted we may disagree on the subject.
Eventually, she told me that if I think Israel is anything but an apartheid state seeking to do harm to its Arab residents then I have my head “buried deep in the sand.”
She knows this because she reads Ha’aretz occasionally.
My response was this:
“I follow the news very carefully, and the news of Israel most religiously (so-to-speak), and am very familiar with its faults and foibles, which are no less or greater than any other collection of human beings. Though held to a higher standard of behavior than any other country, Israel is, in fact, similar to some and better than many – and immeasurably better than most of its closest neighbors. It is in the unique position of having to decide if its constitution is to become a suicide pact or if it can find a way to survive as the world’s only Jewish country and maintain its humanity. (The U.S. faces similar questions, BTW).
But, in any case, it is the last bastion of protection for world Jewry, and is surrounded by homicidal neighbors bent on the destruction of the nation and the people. It’s a position the Jews have been in before, only this time, we’re armed, which is a good thing.
And, like all those other times before – the Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the Holocaust – there are Jews who, for whatever reason, are unwilling or unable to recognize their own enemy or understand that their enemy knows them whether they see it or not. So, history shows us that those of us who take the side of the anti-Semites, and there always are some, wind up in the same ovens as the rest of us, every time.”
I expect to be “unfriended,” but what can you do?
Political Mavens
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