A Swedish poster urging the boycott of Israeli products. (Source: Creap)
When World War II ended sixty-seven years ago, the world learned that one-third of European Jews had been murdered by the Nazis and a multitude of European collaborators.
The Jewish people are easy scapegoats. We are characterized as both communists or capitalists. We are either rootless wanderers or rootless cosmopolitans, a people eternally damned because we rejected the ministry of Jesus or the cruel depredations of Mohammed.
Before the modern state of Israel was established, we were despised as a people without a nation. Now we are despised for having reclaimed it.
The Jewish people’s love of the land of Israel, which is one of the core narratives of the Torah, is part of Christian scripture as well.
Even the Koran, a Jew-hating document par excellence, mentions the Jewish people and Israel. But the Koran, the Torah, and the Christian Bible never mention any place called Palestine or a Palestinian nation. That is because Palestine is a post-modern construct designed by the KGB for their Arab allies during the Cold War. The purpose of this political fabrication was not to establish yet another dysfunctional Arab-Muslim nation, but to commit another genocide of the Jewish people.
We tend to think of Muslim Jew-hatred as an existential threat to Israel and to the Jewish people. We also tend to downplay European Jew-hatred as a vestige of times gone by.
But European Jew-hatred is alive and well. It has morphed into political anti-Zionism. And now the EU has institutionalized Jew-hatred in a series of boycott guidelines that recall the dry, legalistic language of the Nuremberg Laws.
The Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses is the model for the current EU guidelines for boycotting Israeli products. Leftist policies are, by their very nature, totalitarian in impulse and execution.
The EU guidelines are clearly anti-Semitic: they are a unique set of guidelines crafted for the occasion of targeting Jews. The EU does not ask similar guarantees of China for Tibet, Turkey for Cyprus, or Indonesia for Western Papua.
Last week, the European Union issued guidelines regarding the use of EU funds in Israel. From now on, Israeli institutions cooperating with the EU or benefitting from EU funding must demonstrate that they have no direct or indirect links to Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights. The guidelines, drawn up by the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, bind the EU, a supranational organization of 28 European nations, and one of the world’s largest donors of development aid. The guidelines also forbid any funding, cooperation, awarding of scholarships, research funds or prizes to anyone residing in Jewish settlements in Israeli territories outside Israel’s 1967 borders.
Only the 500,000 Jewish inhabitants of Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are singled out in this respect. The EU guidelines are clearly anti-Semitic: they are a unique set of guidelines crafted for the occasion of targeting Jews. The EU does not ask similar guarantees of Chinese institutions regarding their links with Chinese occupied Tibet, nor does the EU forbid any funding, cooperation, awarding of scholarships, research funds or prizes to ethnic Chinese residing in Tibet. Neither has the EU issued similar guidelines regarding Turkey and Turkish occupied Northern Cyprus, Morocco and Moroccan occupied Western Sahara, Indonesia and Indonesian occupied Western Papua, or territorial disputes anywhere else in the world.
In issuing the guidelines, the EU has come out in full support of the so-called “BDS” movement, which advocates “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” against the Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
The EU decided to draw up the guidelines last December, shortly after a group of 22 political NGOs, all of them supporting BDS, called on Brussels to join the BDS actions. Ironically, many of these political NGOs, despite their involvement in a delegitimization campaign against Israel, have themselves for years been beneficiaries of millions of euros of EU money. In effect, the EU has been funding political NGOs whose main objective it was to pressure the EU member states into adopting anti-Semitic policies.
The Muslims burn Malmo, the cops won’t even go in to Muslim areas there
and Sweden has a poster about boycotting Israel…with attendant blood
dripping from an orange. To quote that old commie folk singer , Pete
Seeger, “When will they ever learn?”
I regularly send Robert links to reports of academics calling for boycotts of Israeli universities and researchers. British faculty are most persistent in boycott efforts, but the first successful organizational vote for boycott came from the Asian American Society.
Here is a link to a quick search of InsideHigherEd.com stories on Israel and boycotts (Stephen Hawking, for shame): http://www.insidehighered.com/search/site/Israel%20%2B%20boycott
Resigning from the Gendarmerie, was punishable by court martial during the Occupation, which could include facing a firing squad. The Resistance also complicated things: Gendarmes were asked NOT to resign if they opposed the Occupation, but to work from within.
Official condemnation of the collaboration? 791 people were executed in France from 1944-1951 following a trial for collaboration (with about 6,000 more sentenced to death but having their sentences communted). Marshal Petain was one of them. He died in prison after six years aged 95.
Between 4,000 and 6,000 people are officially estimated as having been summarily executed in 1944-1945. Raymond Aron estimated the number of executed at over 40,000, many of them simply enemies of the local Communist gang.
For comparison, about 40 Kapos have ever been put on trial and only one was executed for his crimes. I find these figures very hard to believe and hope the true figure is much higher.
And for the record, one of my relatives escaped three times from a POW camp where he contracted TB (I have his watch). Another relative, a general, was murdered by the SS in a staged escape attempt as retaliation for the death of a German general (von Brodowski) at the hands of the Resistance. The German general was believed at the time to have given the order for the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.
I’m pretty sure my great-uncle and great-great uncle didn’t “enthusiastically” round up Jews.
I am not attacking or condemning those brave and good French or Polish people who resisted the Nazis.
And this is not, not, not a condemnation of your fine and brave relatives. To take this personally as you seem to be doing, saddens me terribly.
The death figures of French and Polish Jews speak for themselves. Were there difficult punitive and life and death choices for French gendermes? Obviously. But that’s where courage and conviction comes into play. In truth, resisting genocidal fascism is usually a death sentence. But the societies that do make that existential choice, as did the Danes, speaks volumes about the values of that culture.
It would be unfair and a sign of intellectual collapse, I’m sure you will agree, to place the Danish and French-Polish behavior, during their occupations in regard to the Jews, on the same moral plane.
Kapos: Many were murdered by their fellow Jewish inmates, who rightly wanted revenge. Justice is never perfect.
But honestly, what do individual kapos have to do with the French or Polish nations? I’m baffled.
“During the Holocaust I believe the civilians of France and Poland were enthusiastic in turning in Jews.”
Wouldn’t want to make any sweeping generalisations now, would we?
Most generalizations are used because they are true.
Obviously, I am talking civil societies, not the Muslim world, where generalizations about America, Jews, Chritians etc., exist and persist because of the pathological nature of these cultures.
It is also true that not every Frenchman or Pole was a murderer, a collaborator, an informer, or simply indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors. There are shining examples of courage and defiance on the part of non-Jews who risked their lives and frequently sacrificed their lives in order to rescue Jews. These righteous among the nations are luminously memorialized in Yad Vashem, and almost every Holocaust remembrance site which I have visited.
However: the sad, indisputible fact is that before the World War II, the Jewish population of Poland was 3,300,00. Three million were murdered by the Nazis and their Polish collaborators.
Pre-war France’s Jewish population was 350,000. Seventy-seven thousand were murdered.
Contrast Denmark’s prewar Jewish population of 8,000. Of these, sixty were murderd.
Thus, we safely generalize and state that the people of Denmark courageously and successfully resisted the Final Solution.
antoineclarke – it is true that while all generalizations are false – nothing is 100% – yet – as Robert pointed out – in Denmark and Holland the population as a whole did not cooperate in turning in their Jewish citizens. In many cases they were aided in hiding their identities.
There is no story of Anne Frank in France. Certainly not Poland.
I was watching a program series on Auschwitz on Netflix – and in one segment high ranking Nazis were meeting with French officials to discuss how France’s Jews would be rounded up, and the French proposed letting their gendarmes do the work.
Antoine, I don’t know how much you’ve read up about the holocaust, or how much personal knowledge you have on the subject. I have known/met/spoken to many holocaust survivors, including family members, and I’ve read many, many books including survivor stores. You can be assured that without the eager collaboration of the Polish people, the Nazis could have never achieved their goals and in such a quick way. Polish people would give away jews for a bag of sugar. They danced for joy when jews were rounded up and taken away. They were able to take over the jewish homes and possessions. I know of someone who was a little girl (6? not more than 10) when her family came out of hiding and returned to their home. Their neighbors butchered the family, while she hid in the oven. I could go on and on. If you want the stories about what happened in France – read Sarah’s Key (a fictional novel that’s historically based) and watch the movie Au revoir les enfants. Of course as Robert says, there were exceptions.
M.H. You couldn’t be more correct. A wonderful fictionalized account of this phenomenon is the novel Mila 18 by Leon Uris. Eye-opening and heartbreaking.
I didn’t care for Sarah’s Key. But read Sebastian Faulks’s “Charlotte Gray” for historically-based, highly readable literary fiction on French collaboration.
This is slightly tongue in cheek, but since the enemies of Israel are universally pretty dumb and are addicted to knee jerk reactions, Israel should announce it’s boycotting itself and let’s see how many run away from the “Zionist conspiracy”.
I’ve written before regarding my experience with Swedish anti-Semites as-well-as my periodic exposure to Europe and the anti-Semitism that is endemic there – but now referred to as anti-“Zionism” (as-if there’s a difference!). I’ve always believed that the root of all this animosity was envy (‘Moneychanger’s from the middle-ages’, etc..). Israel is the current personification of the qualities the Jewish people have always emphasized to prosper in a marginalized world. Using ingenuity and intellect to ‘make the desert’ bloom (their little nation). The basis for the hatred is simple Cretinous jealousy. By-the-way, I’m not Jewish.
Robert, I must be reading this wrong. You state, “But, of course, the Koran, the Torah, and the Christian Bible never make reference to Palestine or a Palestinian people for the simple reason that this is a post-modern construct designed by the KGB for their Arab allies during the cold war”. You are saying, the Christian Bible does not make reference to Palestine because it is a post-modern construct designed by the KGB? What?? Claudia
I think Robert refers to the use of “Palestine” as the name of a nation rather than a region and to the concept of a “Palestinian people” as members of such a nation. The region named Palestine by the Roman conquerors — named after the Philistines, the classic Jewish enemy nation, as a poke-in-the-eye — was never a nation in any political sense of the word and so never had a people. It still is not and does not. Such claims are recent, as Robert refers properly to them.
During the Holocaust I believe the civilians of France and Poland were enthusiastic in turning in Jews.
You are right in anti-Semites over the years accusing Jews of being both Communistic and Capitalistic.
I believe a lot of Antisemitism is rooted in resentment over their success. They have always valued education (like many of the people from Asia) and work hard at achieving their goals.
Heck if Israel was the desert wasteland that it was before 1948 would there be this much turmoil?
(and observing Gaza the cynic would conclude that if left to their own devices it would turn back into a barren wasteland).
Bill — I believe you to be incorrect in attributing anti-semitism to any rational impluse — even one as base and unfounded as envy. It is what it is. My wife was a child in France during the War and you are indeed at least somewhat correct in your assumption that many of the French public co-operated with their captors. How about if all of this is driven by similar impulses to the Al Sharpton — Trayvon Legacy crowd. Admittedly some of this is unwitting, but then we go to stupidity, which seems to pop up everywhere.
I think you’re mistaken in thinking that antisemitism is mostly irrational in the sense that antisemitic behavior is solely emotional reaction without thought or foundation. Antisemitic behavior comes from somewhere because people throughout history have not simply been struck with that irrational emotion from out of the blue. Instead, there was at least one person who came to a rational decision to use Jews as the ultimate scapegoat to accomplish one or more rationally decided, specific purposes and had the rhetorical ability and large enough soapbox to stir up the emotions of others who were ready to be stirred up. Historical examples of exactly that sequence are myriad and obvious.
I interpret this as just another example of tribal warfare — which history has been littered with. There is a difference: the Jewish people have hung in and did not for most of their history have a home base, that is, a central nation to call their own.
French Jew-hatred is unique in that France is the only country in occupied Europe where the Nazis did not need deploy a single soldier to aid in the round-up of Jewish citizens for deportation to Auschwitz.
The French gendarmes, along with enthusiastic French citizens, did the job all by themselves. Even the Nazi high-command was stunned by France’s embrace of genocide.
As for Poland: even after the war was over, and the horror of the death camps revealed, some Jews who survived Auschwitz, attempted to return to their homes and were murdered in organized pogroms by their Polish neighbors.
The Kielce pogrom is probably the best known and documented:
The Muslims burn Malmo, the cops won’t even go in to Muslim areas there
and Sweden has a poster about boycotting Israel…with attendant blood
dripping from an orange. To quote that old commie folk singer , Pete
Seeger, “When will they ever learn?”
I regularly send Robert links to reports of academics calling for boycotts of Israeli universities and researchers. British faculty are most persistent in boycott efforts, but the first successful organizational vote for boycott came from the Asian American Society.
Here is a link to a quick search of InsideHigherEd.com stories on Israel and boycotts (Stephen Hawking, for shame):
http://www.insidehighered.com/search/site/Israel%20%2B%20boycott
Resigning from the Gendarmerie, was punishable by court martial during the Occupation, which could include facing a firing squad. The Resistance also complicated things: Gendarmes were asked NOT to resign if they opposed the Occupation, but to work from within.
Official condemnation of the collaboration? 791 people were executed in France from 1944-1951 following a trial for collaboration (with about 6,000 more sentenced to death but having their sentences communted). Marshal Petain was one of them. He died in prison after six years aged 95.
Between 4,000 and 6,000 people are officially estimated as having been summarily executed in 1944-1945. Raymond Aron estimated the number of executed at over 40,000, many of them simply enemies of the local Communist gang.
For comparison, about 40 Kapos have ever been put on trial and only one was executed for his crimes. I find these figures very hard to believe and hope the true figure is much higher.
And for the record, one of my relatives escaped three times from a POW camp where he contracted TB (I have his watch). Another relative, a general, was murdered by the SS in a staged escape attempt as retaliation for the death of a German general (von Brodowski) at the hands of the Resistance. The German general was believed at the time to have given the order for the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.
I’m pretty sure my great-uncle and great-great uncle didn’t “enthusiastically” round up Jews.
Antoine:
I am not attacking or condemning those brave and good French or Polish people who resisted the Nazis.
And this is not, not, not a condemnation of your fine and brave relatives. To take this personally as you seem to be doing, saddens me terribly.
The death figures of French and Polish Jews speak for themselves. Were there difficult punitive and life and death choices for French gendermes? Obviously. But that’s where courage and conviction comes into play. In truth, resisting genocidal fascism is usually a death sentence. But the societies that do make that existential choice, as did the Danes, speaks volumes about the values of that culture.
It would be unfair and a sign of intellectual collapse, I’m sure you will agree, to place the Danish and French-Polish behavior, during their occupations in regard to the Jews, on the same moral plane.
Kapos: Many were murdered by their fellow Jewish inmates, who rightly wanted revenge. Justice is never perfect.
But honestly, what do individual kapos have to do with the French or Polish nations? I’m baffled.
“During the Holocaust I believe the civilians of France and Poland were enthusiastic in turning in Jews.”
Wouldn’t want to make any sweeping generalisations now, would we?
Antoine:
Most generalizations are used because they are true.
Obviously, I am talking civil societies, not the Muslim world, where generalizations about America, Jews, Chritians etc., exist and persist because of the pathological nature of these cultures.
It is also true that not every Frenchman or Pole was a murderer, a collaborator, an informer, or simply indifferent to the fate of their Jewish neighbors. There are shining examples of courage and defiance on the part of non-Jews who risked their lives and frequently sacrificed their lives in order to rescue Jews. These righteous among the nations are luminously memorialized in Yad Vashem, and almost every Holocaust remembrance site which I have visited.
However: the sad, indisputible fact is that before the World War II, the Jewish population of Poland was 3,300,00. Three million were murdered by the Nazis and their Polish collaborators.
Pre-war France’s Jewish population was 350,000. Seventy-seven thousand were murdered.
Contrast Denmark’s prewar Jewish population of 8,000. Of these, sixty were murderd.
Thus, we safely generalize and state that the people of Denmark courageously and successfully resisted the Final Solution.
First rate, Robert
antoineclarke – it is true that while all generalizations are false – nothing is 100% – yet – as Robert pointed out – in Denmark and Holland the population as a whole did not cooperate in turning in their Jewish citizens. In many cases they were aided in hiding their identities.
There is no story of Anne Frank in France. Certainly not Poland.
I was watching a program series on Auschwitz on Netflix – and in one segment high ranking Nazis were meeting with French officials to discuss how France’s Jews would be rounded up, and the French proposed letting their gendarmes do the work.
Antoine, I don’t know how much you’ve read up about the holocaust, or how much personal knowledge you have on the subject. I have known/met/spoken to many holocaust survivors, including family members, and I’ve read many, many books including survivor stores. You can be assured that without the eager collaboration of the Polish people, the Nazis could have never achieved their goals and in such a quick way. Polish people would give away jews for a bag of sugar. They danced for joy when jews were rounded up and taken away. They were able to take over the jewish homes and possessions. I know of someone who was a little girl (6? not more than 10) when her family came out of hiding and returned to their home. Their neighbors butchered the family, while she hid in the oven. I could go on and on. If you want the stories about what happened in France – read Sarah’s Key (a fictional novel that’s historically based) and watch the movie Au revoir les enfants. Of course as Robert says, there were exceptions.
M.H. You couldn’t be more correct. A wonderful fictionalized account of this phenomenon is the novel Mila 18 by Leon Uris. Eye-opening and heartbreaking.
I didn’t care for Sarah’s Key. But read Sebastian Faulks’s “Charlotte Gray” for historically-based, highly readable literary fiction on French collaboration.
This is slightly tongue in cheek, but since the enemies of Israel are universally pretty dumb and are addicted to knee jerk reactions, Israel should announce it’s boycotting itself and let’s see how many run away from the “Zionist conspiracy”.
Robert:
I’ve written before regarding my experience with Swedish anti-Semites as-well-as my periodic exposure to Europe and the anti-Semitism that is endemic there – but now referred to as anti-“Zionism” (as-if there’s a difference!). I’ve always believed that the root of all this animosity was envy (‘Moneychanger’s from the middle-ages’, etc..). Israel is the current personification of the qualities the Jewish people have always emphasized to prosper in a marginalized world. Using ingenuity and intellect to ‘make the desert’ bloom (their little nation). The basis for the hatred is simple Cretinous jealousy. By-the-way, I’m not Jewish.
Robert, I must be reading this wrong. You state, “But, of course, the Koran, the Torah, and the Christian Bible never make reference to Palestine or a Palestinian people for the simple reason that this is a post-modern construct designed by the KGB for their Arab allies during the cold war”. You are saying, the Christian Bible does not make reference to Palestine because it is a post-modern construct designed by the KGB? What?? Claudia
I think Robert refers to the use of “Palestine” as the name of a nation rather than a region and to the concept of a “Palestinian people” as members of such a nation. The region named Palestine by the Roman conquerors — named after the Philistines, the classic Jewish enemy nation, as a poke-in-the-eye — was never a nation in any political sense of the word and so never had a people. It still is not and does not. Such claims are recent, as Robert refers properly to them.
CJ:
Larry’s response to your objection is correct. Sorry for my awkward phrasing.
During the Holocaust I believe the civilians of France and Poland were enthusiastic in turning in Jews.
You are right in anti-Semites over the years accusing Jews of being both Communistic and Capitalistic.
I believe a lot of Antisemitism is rooted in resentment over their success. They have always valued education (like many of the people from Asia) and work hard at achieving their goals.
Heck if Israel was the desert wasteland that it was before 1948 would there be this much turmoil?
(and observing Gaza the cynic would conclude that if left to their own devices it would turn back into a barren wasteland).
Bill — I believe you to be incorrect in attributing anti-semitism to any rational impluse — even one as base and unfounded as envy. It is what it is. My wife was a child in France during the War and you are indeed at least somewhat correct in your assumption that many of the French public co-operated with their captors. How about if all of this is driven by similar impulses to the Al Sharpton — Trayvon Legacy crowd. Admittedly some of this is unwitting, but then we go to stupidity, which seems to pop up everywhere.
I think you’re mistaken in thinking that antisemitism is mostly irrational in the sense that antisemitic behavior is solely emotional reaction without thought or foundation. Antisemitic behavior comes from somewhere because people throughout history have not simply been struck with that irrational emotion from out of the blue. Instead, there was at least one person who came to a rational decision to use Jews as the ultimate scapegoat to accomplish one or more rationally decided, specific purposes and had the rhetorical ability and large enough soapbox to stir up the emotions of others who were ready to be stirred up. Historical examples of exactly that sequence are myriad and obvious.
I interpret this as just another example of tribal warfare — which history has been littered with. There is a difference: the Jewish people have hung in and did not for most of their history have a home base, that is, a central nation to call their own.
Bill:
French Jew-hatred is unique in that France is the only country in occupied Europe where the Nazis did not need deploy a single soldier to aid in the round-up of Jewish citizens for deportation to Auschwitz.
The French gendarmes, along with enthusiastic French citizens, did the job all by themselves. Even the Nazi high-command was stunned by France’s embrace of genocide.
As for Poland: even after the war was over, and the horror of the death camps revealed, some Jews who survived Auschwitz, attempted to return to their homes and were murdered in organized pogroms by their Polish neighbors.
The Kielce pogrom is probably the best known and documented:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kielce_pogrom