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An “Enlightened” Double Standard – The Hypocrisy of the Left

Last Shabbat my husband Alex began telling me about the huge hypocrisy of the Europeans in condemning Israel over the “occupation” and “right of return” considering how they have dealt with such matters themselves. I was astounded at the information he proceeded to give me and asked him to please write it down so I could share it with all of you.  Here it is: read and be amazed.

The hypocrisy of the virtue-signaling “enlightened” Left
 by Alex Ragen

At the end of World War II, Czechoslovakia forcibly expelled some 2.4 million Germans from Sudetenland, about a third of the area’s population. The Czechoslovak government justified the expulsion – which it termed a “deportation” – on the grounds that the Sudeten Germans had been a major cause of the war and destruction inflicted by the Nazis: thousands of them had served in the Nazi armed forces and Gestapo and participated in political murders as well as the deportations of the country’s Jews.

In the years before the war, the Sudeten Fascist party, which won 90% of the German vote in the last election, organized – under the personal direction of Hitler – violent demonstrations demanding annexation to Germany, as well as a brutal purge of its opponents. Hitler’s threats to invade Czechoslovakia under the pretext of “protecting the German minority” led to the infamous Munich Agreement that forced Czechoslovakia to cede Sudetenland to Germany. A few months later Hitler violated the agreement by taking control of the rest of Czechoslovakia.

The horrific Nazi crimes against the people of Czechoslovakia are well documented, and the anger of the victims entirely understandable. Indeed, for months before the official expulsion – a period known as the “Wild Expulsions” – hundreds of Sudeten Germans were murdered in private acts of vengeance.

Edvard Beneš, the head of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, had declared that “what the Germans have done in our land since 1938 will be revenged on them multifold and mercilessly”. Sergěj Ingr, its Minister of National Defense, told his countrymen to “beat them [the Germans], kill them, let nobody survive”.

The Czechoslovak National Assembly enacted a law that provided amnesty for acts “aimed at righteous retaliation for deeds of occupants or their collaborators”, even if these acts would otherwise be illegal. In other words, any and all acts of violence, including murder or rape, committed against Sudeten Germans, even by private persons, were declared not punishable by law.

The official government-organized expulsion followed. The expelled were stripped of their citizenship and were not compensated for property left behind. Altogether, there were an estimated 20,000 casualties in the course of the expulsion, including violent death, suicide, rape and death in internment camps.

Despite the brutality of the expulsion, the United Nations did not pass a single resolution condemning Czechoslovakia or its leaders’ exhortations to kill all Germans, or urging a “right of return”; nor did the UN establish a special commission to house and feed the refugees and generations of their descendants forever; nor was there any call to affix special labels noting the expulsion to products produced in Sudetenland so that “progressives” across the West could express their displeasure; nor did there arise a BDS movement that called for Czechoslovakia’s economic destruction.

Nor was a case ever brought against Czechoslovakia or its leaders for “war crimes”, or “collective punishment”, or “crimes against humanity” in any international judicial forum. This for two reasons: no such judicial forum existed at the time, and more importantly, the expulsion had been approved in advance by the Allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, at the 1945 Potsdam Conference, after the war’s end.

Germany quietly accepted all the Sudeten deportees, granted them citizenship, and integrated them into German society. In later years, a number of lawsuits were filed with the UN Human Rights Committee, which issued decisions calling for the Czech Republic to return confiscated property to its owners. All these decisions were ignored by the Czech government, which in 1997 reached an agreement with Germany in which both sides “expressed regret” and “took full responsibility”, but neither side undertook to do anything further.

In 2015, six decades after the expulsion, the Sudeten German Homeland Association finally threw in the towel, issuing a statement that recognized its share of responsibility for the persecution and murder of Czechs and Jews during the war and abandoning all claims for repatriation and compensation.

That story is finally over, and all sides have moved on.

In 1948, only two years after the Sudeten expulsion, many thousands of Palestinian Arabs voluntarily left their homes in response to the Arab League’s call to get out of the way so that its invading armies could “drive the Jews into the sea” unhindered. After Israel’s heroic efforts expelled the Arab invaders, the Palestinian Arabs who had helpfully gotten out of the way found themselves stranded in the countries that had invited them to take temporary refuge within their borders.

In response, the United Nations has passed hundreds of resolutions condemning Israel and urging a “right of return”; established a special commission to house and feed the “refugees” and unlimited generations of their descendants forever; European nations repeatedly call for special labels to be affixed to products produced in the “occupied territories” so that “progressives” across the West can express their pious displeasure at the failure of Israel’s neighbors to drive the Jews into the sea; the EU is preparing a blacklist of Israeli companies operating in the “occupied territories”, and a BDS movement has arisen that calls for Israel’s economic destruction.

Seventy years later, the story of the Palestinian Arabs is far from over. In contrast to Germany, which acknowledged its responsibility for the war and accepted and resettled the refugees, the Arab countries that attacked Israel have never expressed regret or accepted responsibility for the unprovoked attack – after all, there were then no Palestinian refugees. Instead, they denied the refugees citizenship and encouraged them to continue their “armed struggle” from the camps to which they were confined, in the process spawning an alphabet soup of terrorist groups that continue to plague the entire world, not only Israel.

The fact that roughly the same number of Jews were brutally expelled from some of those same Arab countries after 1948 – and thousands murdered in pogroms – has been studiously ignored, even though one might consider it a population exchange, like the now-forgotten exchange that took place between Greece and Turkey after World War I. Israel granted full citizenship to the expelled Jews and made every effort to integrate them into Israeli society. No one even talks about repatriation or compensation of property for the Arab Jews.

The tens of millions of European refugees of World War II have all been resettled, and the refugee camps shut down and abandoned decades ago. Not so the Palestinian Arabs. They remain imprisoned in their squalid camps, hostages to the belligerent Arab states in their unending war against the Jewish state, housed, fed and clothed by the “enlightened” European countries so nobly determined to once again bring about “peace in our time”.

Today Israel’s leaders and IDF officers find themselves accused of war crimes in the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and face arrest should any of them ever set foot in Europe. No one is surprised that none of the Arab leaders – Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, or Assad père et fils – have ever had to face an international tribunal to account for their well-documented mass murders of their own people, or had their international travel hindered in any way.

Throughout it all, despite the terror attacks that have killed thousands of Israelis, the country’s leaders have never urged their followers to “mercilessly avenge” the terrorism, as the Czechoslovak leaders did, yet they are repeatedly accused of doing so. The leaders of the terror groups and their “spiritual leaders” do use such language – their school textbooks overflow with it and have been poisoning the minds of their children for years – but no one is ever called out for it.

If the world community would apply to itself the standards it demands of Israel, Poland would have to return East Prussia to Germany, the United Kingdom would have to return Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic, and the descendants of non-native peoples in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand would be forced to return to their ancestral homelands. Of course, no one imagines that anything like this could ever happen.

Whence this double standard? How is that wars undertaken in self-defense are suddenly declared to be crimes against humanity, but only certain wars. How is it that territories acquired in such a war are declared to be “occupied territories”, but only certain territories? How is it that these “humanitarian” standards are applied only to one country, why can a NATO member like Turkey invade Cyprus and occupy its north since 1973 without a word of protest from the international community while Israel cannot pave a road through 50 meters of “occupied territory” without a deafening chorus of international censure?

It’s tempting to put this double standard down to anti-Semitism, but that would be only partly true. If the Arab nations were still the poverty-stricken disease-ridden illiterate Third World hovels that they were at the end of the nineteenth century, if Europe had not consumed itself in two World Wars and now desperately needed their oil and gas, perhaps things would be different.

Or perhaps not. Are the British Labor Party and American Democratic Party and Amnesty International – indeed, the entire political Left – really so deeply concerned for the welfare of the “oppressed Palestinians suffering under the brutal Israeli Occupation”? Or is it more akin to what George Orwell discovered about the prewar British Left when writing The Road to Wigan Pier – that they didn’t love the working class nearly as much as they viscerally detested the rich, that behind all the pious rhetoric of the virtue signalling “progressive” movement there lurk the vilest of human motives, rabid hatred of the other, and jealousy too, especially if the other is more successful that you are, and especially if your society has vilified the other for two thousand years as the source of all evil in the world?

Is the post-modern post-Christian world, the champion of human rights and politically correct discourse, still clinging to its most poisonous heritage? After all, only eighty years ago the most enlightened of European nations, the land of Kant, Beethoven, Goethe and Schiller, was reducing all of Europe to ruin and perpetrating the industrialized murder of millions of Jews.

Yet, despite all the vitriol, all the hatred, all the boycotts and sanctions, all the crazed shouting down of Israeli speakers at US and European campuses, Israel continues to survive, indeed to prosper, as a democratic state with a free economy, a free press and freedom of religion for all religions, in marked contrast to its neighbors. In contrast too to so many other countries that gained their independence in the postwar period: Pakistan, Iraq, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh … the list of failed repressive states goes on and on.

Perhaps Israel will one day no longer be the most vilified of nation but will instead become a “beacon unto the nations”.

Perhaps, but the nations must first want to see the light.

One can hope.

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11 comments on “An “Enlightened” Double Standard – The Hypocrisy of the Left”

  1. Gerald Moses

    I received your email/article from my brother in Sydney where he had received it from another person in the Community.This is one of the better uses of emails!
    I forwarded it on to my Address Book with the following message.
    “How well written and true.
    How is it so that Israel continues to survive, thrive and punch above it’s weight?
    Whilst to us the more recent past (80 years or so) demonstrates all of this, our history over thousands of years is all so similar.
    How have the Jewish People survived all the obstacles which have confronted them?
    They have outlived so many “civilisations”.
    The Jewish world population is minimal compared to others, yet Jewish people the world over (of course predominantly but not exclusively in Israel) contribute so much to the benefit of the world in some many different fields.
    And still the Arab nations want to drive Israel into the sea- But not really- They want to drive the Jews into the sea!
    Whether we all believe or acknowledge this or not we have a Protector.
    Am Yisrael Chai!
    Go figure!
    Best wishes
    Gerald
    (Gerald Moses Gold Coast Queensland Australia)

  2. Harry Bentwoode

    Surak wrote: “Why pick on Israel? If you are going to pick a fight with one of two dogs, you will choose the smaller one, that constitutes a smaller threat.”
    For two twentieth-century examples, consider Turkish actions — its seizure of Syria’s Hatay after WW I, and its invasion and seizure of northern Cyprus in 1974. In the former case, the aggression was met with international approval and sign-off, despite Turkey’s alignment with Germany. In the latter case, apart from official non-recognition of a (pseudo-)independent puppet state, no action was taken against Turkey for its aggression. Is Turkey “too big” to fall”? It would seem so.

  3. Dolly Chinitz

    I was in Yugoslavia (Subotica)after the Shoah (survived as a hidden child) and watched from the window as the Sudeten Deutsche (we called them Svabs)forcibly but peacefully left with their horse-pulled wagons piled high with belongings. This exodus took about 2 days. They lived until then in the neighbouring villages for maybe a hundred years, but Yugoslavia now considered them enemy aliens and expelled them. As you say above they were integrated without any problems in Germany and no one ever called them refugees or castigated Yugoslavia or was any compensation ever requested or given.

  4. Surak

    Alex tells only the beginning of the story of population exchanges between hostile parties, particularly in the aftermath of World War 2. He could have mentioned the exchange between Greece and Turkey, or the much larger exchange between India (Hindus) and Pakistan (Muslims, East and West), involving tens of millions of people.

    The list of “occupations” is nearly endless: China in East Turkestan, Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, and Tibet; England in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; France in Bretagne (Brittany), Corsica, and Provence; India and Pakistan in Kashmir; Italy in Sardinia, Sicilia (Sicily), and the north; Japan in the Ryukyu Islands; Morocco in Western Sahara; Russia in Chechnya and Crimea; Spain in the Basque country and Catalonia; almost the entirety of North America, South America, and Oceania…

    Why pick on Israel? If you are going to pick a fight with one of two dogs, you will choose the smaller one, that constitutes a smaller threat.

    I hope to see President Trump and PM Netanyahu leave the UN. Good riddance!

  5. Lawrence Proman

    Naomi-

    Right ON! My grandfather fled the Russian pogroms; my grandmother, Latvia; my father, Russia. Members of my father’s family were hauled from Poland to sanctioned murders, and members of my mother’s family were executed in France’s streets. NO ONE will haul me off in a cattle car. Each voice MUST speak out NOW and always.

    Heil Hitler Replaced Guten Tag

    Civil Liberties … Tolerance… Equality…
    Were not considered in Berlin, on the night of April 13th, in the public square.
    As Hebrew Books, Rabbinical Treatises, and International Books were burned.
    In a massive bonfire!
    Helen Keller burned; Upton Sinclair burned; Ernest Hemingway burned; H.G. Wells burned.
    Burned with the Torah,
    Burned with the Mishnah,
    Burned with the Key Of Solomon,
    Burned with prayer books,
    Burned with Scrolls,
    Burned 1000’s of years, of countless writers.
    All in flames.
    As the fires leaped upward; and the fever fed fury.
    Free thought was eradicated by goose stepping mentally diseased thugs.
    “Heil Hitler” replaced, “Guten Tag!”
    “Seig Heil” replaced, “Guten Nacht!”

    Lawrence Proman

  6. shimshon bitnun

    NAOMI thanks for an excellent article,a real reminder that the UN has,for us in israel at least,become the class bully and we are it’s major,almost in fact,its only target.for some time now we have tried to be “a light unto the nations”.we send teams to help people all over the world suffering catastrophies of all varieties,we contribute regularly internationally in the field of medicine in particular,but not only.our “start-ups”also benefit the world at large.we have helped many struggling african nations in the field of agriculture,water resources and treating the sick.The UN is completely silent when nations like turkey and russia take the law into their own hands.
    We must continue bringing hope to countries in distress,stay true to ourselves and ignore the collection of villains called the united nations.they will never change and neither should we.

  7. David Perl

    Thank you. Incidentally, after their liberation from the Nazis yms”h, my father, his brother and their two sisters lived on a farm that had belonged to an expelled Sudeten family.

  8. Robin Rosenblatt

    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
    “Niemöller”
    The UN….
    First they came after Israel, and I did not speak out.
    Then they came after America….

  9. David Terlinsky

    Alex

    You point out so much hypocrisy and facts. The left hates to deal with real facts. Great article! Naomi I just finished “An unorthodox match” wow that was amazing! Cant wait for part two.

  10. Rosalie Lazarus

    This article is brilliant. Thank you Alex.
    I have read all your novels and play, Naomi.

    You are a blessing, Naomi and Alex.

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