Today is the Ninth of Av, the day of the Jewish people’s biggest calamity, the destruction of Jerusalem and the beginning of the torturous exile in a murderous diaspora across Europe and the Middle East punctuated by pogroms and humiliations. It is a fast day, and a day of profound mourning.

For some time now, I have been struggling – as have all those out there who still have a moral backbone–  with the proper response to the hateful, disgusting antisemitic events and language being tossed like little shit bombs at the Jewish people. Vueling Airlines’ disgraceful treatment of Jewish children and their counselor put into motion by a pilot interviewed by the FBI for teaching the September 11 suspects how to fly; the Israeli family thrown out of a Spanish restaurant with insults; the Israeli musician kicked out of an Viennese restaurant for speaking Hebrew in which not a single customer rose to leave in solidarity (how 1930’s!).

Of course, we can all report online antisemitic tropes in the hope that they will be deleted by the responsible adults supposedly in charge of Twitter (sorry X), Facebook, TikTok and Instagram but don’t hold your breath. I can’t tell you how many times I reported really der Sturmer-level Nazi propaganda only to be loftily informed that “it doesn’t go against our guidelines.” (X is the worst by the way. I have yet to find anything they consider antisemitic enough to be out of bounds of their “guidelines”).

But really, why should I be surprised? Every Western European country involved has a long, black history when it comes to Jew-hatred. Keir Starmer is threatening to recognize a Palestinian State? Let’s remember during WW II the many opportunities to rescue substantial numbers of Jews that were blocked by Great Britain who, in the words of an American ambassador to Great Britain said their foreign office was “concerned with the difficulties of disposing of any number of Jews should they be rescued.” As Arthur D. Morse, author of “While Six Million Died” put it: “…the vision of Jews streaming to Palestine seemed to upset Whitehall more than the vision of Jews walking to their death into gas chambers.”

I would add the fake and discredited photos of starving Gazan children seem to upset the Brits far more than the real, Hamas-released photos of starving hostage Evyatar David, 24, forced to dig his own grave. The astonishing response of that vicious airhead Piers Morgan is typical, doubting its authenticity. Right, the photo taken by Hamas in a tunnel showing the meaty arm of a terrorist handing something to starving David was… staged? He is actually getting three squares a day? While the “starving” children, all held in the arms of well-fed parents –  are to be trusted? Nincompoop.

Morgan, and the rest of Europe, are all choosing silence over this concentration camp-like photo, even refusing to pay lip service to the idea of Israeli hostages being mistreated, despite numerous first-hand testimonies of released hostages. This way they deny the atrocities of October 7.

As I read in Eliezer Berkovits’s excellent book Faith After the Holocaust, it’s reminiscent of the behavior of the allies during the Holocaust. There was always a reason the Jews of Europe could not be helped. Countries refused to take in Jewish refugees. The allies refused to bomb the transports to Auschwitz. Palestinian Jews willing to parachute into Hungary to save the Jews were kept out for fear their contribution to the war effort would have to be recognized and rewarded. “As the Germans and their collaborators in Czechoslovakia and Hungary would joke the safest way to get military transports to the front were to mark them in large letters: ‘This is a Jew transport to an extermination camp.” Thus it for sure would not be molested by the allies” (M.D. Weissmandel in Min Hamezar).

I think of the loud-mouth influencers on social media – Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and even recently Megyn Kelly, who proclaim that Israel’s fight with barbaric Hamas is not “an America First” issue, and Kelly “Israel is now a villain all over the world,” heartbreaking proof that America, the land of the free and home of the brave, is not immune to the demoralization and inhumanity being spread worldwide by Islamic maniacs. There was a time when speaking up for victims of persecution |in the name of humanity” was a bona fide American issue! But like the Hitlerite demoralization of the West, the Muslim Brotherhood’s immorality has swept over the civilized world, collapsing moral standards so that even taking sides with Israel against Hamas seems unfair, partisan, impolitic even in America.

In the Hamas marches through American and European cities the October 7 atrocities have been long forgotten, or justified by some fabricated lie about being colonized, or in an open air prison. It was the same after the Holocaust, when in the wake of the horrors of the concentration camps, Europeans shifted the blame to the victims: “They went like sheep to the slaughter!”

This leads me to the following realization about why so many today are proclaiming that they are not against the Jews, but just the Zionists.

Let me explain to you what this means. The Jews, the ones who were defenseless and weaponless, and friendless, could be rounded up and shipped off to gas chambers without a peep. Their babies’ heads could be smashed against stones. Their women raped and murdered. But the Zionists, well, they have soldiers, they have tanks and planes and bombs and defense systems. They have an army trained into a magnificent, intelligent, brave, loyal fighting force, the IDF. What you get when you attack Zionists is what happened in Gaza.

People are unhappy about that, and wish to turn the clock back, especially Europeans who cannot help but compare their own passive response to the Muslim takeovers of their countries, the rape of their little girls and women, the burning of their churches, to the brave and fierce response of the Jews to similar aggressive Muslim acts against Israel. Unfortunately, many people born to Jewish parents who raised them with zero knowledge and hoped only for their complete assimilation in the basements of their two-family homes in the suburbs with video games, also want to go back to being Jews, and are frightened of being identified with Zionists. Because if attacked, they would be unable to protect themselves. “We are Jews,” they whine, “not Zionists. Spare us!”

They won’t be spared. And I can’t help not caring.

Writes Berkovits: “Never in the long history of the Jewish people has there lived a generation of Jews having experienced so much degradation and humiliation as ours, that has also been granted such a rich measure of encouragement by the God of history as ours…They marched from the darkest pit of man-made hell into the light of Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel.”

On this Ninth of Av, we would do well to remember what the Nazis and their successors, the Muslim Brotherhood, wanted to accomplish was “to eradicate the last vestiges of a possible innate sense of humanity.” They wanted – and continue to strive for – the erasure of any reminder of the fear of God. As they are fond of proclaiming, they plan to accomplish this goal: “by any means necessary.”

What we, as Jews, have been chosen to do is to steadfastly oppose them.

As long as we Jews and those who join us remember our destiny, learn the truths of the prophets and the Torah, these enemies of human decency will never be wholly in control of humankind. It is a terrible job, for which all moral people continue to pay an inhumanly high price. But it is the job for which we, as the nation of Israel along with our allies, have been chosen.

May Trump’s America continue their steadfast support even as Europe sinks into darkness. And may the darkness spreading over the world be pierced by our light.

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