The Wandering Jew No More

"Only in [a] bizarro world and America would Islamism be considered Progressive."

"In reality, Islamism is the most regressive, misogynist, racist, exclusivist, supremacist of ideologies."

"Read Fida and Qutb, or keep on getting your Ivy League education through TikTok."

Hussain Abdul-Hussain, research fellow, Foundation for the Defence of Democracies

 

"In 2022, there was one resolution each to criticize Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar and the United States for its embargo on Cuba."

"There were six resolutions last year on Russia because of its war in Ukraine. The total of all these is 13. Yet on Israel alone, the [General Assembly] passed 15 condemnatory resolutions."

"Not a single [General Assembly] resolution was introduced on the human rights situation in China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Turkey, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Qatar, Vietnam, Algeria or 175 other countries."

Hillel Neuer, UN Watch

 

"One doesn't see the instant outpouring of emotions, the pain and anger, when Muslim populations across various conflict zones and under various dictatorial regimes suffer far more atrocities than the Palestinians."

Raheel Raza, Council of Muslims Against Antisemitism

Israel Defense Forces via AP

Accusations against evil-doing Jews are legendary throughout the ages; once held responsible for the Black Plague in the Medieval era, closer to our collective memory the Coronavirus Pandemic for which Jews were once again singled out as the cause of another catalyst of global collective death. Following the Roman Empire's putting down of a rebellion by Jews against centuries of domination/occupation by the Romans, when the Second Temple of Solomon was destroyed in the conflict and Jews were expelled from their ancestral homeland, a great diaspora took place when Jews were scattered all over the world.

Wherever they went on the globe, east, west, south, north, they were viewed with suspicion and frequently outright hostility. Their presence succeeded in benefiting the countries where they were allowed to settle, in technical innovations, scientific enquiry, medical progress and economic enterprise, but eventually they were hounded and expelled as they were in Spain and Portugal by the Inquisition. Expelled in Austria and Britain, eventually to return. In Eastern Europe land ownership was denied them, and pogroms resulted whenever area authorities wanted to divert the public's attention from their own administrative incompetence.

In Germany, where Jews were well established, proud of their assimilation into German culture, social and professional life, the final iteration of a carefully calibrated campaign of oppression, intimidation, threats and pogroms burst into a state-sponsored-and-designed elimination of the right to consider themselves human, as the machinery of annihilation of a people went into full gear. The world heard rumours of death camps but preferred to remain oblivious of state-organized slaughter on a scale never before imagined.

Genocide is a wound that can never heal, its perpetrators can never rehabilitate their nationhood, destroyed along with the uncountable human souls they destroyed. Jews realized throughout their endless mourning that the curse that followed them through an eternity of existence had lifted but it was a temporary reprieve. Now, Islam, a religious devotion sacred to an immense global population has offspring infected with a religious fervour to complete what European fascism aimed for.

A number of fanatical Islamist sources within the greater Islamic population treasure a covenant to destroy Jewish life and with it the reborn geographic heritage that led to the final chapter in the legend of the wandering Jew. Terrorist groups incited, armed, trained and loyal to genocidal regimes dedicated to the obliteration of the State of Israel. Their oil wealth and their interpretation of Islam's sacred scriptures lead them to the belief that it is their version of god that instructs them to commit genocide anew.

 

Palestinians taking Israeli hostage to Gaza ... AP

 

They have become skilled in the social-human art of propaganda and social conditioning inherent in 'public relations' where they portray themselves as avenging saviours of the world's longest-reigning 'victims' whom Jewish cunning and evil-mindedness has deprived of their freedom, their land, their hopes for the future. The ancestral homecoming of the Jewish diaspora enraged the Arab League and the UN's Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Arab armies combined to launch wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973 in the fledgling rebirth of Israel. They were repelled, defeated by the infinitely smaller, poorly equipped defence forces of the Jewish State.

"No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel and no recognition of Israel", was the guiding light of response from the Arab League following the 1967 war, when Israel's defence won territory in Egypt and Syria which it was willing to surrender for peace. The most recent war now takes place in Gaza, which Israel unilaterally surrendered to the Palestinians hoping the gesture would result in peace. The terrorist group Hamas had other ideas. Its covenant is clear; its goal is Israel's destruction.

There are many ways to destroy a people; one begins with slander that holds them to be less than human, accusing them of planning the wholesale death of others, of perpetrating the worst horrors imaginable upon helpless civilians, when in fact, they have engaged in conflict to inflict a penalty upon a conscienceless group of Islamist terrorists whose savagery mutilated and murdered Israeli civilians setting Israel on a course of destroying those that would destroy it and its people.

 

Elderly hostage from Kfar Azza kibbutz ... AP

"There is NOTHING anyone could do that would lead me to kill a child in cold blood, dismember a woman, slice her genitals, blow up parents in front of their children, laugh, sit and eat at their table." 

Shoshana Keats Jaskoll, Jewish activist and writer

The Normalcy of Cultural Psychotic Sadism

"The riots of 1929 were driven by a campaign of incitement and lies perpetuated by Grand Mufti Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the spiritual and political leader of Palestine’s Muslims under the British Mandate. Husseini had spent the year preceding the massacre galvanizing Islamic sentiment against Palestine’s Jewish minority. He fomented support for his cause by claiming that the Jews of Palestine sought to destroy Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque to rebuild their ancient Temple, upon whose ruins Al-Aqsa was built. In sermons at Al-Aqsa the day before the massacre in Hebron, clerics called on the faithful to defend Al-Aqsa from the Jews. Armed worshippers flowed from the mosque and down to the Old City, where they attacked Jewish passersby and set fire to Jewish shops. Within hours, the riots spread throughout the country, killing 133 Jews across Palestine and wounding nearly 400 others."

"Jews had lived in Hebron since biblical times, their lives centered around the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah are believed to be buried. Much like the Jews who were killed on Oct. 7 were not settlers, the Jews killed in Hebron in 1929 were not Zionists. They did not need to be. They just needed to be Jewish."

"One of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities, composed of some 800 people before the massacre, was decimated, along with centuries of coexistence that had made Hebron a model of peace between Jews and Muslims. In the aftermath of the attack, the British authorities that ruled Palestine forced the Jews of Hebron to evacuate, turning them into refugees."

Yardena Schwartz, Tablet Magazine

 

"There can, in our view, be no doubt that racial animosity on the part of the Arabs, consequent upon the disappointment of their national political aspirations and fer for their economic future, was the fundamental cause of the outbreak of August last."

British Shaw commission 

Israeli soldiers at the forensic center in the Shura military base near Ramle, where hundreds of dead bodies arrived since the October 7 Hamas onslaught, October 24, 2023. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)

 

Only a culture that distinguishes itself through a pathology of psychotic events replete with an invasive onslaught surprising civilian residents of towns and villages for the distinct purpose of inflicting inhuman acts of violent rage and hatred could fail to be shamed after its first such breakdown of human behaviour running completely counter to our best instincts, could or would retain the memory not in shame, but as a sterling example of what had once been done, could and would be repeated. For as long as it would take to destroy those it considers a hated impediment to their own aspirations.

If those aspirations are consumed with the fixed idea that land not theirs should be theirs in perpetuity rather than the legitimate inheritors of ancestral patrimony, they have proven that nothing will dissuade them from their course of action; in effect a genocide. Imagine a scenario of recent vintage that has shocked the world in its crude and sadistic savagery where a violent invasion led to planned mass rape, slaughter, abductions of  children and the elderly, torture and mutilation of helpless civilians. That happened on October 7 of this year.

Then there are unsettling details such as house-to-house searches for frightened occupants where butchery took place, or bombs or fires set to destroy the lives of quavering people hiding in safe rooms; where  young girls and women were raped, tortured and raped again, where people were mutilated for the amusement of the invaders relishing their agonies before death took them. A baker's head thrust into a stove. A Rabbi's brain extracted from his skull. A Jewish woman hung by her feet. Breasts, noses, hands cut off bodies.

That is a description of an event that occurred in 1929, in Hebron when 3,000 Muslim Arabs armed with clubs and swords and knives mobbed the town in a frenzy of bloodlust. Add beheading babies, baking them alive in ovens, mass raping girls and women, abducting 240 infants, elderly, infirm, foreign farm workers, soldiers, and you've moved forward in time to October 7, 2023 when Palestinian Muslim Arabs reenacted scenes of stark horror on Israelis in southern Israel close to the Gaza border.

 

Zaka personnel collect clothes that belong to the victims of the October 7 Hamas massacre, near the Israeli-Gaza border, southern Israel, November 19, 2023. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

 

In Hebron in 1929, Jewish babies were thrown by Arab gangs into fires.  In 2023 babies were baked in the ovens their Jewish mothers busied themselves in their kitchens to prepare meals for their families on normal days. Instead those Jewish mothers were forced to bear witness to the unspeakable atrocities committed by Hamas operatives in pre-planned horrors designed to convince Israel it has no business installing itself where Palestinian Arabs aspire to live and reproduce.

In that earlier event, hundreds of Muslims shouting "Allah is great! Down with the Jews!" inside the Jaffa gate, seeing a Jewish man shouted "Here is a Jew" then seized him and used daggers to repeatedly stab him to death. Viewings of bodies slaughtered that day were refused by authorities in view of the fact they had been unrecognizably mutilated. In the current rendition of a similar atrocity, months after the October 7 tragedy pathologists and medical experts are still trying to identify the remains of Israelis whose corpses have been burned beyond recognition, their bones shattered and scattered.

Not to be overlooked was the eager cooperation in both instances of ordinary Muslims in the orgy of slaughter and rape and mutilation of Jews. Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the PLFP may have been the active fomenters and brutalizers, but they were eagerly joined by hordes of ordinary Palestinian Gazans for whom the opportunity to join the raping, the murders, the hostage-taking appeared irresistible. And far from ordinary Gazan civilians reacting in horror to what their rulers did, they applauded the injured and frightened trophies brought back to Gaza, celebrating a victory over Israel in the guise of captured infants, grandparents, women and soldiers.

Personal effects are scattered around the Supernova Music Festival site, where hundreds were killed and dozens taken by Hamas.  Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images

Mocking Genocide

The court's [Federal Court of Justice] decision was an "underestimation of the real danger" of the sculpture.

"You can't neutralize it just by putting a simple plaque alongside it of what it means. [Such] propaganda [can be found in more than 30 churches across Germany today]."

"The Judensau isn't only an insult, it's so much more -- it's a call to murder the Jews."

"No institution besides the church, and no single person besides Martin Luther, did more to prepare the German people for Auschwitz. Auschwitz came not from a vacuum. It was the result of centuries-long agitation against the Jews."

"I'm very concerned about the situation here and I think the intellectuals and those in politics are underestimating the dangers. They are willing to make concessions to the right wing."

"It's my will go to to the Constitutional Court and to continue to fight this and if I lose I will go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg." 

Michael Dietrich Düllmann, 79-year-old retired psychiatric nurse, Wittenberg, Germany

A thirteenth century anti-Semitic sculpture is displayed at St. Marien church in Wittenberg, Germany. REUTERS/Annegret Hilse

"[The ruling was] understandable [but] neither the base plate nor the explanatory slanted display contain an unambiguous condemnation of the anti-Jewish work of art."

"Both the Wittenberg church community and the churches as a whole must find a clear and appropriate solution for dealing with sculptures that are hostile to Jews."

"Defamation of Jews by churches must once and for all be a thing of the past."

Josef Schuster,  president, Central Council of Jews, Germany

Germany has strict laws against Holocaust denial, against incitement to hatred, against displays of antisemitism, against symbolic depictions of its Nazi past. And it generally enforces those acts when they occur. Despite which the ugly vitriol of antisemitism is once again blossoming its noxious stink in the country that went to great ends to stretch its rare resources during a world conflict, in formulating a solution to the presence of Jews whom fascist Germany officially declared sub-human. The 'final solution' of genocide resulting in the Holocaust.

 

In the last decade, despite these measures at stamping out the mass psychosis that generated a level of hatred against Jews that made their mass murder inevitable, acts of viral antisemitism have been spiraling upward in Germany. Much of it resulting from a more recent inclusion into German society of refugees and economic migrants emanating from the Middle East and North Africa. Where now in Germany, another million Muslims have been added to the already-present five million. A number equaling those of the murdered Jews of Europe.  

During the Gothic and Medieval eras, Church architectural was replete with gnome-like sculptures, sculptures of fantastic creatures, chimeras, half-man, half-beast, frightful carvings originally meant to declare to the devil that the Church had its own defenders against evil. Yet evil lurked within the Church's own shadows. Among the goblins and the witches, the gargoyles and grotesques, were mockingly cruel images meant to caricature and belittle Jews.

The religion of peace, goodwill to all, was not beneath spreading contempt in influencing the faithful to detest and avoid any contact with repugnant Jews that might live in their midst. One such depiction of the Church's virulent contempt for Judaism was a carving on a 13th Century Wittenberg Stadtkirche Catholic church, which boasted a "Jews' Sow" (Judensau), a sandstone carving of a rabbi lifting the hind leg of a pig, with two Jewish children suckling its teats.

Michael Düllmann found the contemptuously hateful depiction so offensive he applied time and again to the courts to force the church to remove the insulting carving. Which represented a curse on Judaism with a double meaning since in Judaism, it is forbidden to eat swine; they are unkosher and offend religious strictures. Whoever the skilled craftsman of the time was to whom the idea of having a rabbi enable Jewish children to suckle from a pig implied both that Jews are hypocritical and children of pigs, might have felt it amusing.

The complainant's appeal to the German courts went nowhere, until the appeals court ruled with his complaint that the sculpture was indeed hugely antisemitic. Irrespective of which the court would not order the church to remove the image. Judensau could remain where it was. The church did earlier resort to an explanation on a plaque, placing the image in the context of medieval art, once acceptable, in the current milieu no longer so.

An assault on the sensibilities and sensitivities of any ethnic/religious/cultural group is still a slander and an insult. Were it to have been directed against any other group of numbers and influence in society consideration might have been given to removing it as unsuitable for the times. There is also the coinciding of history, where Martin Luther in 1517 in Wittenberg spurned the corruption of the Catholic Church and its indulgences to bring in its Lutheran replacement as a stricture version.

His loathing of Jews was such that he incited to violence against the Jewish population in Germany. His book, "On the Jews and their Lies" precipitated the genocide that erupted during World War II. History continues to influence the present. And the present looks back on history, prepared to repeat it. A repentant Germany may be eager to make amends, but how can one amend the most colossal genocide in history?

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945.  AP Photo

Sacrilege

Sacrilege

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945

To Jews, ever mindful of Jewish history and a never-ending plague of assaults on their presence by communities wherever diaspora Jews have put down alternate roots, after their second expulsion from Judea, their ancestral homeland in the Middle East, the Holocaust represents an unspeakable atrocity committed by Nazi Germany with the considerable assistance of eastern and western Europe and the determined oblivious attitude of the West in general to their plight. 

 

When Jews repeat in their minds 'never again' it means that they will do their utmost personally to fight back against the persecution and defamation they are endlessly subjected to. 'Fighting back' is a passion expressed in the struggle for survival. Slights, born of an inbred, taught and sought discrimination  expressed against the Jewish presence has a habit of becoming socially institutionalized. It ebbs and flows, like the oceans surrounding continents.

 

A German in a military uniform shoots at a Jewish woman after a mass execution in Mizocz, Ukraine. In October of 1942, the 1,700 people in the Mizocz ghetto fought with Ukrainian auxiliaries and German policemen who had intended to liquidate the population. About half the residents were able to flee or hide during the confusion before the uprising was finally put down. The captured survivors were taken to a ravine and shot. Photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial

 

And whatever continent Jews happen to populate, a minority group within much larger groups, they are always 'noticed' as outsiders. With that notice comes a degree of suspicion. A suspicion often a nudge away from contempt and hatred. For within the larger population there are always those whose antipathy toward Jews -- even and particularly if those haters know nothing about Jews, do not know any individual Jews, have never met Jews -- twists them toward rage against Jews.

 

There are Holocaust memorials erected in various geographies across the world, in a determined effort never to forget the stark inhumanity that humans are capable of exerting against other humans. Where governments and individuals embrace the opportunity to learn and to empathize, committed to ensuring as believers in elementary human rights that nothing of this dread magnitude will ever re-occur. And yet, on a smaller, and equally inexcusable scale, they do, and each time they do humanity is shamed and shocked anew.

 

The arrival and processing of an entire transport of Jews from Carpatho-Ruthenia, a region annexed in 1939 to Hungary from Czechoslovakia, at Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland, in May of 1944. The picture was donated to Yad Vashem in 1980 by Lili Jacob

 

Start small? With ignorance about the fact that a fascist horde schemed to annihilate the entire Jewish population of Europe, on its way to conquering the world for Aryan purity. That the organized industrial-scale mass murder succeeded to the degree that an estimated six million Jews were systematically slaughtered. The corpses were used to produce soap and fertilizer. Children and adults alike fed into death chambers where Zyklon B, a cyanide-based pesticide, killed them, and their bodies were shovelled into vast, non-stop crematoria. The odour of burning flesh and the ash circulating as particulate matter lifted by the smoke exuded by the giant chimneys to fertilize the fields of Europe. 

Canada was late to erecting a memorial to the Holocaust; but one was finally built and opened to the public in 2017. On a number of occasions, the stark, grey angular walls of mourning attracted professional photographers on fashion shoots, as likely backgrounds to show off glamorous designer apparel featuring poised, sleek female models. The photographers in each instance appear not to have known, or really gave no thought to the fact that their commercial enterprise in artistry and mercantilism in a place sacred to the memory of millions of people was an assault on social morality and values.

In the latest of these events, the photographer was scathing in his response to criticism over his obtuse choice of backdrop for a photo shoot:

"If taking a photo with grey walls as a backdrop is a crime, lock me up."

"If you don't want people shooting at certain walls in the city, you should put on a reflective vest, get a whistle and go stand in front of them year 'round."

 

Caustic, Flammable, Incendiary Holocaust Truths

"Let's be truthful about it because Holocaust isn't about race. It's not about race. It's not about race. It's about man's inhumanity to man ... "

"These are two white groups of people! The minute you turn it into race it goes down this alley. Let's talk about it for what it is."

"It's how people treat each other. It doesn't matter if you're Black or white, Jews, it's each other." 

Whoopi Goldberg original incomprehensible logic

"On today's show, I said the Holocaust 'is not about race but about man's inhumanity to man'. I should have said it is about both."

"As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, 'The Holocaust was about the Nazis' systematic annihilation of the Jewish people -- who they deemed to be an inferior race'. I stand corrected."

"The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waver. I'm sorry for the hurt I have caused."

Whoopi Goldberg amended incomprehensible logic

Lt. Col. Ed Seiller of Louisville, Kentucky, stands amid a pile of Holocaust victims as he speaks to 200 German civilians who were forced to see the grim conditions at the Landsberg concentration camp, on May 15, 1945.  The Atlantic

 

Celebrities feel it is their destiny to launch their opinions through social media to prove just how sensitive they are, how knowledgeable, how comprehensive their information-gathering prowess is; nothing seems to escape their opinions. Opinions they share with their multitudes of followers who give credit to whatever is emitted from their sometimes-malfunctioning intellectual smugness. Sometimes in the process they create a sensation of condemnation for thoughtlessly taking credit for issues they know little of, and don't hesitate to misinterpret.

The Holocaust is one of those issues. The world is full of historical deniers, convinced that episodes in history cannot have occurred because they are unable to wrap their minds around certain events or because they feel people make too much of an issue out of events that don't really interest them. History, after all, is gone and over. But of course, it is never gone and over and done with for those who were directly impacted; the survivors and those whose humanity was diminished through a state-orchestrated genocide.

 

American soldiers walk by row after row of corpses lying on the ground beside barracks at the Nazi concentration camp at Nordhausen, Germany, on April 17, 1945. The camp is located about 70 miles west of Leipzig. As the camp was liberated on April 12, the U.S. Army found more than 3,000 bodies, and a handful of survivors.  The Atlantic

 

Whoopie Goldberg in particular views world events through the lens of Black experience and history. To her and those like her, nothing that has ever happened would ever equal the suffering of people like her, enslaved, abused and used as slave labour, families torn apart, children ripped away from mothers since they were regarded as personal chattel of the slave owning fraternity. That lens views their oppressors as White.

In Africa, black tribes themselves embarked on slave-hunting expeditions of other blacks. Dark-skinned Arabs viewed African blacks as inferior proto-humans fit for slavery. Turks took white captives into slavery. The ancient Greeks believed that some people were born into slavery and had no compunction despite their philosophical wisdom, in treating them as such. Jews too suffered enslavement and slave labour, but their fate had a different conclusion; not to be viewed as protected private property but ushered into a massive cauldron of collective annihilation.

 

A group of Jews, including a small boy, is escorted from the Warsaw Ghetto by German soldiers in this April 19, 1943 photo. The picture formed part of a report from SS Gen. Stroop to his Commanding Officer, and was introduced as evidence to the War Crimes trials in Nuremberg in 1945  The Atlantic

 

Surely someone who deliberately takes on a name readily identified as Jewish is sensitive to the history behind that name and its origins? On the other  hand, show business is known for its quirks leading to attention. And the consequences of taking on a readily-identifiable Jewish name and claiming some distant Jewish ancestry can be useful in an entertainment industry identified with Jewish entrepreneurship. The depth of 'commitment' to honouring the source can be fairly shallow.

Whoopie Goldberg speaks of Jews as being 'white', and the anti-Semitism that led to the obliteration of Europe's Jews by a proudly Aryan nation representing an argument between 'whites'. Which does little to address the reality of Ethiopian Jews, Chinese Jews, Indian Jews Kurdish Jews, Arab Jews, coming in all shades of the human genetic rainbow. What they have in common is their claim to be part of the tribe, priding themselves on their Judaic culture and adherence to Judaism.

 

German soldiers question Jews after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943. In October 1940, the Germans began to concentrate Poland's population of over 3 million Jews into overcrowded ghettos. In the largest of these, the Warsaw Ghetto, thousands of Jews died due to rampant disease and starvation, even before the Nazis began their massive deportations from the ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising -- the first urban mass rebellion against the Nazi occupation of Europe -- took place from April 19 until May 16 1943, and began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants. It ended when the poorly-armed and supplied resistance was crushed by German troops  The Atlantic

 

Skeptics of the Holocaust close their minds to the reality of history. But history has documented itself fully. The meticulous records maintained by Germany alone lending more than adequate testimony of their Final Solution to the pathology of Jewish existence. Survivors of slave labour camps, death camps, those who went into hiding or were kept alive by compassionate non-Jews testify to the tragedy that overtook their communities. 

 

Because they were Jews.

The Holocaust? A very visible horror that destroyed the lives of men, women and children because of their religious, ethnic, cultural origins. The mass destruction of the Jews of Europe was 'racist' in origin, and that there is a mature audience in the world today ignorant of that fact is quite simply mind-boggling. Some flippant statements of belief are shattering and painful, and some apologies cut to the quick by their shallow roots.

This photo provided by Paris' Holocaust Memorial shows a German soldier shooting a Ukrainian Jew during a mass execution in Vinnytsia, Ukraine, sometime between 1941 and 1943. This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier.  The Atlantic

Decapitating Statues of Historical Figures

Address snapshot ... Pope Francis

"[Beware] a form of ideological colonization, one that leaves no room for freedom of expression and is now taking the form of the 'cancel culture' invading many circles and public institutions."

"This view of history risks cancelling identity under the guise of defending diversity. [Representing a type of] one-track thinking [taking shape and developing fully as constraining or denial of history; rewriting it in terms of present-day sensibilities]."

"[Some attitudes] leave no room for freedom of expression and are now taking the form of the 'cancel culture'. Under the guise of defending diversity, it ends up cancelling all sense of identity, with the risk of silencing positions."

"As a result, agendas are increasingly dictated by a mindset that rejects the natural foundations of humanity and the cultural roots that constitute the identity of many people."

"Diplomacy is called to be truly inclusive, not canceling but cherishing the differences and sensibilities that have historically marked various peoples."

"What is needed instead is a recovery of our sense of shared identity as a single human family. [The] alternative can only be growing isolation."

Pope Francis

Cancel culture, the darling methodology of silencing voices that progressives in their culture of 'wokeism' infiltrating all facets of human communication, has many newly emerging critics, none of whom voice concerns from the pulpit of the progressives, but from within society's conservatives and none is more conservative that traditionalists. More neutral sources that speak with indignation of the damning work of the progressives are historians along with individuals and groups who find themselves targeted for their 'controversial' positions, deemed so by progressives whose aim is silencing their critics.

 

A leaflet distributed at the Montreal protest described Sir John A. Macdonald as "a white supremacist who orchestrated the genocide of Indigenous peoples with the creation of the brutal residential schools system"

 

It is hardly surprising that the Catholic Pontiff now sees fit to add his voice to the growing chorus of condemnation of this pernicious, insulting and leftist insularity that rejects reality and history claiming it to reek of colonialism and 'white privilege' while elevating the victimhood issues of 'people of colour' and the socially and gender-deprived in traditional society. At a time when convention with respect to polarizing discrimination has turned in the opposite direction expressing remorse and conciliation.

Woke progressives accept nothing but abject admissions of present-day 'colonialists' that they are guilty of all the sins of their predecessors, presumably by historical inheritance. Unctuous salutations expressed in new language forms of address become compulsory as proof of deserved guilt and condemnation. The wronged will be forever wronged and deserve and expect to be elevated above the descendants of their former tormentors. Demands that society reinvent itself so that exceptional privileges be extended to 'victims' satisfy vengeance-drooling accusers.

 

Damned white society is slowly picking itself up, recalling that dignity must be apportioned to all, even themselves and now question the veracity of claims of victimhood, asking when endless reproaches will come to an end and all people be enabled to live together as individuals no longer divided into groups of 'the guilty' and 'the victims'. The voice of Catholic Christianity speaks from a fear of marginalization, the accumulating loss of faith and worship, the incidentalism of religion, and the relegation of 'Christmas' to mere 'holiday' status. 

 

A statue of Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Va .Credit...@Thicketoftrash, via Associated Press

The re-write of history pivots from Holocaust denial and trivialization of resurgent anti-Semitism as just desserts in a puzzling portrayal of Jews as oriental 'others' while classifying them as part of the subset of 'white privileged' colonialists. Figures of European and North American history with its interminable conflicts and its subjugation of less-'developed' nations, to secure their valuable natural resources, including the enslavement of aboriginals and indiginals, and trading in Black slaves for forced labour is the only history recognized by the woke. Those instrumental in maintaining white supremacy must no longer be regarded as part of history, but trashed.

At the Vatican, Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin expressed his concern with a draft European Union communications manual playing with the suggestion of excising the long-venerated term Christmas, and presumably with that, the very Christian religion itself in an increasingly less religious continent. Who best to speak to diplomats assembled at the Vatican, representing 163 nations of the world than a Catholic Pontiff whose authority as god's spokesman on Earth still resonates?

And so, he spoke of historical situations that must logically be viewed and interpreted in the context of their times, not by the standards of the present day, for this is history that must be unadulterated to suit the surly moods of its new critics, and presented as time and tide viewed all  human interactions when and where they occurred and to whom they referred and whose circumstances they affected; not through the lens of today's critics.

Pictured: Pope Francis warned against attempts to cancel culture, decrying 'one-track thinking' which he said attempts to deny or rewrite history according to today's standards

 

Unravelling Israeli Sovereignty

"Real sympathy with the Palestinian people means searching for solutions for an actual and practical peace that guarantees their safety, security, and development. The solutions should also stop those [Hamas] who are ready to burn Palestine and its people."

"[The Hamas terrorist group] was well prepared for this war by building trenches in which its members can take shelter, while innocent Palestinians were being killed. Hamas likes to play the role of victim and kill Palestinians to win Arab, Islamic and international sympathy."

"Some ask, is this the right time to present the crimes of Hamas.? This is precisely the best time to do so. The reader can conduct a quick search on the Internet to learn about the crimes that Hamas has committed against the Palestinians. Hamas has the right to destroy its homes with its own hands, but it has no right to destroy the homes of Palestinians and underestimate their blood and the blood of their children."

"Hamas and its Muslim Brotherhood patrons do not care about the suffering or interests of the Palestinians. They only care about demonizing those who stand against them. Hamas is saying: Let the Palestinians die for the sake of a Muslim Brotherhood victory."

Saudi writer/researcher Abdulah Bin Binjad Al Otaibi 

"Abbas wants to cover up for this decision to postpone the Palestinian elections so that he can continue to sit on the presidential chair at the expense of Palestinian blood. Hamas aspires to increase its popularity and drain the pockets of those who see it as a resistance movement by launching futile missiles that harm it more than doing any good."

"A few months ago, we were very happy with the signing of the Abraham Peace Accords [with Israel], which the people rely on to create peace that benefits everyone politically, economically and socially,"  "But the extremists are working to kill this dream. It is sad that some are working hard for peace, while others are working hard for the sake of war and the continuation of the conflict."

Emirati writer Al-Sheikh Wuldalsalek

Air Strikes in Gaza   EPA

Geographically, Israel is a tiny sliver of a country. As such it wasn't too much to ask for, for the remnants of world Jewry following World War II when the total number of diaspora Jews was reduced by six million men, women and children. And the singular event of the Holocaust convinced Jews that there was no country where Jews had residence, whether for a thousand years or a hundred, that would bother itself to give security to its Jewish civilian population (with rare exceptions).

Throughout history in the millennia of the diaspora, Jews became accustomed to keeping a low profile, hoping not to bring attention to themselves. They lived in Europe and throughout most of the world where happenstance took them, sometimes tolerated, sometimes not, but always vulnerable to a fallback scapegoat position of a tiny ethnic, cultural and religious minority among majority population of different heritage, culture and religions and often visceral hatred of Jews.

That tiny sliver of a country has produced miracles. As a nation dedicated to the preservation and safe security of Jews it has also absorbed, as a democratic state, people of other ethnic, cultural, social and religious groups as citizens of a Jewish state. In that state pioneering breakthroughs of another kind regularly take place in various areas of science and technology. Discoveries that render service to the world at large, from medical advances to agrarian and technological discoveries.

This country of great accomplishment whose science, medical research and allied breakthroughs give it recognition, has also in its over 70 years of existence, never started a war, though it has fought many, for its survival. It has some admirers and many critics. Who never tire of challenging the reality that is Israel's existence. From the horror of the immediate Holocaust years when the world witnessed the liberation of death camps and became knowledgeable of the hideous strategy to exterminate the Jewish identity and people, empathy has returned to the viral pathology of anti-Semitism.

In 1948 Israel was given permission by the great United Nations to form a sovereign nation out of that sliver of land representing a mere fragment of its ancestral heritage geography. Arabs, identifying themselves as 'Palestinians' (when the original Palestinians were in fact Jewish inhabitants of the land), refused the land they were offered under the UN's Partition Plan of equal opportunity. When combined Arab armies marched on the nascent Israel to destroy it, half of the Palestinians, some 700,000 people, left with plans to return once victory was assured.

At the very same time, a like number of Jews, Sephardic and Mizrahi who had lived for thousands of years in Arab lands were summarily exiled, becoming stateless refugees, and were welcomed to Israel where they found haven. Neither the Arab/Muslim nations in the Middle East nor the Palestinian Arabs themselves would give recognition to a Jewish state in the  geography; ongoing hostilities led to a number of wars until the final one that saw Israel take the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, east Jerusalem and in fact the Palestinian Territories in its defence from its enemies.

An Israeli soldier looks on as Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system intercept rockets launched from the Gaza Strip  Reuters

Returning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians did nothing to convince the Palestinian leadership that it would be in their best interests to live in peace, side by side, and to attain their own sovereignty through a mutual agreement with a fellow-nation it would give recognition to. The Palestinian Authority speaks of 'occupation', but it is one forced upon Israel by constant violence afflicting its people from incited Palestinians who are taught that 'resistance' (violence) against the 'enemy' (Israel), results in martyrdom for which they can anticipate financial rewards and/or Paradise.

During the First Intifada in 1987, the Palestinian uprising, conflict saw 1,200 Palestinians  and 150 Israelis die. And when the Palestinian leadership identified Palestinian collaborators with Israel they executed over 800 of their own people who preferred to live in peace with Israel rather than kill Jews and die as martyrs to the Palestinian 'cause', thus setting an example that other Palestinians with such dangerous ideas would be certain to avoid.

Of those Palestinians who remained in Israel, a number equal to those who fled, this 700,000 has swelled to 1,900,000, representing 21 percent of the total 9.2-million Israeli population. Not the 'apartheid' government that Israel-haters are so fond of declaring, but one that accepts its Palestinian population as citizen-Israelis. A month ago, before this current round of attacks between Gaza/Hamas and Israel, the Jewish People Policy Institute released an annual study on Israeli identity. 

The overwhelming majority of the 1.9 million the world knows as Palestinians, refer to themselves as Israeli-Arab (51 percent), or just Israeli (23 percent), with those who identify as Palestinians amounting to roughly 7 percent.

Yet in the West Bank and Gaza the Palestinian Authority (Fatah/PLO) and Hamas, celebrate the 'Naqba' (Catastrophe) which identifies the establishment of Israel in 1948. They could be celebrating 'Palestine' from that same date forward, had they not refused categorically to even consider accepting half the disputed territory as their own. In fact, the land originally envisaged as being offered to Israel was much greater in size, but was handed over to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan which had been ensconced there as compensation when the British Mandate helped the Saudis to claim Arabia as their own, displacing the Hashemites contesting Arabia as theirs.

There's a certain hypocritical similarity in the two situations which no one ever seems to linger on, all the more so when Jordan illegally occupied part of Jerusalem, the Judean city of antiquity, the Old City called Eastern Jerusalem where Judaism's most sacred symbol sits, under an Islamic shrine and mosque built on the twice-ruined Temple of Solomon. Under Jordan's rule, the Jews who had lived in East Jerusalem since time began were forcibly displaced and no Jews were permitted to enter the area,much less to pray at the Wailing Wall, the remnants of the Eastern Wall of the Temple.

Even before that Jews were massacred in Hebron, Sefad and a dozen other ancient Jewish communities in the 1920s by rampaging Arab/Muslim mobs in what is now Israel. And the Jews exiled in 1948 from Morocco, Iraq, Syria, Algeria, Yemen and Libya among other Arab states where Jews lived for thousands of years, might consider those events their own 'naqbas'. The designs of the Muslim Brotherhood in their alignment with the Nazis helped entrench anti-Semitism throughout the Arab world in the 1940s.

And what brings the situation to the present, is the break-away group from the Muslim Brotherhood that became Hamas with its charter outlining its intention to exterminate Israel, with their links to the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the al Quds Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the great patrons of Hezbollah, Hamas and Yemeni Houthis, all happily conspiring toward the destruction of Israel, with the complacent disinterest of the West other than its instant recoil of disapprobation when Israel has the unmitigated gall to defend itself.

Palestinians inspect damage to buildings in Gaza City on May 20, 2021.  Fatima Shbair/Getty Images

"What’s different about this round is the fact that Hamas has managed – not just to fire missiles in the direction of my house or to bash Ashkelon with lots of rockets – but they have made Jerusalem, and Arab and Muslim claims and complaints about Jerusalem, into a focal point."

?They have incited Arab citizens of Israel to attack Jews, who attacked Arabs in return. They have helped start a conflict inside Israel, while inciting a mini-intifada in the West Bank and also sympathy rockets fired from Lebanon."

Yossi Alpher, former Israeli intelligence officer

 

Black Skeletons in Canada's Closet

"There are estimates that over the 200 years of Canadian slavery, between 4,000 and 8,000 were held in bondage. Even at the height of slavery in Montreal, slaves constituted only 0.01 percent of the population."

"By contrast, at the outbreak of the American Civil War, slaves constituted 40 percent of the population of the Confederate States of America."

"The result was a society and economy wholly geared toward slavery in ways that never quite materialized in Canada. Full-time bounty hunters roaming the countryside for fugitive slaves, columns of shackled men and women being marched into frontier settlements, vast plantations of slaves overseen by whip-

 

wielding overseers; these were all scenes distinct to the territories south of the Mason-Dixon line."

Tristin Hopper: Canada's Best-Kept Secret, National Post

"Canada might not have been a slave society -- that is, a society whose economy was based on slavery -- but it was a society with slaves."

"Canada's best-kept secret."

Afua Cooper. Canadian historian: The Hanging of Angelique, a chronicle of Canadian slavery, 2006

 

"We have a duty to remember slavery, but it is not an identity, and we cannot let slavery define Black history in Canada."

Aly Ndiaye/Webster, Quebec artist and author

 

 

Abolitionist Harriet Tubman lived openly in what is now St.Catharines, Ontario, her actions in shepherding fugitive slaves to freedom aside, though it was considered to be a federal crime in the United States to aid and abet runaway slaves. They were enshrined in U.S. law as personal property. At the time, however, in the 1850s, Canada had long since surrendered as an abomination to humanity the keeping in bondage and owning of human beings.

 

But it was not always that way. During the American War of Independence, the paroxysm when the United States rebelled against the British Crown, to become a new country whose foundation was freedom and liberty, those living in those British-American colonies faithful to the Crown, known as United Empire Loyalists left the United States to trek north to Canada.  "Neither confiscation of their property, the pitiless persecution of their kinsmen in revolt, nor the galling chains of imprisonment could break their spirits", a monument to the loyalists proclaims.

Josiah Hanson, Philanthropist

Who knew there were Black Loyalists? These were freed slaves who had escaped from American owners emancipated by the British who settled in Nova Scotia. And then there were the others, the Black slaves who accompanied their owners as they made their way to Canada. The official Act of Parliament welcomed white Loyalist refugees to British North America, allowing them to bring "any negroes in their possession", along with them, exempt from paying duty to the Crown. 

An estimated 2,500 Black slaves were brought to Nova Scotia which became a slaveholding territory. "During the late 18th century practically every county in mainland Nova Scotia had slaves, and this story remains to be told", wrote historian Ken Donovan in 2014. Nova Scotia has always been represented as the final stop of the Underground Railroad, which abolitionist Frederick Douglas called "the real Canaan of the American bondmen". 

A generation prior to Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, in Canada human beings were listed for sale in newspapers; enslaved children were presented as gifts, authorities hunted down fugitive slaves, murder and rape of enslaved Africans was permitted by the Crown. A young woman whose name was Angelique was tortured and hanged to death in 1734 after being accused of setting fire to a large section of Montreal. 

 

Incendiary, Marie-Joseph Angelique      Kit Lang

 

Mohawk leader Joseph Brant who marshalled indigenous armed resistance to the American Revolution was the owner of 40 Black slaves. Advertisements of slaves for sale were published in the Montreal Gazette, as well as rewards offered for the return of escaped slaves. "FOR SALE: A Young healthy Negro Wench between 12 and 13 years of age, lately from Upper Canada, where she was brought up", read an ad from 1735. 

 

In fact 1628 is thought to have been the year that the first Canadian slave arrived in Quebec City where New France was actively encouraging the use of African and Indigenous slavery in order to build and serve the growing colony. Following the conquest of New France in the Seven Years' War, Canada was the westernmost outpost of a British Empire that became the world's leading slave trader. 

 

(Mario Tama/Getty Images)

French law recognized slaves as humans, albeit of diminished rights, while under English law any slave resident in Canada was considered property, nothing more. It took until the early 19th  century for slavery in the British Empire to be reversed when co-ordinated boycotts led to the outlawing of slavery in the British Empire and antislavery patrols off the West African coast. Emancipation in Canada began three decades earlier, the result of grassroots actions of members of Canada's Black community.

 

In 1793, Peter Martin, a free Black Loyalist, veteran of the Revolutionary War, appealed to Upper Canadian authorities at a executive council before which he appeared to speak of the "violent outrage" Americans committed against an escaped Black slave, Chloe Cooley, whom they violently forced aboard a vessel to return her to her owner in the United States. His appeal against the situation where Americans could enter Canada and violently abduct someone inspired the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada.

 

The act, even while enshrining the legality of slavery, banned the importation of slaves, setting out a program to free the children of Canadian slaves who had reached the age of 25. The act, however, began an inevitable trajectory toward rejecting institutionalized slavery. One that London cemented with its passage of the 1833 Slave Emancipation Act. So that by the 1850s, while Americans were hotly divided over the issue, Canada had long since settled it. Publisher George Brown while negotiating the creation of modern Canada, accused the United States of perpetrating the "sum of all human villainies".

 

In Canada today here are 1.2 million Black Canadians, fifty percent of whom are first-generation immigrants. None of whom may know that centuries ago Black slavery was institutionalized in Canada. Because Canadians simply are unaware of this iniquitous part of Canadian history; best 'forgotten', laid high up on an unreachable shelf of stagnant memory. 

 

The Slavering PC Lynch Mob

David Starkey, author and historian

"Slavery was not genocide -- otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn Blacks in Africa or in Britain, would there? An awful lot of them survived."
"As for the idea that slavery is this kind of terrible disease that dare not speak its name, it only dare not speak its name ... because we settled it nearly 200 years ago."
"We don't normally go on about the fact that Roman Catholics once upon a time didn't have the vote and weren't allowed to have their own churches because we had Catholic emancipation."
"And do you know what -- we had Catholic emancipation at pretty much exactly the same time that we got rid of slavery in the 1830s. We don't go on about that because it's part of history, it's a question that's settled."
"And again there is no point in arguing against globalization or Western civilization - they are all products of it. We are all products of it."
"[The British Empire was] generally speaking, in most ways, actually fruitful."
Dr.David Starkey

Move on folks. The words of this intellectual and public figure -- no longer a celebrity in academic circles -- are a reflection of the truth, honestly spoken and honestly come by. Yet an expression of verity that breaks the eggshell of the shibboleth of recent adoption that the tragic suffering of Blacks throughout history is somehow unique to humankind, akin to a genocide, none of which is accurate, and which Dr. Starkey was quick to point out. Slavery has existed since time immemorial and slaves have not only been black, but white and any other colour of the spectrum of humanity.

There have indeed been periods in history when genocidal intent has been carried out in a mass slaughter of an ethnic-cultural-religious group with the intention of total annihilation in conformation with a racist ideology regarding them as vermin to be eradicated from the face of the Earth. During those years of institutionalized and carefully orchestrated violation of humanity, the targets were enslaved, tortured and methodically murdered. Six million in number, representing a significant mass proportion of their presence globally. That is genocide.

At a time in many Western civilizations when signs proliferated in the early- and mid-20th Centuries that "Jews, Blacks and Dogs" were not permitted entry, assaults on the dignity and humanity of people of such specific origins were widespread and supported both by the citizenry and the governments representing them. This kind of degradation of humanity was common and broadly accepted. To the present day, racist discrimination, oppression and deranged violence targets specific groups.

Black Lives Matter protesters in Hyde Park in June  Reuters

Dr. Starkey, for all his academic acclaim and reputation as a historian of the first order is also a plainspoken man; he does not cloak his utterances in the precious exclusionary language of academia; he speaks directly and plainly of what he knows, of historical precedents, giving his studied opinion based on reality, not the popularity of the most recent publicly-adopted issue designating it the flavour-of-the-moment, which crowds of people, eager to portray themselves as engaged progressives march sanctimoniously in favour of.

Rectifying the past to better reflect the outrage of the present over established customs and values long since abandoned in favour of more enlightened practises reflecting the public weal as humanity drew closer in the event of mass exoduses from countries where enslavement still persists, where violations of human rights are ongoing, where exploitation of human potential is rampant, where internecine and sectarian and tribal enmities cause explosions of violence and civil war. Refugees and emigrants stream into developed societies to add their dreams to national aspirations.

And living in those present-day situations, opportunistic groups still favour revolutionary hatreds and chaos over secure societal normalcy. Bringing hate groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter  together with the Muslim Brotherhood to espouse change in an imperfect society that has offered them freedom and the potential to succeed in normalizing their own lives, to prosper and to meld with a society meant to embrace equality of opportunity and the recognition of how much we have in common.

For speaking his mind based on fact, not the fiction of victimhood and blame, Dr.Starkey is no longer academically associated with Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and Canterbury Christ Church University; no longer a visiting fellow at University of Buckingham, and Lancaster and Kent Universities have placed his honorary graduate status under review. His publisher cacnelled the release of Dr.Starkey's latest history books.

"He's been saying this stuff for years. It's only because of the work of #BlackLivesMatter that it's being taken more seriously Personally I believe he should lose his CBE (Commander of the British Empire) too", claimed an academic colleague, obviously in the progressive league, and without doubt green with jealousy and schadenfreude  of the now-destroyed popular reputation of Dr.Starkey in his so-recent heyday as an acclaimed debater, historian, author.

"It's just not acceptable what he said. With freedom of speech goes responsibility. It's not an absolute right, and you cannot thoughtlessly provoke and incite and inflame, particularly at such a sensitive time", commented Sir Anthony Seldon, Dr.Starkey's employer at the University of Buckingham. Unwittingly (perhaps as a reflection of his own witlessness) describing precisely what Black Lives Matter's campaign is promoting: incitement, inflaming attitudes, and indulging in violent chaos.

These academic institutions are quavering in fear lest they be labelled anti-Black racists.

"We cannot decolonize the curriculum, because you Black Lives Matter are wholly and entirely a product of white colonization."
"You are not culturally black Africans."
"You would die in seconds if you were dumped back in black Africa, you wouldn’t know how to cope."
"[The same white people who support the BLM movement were the people] who work themselves up into a lather about leaving the European Union."
"These are the people who tie themselves in knots despite the fact they have lots of money, live in big houses, drive big cars."
"They get wildly excited about extinction. It’s a form of upper class and middle class arrogant patronage."
Dr.David Starkey

David Starkey made the comments on YouTube channel Reasoned UK (Photo: Getty)