by Dennis Prager
POSTED WITH PERMISSION!
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- WITH all the attention
paid to how Muslims and Arabs in America feel about the Islamic terrorists'
attacks on America, it may come as somewhat of surprise to learn about
another anxious group of Americans - Jews.
All Americans are worried about the America hatred among groups who do
not value human life. But Jews who know their history have additional fears.
We Jews have reasons to worry because a significant part of humanity has a
hatred of us indistinguishable in kind and intensity from that of the Nazis.
The most cursory acquaintance with the Arab press and fundamentalist
mosque discourse around the world makes it clear that millions of Arabs and
Muslims loathe Jews and many want Jews dead. Not to mention the hundreds of
millions of Muslims and Arabs who want the one tiny country Jews have ever
called their own eliminated from the map. Protests that the Arab/Muslim
hostility is directed only at Israeli occupation of that even tinier area
known as the West Bank have no basis in reality. The Arab/Muslim world
sought Israel's destruction before Israel occupied an inch of the West Bank.
We Jews have reasons to worry because the last time a civilization
declared such hatred against Jews, what ensued was the most organized and
monumental evil in history, the Holocaust. We hoped that Nazi-type hatred
would never reappear. But it has. In fact, in two ways, Arab/Muslim
anti-Semitism is more frightening.
First, while both Nazi and the Arab/Muslim anti-Semites have used closed
societies with their controlled press to promote horrific lies about Jews,
the Nazis hid their murder of Jews from the German public. They did not have
confidence that enough Germans would support the murder of Jewish men, women
and children. The Arab/Muslim anti-Semites, however, have no such problem.
Those who kill Jews in Israel are public celebrities.
On the West Bank, a Palestinian university in Nablus has been putting on
an exhibition celebrating the Palestinian suicide bombing of a family pizza
restaurant in Israel. The exhibition consisted of a replica of the Sbarro's
restaurant complete with Hebrew inscriptions. Inside the exhibit, replicas
of human body parts and pizza slices were strewn. Pictures published on the
Internet showed Palestinians waiting in line to see the exhibit. In Nazi
Germany, there were no public exhibits of Einsatzgruppen (Nazi mobile
Jew-killing units) or gas chambers.
The second more frightening aspect of Arab/Muslim Jew-hatred is that many
of these haters do not value their own lives. Nazis did.
We Jews have reasons to worry because no libels against Jews are too
awful or too incredible in much of the Arab/Muslim world. That is why the
father of Mohammed Atta, suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11th attacks,
could tell Newsweek that his son was kidnapped by Israelis and that it was
Israelis posing as Arab Muslims who actually attacked America.
He could say
this because he and millions of other Muslims (not only in the Arab world)
believe it, as well as the notion that no Jews died in the World Trade
Center because they were alerted in advance. Americans may recall the flap over then-First Lady Hillary Clinton
listening to the wife of Yasir Arafat state that Israel was poisoning
Palestinian water supplies. Like the Nazis, many Arab/Muslim societies
attribute to Jews virtually all evils, including, for example, deliberately
spreading AIDS in the Arab world.
We Jews have reasons to worry because the West ignores this Jew-hatred.
One reason is that Third World evil is rarely taken seriously among Western
elites. A second reason is the psychological and political need of
Westerners to believe that Islamic societies are, with the exception of "a
few extremists," tolerant societies. And the third reason is that
Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism is dismissed as a temporary phenomenon that will
disappear when Israelis and Palestinians make peace. But this belief inverts
reality. The lack of peace between the Jewish state and its neighbors is not
the cause of Arab anti-Semitism, it is the result of that anti-Semitism.
Since 1948, there has been one reason for the Arab-Israeli conflict - the
Arab/Muslim world rejects the concept of a Jewish (or any non-Muslim) state
in its midst.
We Jews have reasons to worry because while much of the Muslim world - a
billion strong stretching from the Atlantic through Asia to the Pacific -
hates us, Europe and Japan do not defend us. Instead they defend their
business deals with Saddam Hussein and with Iran's medieval theocracy.
We Jews have reasons to worry because the Islamic terrorists who blow up
Jews are not on the list of terrorist organizations our government is
fighting. There are political reasons that account for omitting terror
groups that target Jews, but whatever those reasons, how can a Jew not worry
about this omission? If America, the most philo-Semitic country in the
world, will not regard terrorists who murder Jews as worthy of fighting -
even though these terrorists share sponsors and philosophy with
anti-American terror groups - no nation will.
As I write this article, my 8-year-old son is playing next to me with his
Nintendo. While he is painfully aware of the attacks on America, he remains
blissfully unaware that a substantial percentage of humanity would like to
see him dead. One day, unfortunately, he will know this. Unless the good
people of the world finally learn the great lesson of anti-Semitism - that
Jew-haters hate all that is good, that they target Jews first but never Jews
alone, and that Jew-haters must therefore be fought - one day he may in fact
be hurt. That is why at least one Jewish father worries today.
JWR contributor Dennis Prager hosts a national daily
radio show based in Los Angeles. He is a director of Empower America and the
author of
"Happiness is a Serious Problem".
Click
here
to visit his
website and
here to comment on this column.
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