“Seek Yahweh while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts and let him return to Yahweh, and He will have compassion on him. Turn to our Elohim, for He will abundantly pardon.”
Isaiah 55: 6-7
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The Rapid Rise in Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israel Propaganda is Dangerous
For several years, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States have been on the rise. In 2021, they reached a record high, and 2022 looks like another very bad year. See “Antisemitic incidents hit a record high in 2021. What’s behind the rise in hate?”.
Anti-Semitism in the U.S. is bad, but it’s much worse in Europe. See “Worrying rise in anti-Semitic acts in Europe”.
In fact, the rise in anti-Semitism is a global phenomenon. See “The Rise of Global Anti-Semitism”.
For believers: It helps to keep in mind that for Satan, Jewish people are Target Number 1.
Anti-Semitism is not New
Anti-Semitism isn’t a recent development. It’s been around for millennia, but it ebbs and flows. When it peaks, Jewish people are in great danger for one reason: They are Jewish.
At the end of World War I, anti-Semitism in Germany started to rise rapidly. Adolf Hitler took advantage of that cultural shift politically, and he turned most of Continental Europe into hell on Earth for Jewish people. Before he committed suicide in his bunker, Hitler was responsible for the deaths of more than 6 million Jews.
The fact that anti-Semitism reached its zenith in Germany is telling. Germany was the economic engine of Europe then just as it is today. It was also the cultural center of Europe with a highly-educated, sophisticated population. Even so, Hitler was able to gain the open acceptance or the acquiescence of most Germans for his so-called “Final Solution”. Hitler didn’t beat around the bush when he talked about his plan. He explained it openly, although not in detail, before large crowds of mesmerized Germans to riotous applause, and he broadcast his tirades over the radio so that every German could hear him. He even had motion pictures made to deliver his message. Jewish people were portrayed as vermin, and the German people bought into it.
When World War II ended, many Germans who had survived the war denied knowing anything about what had happened to their Jewish neighbors. That’s ridiculous. Of course, they knew. Some of them knew everything, but everyone knew a lot. You can’t keep the murder of 6 million innocent people a secret.
All Germans saw their Jewish neighbors being denied basic rights. They witnessed them being forced to wear the Star of David. They watched as their Jewish neighbors were prohibited from walking on sidewalks or sitting on park benches. They had firsthand knowledge that their Jewish neighbors’ possessions were stolen and their homes were expropriated. Many Germans participated in those crimes. Summary executions of Jews on the streets were not uncommon. There were lots of German witnesses to those atrocities. Germans saw their Jewish neighbors being rounded up by the Gestapo and hauled off to camps. Most of the Jews would never return. Young or old, rich or poor, every German alive witnessed at least some of those things taking place. As I said, their denials after the war were ridiculous.
After the fact, denial of any knowledge of atrocities is a coping mechanism, but saying “I didn’t know” will not absolve anyone who actually knew of responsibility in the highest court. Yahweh knows what happened, and He is the final Arbiter. As always, in the end the truth is inescapable.
Today’s Anti-Israel Lies are a Socially Acceptable form of Anti-Semitism
The fact that anti-Semitism is on the rise again in Europe and in the U.S. should alarm all of us, but unlike the pre-World War II variety of anti-Semitism, today Israel is a convenient scapegoat for modern anti-Semites. Otherwise intelligent and sophisticated Europeans and Americans proudly display their anti-Semitic inclinations in a socially acceptable manner by attacking the tiny Jewish state that became the home for Jews who survived the Holocaust.
The facts on the ground in Israel don’t support the ignorant claims of today’s high minded European and American anti-Semites who act as though theirs is a righteous cause. It is nothing of the sort. It’s anti-Semitism, pure and simple. It’s rotten and evil to the core.
Everyone is entitled to opinions, but opinions are not facts.
I started exploring Israel more than a quarter of a century ago while I was a professor at the University of Virginia. I have seen Israel up close and personal. I’ve explored Israel from north to south and from east to west. Eventually, I focused most of my attention on Jerusalem, because that’s where I think I will make my mark, so to speak.
What I have seen and done in Israel is not the focus of this SnyderTalk editorial. I bring it up to let you know that I am not just casually acquainted with Israel and the Israeli people. In fact, Katie and I have an Israeli family. That requires some explanation, but I won’t provide it here. I explained some of the details in a SnyderTalk editorial that I wrote a few years ago. It’s titled “The Pope and Me: A True Story”. You can read it if you want to know more. It doesn’t address all the things I’ve seen and done in Israel, but it does provide enough information to let you know that I have accumulated experiences in Israel that are both deep and wide.
When I first started visiting Israel in the 1990s, tourists arriving at Ben Gurion International Airport were given a choice when they went through passport control. Either they could have their passports stamped, or they could be given a visa in lieu of a stamp in their passports. Today, Israel doesn’t give visitors that choice. All tourists arriving in Israel are given visas. There is no paper trail in their passports that indicates they ever entered the country.
The reason for that is simple. Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Libya, Kuwait, and Sudan deny admission to anyone with an Israel stamp in his passport. In those countries, the reason why a person went to Israel is irrelevant. The fact that he went there is the only thing that matters. That is a form of discrimination and anti-Semitism that most Europeans and Americans have never experienced. Most of the high minded intellectuals in Europe and America who lambast Israel have never been there, and probably, most of them will never go there. All they know and all they want to know is what they have seen on television, read, or been told, and most of what they think they know is just lies.
The Lies Keep Coming
This editorial is not about the lie that Israel practices what amounts to apartheid, but based on my personal experience in Israel over more than 25 years, I can assure you that I have never seen anything in Israel that resembles apartheid. However, since May 1948 when the U.N. declared that Israel is an independent state, the Israeli people have been forced to fight for their survival in one war after another. Between wars, Israel must protect herself from constant terrorist threats, most of them emanating from within her own borders. They are instigated by people who call themselves “Palestinians”.
Israel’s fight for survival started the day she declared her independence. Egypt, the All-Palestine Protectorate (a.k.a. All-Palestine, the Gaza Protectorate, and the Gaza Strip), the Army of the Holy War or Holy War Army (a fighting force set up by Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Mufti of Jerusalem, as his personal security force), Transjordan (now Jordan), Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen attacked the fledgling Jewish state to “drive the Jews into the sea”. At the same time, most of the Jews living in those countries were forced to flee for their lives. Although their families had lived in those countries for generations, some of them for more than 2,000 years, they departed. Many of them settled in Israel and helped to build the State of Israel that we know today.
Very few Arabs were forced to leave Israel when Israel’s War of Independence began, and they were known terrorists. Every other Arab was invited to stay and help build the country as fellow citizens. Those who stayed and their descendants are called “Israeli Arabs”, and today, there are about 2 million of them. All of them are citizens of Israel, and they have Israeli passports. They are not Palestinians, and they don’t like to be thought of as Palestinians.
It may surprise you to learn that Arabs living in Arab countries in the Middle East have a very dim view of Palestinians. They see them as rabble rousers and troublemakers. Read “Black September: The Jordanian-PLO Civil War of 1970,” and you will understand why. As you read it, it helps to know that today Jordan is roughly 60% Palestinian and that the 40% of Jordanians who are not Palestinians want nothing to do with Palestinians.
Arabs that left Israel when Israel’s War of Independence started did so on their own accord at the urging of the leaders of the combined Arab armies. They were told that the war would last only a few days, and then they could return and claim Jewish property as spoils.
Jews fled Arab countries, too. They were given an ultimatum: Leave or we will kill you and your family. So, they left to save their lives, and they were not allowed to take anything with them. They were forced to leave with only the clothes on their backs. It’s the same kind of thing that happened to Jews in Germany during World War II.
There were more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries, but there were at most only 650,000 Arab refugees from Israel. The value of the assets left behind by Jews far exceeded the value of the assets left behind by Arabs. Most of the Jews fleeing Arab countries settled in Israel. They were integrated into the new state, but many (not most) of the Arabs fleeing Israel were placed in refugee camps. The descendants of many of those Arab refugees still live in refugee camps, because for political reasons, the Arab states refuse to absorb them. They remain in those camps to convey the false impression to the world that Israel is responsible for the plight of Palestinians.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Israel is not responsible for the wretched conditions in Palestinian refugee camps or for the camps themselves. The people responsible are the leaders of Arab countries. They deserve all the blame, and they know it.
Only a few Arab leaders have been willing to talk about the Palestinian issue publicly and truthfully. The late King Hussein of Jordan became an outspoken critic of the atrocities committed by Arab countries against so-called “Palestinians”. He opened his arms to them, and it cost him dearly. They returned the favor by trying to overthrow the king. That prompted Black September and shaped the attitudes of ordinary Jordanians toward Palestinians in general.
When King Hussein drove Palestinian leaders out of Jordan, they went to Lebanon and fomented a revolution there. In effect, Palestinian leaders paved the way for Hezbollah, and Lebanon has not been the same since the Palestinians arrived. It’s no wonder that leaders in Arab countries don’t want Palestinians. They would rather watch Israel deal with the Palestinian problem.
I have visited Jordan many times. If you want to see a strong reaction from an ordinary Jordanian, simply ask him if he is a Palestinian. His response will be swift and strong. He will say, “No!”
Israel is the only country in the Middle East that is being forced to endure “Palestinians”, and Israelis are expected not to complain about it. High minded pseudointellectuals in Europe and America know so little about the reality on the ground in the Middle East that it boggles the mind. I wish some of them would go there and see for themselves what is taking place, but that’s just a pipe dream. Their motto should be “To hell with the facts. I have an opinion,” and they love to share their opinions. I do my best to avoid them, because talking with them is as productive as talking with cows in a pasture.
Today’s Anti-Israel Invectives are Anti-Semitism in Disguise
To this day, anyone with an Israeli passport is prohibited from entering Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, The United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. That’s a form of apartheid on a global scale, but it attracts little or no attention from high minded anti-Semites in the European and American media. They continue to vilify Israel even though Israel is a victim, not a perpetrator of crimes.
It saddens me to say this, but The New York Times and the people who write for the Times are probably the worst offenders, and many of them are Jewish. As far as I am concerned, Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristof of the Times are the worst offenders, and both of them are Jewish.
Friedman, in particular, loves the limelight. He’s a glory hound. When I read his articles or see him giving interviews on television, the Israel he describes is nothing like the Israel I have seen and gotten to know. I would be shocked to learn that he has spent even half as much time in Israel over the past 25 years as I have, and as I have said, I have made it a point to see all of Israel. Even so, Friedman has enormous influence over high minded Europeans and Americans. They think he is trustworthy especially since he is Jewish, but he is not. To me, Friedman resembles Balaam in the Bible. See Numbers chapters 22, 23, and 24.
Israelis are at risk in every country they visit. That’s true in Europe and America, too. They are at risk because the anti-Israel narrative spread by so-called “Palestinian” Jew and Israel haters is taking hold all over the world. It’s easy to see how much influence they have in the United Nations. Their influence is not as evident yet in the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament, but it’s there, too, and it’s growing.
Islamists are targeting Christians and Jews all over the world right now, but they hate Jews most. They flourish in Europe and America. Whether they know it or not, high minded Europeans and Americans are joining forces with Islamists. Read this and see what Islamists are trying to accomplish: “‘The Kafirs [Unbelievers] Should Be Killed, All of Them’: The Persecution of Christians, October 2022”.
Islamists bear a striking resemblance to Adolf Hitler.
Don’t be Offended
Many people who have read this far are probably offended. They see themselves as intelligent, caring people who simply want to do good. Problem is, they have never been to Israel, and most of them will never go there. They are totally dependent on others to provide them with accurate, objective information, and they have been duped.
Vladimir Lenin called people like them “useful idiots”. They aren’t stupid, but they can be deceived. Once they buy the lies, they trumpet them from the housetop. They have been propagandized for a cause. In this instance, it’s a terrible cause that originated from devious, ruthless sources that are hell bent on Israel’s destruction. Useful idiots don’t understand the cause’s goals. They buy into slogans, and they allow themselves to be cynically used by the cause’s leaders.
Some people are probably offended again, because I used the word “duped” and the phrase “useful idiots”. No one likes to think of himself as a dupe, and no one likes to think he has been spoon-fed lies and willingly accepted the role of a useful idiot. Even so, that’s what buying Palestinian propaganda boils down to.
I can appreciate how it happens, though. For example, Palestinian terrorists are not shy about murdering little children. They intentionally murder innocent Jewish children in Israel, and they call it “psychological warfare”. In Gaza where Hamas regularly fires rockets into Israeli cities, they store armaments and fire from schools, hospitals, and mosques. To protect their arsenals of weapons and to forestall Israeli countermeasures, they tie their own children to fences around those sites. Hamas continues to attack until Israel is forced to respond, and innocent Palestinian children die. That’s what anti-Semites in the media in Europe and America report. This routine has been repeated so often over so many years that it has become like a well-rehearsed Broadway play, and like starving pigs, high minded European and American anti-Semites gobble it down time after time after time.
Calling them “useful idiots” is probably being too kind. I think they are anti-Semites with a wafer-thin layer of veneer for social acceptance.
People buy into Palestinian lies, because they trust the sources they use and because they have read, heard, and seen the same lies repeatedly for many years. They can’t imagine that big lies can survive for long in a world where access to information is almost instantaneous, but big lies can and do last for a very long time.
Right now, we are witnessing an attempt to rewrite history, and we are being told that the Holocaust never happened. That’s a Palestinian attempt to rewrite the historical narrative for political purposes, and it can work if we allow it. The current PLO President, Mahmoud Abbas, is one of the architects of that lie. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on it. It’s title is “The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism”. According to Abbas, Zionists (i.e., Jews) in Europe were actually in cahoots with Hitler.
Palestinians are also telling us that Jesus was a Palestinian, that Jewish people have never had any connection with the land of Israel, that Yahweh’s Temple never existed, etc., etc., etc.
You can’t make up stuff like that. I dare you to even try.
Today’s dupes and useful idiots don’t know enough history to understand what happened or what is happening. From Israel’s War of Independence in May 1948 to the mid-1960s, Israel was seen globally as the David in a Middle East of Goliaths. In the mid-1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed. It’s leader, Yasser Arafat, was an Egyptian, but that didn’t matter. His nation of origin was not part of the story. All that mattered was that he was representing downtrodden Palestinians.
Then came the Six-Day War of 1967. It took Israel just 6 days to defeat the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Lebanon and to take complete control of Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the Sinai Peninsula. As the ceasefire that ended the war went into effect, Israeli forces were moving toward Cairo in Egypt, Damascus in Syria, and Amman in Jordan.
Suddenly, the media started portraying Israel as the Goliath in the Middle East, and Palestinians became the David. Those who have long memories can’t forget the many plane hijackings and bombings that were orchestrated by Palestinians in the late-1960s and early-1970s to elevate their cause in the eyes of the world. It worked. Rather than being seen as terrorists and criminals, most people saw Palestinians as victims of Israeli brutality. The fact that a change in perspective like that could happen is a clear indication that most people globally are woefully ignorant about reality in Israel and the Middle East.
Then came the Yom Kippur War of 1973. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. It’s the holiest day of the year. In Israel, everything shuts down for Yom Kippur, and I mean everything. Israel’s enemies chose that day to attack, because they thought they could finish Israel off in one fell swoop. The Yom Kippur War lasted for 19 days, and Israel defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, Kuwait, Tunisia, Morocco, Cuba, and Sudan with support from the Soviet Union, East Germany, North Korea, Pakistan, and Lebanon.
After the Yom Kippur War, Israel’s enemies decided to stop initiating wars with Israel and to support groups like the PLO. Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s leader, explained perfectly what he was trying to accomplish on many occasions as he traveled the world drumming up support for the Palestinian cause. For example, he said,
“We shall never stop until we can go back home and Israel is destroyed… The goal of our struggle is the end of Israel, and there can be no compromises or mediations… the goal of this violence is the elimination of Zionism from Palestine in all its political, economic and military aspects… We don’t want peace, we want victory. Peace for us means Israel’s destruction and nothing else.” (The Washington Post, March 29, 1970.)
Arafat made many other belligerent statements like that, but that one sums up all of them. Until the day he died, Arafat was true to his word. He never stopped fighting to destroy Israel. He invented the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. You hear it chanted today when Palestinians, Palestinian sympathizers, dupes, and useful idiots get together for a rally or a protest.
“The river” is the Jordan River. “The sea” is the Mediterranean Sea. That encompasses all of Israel.
Palestinians don’t want peace with Israel. Arafat explained it this way:
“All our moves are based on four general principles: continued use of the rifle, no waiving of historical rights, no peace, and no negotiations… Whatever form of government is established in the territory when the shadow of occupation passes away, whenever I address my fighters and revolutionaries, I shall say: ‘Let our rifles be aimed at the beloved land, the land of the homeland, the land of Palestine.” (Statement from Wafa, Beirut, June 9, 1974, as quoted in Journal of Palestine Studies, 1974, p. 224.)
“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations… We shall not rest until the day when we return to our home, and until we destroy Israel.” (Quoted in The Times, UK (August 5, 1980.)
Arafat was telling the unvarnished truth, and nothing has changed. That’s what people who support the Palestinian cause are really buying into. Palestinians incite and provoke until Israel has no choice except to respond, and then they blame Israel for defending their citizens. If the truth were widely accepted, the Palestinian cause would wither up and die, but there are too many dupes and useful idiots in the world for that to happen.
Israel is a nation of about 9 million people, 2 million of whom are Israeli Arabs. It’s surrounded by more than 400 million Arabs many of whom are hell bent on Israel’s destruction. The fact that Israel exists today is evidence that Israel has an Elohim and a Protector. His Name is Yahweh.
The SnyderTalk editorial below might interest you. I hope it does:
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“I am the good shepherd. I know My sheep and My sheep know Me — just as the Father knows Me and I know the Father — and I lay down My life for the sheep. I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also. They too will listen to My voice, and there shall be one flock and one Shepherd. The reason My Father loves Me is that I lay down My life — only to take it up again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of My own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from My Father.”
John 10: 14-18
