The Jews and the Left and the “but” of circumstance
There is a circumstantial “but” that accompanies these days any recognition concerning the state of siege under which the state of Israel is living, at home with the enemy with terrorists as their next-door neighbors. It’s the very same “but” of those that declared their pity for the victims of the Twin Towers. A “but” that really means that both Israel and the United States somehow deserve their fate as victims of terrorism. It’s a “but” that’s like a wall between those who realize how high the stakes are for the survival of our civilization and those who for the sake of false do-good-isms are readily putting our values at risk.
Several years ago the pacifist, the do-gooder, the politically correct left began a media driven forced feeding of programming commemorating the horrors of the Holocaust. Not a week went by without a program, or two, or three, that recalled its terrors with never-ending testimonies, fictionalized films, and documentaries of the persecution perpetuated by the Nazis.
At that time anyone who tried to compare the slaughter that was going on in the Balkans with the horrors of the Shoah, was immediately silenced with a cry of scandal for the supposed belittling of the tragedy of the Jews. The term “holocaust” became monopolistic; it could only be used to refer to the one and only true Holocaust.
When historian and former ambassador Sergio Romano warned of the dangers that might occur from such an overdose of lamentation ad nauseum in a book entitled “Letter to a Jewish friend,” he received a verbal lynching from the leftist intelligentsia.
The times have changed and so has the wind of what is politically correct and incorrect. No one (on the left) seems to care about the Jews anymore. The Palestinians are back in fashion. We have seen delegations of Europeans parting for the mid-East to donate blood to the Palestinian refugees. (Does it really make any sense to continue to call them refugees after 40 years?). They acted as human shields against the evil Israeli tanks. They visited Arafat to check on his state of health and well being. They reported from our television screens of Arafat’s great value as the representative of the Palestinian people.
They seem to have a short memory, forgetting their own reminders of the sufferance of the Jews for whom they now demonstrate distain or indifference. Or even worse: they accuse the Israelis of some sort of collective amnesia, for having passed from the role of the slaughtered of yesteryear to that of the slayers of today.
I found it incomprehensible this passage from an exhaustive recounting of the Shoah of the past to an apathetic attitude toward the present plague of Jewish society. However, after much reflection I’ve come to the only possible conclusion: These ex, post, refounded, and confounded, but most importantly, in the soul of their souls, still Communists, never really cared about the fate of the Jews, as they never really cared about the plight of the proletariat. The latter simply served as a justification to pump the battle cries of their cause against their arch ideological enemy: capitalism. And the Jews and the Shoah served to keep the memory of Fascism alive, their only remaining reason for being, with communism dead and buried except in Cuba and North Korea and in the their own die hard communist hearts.
May 2002
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