THE ROOTS OF PALESTINIANISM

FASCISTS, COMMUNISTS AND END-TIME RELIGIOUS NUTS COME TOGETHER AGAINST A SINGLE ENEMY. GUESS WHO?

Start ’em young.

One is hardly able to express so much as the most general empathy with Israelis or Jews these days without somebody jumping down your throat to declare, “But what about …”

The next word is usually “Palestinians.”

Of course, the current conflict has led to tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths. Every innocent person killed in this conflict — Israeli or Palestinian — represents a universe of tragedy and lost human potential.

We must not lose sight of the fact, though, that every person killed in this conflict — Palestinian or Israeli — has died because of a war initiated and perpetuated by Palestinian terrorists and their enablers.

This is a crucial fact we must keep in mind.

In addition to all of this, it is worth also bearing in mind that, even the tragic scale of the current conflict does not place it among the most fatal of the ongoing tragedies in the world today.

It is always distasteful to compare one people’s catastrophic historical experiences with that of another — although, when it comes to Jewish experiences, that is almost an inevitable comparison, as I noted at the start.

Activists, NGOs, governments, the UN and media worldwide seem blissfully unaware that something on the order of 10 times as many people have been killed almost right next door, in the Syrian Civil War, than have been killed in the Israeli-Hamas conflict. Elsewhere, actual genocides are taking place while political propagandists invent and promote an imaginary genocide of Palestinians that simply is not happening.

None of this takes anything away from the tragedy of every Palestinian or Israeli death — though you can count on the baiters and the haters to find any reasonable assertion to brand anyone they disagree with as an inhuman racist.

The point, though, is this: No matter what the issue or tragedy, you can depend on activists to pop up and demand, “What about Palestine?”

When African-Americans are shot in the streets of the United States, activists show up to appropriate the issue with signs and slogans like “From Ferguson to Palestine…” Even entire books coopt the Black experience to operationalize it against Israel.

When the American administration threatens to erect barriers at the southern border, along come activists to deflect from that issue back to Palestine, declaring “No walls — Mexico to Palestine!” (Here’s a good example of that, equating the jihadi murderers intent on massacring Jewish civilians with the huddled masses from Latin America yearning to breathe free.)

No matter what the issue, so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists will co-opt and abuse the experiences of any and every other group to serve their own egocentric political objectives.

But who, I asked in my last post, is really served?

Why, in a world filled with tragedy, does this one people’s situation absorb, it seems, almost all of the attention the world has to offer?

We live in a time when the phrase “compassion fatigue” exists. Humankind, it seems, has a limited capacity for empathy. So why, then, have so many chosen what is, ultimately, a comparatively minor conflict and made it the biggest — judging by social media or global activism, you would think it was the only — issue on the planet?

The short answer, as I’ve said too many times, is simple.

Jews.

But there is something more to it than just basic racism.

In whose interest is it to turn the Palestinian cause into the sole priority of a global activist-industrial complex?

If you want to know in whose interest it is to eclipse every other human disaster on the planet in order to focus on Palestinians and condemn Israel, you don’t need to look too hard.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the remnants of the American-Soviet Cold War. As we know, the entire world, effectively, became proxies for this binary conflict.

In the Middle East, the Soviets took the Arab side, the Americans took the Israeli side. Simple enough, it seems.

When the Soviet Empire collapsed, a weird residue remained. There is literally nowhere in the Western world today except at a “pro-Palestine” rally where a bunch of unreconstructed Stalinists can wave the hammer and sickle and draw dozens or hundreds to join them. What does that tell you? Palestine is just about the only thing communists in the political marketplace of Canada or France have that anyone is buying. So they promote that lost-leader like it’s the last pair of faux-nylon stockings in the GUM department store.

Then there is the so-called “nonaligned movement,” which developed as an alternative to the Soviet/American binary. Of course, this was never “nonaligned” when it came to the Arabs and the Israelis. They jumped on the hate-Israel bandwagon from the start.

This misnamed nonaligned movement invented a straw dog called Israel upon which they projected every sin of contemporary political ideology. Apartheid. Settler colonialism. Economic injustice. White supremacy.

None of these fit Israel, of course (at least no more than they fit Canada, the US, Britain, Sweden or most other democracies). But to political ideologues, rationality rarely resonates. When you are looking for a scapegoat, you’ll find one. And if you want to find one, it’s usually a Jew.

Especially with the end of the binary Cold War, the “nonaligned movement” needed an oppositional entity against which to position itself. Guess who they chose?

There is more to this history than simply the remnants of the Cold War, though.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, of course, and Arab leaders, particularly the Arabs in Palestine, led by Hajj Amin Al Husseini, were among the greatest fans of Hitler and the Nazis during the Second World War. (Hitler had few more enthusiastic henchmen in the world than the mufti — a fact that seems to have been largely lost to history.) Indeed, the spiritual and political head of the Palestinian Arabs spent the war years in Berlin as a guest of the führer.

In Europe, the war ended, Naziism was defeated as a formidable force, and a process of denazification took place.

No such reckoning occurred in the Middle East. In addition to the Soviet-aligned ideological connection between Palestinianism and the far left, there was another no less powerful connection. This was the unreconstructed alliance between the Palestinian leadership and the fascist right.

In the 1970s and ’80s, a series of movies and books in the popular culture (The Boys from Brazil, Marathon Man, etc.) focused on the Nazis who fled to South America and, to varying degrees, perpetuated their ideology of hatred.

No similar popular awareness took place around the thriving ideological ancestry of fascism in the Middle East. The fact that Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion enjoy an afterlife in Arabic translation that their authors could only have dreamed of a century ago is a reality that most people in the West are either unaware of, or simply dismiss.

Well, of course, the excuses tend to run, the hatred of Jews by Palestinians and the larger Arab world is understandable given Israel and the ongoing conflict.

But this is to invert the cart and the horse. Antisemitism in the Middle East is not an effect of Israel and the ongoing conflict. Antisemitism is the cause of the conflict and the hatred of Israel.

Until we get these basic facts clear, we will never approach the nut of the matter or come close to resolving the conflict itself.

The “pro-Palestinian” or, more realistically described, “anti-Israel” movement represents one of the most irrational and counterintuitive phenomena in human history.

It is a perverse alliance of far-left recidivist communists making common cause with the descendants of Hitler and the Nazis, and empowered, of course, by Islamist jihadists bent on beheading Jews and ridding the Middle East of their presence.

Palestinianism, or Anti-Zionism, is both the last throes of Soviet communist ideology and a (not-so-thin) wedge of a fascist revival. These strange bedfellows come together with the nihilistic, end-times eschatology of fundamentalist Islam. And BAM.

And so it is a little more complicated than simply hating Jews. It is a deeply perverse complex of perverted religion, ideology and bigotry coming together in a deadly stew.

How, though, could these diverse and seemingly contradictory forces unite so efficiently and effectively?

Well, yes. This is where it comes back to the simple, one word answer.

Jews.

So I guess it’s not so complicated after all.

Communists. Fascists. End-times religious nuts.

They all hate the Jews.

Whatever differences they might have amongst themselves are easily papered over by that shared enemy.

And if, as I said, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, let me put this out there again …

Until the Palestinian people denazify their society, rebuff the Stalinists, and moderate their religion to reflect the dictum that it is a religion of peace — not a sex fantasy of 72 virgins awaiting young dudes who are literally dying to get laid — you’ll find me over there with the Israelis.

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