Recent demonstrations, a mix of pro-Palestine and pro-Hamas — the terrorist organization that calls in its charter for the elimination of Israel — in Canada and around the world, have had a notably corrosive and vicious thread running through them.
They have been darkly embroidered with extreme and repugnant slogans and signs, calls against Jews of profoundest insult, and pockmarked in some cities, Toronto among them, with the Nazi swastika, cries of “Death to the Jews,” and the lacerating declaration from some protesters that Israelis are present-day Nazis.
These manifestations are not merely the product of the moment, adrenalin-fuelled anger tripping demonstrators into unintended extremes of language. They are not rhetoric. They are meant. Death to the Jews was a call that meant precisely what was said — death to Jews.
That slogan was a perfect summoning, and a deliberate summoning of the dark satanic reign of Hitler and his Nazis, whose highest goal was not the conquest of Russia, Europe or the world. Hoped-for-conquest was secondary. They saw it as the path to enabling their first and primary ambition: the elimination via mass extermination of every single Jewish person to which the world gave breath.
Adolf Hitler would have forsaken all, even empire over the entire world, in exchange for the slaughter of every single Jewish person, man, woman and child on the face of the Earth, and only because they were Jewish.
Thus, to summon Hitler to your side, by name and symbol, is the authentic stigmata of anti-Semitism in its full and putrid expression.
We talk a lot these days of hate. Though in this silly and self-absorbed woke time the word is greatly diminished. It far too often gets thrown out over purely and petty differences of opinion.
Those who want to study hate in its essence have merely to look behind.
Hate in its purest form, with all its undiluted rage and fervour, has too frequently targeted Jews. Eighty years ago the world saw hate in its vilest, most savage manifestation. The greatest hate crime in the history of the world, a crime in which hate was the only fuel, torture and death its only aim, and unspeakable malice its companion servant, was the Holocaust.
To bait present-day Jews with being the mirror of their persecutors in those days, with being the same as the sadists and merciless murderers of six million of their ancestors, goes into some region far beyond insult, and outside all boundaries of protest.
So when we see in 2021 cars draped with swastika flags patrolling metropolitan streets, or see a despicable bigot, part-time contributor to CNN (since fired) boldly and publicly post on the internet that “The world today needs a Hitler,” we are somewhere we should not be.
And when we hear chants of “Death to the Jews” in the streets of Western cities, it might be an occasion to look to those unquenchable embers.
And what calls the winds that rouse those embers today? The fact of the existence of the state of Israel. Israel is a state that was meant to be — after the devilish enormity of the Holocaust — a haven; a tiny pitch of earth and sand, a postage stamp of territory, in which Jews after centuries of persecutions and anti-Semitism, and after Hitler’s Goyaesque extermination camps, might find shelter and security.
That haven-state has been fighting for its existence, and for the very lives of all who have become its citizens, since the days of its birth. There is no other country so continuously embattled, no country that has been so often the object of terror, no country so frequently under negative judgment from the United Nations, and finally no country of which it may be said if it loses one combat, it loses all.
It would be natural to think in such a context, that a world that promised “Never Again” would be obliging and resourceful in its defence, not only in wars, but against the brutal propaganda efforts that have plagued Israel from its first days. It would also be natural that in such a context the successes of Israel in building so modern and democratic a state would hold a good part of the world’s admiration.
Natural, too, that its pioneering breakthroughs in science, its ingenuity and invention, and most importantly the tested courage of all its citizens under conditions that would suffocate most other countries, would be a blazon for other countries, which bear none of its continuous peril or its minuscule territory; imagine an Israel the size of Canada.
It is a nation of the greatest accomplishments under the most arduous of circumstances. Its science rivals that of the world’s richest and greatest nations. Its medical research and hospitals are of the best. It has built a modern and democratic nation, while under continuous mortal siege. Does the world applaud?
No. It makes singular demands on the most imperilled state. Its critics — and they are legion — single out Israel for every flaw, while an empire of tyranny (China) or one of rawest terror (North Korea) summons no mass protests on the streets of the civilized West. For Israel it is always under the moral microscope; for the rest it’s a squint through the wrong end of the telescope.
The recent protests demonstrated that animus against Israel is of a special kind, that an element beyond reason or disagreement places Israel in some very distinctive category. And to my mind it is in that category — however complicated other matters in the Middle East may be — for one simple reason: it is the homeland of Jews.
HD Editors Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
Throughout history, there has been an unrelenting, irrational hatred of the Jewish people. This hatred is what we know today as ‘Antisemitism.’
Many for thousands of years have sought to understand what “reasons” people could have to hate and target the Jewish people to such a severe extent. However, it is only with a Biblical understanding that one can answer this question.
Scripture indicates that their antipathy has nothing to do with their chosen reasoning but instead that their hearts are (satanically) predisposed to hate Jews.
The children of Israel are the “Chosen People of God.” God hand-selected Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’s seed to be the line from which He Himself would become flesh (Jesus Christ) and be born into.
In deliberate attempts to disrupt God’s plans (i.e., redemption for mankind, Salvation of Israel, and his ultimate defeat), Satan sought relentlessly through men and nations to wipe out the Jewish people. We are told that he will try and fail again through the Anti-Christ (See Revelation 12).
In Genesis 12:3, God not only calls all the nations of the world to bless Israel, but He also presents a warning to those nations and people that choose to curse them: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.”
This is also why it is incumbent upon Christians to love, pray for and stand up for the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and their eternal capital of Jerusalem. God has not forgotten His people, and neither should His servants.
