Melanie Phillips is a British journalist who writes regularly on issues related to Israel and Jews. Her writing is brilliant, and I quote her here less often than I should (something I’ll keep in mind for future blogs).
Ms. Phillips’ latest commentary, is titled “Nazi chic and soft-soaping the Jew-baiters”. It discusses the so-called “pro-Palestine” protesters – who, in reality, are the anti-Israel/anti-Jew protesters. And it is excellentr.
Here is just one key segment:
Palestinian terrorist armies, as well as their fellow travelers on the streets of Western cities, have been repeatedly seen giving the Nazi salute. Israeli soldiers in Gaza report finding copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in house after house. Yet while the West ignores or dismisses the Nazi roots of the Palestinian agenda to exterminate Israel, in an Orwellian inversion it accuses Israel itself of Nazi-style crimes.
It accuses it of committing genocide against Palestinian Arabs and claims that there are concentration camps in Gaza. In Britain, Adnan Hussein, an independent “pro-Palestine” member of parliament, suggested this week that Israel might be planning “gas chambers” for Gazans.
Many of the young people who parrot these obscenities in such huge numbers are so profoundly ignorant and with so little capacity to think that they have no idea what they are saying. Throughout the West, Hitler and the Nazis have long been reduced to all-purpose cartoon villains.
At a deeper level, however, falsely accusing Israel and the Jews of committing the monstrous crimes of which they have been the victims taps into far darker cultural currents. For some, painting Jews as Nazis is a way of cleansing themselves of the unbearable stain of cultural complicity in the Holocaust.
If the Jews are committing genocide, goes this thinking, the Nazi genocide of the Jews was obviously not such a big deal. And so the rest of the West—whose policies of appeasement enabled the Holocaust to happen, which shut its doors against the victims and whose own culture gave rise to that horror in the first place—is off the hook.
With the Palestinian cause having become the default position of the liberal mind, millions in the West are parroting its propaganda. And alongside the Nazi-derived tropes of Jewish demonization, Palestinian Arabs themselves repeatedly accuse Israel of genocide and other Nazi behavior.
Does that get your attention? If so, use the link I’ve provided (here it is again) and read every word.
Then join me in wishing Melanie Phillips has this wrong….despite knowing damn well that she does not.
