PrintOctober 17, 2010
Forward to the Past
Edmund Burke, British statesman and philosopher, known for his famous aphorism "all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," also uttered other words of wisdom.
Reflecting on the parlous condition of the stateless Jews in his time, Burke was moved to observe the following:
Having no fixed settlement in any part of the world, no kingdom nor country in which they have a government, a community and a system of laws, they are thrown on the benevolence of nations ... If Dutchmen are injured and attacked, the Dutch have a nation, a government and armies to redress or revenge their cause. If Britons be injured, Britons have armies and laws, the law of nations ... to fly to for protection and justice. But the Jews have no such power and no such friend to depend on. Humanity, then, must become their protector and ally.
But of course, humanity, except for a few exceptional and honorable individuals, did not protect the hapless Jews. They were alone in a bleak and ever-dangerous world.
Speaking after the Second World War and the Holocaust, which reduced the world Jewish population in the space of nearly seven dread years from eighteen million to barely twelve million, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet Union delegate to the United Nations, said,
The fact that no Western European State has been able to ensure the defense of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist executioners explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own state. It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.
Gromyko was addressing the U.N. during the passage of Resolution 181, which granted the reborn State of Israel Jewish sovereignty at last in its ancestral and biblical homeland. The territory was then the geographical territory known as Palestine, under the occupation of the British Mandate.
However, despite Gromyko's fine and humanitarian words, the Soviet Union went on to support Arab dictators in several wars against Israel, aiding and abetting Egypt, Syria, and the PLO in relentless acts of anti-Israel aggression.
But it was not only because of the Holocaust that Jewish aspirations for a return to Zion existed. That yearning had existed for millennia, and Jews continued to return to the now-stagnant and barren land of their fathers in whatever numbers and whenever they could.
In 1894, a young Austrian Jewish journalist named Theodore Herzl traveled to Paris, France to witness a trial against a Jewish military officer, Alfred Dreyfus. This officer was falsely accused of treason by the French High Command. The trial led to outrage among many writers and artists as they witnessed the specter of growing anti-Jewish excesses within civilized France. Emil Zola's J'Accuse was a searing indictment of the French military and society.
Herzl, who believed that Jews could freely assimilate into the wider European populations and who thought that at long last, they had found equality throughout Western Europe, was devastated. The outpouring of such hate towards an innocent man in civilized France, primarily because of his Jewish faith, irrevocably altered Herzl's earlier assumptions.
He began to believe that for the Jews, the only salvation was a return to the ancient physical and spiritual homeland. Herzl went on to found modern Zionism, the movement supporting the Jewish people's own right of self-determination and their national liberation.
Even before Herzl began to work tirelessly for the dream to become a reality, a great thinker and leading exponent of the European Enlightenment, Jean Jacques Rousseau, wrote of the Jews' plight:
These unfortunates feel themselves to be at our mercy ... What will they dare say without laying themselves open to our accusing them of blasphemy? ... I shall never believe I have seriously heard the arguments of the Jews until they have a free state, schools and universities, where they can speak and dispute without risk. Only then will we be able to know what they have to say.
And it came to pass. The long and seemingly endless statelessness and trail of tears, stretching over nearly two thousand years from the Roman defeat of ancient Judea, came to an end on November 29, 1947. The U.N. voted in favor of the creation of a Jewish and an Arab state. Even before that date, Jewish universities and schools had indeed sprung up as Rousseau had hoped.
Though the Jewish remnant had, like some wondrous Phoenix, risen again from the charnel house of Europe and accepted the tiny and perilously truncated state in the hope that they could realize their own destiny in peace, the Arab League rejected outright the existence of any Jewish state. Tragically, in May 1948 -- immediately upon Israel's declaration of independence -- the Arab armies invaded.
Miraculously, the Jewish State, outnumbered and with few arms to defend the nascent nation, beat back the Arab forces. But Arab and Muslim hostility remains to this day and is becoming ever more dangerous to the continued existence and survival of the Jewish state.
The European nations who treated the once-stateless Jews so harshly now heap calumny upon the reconstituted democratic Jewish state. Indeed, to their shame, many European governments are complicit with some of their own radicalized citizens in accusing Israel of violating basic human rights -- this while totally ignoring the horrors routinely inflicted upon women and non-Muslims throughout the undemocratic Arab world. As for the Tibetans, Kurds, Serbians, and all others who deserve justice, the Israel-bashers have little or no time for their suffering.
Baseless charges of "apartheid" are routinely hurled at Israel by an orchestrated and heavily funded constellation of leftists, progressives (aka communists), and those who for whatever murky reasons choose to demonize one state alone: Israel.
The supreme irony in the apartheid slander is that, alone in the world, only Israel saved black populations (the ancient black Jews of Ethiopia) and brought them to a country, not as the Europeans and Muslim Arab slave traders did as slaves, but as free men and women. To quote William Safire, "For the first time in history, thousands of black people are being brought to a country not in chains but in dignity, not as slaves but as citizens."
Now, if you need proof of real apartheid, simply look at the demands of the Palestinian Authority, Israel's so-called "peace partner," that all Jews living in territory the Arabs want for a state must be ethnically cleansed. And look at Jordan, which sits on four-fifths of the original geographical territory of Palestine, and in which no Jews are allowed to live. Now that's apartheid by any other name.
As the world nears the end of the first decade of the 21st century, democracy is under increasing assault from Islam. It is not beyond reality that we may see both Europe and America subsumed under growing Muslim populations and Judeo-Christian civilization giving way to ascendant Islamic rule.
Whether Israel, so perilously placed as it is on the front line against resurgent and aggressive Islamic power, will be supported by the Europeans and Americans is for the near future to witness.
Europe, or Eurabia as it is likely to become unless it urgently wakes up, is almost lost under its self-inflicted political correctness, multiculturalism, and growing subservience to creeping Sharia law. But if the unthinkable occurs and the United States Constitution is replaced by Sharia Law, then a new Dark Age will lie ahead, and democratic civilization and religious freedom as we have known it will crumble away. And all this while the amen chorus of fools hurl their unfounded slanders and invective against the embattled Jewish state.
It would be horribly ironic if Burke's aphorism was forgotten and the triumph of evil, which he warned against, comes to be. But this time, not only will Jews return to a stateless existence owing to the unbearable loss of their restored homeland, but vast numbers of non-Jews, by resisting forced conversion to Islam, will join them in shared statelessness and a veritable vale of tears.
Dhimmitude, the terror under which Jews and Christians were forced to endure Islamic tyranny for centuries, will return with a vengeance, and much of the world as we have known it will needlessly stumble forward into the past.
Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
