It’s obscene to blame the victim, but one can condemn being a victim.
On June 4, an Arab stabbed 17-year-old yeshiva student Israel Ifrah in the Parisian suburb of Epinay and shouted, “Allahu Aqbar!” On May 30, a group of men attacked a rabbi’s son in the suburb Boulogne-Billancourt.[1]
Dutch journalist Joshua Livestro recently observed:
In Amsterdam, a Turkish man, apparently mistaken for a Jew, was verbally abused and beaten up by two Arab immigrant youths. A Jewish retirement home was firebombed. Observant Jews no longer feel safe wearing yarmulkes in public. [Emphasis added.] Anti-Semitic slogans appear on Jewish graves and synagogue buildings.[2]
This is part heartbreaking, part infuriating.
After the 1903 Kishinev pogrom in Moldova, Israeli poet Chaim Bialik wrote “In the City of Slaughter.” It states at one point:
…the heirs
Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,
Concealed and cowering—the sons of the Maccabees!
The seed of saints, the scions of the lions!
Who, crammed by scores in all the sanctuaries of their shame,
So sanctified My name!
It was the flight of mice they fled,
The scurrying of roaches was their flight;
They died like dogs, and they were dead![3]
It was a terrible image for a terrible condition, and the monstrousness of the crime made self-defense that much more urgent. Bialik’s poem inspired Jews in Gomel (White Russia) to establish self-defense units that resisted a pogrom in September 1903.[4] Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky was a young journalist in 1903 and had done likewise in his native Odessa.[5]
Similarly, Jewish Defense League founder Rabbi Meir Kahane—murdered in 1990 by an Egyptian linked with the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing[6]—remarked in a discussion of Zionists who in May 1947 freed peers held by the British at Acre fortress in northern Israel:
Jews! Members of a people that the world for 2,000 years had equated with weakness. A nation that had become synonymous with fearful timidity, passivity, and—yes—cowardice. A people that was beaten and did not beat back; that was trampled upon without response; that was Chosen, chosen for slaughter. A people that had, just two years earlier, completed the mostly grisly chapter in its history, a chapter that saw six million die in gas chambers and other products of European culture.[7]
by Myles Kantor
