Why Jews Take Sides Against Israel

All I know about Vic Rosenthal is that he edits a very snappy pro-Israel blog from Fresno, California, USA.

FresnoZionism.org was created, he says “to provide a forum for publishing and discussing issues about Israel and the Mideast conflict, especially where there is a local connection. I think America’s interests are best served by supporting the democratic state of Israel, the front line in the struggle between Western civilization and radical Islam. The viewpoint is not intended to be liberal or conservative — just pro-Israel”.

On Tuesday he commented on a recent piece by high-profile U.K. journalist, Melanie Phillips who has been complaining about those Jews who have taken sides against Israel in the current and growing spate of verbal and written attacks on the country.

Even today, in the web edition of her own newspaper, Mail Online, a reader from Leeds managed to squeeze an anti-Israel jibe into a comment thread about photographs of the earth at night from space!

Phillips had written, inter alia: 

“ … Alas, it was ever thus. Most tragically, throughout the history of anti-Jewish persecution there have always been Jews who volunteered to do the Jew-haters’ dirty work for them. Like Jew-hatred itself, what we are seeing in the [Jews for Injustice Against Jews] is merely yet another mutation — of the racial treachery that has centuries-old blood on its hands”.

Rosenthal says for once he does not agree with her because

“ ... I don’t think it was ever thus. I’m sure it’s possible to dig up a few Jewish Nazis, and there are those malshinim (slanderers or informers) that are mentioned  in our daily liturgy, but the wholesale abandonment of the Jewish people and their homeland by so many who are by some definition Jewish is unprecedented.

“In fact, it would probably be correct to say that the anti-Zionist movements in the US and the UK are led by Jews as much or more so than by Arabs (a great deal of the money comes from Arab sources, but the public face of the movement is mostly Jewish).

“Maybe the reason is that in, say, 1938, the Nazis weren’t exactly accepting of Jews who were willing to come over to their side. Today’s Nazis have learned how useful it is to have a chorus of fools who are prepared to say ‘As a Jew… [insert slander here]’. So they are happy to let them join the dark side and receive their psychic ‘get out of Auschwitz free’ cards. All in the name of peace, justice, human rights and even, as Phillips notes, “Jewish conscience”.

In my view,  both Phillips and Rosenthal are correct. There seems to be an unprecedentedly large number of ill-judged, self-hating Jews aligned against the State of Israel but this is because the world is now so small that wars are  fought as much through  viral marketing and rolling 24-hour news channels as they are on any physical killing field.

But as Rosenthal allows there have always been Jewish traitors. In England, Jews were briefly accused of murder  during the year 1130 but the first major anti-Jewish blood  libel occurred in Norwich during 1144, over the mysterious murder of  12-year-old “St William of Norwich” and was almost certainly actively promoted if not wholly inspired by a Jewish apostate, ‘Theobald of Cambridge’.

Professor Vivian Lipman wrote in his landmark work, The Jews of Medieval Norwich that  information about the murder and  arrangements for removing the corpse first

“ …came from a converted Jew (possibly one Theobald of Cambridge, who became a monk …)

He adds that evidence used in the initial near-contemporaneous account by another monk, Thomas of Monmouth included some from Theobald

“that a ritual murder was annually carried out in a town picked by lot in Spain and that in 1144 Norwich was chosen; scholars are, of course, unanimous in rejecting this as another example of the vindictiveness of an apostate, so familiar in the Middle Ages, against his former brethren”.

Meanwhile in a footnote, Dr Lipman cites his colleague, Dr Cecil Roth’s History of the Jews in England, that “an accusation made in 1130 against the London Jews of killing a sick man, who perhaps had gone to one of them for medical treatment, may be an early form of the accusation”.

Dr Lipman ends this passage by noting that if anyone were to read the story of William in a modern newspaper they would

“naturally assume that it was the work of a sexual criminal, indulging sadistic impulses …”

Phillips and Rosenthal will doubtless retort that what comes around …

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