Friday, March 18, 2011

The New Jews and The New Nazis

anneEvery once in a while someone will say something to the effect of "the Palestinians are the new Jews."

What's meant by this is that if the Jewish people in the past deserved some sympathy for being an oppressed people, today it is the Palestinians, not the Jews, that deserve that sympathy.

It is the Palestinians who are now the icon of oppression and thus in need of our sympathy. In this way, they are "the new Jews."

Leaving aside the truthfulness of this notion, it is interesting to me the many ways in which the Palestinians, and their supporters, often seek to undermine and appropriate Jewish history, identity, and imagery.

For example, here is an image of Jewish icon Anne Frank wearing a keffiyah. It is an image that projects the same idea. Anne Frank with keffiyah is Anne Frank as Palestinian and thus Palestinian as the new Jew.  The inversion also suggests that if Anne Frank was a victim of the Nazis, this means that if the Palestinians are the new Jews than the Jews are the new Nazis.

In this way the artist uses Anne Frank as club to beat the Jews and robs us of a cherished image, giving that image over to the Palestinian Arabs.

One might call it cultural theft and it is one of the unacknowledged weapons used against the Jewish people in the long Arab / Muslim war.

Another example of this is the claiming of Jewish historical or religious figures for Islam. Thus Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, religious figures who lived millenia before the birth of Mohommed somehow become Islamic religious figures... this despite the fact that Islam had yet to be invented. And therefore the Cave of the Patriarchs, where these figures are allegedly buried, gets transformed from a Jewish holy place to a mosque.

Another example, of course, is when a Palestinian will refer to Jesus as the first Muslim shaheed or martyr. This takes the figure of Jesus, a Jewish rabbi, and transforms him into the equivalent of a Palestinian suicide bomber, a shaheed, a martyr for the cause.

This cultural theft, or transference, of Jewish history, identity, and imagery has been going on for many centuries and includes, as another example, the building of the Dome of the Rock directly on top of the remains of the Second Temple. None of this is accidental. It is one of the primary methods designed to undermine the Jews and to strip us of our history and identity.

In a certain kind of way, it is pathetic, however. Do the Palestinians, or those Arabs or Muslims who are intent on driving the Jews out of our traditional homeland along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, have so little regard for their own history and identity that they must seek to appropriate ours?

It's Pathetic.


  1. Why do you hate Arabs? Sadly, you are blind.

    1. He doesn't hate the Arabs. He thinks what they do is outrageous and to use his word, "pathetic." It is you who seems blind -- at least you have not been able to read the article and understand what is rather clear. My suggestion to you, dear anonymous, is to quit feeling sorry for yourself and take a good long look at Arab history, culture, backwardness, violence, cruelty and unwillingness to engage in self examination.

  2. If you have a comment to make, you should make it, rather than slinging around incoherent aspersions.

    Make a substantive claim, in other words.

    For example, you might point out just where you disagree and upon which specific points.

  3. I suggest you read the Koran. You will see that it is the totalizing/totalitarian ideology par excellence. Islam does not even allow that non-muslims suffer, because non-muslims are sub-human to islam. Under islam "human rights" only apply to muslims (see the Cairo Declaration). Muslims not only claim christianity and judaism as corrupted forms of islam, when it suits them they even claim that buddhism and hinduism are forms of islam.

    It is important to get the facts out. It was the west that destroyed the 1300 years of the islamic slave trade.

    The greatest genocide in history was not the Holocaust, but the muslim invasion of India (see vol.1 of Durant's The Story of Civilisation).

    Until islam is subjected to the same critique as the west for its shameful past, muslims will carry on being supremacists, and the left will carry on being the water-carriers for islam.

    1. Heya Joe,

      thanks for the substantive remarks.

      I'll be sure to check your links and please feel free to drop in here anytime.

  4. Why do you say they stole your "jewish rabbi" The Jews didn't accept Jesus 2000 years ago, and they dont accept him now. The Crusaders forced the jews out of Israel not the Muslims

    1. It is true that the Muslims did not force the Jews out of Israel, they merely imposed a brutal system of domination upon us for 13 long centuries.

  5. Cultural theft? Give me a break.