The Unkindest Cut of All Part III --On Jews and other enablers of Hamas with a lookback 75 years

 

The Unkindest Cut of All-Part III 

On Jews and other enablers of Hamas with a lookback 75 years

 

This last Thursday and Friday November 8th and 9th marked 85 years since the dreaded Kristallnacht or as it is often translated into English,The Night of Broken Glass. I don't need to belabor details as to what it signified. I do have in my own family records a note that my grandmother in Vienna was among those attacked at that time and then shortly afterwards my grandparents were able to escape to Switzerland and my father and uncle headed off to Czechoslovakia.

It has been 85 years since ,and I know that we Jews around the world had felt much more safe and secure since the rise of the state of Israel. We had been accustomed to saving Jews in the middle of the hijacking to in Entebbe or the airlifting of Jews to safety throughout the Middle East and Africa in the intervening years. After the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, and more recently, with the potential alliances with various Arab countries, we could allow ourselves into a dream of security.

None of us could have imagined the horror of something worse than a Kristallnacht or  something worse than the worst pogroms of the past but, that did happen on October 7. We have marked the shloshim the 30 days of mourning for those who are dead yet we know that our mourning,  both in Israel, and out, is not ended.

Last week, I allowed myself to vent on those who tried to pin the blame on Israel, or create some kind of equivalency, whether by international authorities or even local media.

I turn now to my central gripe: history repeats itself, or, déjà vu all over again.

 I have been  in the midst of looking for material from my father’s documents for a special exhibit to be opened in December in Frankfurt, Germany, on the 75th anniversary of the re-establishing of the Jewish community after the Holocaust. As you may know, my father, Rabbi Dr William Weinberg, served as the first State Rabbi of Hesse, but before that, he worked with the DP camps in Austria.I published a book about his years up through Soviet exile and, I hope, one day, to follow up with an account of the years helping survivors rebuild their lives. In the process I found three articles of his, from the very first years after the Holocaust, to be eerily relevant to what we are seeing today,

 First, you can hear, very loudly, the justification that the Palestinians are, after all, suffering at the hands of Jews, qua Zionists, for 56, then 75, and, yes 100 years. We should not be surprised if they raped, beheaded, tortured, and kidnapped. It’s “ distributive justice.”

Student groups at Harvard decried Israel as “entirely responsible” for Hamas’ attack; groups at the University of Virginia went a step further in saying that “colonized people can resist occupation of their land by whatever means they deem necessary”; and groups at Tufts took the cake by praising Hamas’ ingenious creativity.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/hamas-slaughtered-wokeness

Now, Jewish students are being physically attacked on campuses at Tulane and elsewhere.

Sadly, for us, the protests by the pro-Palestinian camp are very rough and aggressive, and a local Jewish pro-Israel protestor , Paul Kessler, was knocked to the ground and killed by a pro-Palestinian protestor just this past Sunday. Violence by the pro-Palestinian side is not knew—we saw similar attacks on Jews here just two years ago by the “fellow travelers” and “useful idiots” of Hamas.

 

All of this anger, against Israel, and by extension, against Jews, has been , as we have seen, “justified” by apologists for murder. As I said, déjà vu, just this “ blame the victim” tactic was used against Jews even while we were still mourning our dead and licking our wounds after the greatest and almost completely successful attempt at erasing us physically from this planet.

So here is how the same apologists for murder blamed us after the Holocaust in the same tones:

 

Not mine, but your fault! Dec 1946, in a German journal, Der Neue Weg.

Now the silence is broken, and people are speaking lately also to non-Jews about what had happened to us in the Hitler era. It is therefore not without interest for us to note that what the Austrian accomplices have to say about the causes . The final sentences of this article by a. D. Hornbostel: “Anti-Semitism and Jewish problem" are significant for us.

We quote the same verbatim:

“Another prerequisite for a peaceful and prosperous coexistence with the Jewish elements in Europe is of course the determination of the Jews themselves to get rid of all the fatal mistakes and weaknesses that anti-Semitism wants to attack and incited him to such brutal activity as we have unfortunately had to witness in the recent past.”

 In other words, you Jews deserved it!

Thus, my father summed up the implication:

 “The murder of 6 million Jews in Europe and their plundering were ultimately the expression of the righteous people's anger. At least that's what it must sound like to the ears of the average anti-Semitic reader.”…

“If we're talking about mistakes, why not talk about your own mistakes at the same time! Is this the Austrian way of looking for the splinter in your neighbor's eye and overlooking the beam in your own? …

Were Hitler, Seyss-Inquart, Kaltenbrunner, and countless of their accomplices notAustrian? “

 

Hence, the opposite of a Catholic confession: I have not sinned, rather, you have sinned.!

 This after the Holocaust. This same tone was sounded by political and academic figures here, after the murder, rape, torture and kidnapping of 2023!

Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib: after a full day of silence, finally said:

"I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day," "As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue."

Yes, she cries, but it all Israel’s fault ( with US backing, of course).She also had her original interpretation of “ From the River to the Sea”, saying it was merely “aspirational.” So was Endlösung der Judenfrage-The final solution of the Jewish problem, merely “asprational”.

Now, we have had actual physical attacks on Jews on campuses at Tulane and , closer to home, a UC Davis professor tweeting a call to violence: 

Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article280938278.html#storylink=cpy

 So, Non Mea—its not my fault- its your fault, déjà vu!

 Then, we have those among our Jews, who are very complacent, living lives of comparative luxury and privilege, who would disconnect from the entire Jewish affair. Just so in December of 1945, when the rubbles of war had finally settled in Vienna :

Wir Sind Quitt: We are even! Are we really!( Der Neue Weg)

Here is a summary of the verbal fight as it appeared in a journal of Austrian literature (Friedrich Torberg und Hans Weigel — Zwei Jüdische Schriftsteller im Nachkriegsösterreich :Evelyn Adunka,Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 27, No. 3/4, Special Issue: The Jewish Presence in Contemporary Austrian Literature (1994), pp. 213-237 (25 pages) “ Two Jewish writers in post-War Austria”.)

Hans Weigel was a noted Austrian Jewish playwright and theater critic, who survived the Holocaust in relative comfort in Switzerland.

 

In October 1945 Weigel wrote in an article in the American-published Wiener Kurier:

 "We have nothing to blame each other. No one can bring his dead alive.

With you many are dead and with us too. But we're even! We don't think too much about yesterday."

             Wilhelm Weinberg, the later chief rabbi of Frankfurt am Main, commented on               this     article in the Vienna Jewish Der Neue Weg magazine:

  "Perhaps Mr. Weigel is even - we, the majority of Jews around the world and here too, Not." Weinberg's disgust was joined by a second one: Imagine the indignation when Weigel ,"in the exuberance of "Joy of reunion", was not content with "receipts of over six and a half million dead," but "also to differentiate those Jews who do not want to return home," with the equally problematic sentence: "Because no one is ever forced to return home, only those who come here will come back, who are the most 'Austrian' elements.”

 

My father went on to contrast this Jewish writer, who had lived comfortably in Switzerland, and was only too happy to return to Austria, with the greatest modern German writer, Thomas Mann, who made the US his new home.

 

Of the same ilk, as some of you may recall, a Jewish Chancellor of Austria, Bruno Kreisky,  in the 1970’s, of the same stripe as this writer, who turned the Socialist movements against Israel, said:

 Wenn die Juden ein Volk sind, so ist es ein mieses Volk.« Quoted by his press secretary:

If Jews are indeed a people, then they are a “mieses volk”, an ugly people!

( Der Spiegel, https://www.spiegel.de/politik/kreisky-die-juden-ein-mieses-volk-a-4c081012-0002-0001-0000-000041376698)

 Surely, though, the most painful of all , has been the rush to blame Israel by our very own, the very heirs to a Bruno Kreisky, or a Hans Wiegel, or their intellectual ancestor, the very great antisemite, the intellectual father of all anti-semitism, Karl Marx.

 Here too, we have the case of those who, in the Talmudic statement, “ act like Zimri ( who betrayed Israel in the Sinai) “but demand the reward of Zimri”, who saved the Israelites from Zimri’s sin.

 We might prefer to  use a line from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, about Brutus, his closest friend, who stabbed Caesar

“ For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel:
Judge, O you gods, how dearly Caesar loved him!
This was the most unkindest cut of all”.

 This is a summary of key points in my father’s essay, “Regarding the Problem of Jewish Quislings”. It was published in a special edition of the journal, “ Mosty and Opinin”, in May of 1947 ,as the Jewish communities in Austria and Germany were trying to organize themselves while still in pain from the wounds of Nazi murder.

  

(The full translation and the text can be found here:

http://www.courageofspirit.com/2023/11/regarding-problem-of-jewish-quislings.html)

“In all European states that had the misfortune to experience the bloody rule of the Germans, the concept of Quislings is known, those people who are criminally inclined, by fear or opportunism, or political immaturity, or for money, without dignity, or for the sake of supposed national interests, in the moral sense or factual sense, to have made themselves accomplices of the Nazi tyrants.

“In antiquity we had our Josephus Flavius, who abandoned his comrades in arms in the most difficult hour of our people and went over to the throne, and who, while his comrades were dragged behind the triumphant’ s chariot, enjoyed himself at the court of the same triumphant by writing hymns in his honor. In the same tragic epoch …Tiberius Alexander( nephew of the great 1st Jewish philosopher) , …governor in Judea, and later as governor in Egypt, who let his legions of blood-hungry and rapacious soldiers, like wild animals and beasts, loose on the quarters of the Jews in Alexandria , and then took part     under Titus in the conquest of Jerusalem as the actual head …”

“As is well known, history repeats itself. During Hitler's time, many Jews helped in the enslavement and deportation of the Jews to the labor concentration and extermination camps. Many have committed guilt in their capacity as Judenrate( Jewish council member) by compiling and signing lists of those destined for destruction or by assisting in the confiscation of Jewish assets for the benefit of the Germans; many have committed guilt in their capacity as Jupos (Jewish police) by enlisting Jews for destruction or deportation ; some took part directly in the atrocities and devilries of the Germans as kapos.”

“Times of emergency are known to be the best ground for political adventurers and our time of need is not yet over. While most Jews returned home wandering, lost, groping, grieving, disappointed, uprooted, desperate and tired of life, our Quislings looked in a good mood, were impeccably dressed and stood out from all the others because of their well-fed nature.”

Such people have forfeited, according to all written and unwritten laws in all liberated countries, the right to play any leading role in social life, …

“Where they still try to push themselves into the foreground, it is the inevitable duty of every Jew to push them into the background.”

 

Now, after the knowledge of the horrid pillage, rape, torture, murder, infanticide, and kidnapping, I reserve my greatest revulsion, after the officers and soldiers of Hamas, who carried it out, next onto those of our own, who thought it was “cool” or “hip” or “progressive” to take over the Capital Rotunda ywo weeks ago and Grand Central Station this week, in the name of Jewish Voices For Peace, threatening to shut down the emblem of American democracy, all the while draped in Talit and kippah.They repeated the grand-standing a week later in Grand Central Station.

Here is a group of younger Jews who use this as a flag of distinction, something possible only for children of privileged Jewish elites.

Here is their shameless proclamation:

“We converged in historic numbers in D.C. with unprecedented heart, power, and ferocity, to say: Ceasefire now. Not in our names, not with our money.

This was the largest Jewish protest in solidarity with Palestinians ever.

A staggering 5,000 people from around the country descended on the National Mall in a “Jews against Genocide” rally — with only a couple days notice, in the middle of a Wednesday workday. We were proud to be joined by Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush, as well as author and activist Naomi Klein and actor Mo Amer, as well as our friends at IfNotNow, who had led us in an impressive shut-down of all 13 entrances of the White House on Monday.

Then two dozen rabbis led almost 500 Jews in a sit-in in the rotunda of a key Capitol building. As rabbis blew shofars and shared testimonials from Palestinians in Gaza, the thousands outside the building chanted “Ceasefire now!” and “Let Gaza live!” We shut down the street outside the offices of members of congress for three hours, elected officials and staffers watching from their windows as capitol police arrested the hundreds inside the building.

https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/19/thousands-of-jews-and-allies-shut-down-capitol-hill/

 

This happened as the organization accepted, like all other progressive groups, the Hamas ministry lie of the hospital bombing.The blood of the massacred of October 7 was still wet on the ground and these Quislings mourned the murderers. It is the” most unkindest cut of all”, as it is so convenient, for enemies of the Jews to trot out their token Jew, and use it against us. Jewish students have been harrassed and physically attacked on campus across the country, in part, due to such protestations.

I will now apply my father’s recommendations about the Jewish Quislings and suggest that the Jewish community close out jobs for these fellow travelers. I know that I am being ungenerous, but when the Middle East has been taken over by the dogs of Khomeini, the Hezbollahs, the Hamases, the Houthis, there is no room for generosity of spirit. These are the fellow travelers of Al Qaeda and ISIS. 

Remember that the Communists, too, were split into Stalinists and Trotskyites ,Maoists and Viet-Kongists- often, deadly enemies, yet united in the same goal of ideological domination.

Think carefully when posing for the under trodden.There was one Jew who rose to the highest pinnacle of success in the fight for revolutionary Justice, “the genius of the revolution”, the founder of the Red Army , and the proponent of perpetual revolution, Leon Trotsky:

This is what he received from his colleague and comrade in arms when he was getting his hair cut in Mexico City, exiled from his country, an axe to the head:

 One last thought of warning

 The Jew was the canary in the coal mine in World War II. The Jew, as Israeli, or Zionist, is still the canary in the coal mine. It's not my words, it is , as the Arabs themselves have said” First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.”