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Today’s Surging Anti-Semitism—A Perverse Inversion of Victim & Victimizer

May 22, 2024/in Culture War, Elections, Hot Topics, National Security, News, Policy, Politics, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dr. Martin Sherman

World opinion must be made to understand that the plight of Gazans today is the result, not the reason, for the smoldering Judeophobic hate on their part.

The surge in antisemitism across the US and elsewhere has once again thrown into sharp relief the appalling pervasiveness and perverseness of loathing to which the Jewish people are subject.

It has exposed how shallow it lies, bubbling just below the surface, dormant but not dead, ready to erupt on the flimsiest pretext, even in allegedly the most liberal, cultured, and erudite societies.

“Geographically challenged louts”

Although, since WWII, the naked expression of hatred for Jews as individuals or a religion has been muted—even frowned on, in many parts of the world, it appears that much of this restraint has been released—perversely just after the Jews have been submitted to a brutal genocidal assault within the Jewish state itself. After all, by any rationale standard of decency, the horrific atrocities should have unleashed a massive wave of, if not of international sympathy for the Jews and the Jewish state—then at least of severe and unreserved condemnation of their vile adversaries. Indeed, every assault on an Israeli civilian, every murder, massacre, mutilation, every projectile fired indiscriminately at every non-military target—whether farm, village school, or kibbutz kindergarten —every one of these was an indisputable war-crime.

Yet, stunningly, just the opposite occurred.

Across campuses of prestigious universities, leafy boulevards, and central town squares, we witnessed the groundswell of vicious and visceral vitriol, directed not only against the Jewish state’s righteous retaliation to the tsunami of barbaric war crimes; but against Jews, as Jews, guilty not of any action but merely by association

However, instead of being excoriated for their subhuman savagery, the Gazans were lauded and lionized as bold fighters for freedom, with “geographically challenged” louts chanting “from the river to the sea”—a euphemistic slogan for the destruction of the Jewish state –without them having the slightest idea which river and/or which sea are involved.

Perverse inversion of victim/victimizer

Arguably, some of the most egregious manifestations of this perverse inversion of victim and victimizer have been promulgated by several Armenian sources. Indeed, an analysis (August 2023) by The Institution For The Study Of Global Antisemitism And Policy (ISGAP), entitled Antisemitic and Anti-Israeli Narratives in Armenia and the Armenian Diaspora, warns that in significant circles of Armenian society—under the influence of “antisemitic cliques…[a] popular construct has become the uncritical assimilation of the Arab-Islamic narrative of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” According to ISGAP, this … leads [them] to deny Israel’s right to exist and, accordingly, the right of Jews to their national self-determination –which falls under the internationally recognized definition of antisemitism”

The ISGAP analysis cautions that “in recent months, the Armenian segment of the Internet (including the Russian and English language segments) has been [inundated] with expressions of unconditional solidarity with Palestinians on the 75th anniversary of the Nakba (“the catastrophe of the Palestinian people”, which, according to this narrative, is the creation of the State of Israel). It cites the Policy Director of the Washington-based Armenian National Committee of America as insinuating that the creation of Israel is “a crime that never ended”.

Misplaced pique

Allegedly, Armenian rancor against Israel is due to the supply of weapons to Azerbaijan in its successful wars (2020, 2023) in Nagorno-Karabagh, which resulted in the Armenian enclave being overrun and absorbed into Azerbaijan. However, the real purpose of Israel’s supply of weapons to Baku was not conflict in Nagorno-Karabagh, which has no strategic significance for it. Rather it was to strengthen its strategic cooperation with a moderate pro-Israel Azerbaijan against its extreme anti-Israel Iran, an existential peril for the Jewish state. Significantly, polls by Pew and the ADL show that distinct antisemitic sentiments prevailed well before these military conflicts, now blamed for their manifestation,

Likewise, the Armenian inference, that the situation in Gaza and in Nagorno-Karabakh were in any way similar, is utterly baseless. After all, it should be recalled that since 1993—and particularly 2005–Israel tried repeatedly—albeit ill-advisedly—to extricate itself from Gaza, being thwarted only by unremitting aggression from Gazan terror groups, which made Israeli military action imperative. Indeed, the plight of the Gazans today is manifestly the result, not the reason of the smoldering Judeophobic hate on their part.

Incandescent incoherent vitriol

Recently, echoes reminiscent of the irrational Jew-hatred that has reduced Gaza to rubble, were spluttered (for want of a better word) by Vladimir Poghosyan former advisor to Armenia’s Armed Forces and purportedly an expert on his country’s national security in Armenia. Virtually apoplectic, he ranted: “I will scream to the whole world, about the just killing of Jews…You jackals must be exterminated completely…I never recognized the Holocaust …Jews are a destructive people, who have no right to be on this earth…”

Soaring off into a hate-filled tirade, he charged: “…you suckers have not left your mark in any country in the world, never. You have always been situational temporary workers killing different people.“—somehow unmindful of the fact that Jews (0.2% of the world’s population) comprise over 22% of all Nobel prize laureates–

While it is true that Poghosyan no longer holds any official position, his toxic diatribe is still worthy of mention because of his past standing. Indeed, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, himself on the very day it was made public.

Bearing the blame

Since the dissolution of the USSR Armenia, as a small landlocked country, subject to myriad constraints and pressures from larger and stronger neighbors, has found itself between a rock and a hard place. That truth, however, cannot obscure the fact that it has brought considerable animosity on itself by making some grossly injudicious choices and rash decisions of its own for which it alone must bear the blame,

In shocking discovery, remains of Israeli victim thought to have been abducted found in grave of stranger

December 26, 2023/in Commentary, Culture War, Hot Topics, News, Science, Social Issues/by NEWSRAEL Telling the Israeli Story

The confusion arose when the remains of two women, charred beyond recognition, were mistaken for a single body.

The remains of a woman believed to have been abducted by the Hamas terror group on October 7 were found in the interred grave of another woman after a piece of her jewelry was discovered weeks later.

The tragedy of Shani Gabay, a victim of the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7, unfolded in a sequence of painful revelations and errors. Gabay was among the attendees at the Supernova rave when Hamas terrorists stormed in, unleashing a massacre that claimed over 350 lives at the scene and approximately 1,200 across southern Israel. Gabay was later thought to have been abducted to Gaza along with more than 240 others.

As rockets rained down, 25-year-old Gabay, who had recently graduated Tel Aviv University’s school of law, pulled over in her car near Kibbutz Alumim, close to the festival site, seeking refuge in a field shelter. Unknown to her, the terrorists were already attacking the partygoers. Despite being shot, Gabay managed to flee the shelter, finding temporary safety in an ambulance with other survivors. However, their respite was short-lived as the ambulance was targeted by a rocket-propelled grenade, resulting in the death of all occupants.

For weeks, the Gabay family lived under the harrowing impression that Shani had been kidnapped and was being held captive in Gaza because authorities were unable to locate any trace of her. This belief persisted until a chance discovery of her charred necklace shaped like a half-moon, buried in the debris of the Supernova festival, changed everything.

“We concluded that Shani was missing, there was no sign of life from her, and as the days passed and she wasn’t found among the bodies, we began to believe that she had been kidnapped,” Shani’s brother Aviel, told the Ynet news site. “We became involved in the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, we held meetings in Israel and around the world… we believed that Shani was taken hostage and wondered what she was going through in captivity.”

Her necklace, which was unearthed on the 47th day of her assumed captivity, bore a high concentration of Gabay’s DNA, a clue that finally led to the unraveling of her fate. The police, upon examining the necklace further, also found a lower concentration of another woman’s DNA. This led to the exhumation of the other woman’s grave, where a CT scan revealed two skulls. “A dentist then examined the two skulls and clearly identified teeth belonging to Shani,” Aviel explained.

The authorities “admitted they had made a big mistake and that they had buried Shani on the first week of the war together with another young woman,” Aviel Gabay revealed. The confusion arose when the remains of the two women, found together in the burned-out ambulance and charred beyond recognition, were mistaken for a single body.

Shani Gabay was finally laid to rest just days before what would have been her 26th birthday in a ceremony attended by mourners in the northern Israeli town of Yokne’am.

Want to Be Rich, Powerful, and Influential Today? Play the Victim.

October 5, 2020/in Commentary, Education, Policy, Politics/by Jihad Watch

Has there ever been another time in history when the powerful, moneyed, cosseted elites achieved and maintained that elite status by claiming to be despised, discriminated against and marginalized? The latest example of this fetishization of outcast status came from Yale University’s Council on Middle East Studies last Thursday, when it presented a discussion by associate professor Zareena Grewal on her book Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority.

“At the talk,” reported the Yale Daily News, “Grewal spoke about her first book — which will soon have a second edition — and her next book.” So it appears that Grewal has done quite well: she holds a professorship at Yale, her first book was successful enough to warrant a second edition, and to make her writing attractive enough to publishers that she was able to sign a contract for a second book.

Zareena Grewal has, in short, been successful and prosperous. Her work has received accolades. She got a plum job at an Ivy League university. But to hear her tell it, she lives a terrifying life cowering in fear of the racist, redneck yahoos who are bent on denying her and others like her their just rewards for their labors. Grewal complains that “the pandemic impacts us in such uneven ways reflective of structural racism and disenfranchisement.” On top of that, “we have the escalation of state violence against Black and indigenous people, the climate crisis, the fascist suppression of protestors and voters, a rise in white supremacist movements, the collapsing of institutions, and the very threat of a coup.”

Wait, which side was doing the coup again? Never mind. You’ll be happy to learn that Grewal has learned to cope with all the many, many ways in which she has been victimized: “In these dark times, I rely on what I learned about the nature of crises in writing that book over ten years ago to help me slow down and metabolize all the things we are hit with every day.” Yes, metabolize. That’s how academics these days talk, you unwashed rube.

Grewal is an experienced player of the victimhood game. “During the talk,” says the Yale Daily News, “Grewal emphasized that she wrote her first book in the context of how the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the Arab Spring Revolution affected Gen X Muslim youth.” The 9/11 attacks affected many people other than Muslims, but it has been commonplace for victimhood propagandists to claim that Muslims were the primary victims of the attacks. Several weeks ago, on the nineteenth anniversary of the attacks, the Los Angeles chapter Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a press release to complain of supposed bias against Muslims in the teaching about 9/11 in schools. CAIR-LA Civil Rights Managing Attorney Amr Shabaik wrote that those biases primarily involved conflating “the entire religion of Islam with the tragic events of 9/11.”

Never mind that the 9/11 hijackers and plotters repeatedly conflated their actions with the religion of Islam. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters several years ago penned a lengthy Islamic defense for their actions, which included a closely reasoned explanation of why the 9/11 attacks were justified from the standpoint of Islamic doctrine and belief.

As far as Grewal, as well as CAIR is concerned, such material doesn’t exist. What we have instead is “the Trump Presidency, the possibility of a second term of the Trump Presidency, the transformation of a series of policies in the Middle East, the brutal suppression of those revolutionary movements that I am describing at the end of the book, and how has that impacted American Muslim communities.”

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Travis Zadeh, who hosted the event, highlighted the importance of Grewal’s work in light of efforts to police the borders and control who enters the United States. Zadeh noted that Grewal’s “writing on the containment and exclusion of Muslims takes on heightened meaning in the current context of ultranationalism. In this paramedic state of closed borders, the debate over who belongs where is all the more pressing.”

Who belongs where – that’s a good question. For all their talk of marginalization and exclusion, Zareena Grewal and Travis Zadeh are in the in-crowd, and their talk of how much they are victims is the ticket to success and adulation in today’s academic world and among the intelligentsia in general. In contrast, what about an academic who is not Marxist, anti-American, and obsessed with imagined racism and victimhood? Would such an academic get featured at Yale University’s Council on Middle East Studies? Would such an academic even get hired at Yale in the first place?

The answers are clear. And so in their most inmost of inner circles, Grewal, Zadeh and their ilk will continue whining about how they’re discriminated against, and will be rewarded with prestige, positions, money, fame, and influence for doing so, while genuine academics are genuinely excluded, and must hunt for jobs far outside the academic world. Today, if you can play the victim convincingly enough, how far can you advance? The sky’s the limit.

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