Whatever Happened to Never Again?

It wasn’t that long ago that a good many European Jews swore an oath: Never Again. Never Again will Nazi-like anti-Semitism be tolerated. Never Again will Jews be meekly herded down a path that leads to Zyklon-B showers.

So in response to the explosion of anti-Semitism in France, what is the advice of France’s chief rabbi, Joseph Sitruk? Replace yarmulkes with baseball caps.

“I ask young Jews to be alert, to avoid walking alone, to avoid wearing the yarmulke in the street or in the subway and consequently becoming targets for potential assailants,” Rabbi Sitruk cautions. “I ask them to replace the yarmulke with the baseball cap.” This is the best way, he warns, “to protect our young people.”

Au contraire, Monsieur Rabbi. The best way for your young people to protect themselves would be for them to learn how to beat the crap out of those who attack them. Someone needs to make Rabbi Sitruk write 500 times on a blackboard the French translation of: The Best Defense Is A Good Offense.

French Jews do not need to be told the way to deal with the wave of vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, schools, and temples, and the wave of violent attacks on Jews, sweeping through France today is to cower, cringe, tremble, and quaver, to hide and apologize for their Jewish existence.

That will accomplish one and only one thing: further encourage the Moslem immigrant thugs and French Jew-haters. It will not bring peace, it will not bring security, it will not appease them in any manner.

French Jews need a rabbi who will tell them to wear t-shirts proclaiming in large block letters: Proud To Be Jewish – You Have A Problem With That?

French Jews need a rabbi who will tell them to form armed defense committees to guard their schools, synagogues, and cemeteries.

French Jews need a rabbi who will tell them to start carrying weapons on them personally — guns, knives, whatever — and to not hesitate to use them whenever they are attacked.

French Jews need a rabbi who will tell the French government that it has failed to protect the Jewish community from Moslem and anti-Semitic violence, and until it proves that it has the will and ability to do so, members of the French Jewish community will take whatever measures necessary to protect themselves.

Of course there will be French outrage, coupled with appalled hand-wringing by those Jews afflicted with testicular atrophy. Almost all of the latter will be old, old and thus afraid. French Jews need young rabbis, young leaders who just don’t care if they further stir up an anti-Semitic hornet’s nest already being shaken by Moslem immigrants.

They should not care because that hornet’s nest being shaken now by Islamic Nazis as it was by German and Vichy-French Nazis in the 1930s and 40s, is an ancient structure many centuries old.

It was built by medieval Catholics who vilified Jews as “Christ-killers” (never grasping the absurdity, for it is only by Christ dying the way He did that that Christianity exists), and by the ultimate anti-Catholic, Martin Luther.

Luther was convinced that Christ’s Second Coming could not occur unless Jews, Jesus’ own people, converted — and their refusal to do so was understandable given the wholesale corruption of Christianity by the Catholic Church. The solution to him was simple: Reform Christianity. Luther nailed his 95 Thesis on the castle church door in Wittenburg on October 31st, 1517 and created the Protestant Reformation in order to enable Jews to convert, thus bringing about the Second Coming.

It never occurred to Luther that Jews were quite happy to be Jewish and would remain so whether the Christian Church was reformed or corrupt. There could be no justification for their not converting once his uncorrupt alternative was available — when they didn’t the only other explanation for him was that Jews were in league with Satan. And thus Martin Luther became Hitler’s precursor.

In a pamphlet Luther published in Wittenburg in 1544, Von den Juden und ihren Lügen (On Jews and their Lies), he demands a Christian Jihad against the Jews: “Set fire to their synagogues and schools, and bury with dirt whatever will not burn… I advise that all their homes be razed and destroyed… that all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in which such idolatry, lies, cursing and blasphemy are taught, be taken from them… that their rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb… that safe-conduct on the highways be abolished completely for the Jews… dear Christian, be advised and do not doubt that next to the devil, you have no more bitter, venomous, and vehement foe than a real Jew who earnestly seeks to be a Jew.”

These are the words of Martin Luther himself, written in his own hand. His bitterness and rage reach a crescendo in another letter he wrote in 1544: “If I had power over them (the Jews) I would assemble their most prominent men and demand that they prove that we Christians do not worship the one God, under the penalty of having their tongues torn out through the back of their necks.”
European hatred of Jews is an ancient hate, and periodically erupts from the darkness of men’s souls into the light of history. Today in Europe — particularly France — another eruption has begun. It will get worse unless it is fought and opposed.

This is not a call for another Jewish Defense League. The JDL was founded by Meir Kahane in 1968 to protect Jews from street gang attacks in New York City, but morphed into a terrorist group, bombing, for example the San Francisco branch of the Iranian Melli bank in 1981, and the LA office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (killing its Director, Alex Odeh) in 1985. Kahane himself was gunned down in New York in 1990.

The parents of any boy know they have to teach him the moral difference between aggression and defense, between starting a fight and defending yourself, that appeasement of schoolyard bullies is both a moral as well as an actual surrender, and that a willingness to fight back when attacked is a necessary condition for a successful life.

European Jews have got to start fighting back. Warnings and complaints will not suffice — like Abraham Foxman’s book, Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism, which is little more than a long-winded personal whine. Complaining does not solve the problem.

No responsible parent tells their boy, “Standing up to bullies only encourages them to bully more. It only escalates the schoolyard cycle of violence. Run away and hide from them instead.”

Violence against Jews in France will stop when Moslems attacking them start ending up dead in the street. Jews don’t start fights. But they have got to start ending them.