While hordes of politicians, celebrities, “influencers” and “wannabes” somberly intone “Never Again,” 86 years after Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass” that ushered in the Holocaust, cowardice reigns in the West.
“Never again” is a pledge of Jewish defiance and Israel its embodiment. From the physical borders of the state and from Entebbe to Amsterdam, wherever Jews are threatened, Israel has taken on the role of defender of the Jewish people. If one is an optimist, “Never again” was also a way for the European community to verbalize that it understood the magnitude of its crimes in World War II. Repeating the mantra, Europe pledged it would never let it happen again, and its allies—primarily, the United States, Canada, Australia and others—were partners in that pledge.
The first is right, admirable and proper.
The second is either untrue or a broken promise.
The mantra of “never again” presumed that the lessons of the Holocaust were universal and that “genocide”—which, according to the United Nations, is “the organized killing groups of people for their race, religion or national origin”—would be universally rejected and that the rejection is permanent.
It is neither.
Despite the bastardization of the word “genocide,” there are real post-World War II genocides to consider. Here are a few: Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s; the 1994 attacks on the Tutsis in Rwanda; attacks by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on Iraq’s Yazidis (it took the United Nations 10 years to label that one at a genocide); the Kurds of Northern Iraq who were subjected to chemical weapons attacks in Halabja; a two-phased attack against the Rohingya in Myanmar; the ISIS persecution of Iraqi Turkmen, which was recognized in 2017 by the Iraqi parliament as a genocide; and, one year later, the sexual slavery of Iraqi Turkmen girls and women was recognized as a one by the United Nations. The United States has labeled China’s repression and killing of Muslim Uyghurs a “genocide.”
There is more, but what does this short list tell you?
Firstly, the organized killing of various ethnic and religious groups is on the radar around the globe. Secondly, there remains, among some people, the core belief that their ethnicity, their religion and their standards make other people less than human and, therefore, worthy of elimination. And they are armed.
What does that tell you about the Amsterdam pogrom? After all, that didn’t happen in the distant mountains of Iraq or the fields of Myanmar.
It tells you that liberal, democratic Western governments have become cowardly and are unwilling to defend the liberal, democratic principles they promote on paper. They talk the talk—King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands said “Never again” and apologized for the pogrom—but so what?
Europe is inundated with Islamist immigration, legal and illegal (that’s Islamist, a subset of Muslim), and the radicals create fear among Muslim and non-Muslim people. Every major city in Western Europe has seen hordes of radicals marching, calling for the destruction of Israel and often for the killing of Jews.
In Australia, on the other side of the world, “Gas the Jews” was written on signs in Sydney.
In major American cities, Jews are attacked—sometimes as individuals identifiable as Jews by their clothing, sometimes when they gather in groups. Jewish communal buildings and certain American universities are dangerous places for Jews as well. Jewish-owned or kosher establishments have been vandalized in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC.
It isn’t about Israel. It is about Jews. And about the wider Western construct as made clear by pro-Hamas, anti-American graffiti in Washington.
Nothing but Western liberal cowardice explains it. Western governments let in people with entirely illiberal beliefs. They let lawlessness run rampant in immigrant neighborhoods and then beyond. They allowed these groups to have schools separate from and contrary to the liberal education given to others.
As Congressman Ritchie Torres said, “A society that fails to stigmatize antisemites will get more of them.”
Now, these same governments are afraid of the mobs of Islamists and the Iran- and Qatar-funded, pro-Hamas, antisemitic, anti-Western radicals. The governments know that those people are willing to kill. They do so across the Middle East and Africa, and they will do it in Europe and America. Yet the governments are willing to appease the mob as long as the mob hates Jews.
Sen. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) epitomized the problem when he told the administration at Columbia University to ignore concerns about antisemitism, saying that it was a problem for Republicans and that they should “keep their heads down.”
Keeping your head down may temporarily keep you, personally, out of the line of terrorist fire, but it is a poor substitute for a strong, and yes, physical defense of Western civilization and values. Sir Winston Churchill knew that a long time ago:
“We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength … we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew it:
“I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
This is not only Israel’s war or a Jewish war. It is a war for our civilization. Who, in 2024, will understand the war and fight it?
