History Repeats Itself

“Dr. Bostom’s work documents Islam’s absolute hatred and systematic and barbaric persecution of Jews beginning with Muhammad, and lasting right through the twenty-first century. Islam did not have to rely upon Christian or Nazi myths about the Jews; they had their own indigenous blood libels about the Jews, which prevail to this day and explain why the Muslims won’t make peace with Israel, the only Jewish state. Boston’s work is dramatic, devastating, chilling, comprehensive, and utterly, heartbreakingly, persuasive. It should be required reading for journalists and scholars the world over—–especially those who believe that historical and theological Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance and that to say otherwise is to engage in ‘Islam phobia.” [ The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism ]

“Totalitarianism recognizes in the Jew, as the bearer of Judaism, that is to say the bearer of a philosophy of life which makes justice the cardinal principle in man’s relationship with his fellow, a natural enemy, and rightly so.” [The Forgotten Ally” – Chapter Six Page 337, authored by famed Pierre Van Paassen].

Shortly after World War One, Van Paassen started his career as a journalist at The Globe, a Canadian newspaper in Toronto. His next position as a journalist was at the great southern liberal newspaper, The Atlanta Constitution. This is where he actively became interested in Jewish affairs after interviewing a Rabbi from New York who had just returned from Mandatory Palestine.

From this point on, Van Paassen took a great interest in the issue of Palestine and the plight of European Jewry. In 1925, he became the foreign correspondent for the New York Evening World which placed him in Paris.

In 1933, Van Paassen, a fluent German speaker, reported on the Nazis and courageously exposed the doctrines and policies of Hitler’s fascist regime. His news reports greatly upset the Nazis, and the Toronto Star became known as “atrocity propaganda”. The newspaper was banned from Germany and Van Paassen was expelled but not before he was imprisoned by the Nazis for several weeks, which included some physical blows to his own person.

Van Paassen writes with power and fervor of a latter day prophet without forgetting the need for facts, figures and documentation. When one reads this book today, one notices how profound and ironic it is, that the times which Van Paassen describes of his generation are now repeating themselves, the only differences are the players’ names.

He was sent to Palestine in 1939 to report on report on prevailing conditions and admitted that he was sympathetic to the aims of the Jewish national movement including rebuilding Palestine as a central motif. What was known as Jewish nationalism had been service and not oppression, love and not hatred. He asks, “And what had been the world’s answer? Blood and terror! Lies and sneers and calumny! The liberals were turning over their specious shibboleths about the rule of the majority.”

Someone asked Lloyd George at the Peace Conference why he had been so persistent an advocate of the conquest of Palestine by British arms. “Because,” replied the Welshman, “it was not only the surest way to break the backbone of the Ottoman Empire, but the promise of a National Home for the Jewish people in the Holy Land —-in the eyes of my Methodist constituents.”

Palestine fell into British hands in the latter part of 1917, shortly after Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, made public his famous note, known as the Balfour Declaration, wherein the British government declared itself favorably disposed towards the establishment of a National Home for the Jewish people in Palestine. However, the history of the 17 years of mandatory regime in Palestine reveals an unbroken succession of restrictive measures, acts of pettifogging chicanery, scriminess and outright opposition on the part of the Administration to the Jewish National enterprise. When the Arab mob in 1929 shouted: “The government is with us,” and threw themselves upon the Jewish colonies——-they gave a true expression of the situation.

At Van Paassen’s meeting with the Grand Mufti, he said, “—is that Your Eminence should think that the English are ever going to go home or that the Zionists will give up their plan for redeeming the Land of Israel.” “There will be no peace in this country until they go.—-It is the British government and not the Jews who have foisted the scandalous Balfour Declaration on us.”

“Did those Jewish women and children and old men in Hebron and Lifta and Safed commit suicide?” Van Paassen said, to which the Mufti replied, “We were provoked—. We were challenged in our holiest possessions.—The Jews are stealing our land.”

On August 23, a Jew passing by on his way to the synagogue was stabbed to death.—An hour later the synagogue was attacked by the mob, and the Jews at prayer were slaughtered . The next day, the Yeshiva or theological seminary, which stands away from the center of the town on the road was put to the sack, and the students were slain.—-Unable to open the door, the Arabs climbed up the trees at the rear of the house, and dropping onto the balcony, entered through the windows on the 1st floor.

From the upper windows came the terrifying screams of the old people, but the police galloped off, leaving the boys in the road to be cut down by Arabs arriving from all sides for the orgy of blood. What occurred in the upper chambers of the house could be seen of the twelve foot high ceiling splashed with blood. The rooms looked like a slaughterhouse. —the blood stood in a huge pool on the slightly sagging stone floor of the house. Clocks, crockery, tables and windows had been smashed to smithereens. Of the unlooted articles, not a single item had been left intact except a large black-and-white photograph of Dr.Theodore Herzl, the founder of political Zionism. Around the picture’s frame the murderers had draped the blood-drenched underwear of a woman.

A British soldier, Mr. Keith-Roach, governor of the Jaffa district, followed by a colonel of the Green Howards battalion of the King’s African Rifles strolled in. They took a hasty glance around that awful room, and Mr. Roach remarked to his companion, “Shall we have lunch now or drive to Jerusalem first?”

During 1937, the English-manned commissions of enquiry reached the conclusion that the mandate was unworkable.

Palestine, it is said, cannot take care of all the refugees. Perhaps it cannot. Yet, vast tracts of land are available for settlement and acute shortage of labor prevails. Pierre Van Paassen concludes:

“Let a beginning be made in taking the Jew there before it is too late and the barbarians carry out their threat to exterminate the remnant of Israel by the sword and the fire. More cruel, more inhuman than persecution and ostracism and the imposition of ghettos and of the yellow badge of shame it would be to keep the door of their home shut in the face of the clamoring multitude of Israel”

Bassam Tawil’s,”The ‘Two-State’ Solution to murder Jews of November 2, 2023” helps us to view the present as a derivative of the past. He recognizes the idea of establishing a Palestinian state in the West Bank means turning this area into another launching pad for attacking Israel and slaughtering Jewish men, women and children.

President Biden and US Secretary Anthony Blinken can argue as much as they want that Hamas does not represent the Palestinians, but everyone who lives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip knows that this is a lethal lie. Every Palestinian is aware of, and often admires the pro-Hamas demonstrations that have been taking place in the West Bank since Oct.7.
It is worth noting that in 2007, Hamas expelled the P.A. from the Gaza Strip after killing hundreds of Abbas loyalists, some of whom were dragged through the streets and lynched, others of whom were thrown from rooftops of tall buildings.
US President Joe Biden and some Western leaders are continuing to talk about the need to establish a sovereign and independent Palestinian state, even after Hamas’s atrocities. Shades of Arafat’s ‘Phased Plan.’

Front Page-History repeats itself: “The Late, Great Hamas Finally Got its Wish” authored by Dr. Victor Davis Hanson on October 13, 2023, commences with dreaming of their own version of the Holocaust.

Since Hamas was viewed as the most “volatile and creepy of the Palestinian factions, and most useful to Iran, the Obama and Biden administrations appeased the murderers. Was it not part of their hair- brained grand strategy of empowering theocratic Iran and its Syrian, Hezbollah and Hamas hirelings? They, no doubt recalled Sharon’s displacement from Gaza- 10 years ago.

Hamas has killed Jewish civilians for nearly two decades, always escaping the full wrath of Israel’s retaliation by appealing to the amoral consciousness of left-wing European and American governments. It counted on ample help from both Iran and Arab regimes, along with Turkey, which always screams “instability” at the 1st sign of Israeli retaliation.

Hamas promised their mass killing of innocents would ignite the Muslim world, and incite simultaneous attacks on Israel from Syria, Lebanon and perhaps Egypt –all as their planned anniversary replay of the 1973 Yom Kippur War’s 1st 48 hours.

Even a shaken and shamed Biden administration —guilty of an open border and its de facto support for Hamas and Iran, but suddenly scared of a furious election-cycle American public—may for a while not call of Israel.

“The arrogant but half-educated crowd, the European Islamists, the Woke ad pampered anti-Semites on Western campuses, the AOC socialists, the pro-Hamas Squad, the BLM chorus who cheered on the Hamas glider death attack, of course, CAIR, and all the usual suspects, for now, are as furious as they are impotent—petulant that, for this once, just this once, and for a while longer at least, no one is listening to their oh-so-tired amoral defense of the indefensible.”