Say the Word ‘Genocide!’

Say the word “genocide” is often demanded of politicians these days. Some of the office seekers are delighted to say the word, assuming that it applies to Israel, the Middle East’s only democracy. Others refuse to say the word and are verbally beaten by so-called “protestors”.

“Genocide,” of course, is the purposeful attempt to eliminate a particular people.

The phrase is attributed to Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. Not too long ago I was contacted by an ancestor of Lemkin upset about the use of the “Lemkin” name.  The organization which had appropriated, or in the words of the people who contacted me, misappropriated the “Lemkin” name were said to be distorting the views of Raphael Lemkin.

In recent years, the “Holocaust,” the murder of Jews in Europe, has been stolen, misappropriated, and distorted by every sort of bigot on the planet.

The murder of Black Christians in Africa by Muslim fighters is genocide. The mass murders in Cambodia and Laos were genocides. The attempt by the Chinese to destroy all non-Han populations is genocide. However, the attempt by Israel to survive and to fight against a war of annihilation lodged against the tiny Jewish State by Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups is not genocide.

Recently, there was a fascinating article published about the Jews of Saudi Arabia.  The article focused on Jewish populations in Saudi Arabia and other parts of North Africa.

The author noted that significant groups of Jews lived in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and right across the North African continent all the way to Morocco long before there were Christians or Muslims on the planet.

The first Holocaust waged against Jews was carried out by the Babylonians and Persians. We tend to put that on the back burner of history. More well known is the fact that the Roman Empire, approximately at the time that Jesus was born through the year 125, murdered 1.25 million Jews. Today that would be well over 60 million people.

To this day, the Romans are called “Edom” and are equated with the most genocidal of rulers in the history of mankind. The people who live in Italy today are not Romans. They may live in the city of Rome, but they are a mixed multitude including Germanic tribes and others from South Central Europe.

Those Jews who escaped the Roman Holocaust made their way to Spain, the British Isles, modern Turkey, North Africa, and even as far as China.

With the rise of Islam in the Sixth Century, the Jews faced extinction. They were indigenous to North Africa, including the Arabian continent. There were substantial successful Jewish communities in Arabia before it was Arab, and before it was Muslim. There were Jews living in Britain, before the presence of Anglo or Saxon tribes and long before the Norman Conquest.

There were Jews in Spain and France before those places became countries and before they were Catholic.

The next major Holocaust against the Jews after the Islamic Wars were those of the Church beginning with the First Crusade. Beginning in the Eleventh Century, Jews were murdered or driven out of Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain.

By 1492, there were no Jews left in Europe or in the British Isles. The Jews in the Holy Land, Israel, were crushed but nevertheless comprised the majority of the small population in the ancient homeland.

In our daily prayers, we still remember those Jewish communities in East Central Europe devastated by the Crusaders. When those hordes of Christian faithful reached the Holy Land, the streets of Jerusalem ran knee deep in the blood of Jews.

When Hitler came up with the “Final Solution,” the reason why he used the term “final” is because so many Jews had already been killed in Europe. The Nazi monster simply wanted to finish the job. 6 million dead Jews later, virtually all hope had been given up for the continuity of the Jewish people.

Thanks to heroic efforts, Jews from abroad united with the Jews of Jewish Palestine to build a modern, democratic, egalitarian state. In 1948, the entire Arab world attempted to murder the remaining Jews in Israel. As a result of that war, Jordan occupied most of Israel, to within 4 miles to the Mediterranean Sea in some places.  Egypt illegally occupied Gaza. Neither Jordan nor Egypt permitted any form of democracy in the regions that they ruled; they suppressed dissent, they starved the people, and they placed the Arabs in camps.

Israel liberated Gaza from Egypt and the West Bank of Jordan from Jordan. I was in those places only 2 years after Israel’s war of survival and liberation. The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza were thrilled to work with the Israelis, to have clean water, decent places to live, schools, and the opportunity to advance themselves.  Everywhere that I went, as a Jew, I was treated as a hero. I traveled to Jericho, Ramallah, and other locations formerly occupied by Jordan, and I could not have been treated better.

But something changed. Radical Islam took hold and the equation was flipped.  Suddenly, the liberators became the demons. It was Israel that gave Gaza its independence. It was Israel that agreed to permit the West Bank of Jordan to be administered by the former terrorist group, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, now called the Palestinian Authority.

Thanks to a glut of Arab oil money, countries like Iran joined the fight against Israel and have financed every form of terrorism known to modern man.

Donald Trump made the unpardonable error of going soft on Iran. When he had the opportunity to destroy that culture of hate and terrorism, he blinked. Whether it was fear of midterm elections, gas prices, or something else, who knows. Clearly, we have protected Saudi Arabia which appears to have been responsible for the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Arabs and Muslims running for election in the United States have knowingly and deliberately taken the word “genocide” and applied it to Israelis and Jews in general.  Unfortunately, gullible people believe.  Perhaps they just want to believe that Jews are bad people, or it may be a case of ignorance often blamed on social media.  However, social media does not make up nonsense by itself.  Social media is fed by billions and billions of dollars of Arab oil money, Russian and Chinese anti-Western influence, and domestic cretons as well.

With Jewish people making up only 2% of the United States and as little as .2% of the world population, it seems as though the fate of the long-suffering Jew is sealed. Is our death and subservience the future of the American and world Jew?  Many people think so.  Some people want that to happen.

We Jews have just started reading a new cycle of the Bible.  Soon we will reread the story of Abraham and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  I have been to Sodom and Gomorrah.  It looks as awful as it is described in the Bible.  Abraham prays for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah and asks G-d to give them a chance if there are at least 10 good people there.  G-d agrees, but goodness in those cities was found absent.

Hopefully, in that world today there will be enough good people, decent human beings who seek to learn the truth so that the Jewish people can continue to exist, survive, excel, and to contribute to the wellbeing of those nations that are still democracies.