The Silence of the PhDs

Way back then, in the Jewish primary school I went to as a boy, I was friends with another boy from a French family that had come to the UK as refugees shortly after the war. We used to go over to each other’s houses and play together, and quite frequently before we got together, I remember my mother telling me not to say anything about the war to his mother, because it might upset her.

Looking back, as an eight or nine year old in the late 1970s we probably had a million other things on our minds to talk about together apart from World War Two. But at the same time, before I knew anything of the Shoah, the second hand trauma of that horror yet to come in my early teens, I sensed the awful something that lay behind my mother’s warning.

I never found at what precisely had befallen my friend’s family during the war, and we went to different secondary schools and lost touch, but I thought of the unspoken dread that impinged on the edges of my boyhood friendship when I heard how the Bibas children, Kfir and Ariel, and their mother Shiri, had died by the hands of their murderers. The shock of something that is too horrific to be comprehended. Something too terrible to say that can only be grasped at the edges, lest it overwhelm our spirits and our very lives. Perhaps this was how it felt to be a Jew and to hear the news of the camps slowly come out and take over our consciousness. This is how it might have been to realise that soldiers who were fathers themselves, or others who held the mask of humanity, had killed Jewish infants as they would poison rats.

Dave Rich has written about the way in which the story of Anne Frank has been, as with the Shoah itself, inverted and bastardized by progressives claiming it as some sort of universalist lesson for mankind, in which modern day Jews become the Nazis. The keffiyeh draped Anne. Marvelling at how this revisionist horror could be even be conceived, Rich suggests that what makes it possible, and permissible, in the eyes of the left, is their terrible unforgiveable failure to realise that when Jews think of Anne Frank, they know that could have been me. That could have been my daughter, my sister, my cousin, lost in the ashes of Bergen-Belsen. What makes the inversion of  the progressive left possible is that deep down they know it couldn’t have been them or their families. And it’s this that is in play with the reaction to the Bibas murders. Surely the strangling to death by hand of a 10 month old baby might give people who profess a commitment to universal human rights, to diversity, to equity, to inclusion, some pause for thought. Surely it would compel some of them to speak out. Yet what is truly shocking is the brushing aside of these events by the world as though they mean nothing. The silence by so many who have taken to the streets in supposed solidarity with the oppressed, when they should have been back on those same streets shouting no, not in my name, no, this cannot stand. They are silent because they know it’s something happening to Jews, and it won’t happen to them.

There have of course been some non-Jewish voices raised in horror and anger, but they have been both precious and so few in number. Where are the exclamations from the university professors, my colleagues across the world, always so quick to condemn oppression? The PhDs, with their ethics committees, have been silent. Silence can be a way of dealing with the unimaginable. Perhaps my boyhood friend’s mother, like so many survivors of the Shoah, could only continue to function by retreating in to silence. Perhaps by leaving what happened to her family unnamed and unspoken, its awful overwhelming nature that might stretch out from the ashes of Europe to breach the safety of England could somehow be kept at bay. That silence of course she and the other survivors were entitled to. The silence though of the progressive left is something completely different and completely sinister. What that silence reveals is the lie, yes the lie of the universalism of the left. It shows their proclamations about opposing oppression and championing equality as just that, proclamations designed to show off their virtue according to the mores of the times. The mores of this time, as with so many times in the past, being that Jews count for nothing, and that murderous death of Jewish children, is not their concern. After all, it’s the Jews, and not us. The abandonment of compassion for Kfir, Ariel and Shiri, may their memory be forever a blessing, shows the left’s confessions of guilt about their “privilege” up for what they really are, a streaked mirror image of Jim Crow. In the end just a way of promoting and preserving their social status. If you don’t care about the strangling of babies, when they are Jewish babies, then all your claims to care about diversity and inclusion must turn to ashes. We must turn them to ashes in our minds. But we must not stay silent. We do not have the right of those in the generation who suffered the Shoah who chose silence. We must stand up and say their names, and keep on saying them. Kfir. Ariel. Shiri. Never forget.