Who needs Israel? Let’s be honest, the world does
Barry Shaw
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Barry Shaw
Transcript of the speech at the Forum on Global Terror & Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem on March 3, 2015.
“I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder, which will destroy us too.
I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if i look up into the heavens, I think that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
Anne Frank wrote those words, a young Jewish girl killed by a radical ideology linked to Jew-hatred.
Sadly there are too many Anne Franks in the world today, being killed by radical ideologies liked to Jew-hatred.
We in Israel, the Jews of Europe, and Christians in Muslim lands live, and die, in a dangerous and uncertain world, and none of us are getting the help or support we need from the secular democracies.
I truly believe that Anne Frank speaks for us as we approach dramatic and historic crossroads in world events.
Today, our prime minister pleads with an appeasing world to stop giving in to a nuclear Iran, and he’s insulted for it.
Today, the world fails to adequately challenge the emergence of a rampant Islamic radicalism bent on a global caliphate. In fact, the world closes down speech on this burning issue.
Today, the world is ready to force on Israel an ill-defined Palestine that doesn’t recognize our right to exist as the Jewish State.
We see the world being turned into a wilderness. We hear the approaching thunder which will destroy us if we do not act.
Our enemies have said, as did the enemy of Anne Frank, that they intend to destroy us – Iran, Islamic State, the Palestinians.
We live in a part of the world surrounding by countries whose norms disgust us. We see a cruel inhumanity with all three – Iran, Islamic State, the Palestinians.
Sadly, we see the darkness of evil made darker by a gutless global leadership.
As Jews, we feel the suffering of millions, and we look to the world’s leadership and find them weak, fearful, appeasing.
Israel must stand strong and shine the bright light of courage to lighten a once enlightened world against the forces of evil that will surely eradicate us if left unchallenged and unchecked.
The world is increasingly being led by a new breed of limp secular progressives, fresh out of their campus dorms, with strange ideas of ‘let’s all just get along and do nothing.’
They are deniers of evil. They are the apologists and appeasers who are mocked and scorned by those who want to destroy us and our way of life.
They are scared of using the right words. They are too frightened to take direct action against a terror that dare not speak its name.
By their loss of words, and by their lack of action, they aid the enemy by diluting the reality of who they are, ignoring what they stand for, what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
So let’s have the courage, and the honesty, to call it for what it is.
There are religious genocides today against Jews and against Christians by Muslim ideologists in a battle of domination within Islam.
Israel is in the eye of the storm, and Israel is the fulcrum of the enlightened world in this apocalypse.
But the enlightened world is blind to the tragedies being played out in front of our eyes.
The enlightened world is deaf to the cries of those being raped, tortured and slaughtered.
And the enlightened world is dumb, unable to call out and stop this global blood-letting.
Why is it that a public demonstration against liberal democratic Israel can draw thousands – but there has not been one public demonstration against radical Islam’s slaughter of Yazidis, Kurds, Christians, women and children. Not one!
Why am I, an Israel Jew, seemingly the only one to shout out to an enlightened world to demand that they act affirmatively to stop this evil and to stand on the right side of justice?
The world is sick. Intolerance and rejection of liberal democratic Judeo-Christian values, the one thing that keeps us sane, are on the rampage across the Middle East and Africa whether by Al-Qaida, Islamic State, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority.
And yet, the world picks on Israel. It’s madness!
All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men not to recognize evil.
We saw that with Chamberlain and Hitler. We see it with Obama and Iran, and with Obama and Islamic State. We see it with the Europeans and the rejectionist, anti-Semitic Palestinians, and we see it with an impotent world and the march of radical Islam worldwide.
It disturbs me when western leaders deliberately avoid naming, shaming and acting against terrorism.
I accuse them of playing cynical and deadly politics.
I accuse them of doing it to cover up for their failed policies
Or, even worse, adopting policies that endanger the world.
It’s contained in the words they use.
When the jihadists attacked Paris, President Obama said the Jews killed in a kosher store were ‘just a bunch of folks in a deli who were randomly shot.’
This was orchestrated further when the State Department said the victims did not share any common background or nationality.
Obama called the 21 Coptic Christians beheaded by Islamic State in Libya ‘Egyptian citizens.’
So, by taking the Jew out of the Jew and the Christian out of the Christian, he makes horrible acts of targeted terror Into some anonymous random act of violence and, by doing so, he denies the uniqueness of the horror.
In a sense, it is a modern form of pre-holocaust denial.
And while Israel sees the Islamic Republic of Iran’s determined chase for a nuclear weapon as part of their declared aim to annihilate the Jewish state in the name of an Islamic messianic cause, the Obama Administration is equally determined to give them some slack on the pretext of making this terror-state into a new strategic partner in the region.
What madness is this?
Iran is the sponsor of Hamas, Hezbollah, Assad in Syria, and the proxy regime that has just taken over Yemen. The same Iran blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina before killing almost a hundred Jews for being Jews at the Buenos Aires Jewish center. It’s the same Iran that blew up 242 US marines and 58 French troops in the Beirut bombing of 1983.
What is it with this president?
If the Iranian nuclear agreement is such a great deal why isn’t Obama sharing its details with Israel? What is he hiding? After all, it’s Israel’s neck on the block.
Obama claims he has our back. It sure as hell feels that’s where he is sticking the knife, doesn’t it?
But back to words, terrorism, and a world turned upside down.
Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled hijacked a TWA plane in 1969 on route from Rome to Athens. A year later, she attempted to hijack another plane. In this attempt she was knocked unconscious as she tried to rush the cockpit while holding hand grenades while the plane was in mid flight.
In February, Khaled was invited to South Africa by the BDS Movement to help in their fund-raising activities.
You know BDS is a bankrupt organization when they have to recruit terrorists to help them raise money.
In South Africa, they didn’t call her a terrorist. They called her a freedom fighter.
Worse still, the South African government received this convicted Palestinian terrorist as an honored guest at their parliament, the same parliament that calls us an apartheid state.
Khaled is a senior leader of the PFLP. This is the terror group responsible for the cruel murders of many Israeli civilians, including the Fogel family.
In the middle of the night, PFLP terrorists entered the Fogel home, knifed the parents to death
before stabbing the small children aged 11 and 4 and beheading the 3 month old baby in their beds.
Khaled’s PFLP was also responsible for the massacre of four rabbis and a Druze policeman at a synagogue in Jerusalem last November when they attacked Jews at prayer with hatchets, meat cleavers and a rifle.
Khaled’s group called them ‘heroes’. Mahmoud Abbas paid his condolences to the families of the murderers.
PFLP are not freedom fighters. They are terrorists.
Hezbollah are not freedom fighters. They are terrorists.
Hamas are not freedom fighters. They are terrorists.
For a country like South Africa to call a hijacking and murdering Palestinians anything else but terrorists is dangerous.
It gives legitimacy to murderers.
In February and March, on campuses in South Africa and in the West, they organize that annual ritual of farce and fraud known as ‘Israel Apartheid Week.’
They employ an emotive misuse of words designed to demonize and delegimize israel – Israel the apartheid state, Israel the Nazi state, Israel the ethnic cleansing state, Israel the racist state, Israel the illegal occupier.
Meanwhile, Israel Apartheid Week and BDS support a Jew-free Palestine.
Isn’t that a little racist, isn’t that ethnic cleansing, isn’t that Nazi, isn’t that illegal?
They’re acting to force this Jew-free Palestine onto Israel, and they are supported in this effort by European parliaments, trades unions and certain church groups. Isn’t that anti-Semitic?
It’s certainly hypocritical.
In South Africa ‘Israel Apartheid Week’ is endorsed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the South African Council of Churches.
I repeat again what I told them two years ago, and faced with what is happening across Africa and the Middle East to Christians today, my words have even more relevance today.
So this is addressed to you Archbishop and to all church leaders and campaigners that strike at Israel…
Show me a country, just one country north of Johannesburg, including the whole of Africa and the whole of the Middle East from Algeria to Afghanistan, from Iraq to Iran, from Syria to
Sudan, one country that can be called the Rainbow Nation, and that country can only be Israel.
Israel is the only country in the Middle East and much of Africa in which the Christian population is growing.
And as for the human rights groups that target Israel, Israel is the only country in the Middle East where gays are not stigmatized or killed.
Gays for Gaza? Give me a break! If you’re a gay in Gaza you either stay in your closet, fearful for your life, or you escape to Tel Aviv.
As the Chief Rabbi of South Africa said, the world has lost its moral clarity, and it has lost the principled distinction between good and evil which are the bedrock of human civilization.
Nowhere is that highlighted more than in the distorted image being hurled against Israel.
Words matter. Words define between good and evil. And Israel is being demonized and delegitimized by the misuse of words – deliberately or inadvertently, it doesn’t matter.
The misinterpretation of words drove Jews from society in Nazi Europe and to their deaths.
It began with insults, it led to commercial and academic boycotts, it led to Jews trying to flee Europe, it led to personal violence and occasional murders – and then it led to something much worse.
Does any of this sound terribly familiar to you?
It begins with words. People ignored the words of Hitler’s speeches and his ‘Mein Kampf,’ words that led to the death of Anne Frank.
People are ignoring the words of Palestinian Hamas in their media and in their infamous charter. Words like, ‘Oh Muslim! There’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come out and kill him!’
No. I’m not an islamophobe. Neither is this Jewish paranoia. After thousands of years of Jewish persecution, we dare not wait until they spill Jewish blood before we are allowed to point at the perpetrators and call them anti-Semites.
Our instincts are sharper now. We know now, as Jews, that if someone tells us they intend to kill us we’d better believe him – and that, President Obama, applies to the messianic terrorist Mullahs of Tehran.
I recently visited Berlin. I went to Bebelplatz. This was the place where, under the orders and presence of Josef Goebels, the Germans ransacked the national library and burnt 20,000 books, books written by Jews, books about Jews, burnt in Bebelplatz square. It was the start of Kristalnacht.
In that square today there is a bronze plaque on the ground. It has a quotation by German philosopher Heinrich Heine written in 1823, 110 years before Kristalnacht, 190 years before today. It says,
“Where they burn books they eventually burn people.”
It is happening again. And the only reason they are not burning Jews is because the Jews befell an earlier misfortune of being beaten, killed and driven out of these Muslim lands. They found refuge here in Israel, the Jewish state.
So they are burning and beheading Christians instead – and also Muslims in their battle for Islamic domination.
If the world fails to find its moral compass, as it failed to do so in Munich with Chamberlain and Hitler, we Jews will once again face an evil determined to kill us, to burn us, to destroy us.
We Jews face a world that’s eager to demonize and delegitimize us just as they did in Nazi Europe, just as they did in the Spanish Inquisition, just as they did at the dawn of Islam.
Even the most altruistic souls are turning on Israel today.
They include the thousands of human rights and social justice NGOs.
A recent trial in New York convicted the Palestinian authority on multiple terrorism charges brought by American victims of Palestinian terror. It raises a couple of pertinent points.
One is that Israeli terror victims have yet to have their day in court. The fact that they have yet to face their Palestinian and Hezbollah killers is a blot on our society, and I speak as one of the co-founders of the Netanya Terror Victims Organization.
Decades have passed and Israeli terror victims’ rights to justice has been ignored. This is wrong.
Related to this, where are all those human rights activists, and those ‘Justice in the Middle East’ advocates to whom the Israel-Palestinian conflict is their sole pre-occupation?
For years, they have been supporting the Palestinian side in attempting to bring human rights charges against Israel.
Now that the Palestinian Authority has been found guilty of terrorism in a public court why are they suddenly so silent?
Why are they not supporting justice and human rights for the injured Israeli victims of Palestinian terror?
If this is their cause, the cause to which they receive massive funding from European governments and other sources, why aren’t they living up to their principles and acting to obtain justice for our victims of Palestinian terror?
Where is Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International? Or B’tselem, Gisha or Breaking the Silence here in Israel?
It seems when it comes to Israeli human rights & justice they’re not so willing to break the silence.
They don’t even mention the trial, or the verdict. Why? Does Palestinian guilt embarrass these Israeli human rights NGOs?
Truth be told, they’ve been on a mission of falsehood against Israel ever since 2001 and the infamous UN Durban Conference on Human Rights at which they declared ‘Zionism is racism.’
They have been aiding and abetting forces determined to eliminate Israel by terror, violence, boycotts and other means and, when they pick on Israel, and only Israel, for their hate and venom, that is anti-Semitism, and I don’t care if your name is Hamas, Mahmoud Abbas, the BDS movement, the French ambassador who called Israel ‘that shitty little country,’ Archbishop Tutu and his replacement theology, or even the Israeli NGOs that act against Israel.
Who said you can’t be Jewish and also be anti-Semitic? With our Jewish genius, we even do that infinitely better than the goyim.
In the end, it’s not about Israel or Jews at all. It is the way they practice thought in today’s twisted and dangerous world.
So stop for a second and imagine a world without Israel and the enormous contribution that this tiny Jewish state has given to an unappreciative, hostile, and cynical world, and then go further and look at the Middle East and Africa. Look at their deplorable living standards, their ideologies and attitudes, their intolerance to those who dare disagree with them. Imagine what our world would look like if our enemies succeed.
Who would rather live in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, or a Palestinian Hamastan?
Who needs Israel?
Let’s be honest – the world does.
Barry Shaw is the author of ‘Israel Reclaiming the Narrative.’ www.israelnarrative.com He is also the author of ‘Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism.’ Available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
Barry Shaw
