HOWARD EPSTEIN: THE CONDITION OF THE JEWS TODAY
The Black Book, a chronicle of the Shoah, written for the Soviet authorities in 1945 by their ace war correspondents, Ilyah Ehrenberg and Vasily Grossman, was the subject of partial censorship: the Soviets refused its publication, on the basis that it showed Jewish suffering as greater than that of other Russians; but it was published in full in New York shortly after the end of WWII.
There was, at the same time, within the UK, another case of partial censorship. The BBC cut a deal with its star reporter, Richard Dimbleby, and prevented his resignation, by publishing half his report on the liberation by the British Army of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The refusal by the BBC to publish Dimbleby’s report in full was supposedly justified by its refusal to accept it all without corroboration. This may be seen in direct contradistinction to the BBC’s breathless report 75 years later of a brutal bombing by the IAF of the al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza on 17 October last – that never happened! No such corroboration was allowed to get in the way of a good story (ie one defaming Israel).
As you will have appreciated, the thrust of this article is that Jews are subjected to double standards.
Now, consider #metoo, which from 2017 has properly called out the degradation of (mostly young) women, by men in positions of relative domination, to facilitate their making the women their sexual victims.
There can be no excuse for that, can there? It must always be called out and punished, must it not? And yet. And yet. There is an exception to every rule and, in the case of #metoo – it’s us.
#metoo – unless you’re a Jew appears to be its latest iteration. The reaction to the sexual degradation to which Israeli girls and women were subjected on Shabbat Simchat Torah by the monsters of Hamas are notable in many ways. For clarity, I list some of them:-
- from the #metoo movement, there has been a sickening silence;
- the feminists of the West are silent, expressing no condemnation, let alone outrage;
- it took UN Women (the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) fully nine weeks to issue its first criticism: “ We unequivocally condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on 7 October”, spoilt by the “balance” in the preceding words: “all women, Israeli women, Palestinian women, as all others, are entitled to a life lived in safety and free from violence”); and
- three female presidents of Ivy League universities were so unmoved by the sexual torture and abasement inflicted on those of the same (I’d better avoid in their case “sex” and use the politically-correct term) gender, as to proceed to satisfy the vociferous woke minority on each campus baying for Jewish blood, and seek to “contextualise” the calls for Jewish genocide.
Yet one must give credit where due.
“All the news that’s fit to print” has appeared on the masthead of the New York Times since 1897. It failed that motto by relegating to a few column inches under the horseracing results first reports in 1944 of the extermination camps that were headline news throughout Fleet Street; and it has never had any excuse for its being so unremittingly antipathetic to Israeli interests that it eventually drove from its employment the brilliant Ms Bari Weiss in 2020. Her response was: “Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.” If you know anything about Twitter (now “X”), you will be aware that it is straining to replace Der Stürmer as the media source of the most virulent anti-Jewish racism available.
Nevertheless, better late than never. On 28 December last, the NYT reported in detail too dreadful to repeat here, based on the testimony of over 150 witnesses, medical personnel, first responders, soldiers, rape counselors, and government officials of Hamas-perpetrated rape, sexual violence and mutilation inflicted on women and girls, assumed (mostly correctly) to be Jewish.
All doubt is removed as further evidence came from video footage, photographs and GPS data from cell phones and dashcams. The Times (of London) carried a similar but less exhaustive report on 7 December. This is nothing other than the weaponising of sexual abuse, which under international law, amounts to crimes against humanity by Hamas.
Of Hamas’s war crimes there can be no doubt, but where is the general horror? Where is the realisation of the straight-line continuum from Treblinka to the Gaza corridor? Where is the empathy (we eschew sympathy) with today’s “Judenstaadt”, the title of Herzl’s seminal expression of modern Zionism, its correct translation being the state, meaning the condition, of the Jews.
And what is our condition? It is unique. It is based on the story of not merely continual persecution but continuous survival. The ancient Egyptians? Gone. The Assyrians? Gone. The Thracians? Gone. The Greeks and the Romans? Gone. The Ottoman Empire? Gone. Only the Jews can show continuous survival, despite (or, as some would have it, because of) continual persecution over more than 3,000 years. If any heavenly being would like to check back in another 3,000 years, we shall still be here.
Perhaps the Woke will by then have completely rolled back the Enlightenment and perhaps democracy will be a footnote in the study of politics; but for as long as there is sentient human life on this planet there will be Jews. However much our people may be made to live in homes of lower height, specially taxed, subjected to ridicule, yellow-badged, insulted, tormented, flogged, tortured, sexually abused, raped, shot or gassed, singly or by the million, we will always be here to remind the world that there is one God, ten commandments and one path – that of steadfast decency – by which Man should live.
In these, the darkest of our days in the past three-quarters of a century, may these thoughts prevail.
© Howard Epstein, January 2024
