New English Review

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Early in the 21st century, I “found myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.” However, unlike Dante, in Purgatorio, Paradiso, for me, his loss of a straight path was how I found my way. What was happening was very clear to me.

And thus, I began writing about a new kind of Holocaust that was already underway. I wrote about the role that Big Lies had played in both Christian and Muslim anti-Jewish pogroms, and then in the Shoah itself. Other voices were out there. For example, Bruce Bawer, Nonie Darwish, Steve Emerson, Oriana Fallaci, Richard Landes, Douglas Murray, Daniel Pipes, Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye’or. We all paid a price--but no matter.

I kept writing that it was, again, only a few minutes before midnight. And the Western academics, the intelligentsia (the two are not the same), our “progressives,” and our feminists, even our celebrities, as well as the alleged international community had all, Nazi-style, had been joining the permanent Islamic war against the Jews--and against the West.

How can anyone be as blind as those who refuse to see?

There were all the Arab Islamist and Palestinian plane hijackings beginning in 1969. Rremember the much heroized Leila Khaled of the Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine? The constant and ceaseless Palestinian terrorist attacks on Jews and on the Jewish state? I will never, ever forget the 1972 terrorist kidnapping, torture, and murder of Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich or the German failure to rescue the victims or apprehend the terrorists. Also on my mind were the equally ceaseless resolutions against Israel at the United Nations which began to gather force in the 1970s.

I could also never forget the Arab Palestinian terrorist synagogue bombings in Europe--I stood there in the 1980s, taking in the police protection required and provided in Paris, Rome, and Vienna. Who recalls the 1983 bombing of the American Marine Barracks, ostensibly by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon? Remember Jewish-American Leon Klinghoffer who, in 1985, was murdered on board ship by the same group--the FFLP?

In my very illuminated “dark wood,” I could not understand why many more people, especially civilian Jews and the vastly overeducated in the West did not see that Islamists had declared war against all infidels, especially against Jews, as well as against each other? Waging war was a permanent way of life for the greatest imperialists of all time--fundamentalist, fanatic Muslims.

Closer to home: The assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, thirty years ago, in 1990 is being memorialized today in Brooklyn. His assasin, Egyptian-born Sayid El-Nossair, eventually confessed but he was not convicted of murder at the time. Guess what? One of El-Nossair’s two henchmen was later convicted of being involved in the 1993 attempted bombing of the World Trade Center. Guess what else? The man convicted of that attempted bombing, Omar Abdel-Rahman, had planned to truck bomb El Nossair out of Attica. It didn’t stop, not for a moment. Remember the 1994 Islamic murder of a young Jewish-American yeshiva student, Ari Halberstam, on the Brooklyn Bridge, by Lebanese born Rashid Baz?

Come the 21st century the war was fully upon us. Remember 9/11? Remember al-Qaeda? Remember the 2002 video-ed beheading of American Jewish journalist, Daniel Pearl, in Karachi? Oh, there are too many Arab, Muslim, and Palestinian terrorist attacks to mention. The list is so long that one would easily glaze over reading it.

I do not trust or rely upon Wikipedia but rather than repeat their list of Islamic terrorist attacks globally as well as in the United States, please visit their long list.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

Because I saw all this early, I was, for the first time, only able to publish my views in the Jewish and conservative media; never again in the left-liberal media where I was once ultra-trendy. I will always be proud of the new home that my work had found for me.

The Jews now have the following options. As Benjamin Kerstein, the author of “Self Defense. A Jewish Manifesto,” recently suggested: we can pretend, again, that all this is not happening, that we can wait it out, keep a low profile, pass for “saved,” that there are issues larger than Israel and Judaism that concern us--and that Israel is far, far from perfect. (As is Hamas?) We can also flee, certainly leave NYC after Zohran Mamdani becomes our Mayor. Or, we can stand our ground and fight. Israelis are standing their ground. We can do no less.

True, those of us who are young and healthy enough can always migrate to Israel. That’s what it’s there for. But here’s what I’m thinking. American Jews should no longer contribute a penny to all the very large Jewish organizations that have served us so poorly and whose major priorities are their own pension plans, inflated salaries, and travel perks. Notice how many of them are now suddenly promising to “monitor” the raging antisemitism which is fully upon us? See how they are, for the first time, considering that both the left as well as the right are anti-Zionist antisemites. Some are even inching their way toward factoring in the role that Iranian, Qatari, and Soros money have played in the rise of Jew hatred. Slowly considering that the Arab Palestinian war is not about territory or “occupation,” but is a flat out, old time religious war. My friend and colleague, Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a major Israeli Arabist, knew this long ago.

So here’s what I’m also thinking.

First, I understand, even more than ever before, why Jews did not leave Germany early on--at least when they could. How can grandparents leave their children and grandchildren; how can senior citizens leave their doctors? How can people leave their homes, their businesses, their communities, to flee to an unknown place? How can a writer leave her language and her failed, former world completely behind? Stefan Zweig could not do it. He ended up killing himself in Brazil.

So here’s what else I’m thinking.

I am considering that we all, every one of us, begin to form groups that focus on self-defense, on support of each other, and on educational policies for Jewish children. I’d be happy if these ideas are also embraced and expanded by all our Christian, Sikh, Hindu, and atheist allies both here and around the world. In the case of the Jews--although we are so terrifyingly divided on so many issues, I would very much like us to try hard to come together at least on the single issue of our survival. Yes, here in NYC, and in the United States, Europe, and in Israel. This should be an entirely volunteer organization, but one with a national presence.

I hope that we do not have to wait for any Messiah to bring in such peace. She/he/they will never come if we do not first do at least this on our own.