Antisemitism 2001:
SOME THOUGHTS

By Eli E. Lasch, Berlin

The last year saw three events: the Intifada, the Conference against Racism in Durban and the Act of Terrorism on the 11^th of September. All of them were basically irrational and all involve Moslems – and Jews.

The intifada started soon after Camp David, when Israel was ready to make more concessions than ever before.

The conference in Durban was hijacked by the Moslems, who tried to change it into an irrational expression of hate, not only against Israel but against the Jewish people as a whole, a pure and unmitigated antisemitism of the worse kind. This is something new in the Arab World.

Finally the Act of terrorism in New York and Washington, which does not really make any sense. An expression of pure and extreme hatred against the U.S., a deed to which nobody has up till now  laid a  claim, which everybody denies but Bin Laden considers wonderfull. Tentacles of evil out of the deep and unknown dark. Only one thing seems clear: the perpetretators seem to be Moslems, fanatical Islamists.

Does there exist any connection apart from the expression of a most profound hate?

Why am I then constantly reminded of the nineteen thirties? 

In a research whích I am conducting at present about possible causes of the Holocaust and about antisemitism as a phenomenon which has accompanied the Jewish people since antiquity, I have finally come to the conclusion, that most explanations advanced so far do not fully explain the facts. Could it be, as claimed by many Jewish mystics, that there exist deeper roots, which have their origin in the occult? Some karmic group which exists since the most ancient of times?

Or, to speak as a medical practitioner, could antisemitism be viewed as a disease caused by a kind of mental virus  carried by mankind? A virus which is normally quiescent, or at maximum endemic, but which has all the potential of changing into an epidemic form when the time is right? A spiritual kind of virus which manifests itself by causing aggression, fear and chaos directed specifically against people of Jewish origin. A virus which causes people to behave in a paranoid, irrational way. An emotion which in Germany was called „Judenhass“ – an irrational hatred of Jews as Jews and in Arabic  is found in the formula „Itbach el Jahud“ – butcher the Jews wherever you find them, a cry which I myself have heard a few times.

Not the Israelis but the Jews.

Is  there possibly a connection between the recent  events and  the Nazi movement of the nineteen thirties?
The answer seems to be positive, as in all the three instances the places attacked were those with big Jewish conglomerations.

It was after the attack on the World Trading Center in New York that things clicked in my mind. There is one thing which the U.S and Germany before 1933 have in common – a big Jewish community which closely cooperates with other nationalities to advance mutual tolerance and enlightment. To help people in the pursuit of freedom and justice...

If we go back to Germany we have just to be reminded of a few names which changed our world: Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Gustav Mahler, Max Reinhardt and many many more. All were assimilated Jews and all cooperated closely with their surroundings. Even the most famous foreign minister of the Weimar Republic, Walther Rathenau was Jewish.

This is also true for the United States, the biggest conglomeration  of Jewish life being New York. This is also the basic aim of the State of Israel, the only country in the mainly Arab Middle East which has democracy and freedom of speech, even for its enemies. The only country with an impartial judicial system, to which even Palestinians have access. The only country which has a strong movement for human rights.  Are those not exactly the reasons the Arab world is not ready to accept it?

But, the Arab world had never known the kind of eliminatory  Antisemitism which was rife in Europe and which reached its climax during the holocaust. This is a new development which mainly affects the islamic fundamentalists, the Islamists also known as Jihadists. Here too there exists a strong analogy with Nazi Germany, as most of them are well off and highly educated people, exactly like many of the most rabid followers of Adolf Hitler. The aroused masses, in Afghanistan as well as in Palestine, are mainly rabble, camp followers, exactly like the SA and SS thugs in Nazi Germany.

Bin Laden is a well educated multi-millioner and his teacher was Sheikh Dr. (!) Abdulla Azzam, the founder of the islamistic Hammas movement!

So what happened? Could it be that during Worls War II  the disease called antisemitism reached a crisis and left the countries involved more or less immune?  This is something which we know from infectious diseases in the era before the advent of antibiotic. Is it not true that the official and widespread  antisemitism, which has existed for hundreds of years in the western world, has by now almost completely disappeared? Could it not be that the Virus which was responsible for the National Socialism has by now infected the Moslem world, its carriers having been those people who, after world war II, have found refuge in those countries?

(One has only to remember  the cartoons in the muslim newspapers of that period – directly out of the Stürmer) 

This would also show the Arab-Israeli conflict in a different light. The Problem would  not be what Israel is doing or not doing, but the fact of its very existence. The fact that Arab Land is occupied by infidels. Palestine (and that includes Israel) by the Jews and Saudi Arabia by the Americans.