by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

To be born a Jew is to be born with a target on your back. You go to the same movies others do. Enjoy similar foods, although — if you play by the rules — you restrict yourself to kosher ingredients and kosher-certified eating establishments. You root for the same sports teams others do: your sports team of childhood, no matter where you later move, or maybe for the team in the city where you relocate. On your left at the stadium is a non-Jew and also on your right, and you all are shouting “Let’s Go Mets!” in unison, Jews and non-Jews.

But you still know you have a target on your back. Each and every Jew knows this from childhood. Watch “The Fabelmans,” where even Spielberg drops his guard to let you know he knows, too. Israel is his life insurance policy, too. The country that loved “E.T.,” “Jurassic Park,” “Star Wars,” “Indy,” “Jaws,” and “Close Encounters” could throw him out just as Germany threw out Billy Wilder and his cohort of great screenwriters, actors, composers, and Einsteins.

It makes no sense. If left alone, we would be like everyone else. Our voting patterns would be the same. Our everything would be the same. But mindless persecution has made us different — and caused a certain chunk of us, like the makers of Chunky Monkey, to be not normal, even manifestly sick with self-loathing. Ben and Jerry left their ethnically Jewish New York for Vermont, to live as colonizers on indigenous Indian land. So did Bernie Sanders from Brooklyn, to live not only on indigenous Indian land but also indolently on indulgent women’s money. So some Jews become distorted with self-loathing, like a George Soros who grew up as a ward to a Nazi, like a cartoon Robin to an Eich Man, keeping account books for him of property confiscated from Jews, to try proving to “the Goyim” that “We are just like you, no different at all. See? We even associate with the worst Jew haters and oppose Israel — just like you. So please don’t kill us. We’ll do the books.”

And, yet: News Flash, boobie: When a person takes the lead in demonizing people of his own ethnicity for no rational reason, and mires himself in the same pigsty where the Rashida Tlaibs, Ilhan Omars, and Ocasios wallow, that is not normal. Normal people do not do that. Irish-Americans don’t. Mexican-Americans don’t boycott Mexico. Italian-Americans don’t attack Italy. Black Americans, like civil rights heroes Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, do not lead battles for the women of Congo who face a national epidemic of rape, nor challenge Black Lives Matter over the millions that have gone to buy the BLM Communist founder Patrisse Cullors four houses, one more than Commie Bernie’s three.

It so much “makes no sense” that it makes perfect sense. Two thousand years of blood libels, Crusades to Palestine that got out of hand and turned into bloodbaths along the Rhine and the Seine, false accusations of poisoning the wells of Europe, mass burnings of Talmuds and others of our holy books and manuscripts, false allegations of causing the Black Death, autos-da-fé and burnings at the stake, mass expulsions from countries, forcible conversions to majority religions, being confined in ghettoes, pogroms, Holocausts, “Gentleman’s Agreements,” and such leave some people psychologically distorted. They become deeply sick. This is not about hurling invective; it is diagnosis.

Indeed, antisemitism is so incomprehensible that many of us Orthodox Jewish theologians believe that antisemitism is G-d’s way of “mowing the lawn” when He sees Jews assimilating too much, too many abandoning their Judaic ties, being too much like “the Nations” to the degree that they no longer make the Sabbath Day special, one of delight, and abandon kosher dietary practices. Jew-hatred keeps us in check. Maybe that is why we still are around, and will be forever. When too many try to run away, He simply closes all other doors. The rabbis of the Talmud say that the evil Haman brought more Jews back to Judaism than did great teachings.

We don’t look for it. We don’t want it. But it comes. The little Jew-hating snot, Greta Thunberg, knows nothing about climate. Antisemitism is in her forecast, now and forever. As with all storms, it moves from country to country. Where is she from? Sweden? It’s been there forever. It would be nice to have climate change there.

Often, it comes from outta nowhere, just when we never felt safer. Our Golden Age in Spain came in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, when some of our greatest scholars arose: poets and thinkers like Rambam Maimonides, Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi, Avraham Ibn Ezra, and Solomon Ibn Gabirol. And then G-d sent Ferdinand and Isabella to convert us forcibly and to burn at stake any Jews who presented as converts but secretly retained their Judaic faith and practiced Judaic rituals privately. Other countries invited us in, and we contributed mightily to their successes, ever grateful for the opportunity. “And then there arose a new Pharaoh who knew not Joseph,” and it was back to the beginning, kicked out and searching for a new land that would take in the survivors.

We were like baseball superstars who become free agents. All kinds of weaker countries “bid” on us to contribute to their societies when our time expired elsewhere. Then, after we bring in the fans and do our part, they have a few bad years and trade us for cash and “Three Gentiles To Be Named Later.” Only less gently gentile. We never were secure. We first entered Russia, moderately welcomed. Then they turned. We were at the center of the Weimar Republic, never felt safer in Germany. And soon they were painting swastikas on stores and on college dorm rooms, breaking glass windows, burning books and temples, and banning us from the universities. DEI. And so it went. Never to find a haven. England expelled us in 1290 and did not let us back until 1648. When King Henry VIII searched for a rabbi to interpret the Torah books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy to provide Biblical justification for the Pope to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, he couldn’t find a single darned rabbi in all of England — because all the Jews had been thrown out 250 years earlier. France threw us out a few years after. We got slaughtered in Germany throughout the 11^th through 13^th Centuries. Spain threw us out in 1492, Portugal in 1497 when King Manuel married Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s daughter. Italy confined us in those ghettoes, truly “the world’s largest open-air prisons”; that’s why that word, ending in singular in “o,” sounds Italian. Because it is.

(Segué. In my freshman year of college, my dormmate turned out to be an antisemite — even before he got to know me. I had no idea until one day a guy from down the hall told me to watch out for him, that he hates Jews. I asked how he knew. He told me: “Last night, he had a few too many beers and caught me alone while I was watching a movie in the common TV room at the end of the hall. He started ranting how he hates Jews and hates that he was placed on a dorm floor where all the other 118 students are Jews. That he and I are the only ‘Christians’ on this ‘whole damn Jew floor.’ I asked him how he knew I was not a Jew, too. He answered: ‘I feel safe with you because you are Italian.’ I asked how he knew. He said “Because your last name ends in an ‘o.’ ”

And that is how I learned that my dormmate was a Jew-hater. Because he had opened up, after a few beers, to Harry Shapiro.)

South Africa Hates Jews. Who Knew?

And now South Africa has decided to take the lead as the next great world Jew-hating power. Mighty South Africa. Cultural center of the universe. Source of great philosophers and scholars. The locus to which all eyes turn at Nobel Prize season. Suddenly, having gotten better control over their cannibals, South Africa is ready to advance civilization.

What in the world did the Jews ever do to warrant the dirtbags running South Africa joining with Hamas and Arab Muslim terror? If anything, Jews were leaders in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa when that was perilous. The most outspoken anti-apartheid parliamentarian in the country was a Jewish woman, Helen Suzman. The Jews were mostly quite conservative but deeply anti-apartheid. Apartheid is plain wrong. So South African Jews opposed it. And eventually, apartheid fell.

And what did the Jews get in return for a decency that Nelson Mandela recognized, acknowledged, and deeply appreciated? The Jews got a loused-up polity that cannot run its own country, a country where 7,000 of their own people in “peacetime” get murdered every three months — that comes to 28,000 murders a year, the highest numbers they have recorded. Yet, those Jew-haters file a “legal” case in a corrupt United Nations court, accusing Israel of war crimes. Got that? Hamas murderers break into Israel and, in one day, murder 1,200 Jews, slaughter hundreds at an all-night rave dance party for peaceniks who believe Arab Muslims are their friends, then proceed to left-wing Marxist socialist kibbutzim (kibbutzes), populated by leftist Israelis who chose to live near Gaza in order to be peace emissaries to the Arab Muslims in whose good intentions they foolishly believed and slaughter them. In the name of Allah, they stabbed and cutthroats, cut fetuses out of the bellies of living mothers, and then stabbed the babies and mothers multiple times to horrible death, cut off limbs of living people before murdering them, raped dead women, raped living women alongside dead women, cut off heads, in some cases slaughtering so many babies and cutting off so many of their heads in the same nursery room that the religious burial society needed weeks to match the decapitated heads with the right baby torsi for dignified burials consonant with Jewish law; and took other babies and put them in ovens while they still were alive and burned them to death.

In 2006, Israel gave them a land of their own, Gaza, along a beautiful Mediterranean coastline that is no different from the beaches and coasts of Tel Aviv. They could have built a Shangri-la. They were sent $4.5 billion from 2014-2020. They could have built villas, built a national utilities infrastructure. Instead, in 18 years they never built their own electric grid or water system; they chose to rely completely on Israel for it. Instead, they took that by-now close to $8 billion from American taxpayers like you, and from Europeans and Qataris, and they built an underground hell-hole of 300 miles of tunnels that are like the New York City subway system, covering every kilometer of Gaza underground. They built them to store rocket-propelled grenades and launchers, ammunition, rockets and missiles to shoot into Israel, hand grenades, IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), and to hide themselves. They built them under hospitals, UNRWA schools, mosques, residential apartment buildings, even five-star hotels. Israel had to fight five wars they launched, and this is the sixth in those 18 years. So it has got to stop, whatever it takes. If Hamas insists on hiding behind human shields, Israel has to do what America did in Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. There is no choice — or From the River to the Sea, Israel Will Cease to Be. (READ MORE: The ‘Innocent’ Civilians of Gaza)

America — as weak as we have become under politically correct governance — still would never stand for what Israelis endure daily. If every single hour of every single day for the past 18 years, Biden and Blinken and Maddow had to race into bomb shelters — several times daily — to take cover from rockets being fired from Mexico and Canada, that would be a red line even Obama would have to cross. Do you know that, as part of Israel’s housing construction laws, every builder must present architectural plans that include a “rocket-and-missile safe room” in each new apartment unit? Not even “merely” in each building, but in each newly built apartment?

Cry, the Degenerate Country

To hell with South Africa.

This, from the non-partisan Wikipedia:

[C]rime, poverty and inequality remain widespread, with about 40% of the total population being unemployed as of 2021, while some 60% of the population lived under the poverty line and a quarter under $2.15 a day….

By 2020, numerous warnings have been issued that South Africa is heading towards failed state status with unsustainable government spending, high unemployment, high crime rates, corruption, failing government owned enterprises, and collapsing infrastructure … Efficient Group chief economist Dawie Roodt said the country is in deep trouble, “South Africans have been getting poorer for a decade.” He said he is very concerned because “32 million people get an income from the state. The state cannot afford this anymore.” Neal Froneman, CEO of Sibanye-Stillwater, said that crime is out of control, with ‘mafia-style shakedowns’ for procurement contracts becoming the norm. Professor Eddy Maloka, from the Institute of Risk Management, “Government has collapsed in areas across the country. We are seeing inner-cities collapse and degenerate.”

This, from the Arab Muslim Qatari outlet, Al Jazeera:

Quarterly figures showed that the murder rate rose 14 percent between July and September, compared with the same timeframe in 2021, when 6,163 people were killed.

Almost 1,000 women were among those murdered during the period in 2022. More than 13,000 women were also victims of assault with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, and 1,277 women were victims of attempted murder.

“The rate at which women are abused, violated and some killed in South Africa remains worrying and unacceptable,” Police Minister Bheki Cele told a news conference.

The figures also showed that kidnappings doubled to more than 4,000 compared with the same time last year; and rapes, in a country notorious for sex attacks against women and children, were up 11 percent, with 10,000 cases opened across the country.

Carjackings rose 24 percent to more than 6,000.

And between April and September, more than 550 children were killed.

Those dirtbags have a Gaza Strip right under their own noses, in “peacetime,” on their watch, and yet they bring war crimes charges against Israel? And all the other anti-Israel tropes:

1. Millions of Arab Muslims are immigrants all over Europe, though not indigenous there. Are they colonizers? So why are Jewish immigrants to the Land of their Fathers called “colonizers” when they are indigenous, predating the Muslims by more than a millennium?

2. Arab Muslim countries expelled 900,000 Jews in the 1940s and 1950s. Where else did they think those million Jewish immigrants would end up, if not in Israel? There was a population exchange, as with every major war. End of story.

3. The Soviet Marxists persecuted Jews from 1917. Of course the Jews wanted out. Once they got out, where did they expect them to emigrate, Saudi Arabia? Yemen? Syria? They already had been expelled from there. Of course they immigrated to Israel.

4. How can Israel be accused of ethnic cleansing and other Nazi terms of annihilation if actual census data instead show that the population of Gaza has increased by 25 percent under Israeli oversight in under ten years?  “Since the publication in 2012 of the UNCT’s report on ‘Gaza 2020’, Gaza’s population has increased by 400,000, reaching 2 million people by the end of 2016. Gaza’s population is projected to further increase to 2.2 million by 2020 and to 3.1 million by 2032 — just 12 years away.”

And so, we Jews never know where it will come from. When I was in college at Columbia in the 1970s, I marched against the Soviet Union and communism. I knew that Red China was evil and that my parents’ generation had encountered it from Nazi Germany to Vichy France. I knew where we stood with the Arab Muslim countries. But I never imagined I would see South Africa as a new world center of Jew hatred. And yet, I always knew — and know — it will come from somewhere, often a slime-hole of murders, women abuse, kidnappings, sex attacks and rapes, child killings, and carjackings. (READ MORE: Being Vaccinated Against Anti-Semitism)

Today, South Africa.

Yesterday it was from Harvard and Claudine Gay, Penn and Liz Magill, MIT and Sally Kornbluth, and Columbia and Minouche Shafik, who somehow evaded Elise Stefanik.

The day before from Democrats including The Squad and a swath of hypocrites like Senators Tim Kaine and Chris Van Hollen.

Tomorrow? It will come from somewhere else that will be so surprising that, for me as a student of Jewish history, it will not be surprising at all. For the late Jimmy Buffet, who loved to party, it was always 5:00 somewhere. For Jews, it is always midnight somewhere.

Originally published in The American Spectator

Photo Credit: flowcomm on Flickr