Resentment and Revenge

 Funny thing about the Europeans. They still don't get it -- 200 years after they entered the Age of Reason. 

Two percent of the world loves the Jews, 2 percent hates the Jews, and 96 percent has no opinion about us.

    That's what I used to say to paranoids who see every gentile as a foaming Jew-hater. Like my grandmother. We were at a bus stop in Montreal, and a man sat down near us. My grandmother's eyes flashed, and with pure loathing she hissed at me in Yiddish: "Anti-Semitic francoisen!"

    I didn't get it. She wasn't a Holocaust survivor; her generation's much more benign humiliations radiated from Quebec's parochial French-Catholic Church that retarded enlightenment. Sure, there was anti-Semitism there, institutionalized and acculturated by the Church, but the average Quebecois disliked the Jews because they were dumb about us. And yet, despite the malicious fulminations of Quebec's leading political and religious figures, they failed to rouse in the masses a pogrom mentality.

    In my generation, the forceful influence of the Church had waned, and -- though I demonstrably wore a kippa then, even when I went into raucous music halls in rabidly separatist areas -- I never got a whiff of anti-Semitism. Quite the opposite.

    I was working as a sales rep for a company that had a strict policy against discussing politics or religion with clients. No problem, I thought. But it was, because so many of these French Canadians wanted to express their admiration for Jews and Israel. What they wanted to talk about had nothing to do with my jam-proof staplers and non-smudge carbon paper (samples still available upon request).

    Even the one time I recall coming across anti-Semitism, it was of the dumb sort. (I did have a few confrontations in high school, but they were anglos, and kids, and jerks.) I was laboring in a paint factory, and one of my co-workers bore swastikas on his black-leather jacket and motorcycle. Controling my fury, I asked him about it. He shrugged, and explained blandly: "C'est le club." That's what his biking pals wore. He didn't know, or care, that this was the symbol of the Nazis, because he didn't really know about them, or of the Holocaust, and he certainly didn't know that the factory owner was a Holocaust survivor. When I explained all this to him, he comprehended none of it.

   

ANYWAY, OVER the past year and a half, I've been rethinking my statistics, which apparently had a margin of error of 100%.

    Using the same unscientific means of the first poll, I now find that 2 percent of the world loves the Jews, 2 percent has no opinion about us, and 96 percent of the world hates the Jews. (These figures do not include Jews, a fair percentage of whom also hate the Jews.)

    These 96 percent have been spilling their guts at me in piquant e-mails, inspired by reading some of my recent columns on the Internet. One apparently rabid Jew-hater, ironically, was a French Canadian, but he didn't seem to remember me from the bus stop or the paint factory. Several such respondents first assured me they're not anti-Semitic in any way, and then proved they are.

    I can't fathom why these people spend their time scouring Israeli news sites -- all the way down to the bottom, where the humor column is -- to feed their frenzied hatreds. They have nothing better to do?

    Happily, among this garbage (including many anti-Semitic virus e-mails) has been a torrent of supportive responses from loyal Christian Zionists. That's the 2 percent that loves us, and we at the Post have heard from every one of them. These days I don't take such encouragement for granted, and I bless each one of them right back.

    I began to wonder about this generous flow of hate-mail I was getting from abroad, and responded to some of them: "Do you realize this is a HUMOR COLUMN?!"

    I was on to something. Many wrote back: "Oh."

 

LET'S ANALYZE this worldwide scourge of Israelophobic anti-Semitism.

    America doesn't hate us. Except maybe in Berkeley.

    China, India, Russia doesn't hate us. (They're all part of the 2 percent with no opinion. OK, don't argue, I know the math is not exact.) They used to, and maybe they will again someday, but lately they've stopped picking on us.

    The Third World doesn't hate us, but they say they do, because it's what you have to say if you're in "le club." Let's not forget, in your basic Third World country of 30 or 40 million, it's only the two or three well-fed men at the top (the ones syphoning off all their countries' resources and pocketing all the aid money) who matter. And it ain't Israeli oil that's greasing their palms. (Not for no reason is oil called "crude.") Does the average Nigerian or Bangladeshi hate us? Nah.

    All Christian Zionists love us, and most Jews too. (All West Bank settlers love us.)

    Micronesia loves us, and this is important. Canada is not important. Australians love us, and that's nice, cuz they're so cute.

    The Arabs hate us because we're not Muslim.

    Europe hates us. Historically only the least important countries of Europe don't absolutely hate us, like Bulgaria and Gibraltar and Malta, which is why they're the least important European countries.

    Europe REALLY hates us. They REALLY love the Arabs.

    But that's OK, because we'll get the last laugh. At the rate the Arabs are flooding into Europe (France is already 10 percent Muslim), and given their penchant for a high birth rate, not to mention their disaffection and refusal to integrate and coexist, and most of all, the intensifying menace of globalist Islamization taking full advantage of the freedoms of democracy ... get the picture? Within 50 years those poor anti-Semitic Christian Europeans will be overwhelmed by a Crusade in reverse, in a veritable Eurabia. And we'll be saying "Told you so!" I can't wait.

    Islam vs Civilization has already begun, of course. In virtually every flashpoint in the world, one side of almost every conflict is Muslim.

     Funny thing about the Europeans. They still don't get it -- 200 years after they entered the Age of Reason. They're intellectually paralyzed by politically-correct super-liberalism, and can't comprehend that the Arab world, though a millennium behind progressive society, is outfoxing them.  

    The meek shall never inherit the earth so long as the empowered appeases the bully. Moral courage is routinely, cynically sacrificed: Selfridge's in London capitulates to Arab demands and removes Israeli-made products from its shelves; a Paris cinema cancels a special Hanukka showing for Jewish children because Arabs commanded them to. The two largest supermarkets in Norway take swift action against Israel -- one clamping a boycott, and the other posting large signs "warning" that the particular products were imported from the Jewish State -- and they hadn't even been pressured by Arabs. So much for Oslo.

    The boomerang effect on the economy of Europe has been felt immediately: on my last supermarket excursion, I bought Israeli jam instead of French, Israeli spaghetti instead of Italian. I'll just have to live without Norwegian salmon, so hot is my resentment. Somehow I'll make do with Blue and White (that would be not just Israel, but Micronesia too), and Red, White and Blue, and any other national color combination that doesn't make me see red. I won't be buying any European-made Rolls Royces in the near future.

     

EUROPEAN anti-Semitism, at its most obscene, has been the increasingly fashionable characterizations of Jews as Nazis, of our efforts at defending ourselves against mass-murder as a Holocaust. Isn't that just perfect! The Europeans, who either enacted or enabled our genocide, comparing us to -- themselves!

    Their effrontery is incredible. What could be more stunningly obnoxious than for them to come all the way here -- right in our midst -- and smugly call us Nazis! While Jewish body parts are flying overhead, they stubbornly ignore the obvious and accuse the Jews of committing a Holocaust. Portuguese writer Jose "I Am Not An Anti-Semite" Saramago comes here and coolly informs us that "What is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened at Auschwitz, at Buchenwald." When some reporter actually dared to point out that the besieged terrorists in Ramallah don't have to contend with the minor worry of gas chambers, this ass actually responded: "There are no gas chambers yet. But that does not mean there will never be gas chambers."

    I won't be buying any of Saramago's books, either.

    If these Europeans really want to know what the Nazis were like, they should ask their fathers.

    I have not been able to explain to my children why we, of all people, are so hated -- because I myself can't comprehend it. "We're Jewish, we're supposed to suffer": that's the best I can do.

    I would love to find one Jew-hater who could explain, rationally, what it is about us; why even the Holocaust wasn't enough to eradicate anti-Semitism. Jews are (yet again) battling the world's greatest evil and being slaughtered by it (yet again), and no one takes our side. We're expected to bite the bullet that kills us, and pay for it.

    If there is any justice, and if there is a God, there will be retribution (something more substantial than Israelis refusing to buy Norwegian fish and French mustard). Let every Jew-hater heed the startling words of Leonid Brezhnev, when he remarked on the godlessness of communism: "God help us if we're wrong."

    There. I got it off my chest, and I feel much better. Now, let's have all those anti-Semitic letters. 

Next in But Seriously: humor, maybe.