Students on campuses all over the week are currently being subjected to Israel Apartied Week in the name of identifying the Jews as the new Nazis. As outrageous as this calumny is, countries and universities all over the world, give it a pass if not active support. Why? Why isn't Israel Apartheid Week banned outright? Howard Rotberg has written a very engaging article in which he places this event in context. By Howard Rotberg My father, now 90 years old, living in a retirement home, is a survivor of Auschwitz, where his parents and then 8 year old sister were exterminated in the gas chambers. Dad has told me of growing up in Lodz Poland, a textile city of some 600,000 population pre-War, of whom some 180,000 were Jewish, mostly working class. Most were rounded up into the notorious Lodz ghetto from which they were shipped, squeezed into cattle cars, to Auschwitz or other concentration/death camps. My father loves Canada. Although Canada refused to take Jewish refugees during the War, after the War, he was accepted here, married my mother who lived in a small Ontario city, built a successful business, and learned how welcoming and fundamentally decent were the Christian businessman and neighbours who he encountered in the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Neither he nor I ever expected that within his lifetime, in Canada, there would arise an officially sanctioned Jew-Hatred Week. Alas, it is true, and it has been so successful, this year it has even been extended to two weeks. It goes by the name of Israel Apartheid Week, but it is not at all a serious and balanced conference discussing intelligently different points of view.
Jew-Hatred Week
The worst time of the year for Jews in Lodz was Easter week. The then anti-Semitic Roman Catholic priests would sermonize about the vile People who killed, even tortured, the Lord, Jesus Christ, their Saviour. That, on top of the long standing anti-Semitism of the Eastern European and Russian masses, resulted in increased anti-Semitic incidents, including violence, for the week around Easter. Allegations ranged from the Jews using the blood of Christian children to bake the ceremonial matzah crackers for the spring Passover holiday to allegations that it was the Jews rather than the Romans who crucified Jesus. Fortunately, the Roman Catholic Church has made it perfectly clear now that it does not hold the Jews in any way, historically or theologically at fault in any way. However Hollywood, by embracing the work of anti-Semite Mel Gibson, tolerates the movie, The Passion, which I have shown in my book, TOLERism, is a very anti-Semitic movie.
Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel
Thursday, 10 March 2011
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