'I am a Jew': why simply breathing air is enough for many to want Hebrews dead
Those have been the words of the Jewish people for three millennia as they lurched from catastrophe to catastrophe. This is the hardest article I have ever written.
This week has been a mixture of shock, horror and very real pain as I witnessed the genocidal terrorism of Hamas. I am secular, atheist and a milquetoast variety soft lefty; but the last few days have thrown me back to my undergraduate days when I was President of the Stirling University Jewish Students Association. I’ve thought on the various friends I made over the two and a half years running it more than 12 years ago. Many I have long since lost touch with, having spent many years teaching and latterly lecturing in China prior to returning home to Scotland. But the events in Israel sent my mind back there.
I recalled travelling with our plucky small membership of Stirling Uni Jewish students association members to Giffnock to listen to the late Rabbi-in-Chief Lord Sacks, and found myself hugely missing his wisdom at a time like this.
I even reopened my copy of ‘Remarkable Women of the Twentieth Century (1998)’, just to re-read the biography on Golda Meir. She was Israeli PM back when the Yom Kippur War saw Israel attacked, caught by surprise.
As she led the fight-back amid the chaos and imminent danger of the collapse of Israel she defiantly refused negotiations with the enemy who had launched their unprovoked assault. She insisted Israel would hit back hard, but ruminated sadly that “The world hates a Jew who hits back. The world loves us only when we are to be pitied.” I can’t get that quotation out of my mind this week, it’s haunted the recesses of my mind.
In this, longer than usual, article I am doing three things. Firstly, providing a live case-study of an anti-Semitic academic whose twitter rant captures many of the tropes of historic anti-Semitism. Secondly, I offer a (very) brief summary of the Jewish experience of persecution throughout history due to these anti-Semitic canards. Thirdly, most difficultly, I found and provide testimony of Hamas crimes this week. Video footage evidence of where this Jew-hatred has - once again - led to.
A case study in anti-Semitism
Meet Morad El Kadmiri, LLM (Aberdeen) LLB MA (Paris). According to himself he is
“French jurist and academic who taught Law at the Universities of Essex, Warwick and UCL in England and was invited as Visiting Researcher at the Clarke Center for International and Comparative Legal Studies at Cornell University Law School in the US.”
He even enjoyed the opportunity in 2021 to research on legal history biography in a 2-day Workshop in September 2021. An event jointly organised by Legal Scholars Legal History Section and the London School of Economics @LSELaw Legal Biography Project.
He even has his own blog which can be found here.
On the face of it, he appears like an accomplished academic who studied at prestigious universities and is making contributions in his field. But is is also a thorough-going anti-Semite demonstrating a deeply sinister hostility against Jewish people.
On Tuesday, 10th of October 2023 he decided to post a thread on twitter to share some of his thoughts on “Hebrew propaganda” and how “the Jew” enjoys manipulating in order to carry out genocides. He perhaps imagined writing in his native would enable him to fly under the radar of censure, but some of us can read French.
He began his anti-Semitic rant promoting blood libel saying…
In English this translates as follows:
“Hebrew propaganda reveals very devious lies. The ease with which the Jew, whether ordinary or influential, describes the mutilations of war, is indicative of a placid cruelty that it elevates above any argument about illegal colonization that it silences”
From the start we can see this as a case-study in classic anti-Semitism. ‘The Jew’, ‘Hebrew propaganda’, all suggesting Jewish people are a homogenous population which acts, thinks and moves as one. The notion of the Jew as puppeteers hiding behind the curtain pulling the strings is explicit from El Kadmiri; “the Jew, whether ordinary or influential”. It’s the age old prejudice of ‘international Jewry’ engaging in the grand conspiracy. The trope touted by El Kadmiri is the ‘world Jewish conspiracy’; easily the most widespread and durable conspiracy theory of past century.
He is echoing writers such as Hermann Goedsche, a 19th century Prussian diplomat chiefly remembered for his utterly rabid anti-Semitism. It’s ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ territory, a fabricated nonsense first published in Imperial Russia by ‘Znamya’; a newspaper established by ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds journalist Pavel Krushevan.
But El Kadmiri is touting the same hate-filled spew in 2023 in response to the Israeli government publishing video evidence of Hamas insane genocidal massacre inflicted on the Jewish people. But his demented anti-Semitic screed continues…
“The detailed description of the "barbarism" which she blithely comments on and whose use is purely exploited for the purpose of dehumanizing their 'adversary' engendered by their 'own' despoliatory, murderous and genocidal madness, seems to be a leisure activity for them.”
First notice Kadmiri is reversing the roles. The victimised (1,000 dead Jews in Israel) are now the victimisers. And the victimiser (Hamas) suddenly become the victimised. His conjuring trick is to claim the Jews are really focused on committing a genocide against the Palestinians. This is obviously untrue, as 1,000 dead men, women and children can testify.
More broadly however, we see the depressingly frequent argument that Jewish people are really actually responsible for their own suffering. This is precisely the logic of German anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s under the Nazi regime.
Back then ordinary German shrugged their shoulders as the Nuremberg laws were introduced - stripping Jewish Germans of their rights - muttering “Well, they did undermine the German economy.” El Kadmiri today is doing the same vicious thing, effectively saying ‘This is a justified response to the provocation of Israel existing’. Only he goes even further than this insisting Israel and ‘the Jews’ ['“them”] are engaging in genocide as a leisurely activity.
This is the stuff of the medievalist pogrom hysteria where ignorant bigotry insisted the wells had been poisoned by ‘them’ for fun and to kill Christian folk.
But El Kadmiri goes on…
“References to near or distant events which have never concerned the Palestinians are brandished as the causes which would justify the bombings (the holocaust, September 11, 2001, the Bataclan for France, 2015 were mentioned). Everything is a pretext.”
At this point El Kadmiri is insisting Palestinians are being bombed by Israel, which gets away with it be revelling in claimed victimhood (which he has earlier insisted is really all the Jews own fault anyway). The anti-Semitism here is his game of distortion, because the reality is Israel isn’t bombing Palestinians. The Israeli Defence Forces are bombing Hamas, a terrorist organisation. It just so happens that Hamas care so little about the lives of the Palestinians under their control in Gaza that they use them as human shields. Hamas deliberately builds its terror facilities near schools, mosques, hospitals and refugee camps so as to maximise their own peoples casualties when the IDF inevitably strike back following a Hamas terror assault.
But El Kadmiri ignores these realities, insisting ‘Hebrew propaganda’ which ‘revels’ in manipulating people is pursuing a “despoliatory, murderous and genocidal” madness against Palestinians as a “leisure activity”.
In the mind of this slavering anti-Semite, even when Jews didn’t deserve their own slaughter at times in history gone-by, ‘Hebrew propaganda’ is merely weaponizing the memory of it in service to “dehumanizing their 'adversary’”. Remember, in the mind of the Jew-hater Jewish people are all homogenously acting in service of some big international conspiracy of one form or another.
But the anti-Semitic hate from the ‘French jurist and academic’ however has yet to really start flowing…
“These are arguments straight out of an insane asylum, so sick and soiled are their minds with crimes. They do not refer to an ideal, human and societal project. Ethnic cleansing is their proven goal. Blood is their only guide, their master is the devil.”
Now we’re approaching the crescendo of classic anti-Semitic dribbling hate. It seems all Jewish minds are “so sick and soiled” by collective “crimes” of pursuing some “proven goal” which is allegedly “ethnic cleansing”. Don’t you forget now that the Jewish “master is the devil” apparently…
A few centuries ago the alleged target of Jewish people were Christians whereas today apparently it’s Palestinians. In the demented mind of the racist in our case-study today dear reader, all your Jewish work colleagues working in the office from 9-till-5 with you are really all incredibly busy living double-lives. Plotting in the dark recesses of the night mass slaughter of [insert victim here]. Remember El Kadmiri insists that all Jews are doing this, he wrote “The ease with which the Jew, whether ordinary or influential…”
But finally we come to the apex in our case-study in pustulating anti-Semitic bile…
For the crescendo our ‘French jurist and academic’ racist goes all in, finishing with a Martin Luther quotation:
“The Jews have been the bloodthirsty sleuths and murderers of all Christendom for more than fourteen hundred years... They were accused then... of kidnapping children, stabbing them with awls and killing them. to tear to pieces...” Martin Luther. God keep us
Blood libel, the ultimate anti-Semitic canard. One which has been deployed to justify the torture, murder and abuse of Jewish people throughout history.
For those unaware of it, the term blood libel’ is used to refer to the demented allegation that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish, usually Christian children, for ritual purposes.
Historically, blood libels in Europe and early (Christian era) levant and Maghreb close to Passover. This was when Jews were accused of using the blood of Christian children to bake matzahs. Here in the UK, the earliest example in recorded history of blood libel was in 1144. William of Norwich was young English boy who disappeared, and the Jewish community of Norwich was charged with the crime of his ritual murder. William was an apprentice tanner who regularly came into contact with Jews and visited their homes as part of his trade. His murder remains unsolved to this day, although he was made a saint and the Jews of England latterly all accused of his murder after his stabbed body was discovered in the woods.
El Kadmiri is trotting this same bullshit out today in 2023 by referencing Martin Luther. For those unaware, Martin Luther (key figure in the Protestant Reformation) lent credence to the blood libel charge by accepting the Jewish use of Christian blood as fact in his On the Jews and their Lies (published 1543).
In more recent times, the Nazis made effective use of the blood libel to demonize Jews, with Julius Steicher's disgusting jew-baiting ‘newspaper’ Der Stürmer making frequent use of ritual murder imagery in its anti-Semitic propaganda.
Morad El Kadmiri’s finishing touch, his coup de grâce against Jews if you will, is to directly reference this most ancient of anti-Jewish lies.
But thankfully there are always the good guys, such as Yuan Yi Zhu, Assistant prof of international relations and international law. He didn’t let the anti-Semitic hatred of El Kadmiri pass by unremarked:
Personally, I also share Yuan Yi Zhu’s sentiments when he told El Kadmiri; “Get lost, you anti-Semitic pig”
An ancient hate throughout history
I am a Jew. Those have been the words of the Jewish people for three millennia.
Throughout history this has been the line. When the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II’s siege of Jerusalem led to the flight of the prisoners into the darkness of the Babylonian captivity, the Hebrew people insisted on remembering ‘I am a Jew’.
When the ‘Very Catholic Monarchs’ Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon issued the Decreto de la Alhambra, Edicto de Granada (Alhambra Decree), the Jewish people didn’t succumb. 31 March 1492 saw the expulsion of practicing Jews from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon and its territories and possessions. The Alhambra Decree brought Spanish Jewish life to a sudden end. Nevertheless, the identity was kept, the insistence was chanted, 'I am a Jew’, as a hundred thousand preferred exile to the indignity of becoming an untrusted ‘Coverso’.
The story really has been endless, a wandering untrusted fate throughout European history. The national anthem of Israel today is 'Hatikvah’ (the hope). It reflects the 2,000-year-old earning of the Jewish people to return home to the Land of Israel in order to reclaim it as a free and sovereign nation-state.
The text of the song was written much earlier by Jewish poet Naftali Herz Imber (in 1878). His words "Lashuv le'eretz avotenu" (to return to the land of our forefathers) expressed the aspiration of a people constantly subject to the sort of anti-Semitic hate Morad El Kadmiri has been spewing all over ‘X’, formerly known as Twitter.
During the depravity of the Holocaust, a former member of the Sonderkommando reported that the song Hatikvah was spontaneously sung by Czech Jews at the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chamber in 19441. While singing they were viciously beaten by Waffen-SS guards. ‘I am a Jew’.
Where an ancient hate has led…
Finally we come to the hardest part of my article to write. One which I will admit to being in tears putting together. El Kadmiri’s anti-Semitism comes as a defence for the mass slaughter of more than 1,000 Jews in Israel this week. Exterminated by a terrorist savagery which is every inch part of the anti-Semitic prejudice which has hounded the Jewish people for millennia.
Be warned, the evidence I am about to show you is graphic and I don’t present it to propagandise (despite the disgusting ranting of El Kadmiri). I insist on showing it to you so that you know precisely what mere words often fail to communicate.
What has occurred this week in Israel has been the worst single loss of Jewish life since the end of the Holocaust. This is a Shoah (שואה), or "calamity", which I plead with you to muster your courage and not look away from. You need to bear witness to the murderous genocidal anti-Semitism which moral relativists, Hamas apologists and general racists will insist is all fake news.
Here is what El Kadmiri’s anti-Semitic hate leads to, and what he desperately doesn’t want you to believe.
Be warned the following is upsetting material evidence of Hamas genocide against the Jewish people this week
‘They Killed My Sister’: Heart-breaking video of a family held hostage by the terrorists
Daily Wire: Videoing their own crime: Hamas terrorists recorded themselves exterminating a whole family
CNN: Dashcam captures moment Hamas gunmen attack festival-goers
CNN: Bombing the bomb shelter: Hamas attackers kill cowering Jews hiding
Times of India: funerals, pets, nothing safe amid the slaughter
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I can’t begin to comprehend the barbarity that descended on Israel the other day and my heart goes out to that land but I can say without reservation that I utterly despise the politicians, institutions and media in our country who equivocate on Israel’s status as a nation, pretend that there is a justification for a savage and brutal attack and even unashamedly align themselves with these murderous radical Islamists driven by extreme hatred of Jewish people and intent on ethnic cleansing. It has been a most distressing few days and who knows where these events are going to unfold
I can see why that would be “difficult” to write and publish ! Basic decency in a human would make it difficult to write !
Anyone who does not have sympathy with the Israeli people ,has something badly wrong with their world views !