geoffff
The Bar and Grill has an ongoing interest in what is commonly called the Muhammad al-Durrah incident, perhaps the most dangerous and vile blood libel in all of history. Without question it is the fastest and most widely spread. What once took days and months to swamp perhaps a county or country now reaches the world in a second and once it is planted is there forever.
Previous pieces on this affair are here, here and here.
I know the Bar and Grill has readers who may not be completely familar with the concept of the "blood libel" and what a truly disgusting and dangeous thing it is. Again Wikipedia has a pretty good run down on this strange and cultish phenonomen but the internet is teeming with reliable information as always.
A blood libel in its purest form is the ancient allegation that Jews murder Christian (or more latterly Muslim) children as part of their religious rituals. At one time the libel was that the Jews crucified an innocent Christian child at around Easter time to re-enact the killing of Christ. The innocence of the child was symbolic of the innocence of Jesus. Common variations include Jews drain the childrens' blood to use in the baking of matzo as part of the Passover ceremony (which usually occurs around Easter).
Likely these choice little fantasies from hell have their origins in the Christian Bible and specifically to a reference in Matthew 27:25. where after Pontius Pilate has publicly washed his hands of the fate of Jesus the (presumably Jewish) crowd shouts "His blood be on us and on our children" about yet another Jew (one of many thousands) about to suffer an horrific death under the Roman occupation.
That sounds likely.
In doing so, so the story goes, in some mediaeval Christian minds at least, the Jewish people as a whole and for perpetuity bore direct responsibility for the crucifixion and were therefore fair game for persecution and extermination. Or so The Guardian says, and The Guardian is never short of a good story when it can be twisted into an opportunity to bash conservatives and Americans.
Thanks alot, lunatic religious fanatics with mediaeval minds. Deicide. This blog admits to the occasional rough night over the course of his life and for sure some beer has been spilt and the odd glass broken. But I have never killed anybody; least of all God. I'm certain I would remember if I had.
Perhaps the most repellant feature of the twentieth -first century so far is how many lunatic religious fanatics with medieval minds there are, more than ever it seems, and how tolerated they are even in the heart of Europe at the very scene of countless atrocities inspired by the mindset.
The Guardian curiously ignores the substantial English contribution to the blood libel. A nasty piece of theological propaganda written perhaps a hundred years after the death of Christ and at the peak of the turmoil of the Judeo/Christian split, as bad as it was, was raised to a much more potent and dangerous level first in England. The libel was tied to an actual child's death, who was then given the status of martyr and the central figure of an officially condoned cult that drove the murder and persecution of Jews, happened first in England. This is indeed the defining pattern of the blood libel since the twelth century. This is what distingushes it from even the most venal kinds of war propaganda such as WW1 images of German soldiers spearing and hoisting babies on bayonets.
The blood libel is different. First the sick lie. Then the glorious martyr. Next the cult and finally the massacres of innocent and helpless Jews over and over again including inevitably the killing of children in the cruelest ways possible. This apparently is important for the libellers. There have been hundreds of these. In 1144 there was William of Norwich. In 1255 there was Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. Simon of Trent in 1475. The Holy Child of La Guardia in 1491.
It is so easy to think of this as the work of a depraved clergy from an ignorant and superstitious age when the supernatural ruled the everyday that has now passed into distant history. Since then there has been the Enlightenment surely?
Lest we think that this is entirely a thing of the Dark Ages that went out of fashion with witchhunts and the Inquisition, all of these children were among those canonised by the Roman Catholic Church as late as the ninteenth century and often retained their sainthood and cult status, based entirely on the fabrication of Jewish ritual murder, as late as 1964. The Russian Orthodox Church to this day has only one child saint. , the patron saint of children with his own annual feast day, who the Church alleges was ritually murdered by Jews to make matzo for Passover.
It took until 1955 for the Anglican Church to place a plaque at the former shrine of Little Saint Hugh whose remains were buried in the Lincoln Cathedral to say his death inspired a hateful and murderous legend and cult.
In the twentieth century the blood libel prospered and moved on from Christianity. It was a staple of the Nazi gutter press of course but had already infected the Muslim world and this was spread with relish by Nazi allies and Islamic ideologues such as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.
In 1910 the Jews of Shiraz, Iran were accused of murdering a Muslim girl. The Jewish quarter was pillaged and12 Jews killed in the subsequent pogrom. In 1928, the Jews of Massena, New York were accused of kidnapping and killing a Christian girl. The 1946 Kielce pogrom against Holocaust survivors in Poland was sparked by an accusation of blood libel. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia specifically accused Parisian Jews of a blood libel.
In 1986 the Syrian Defense Minister, as his contribution to Arab literature, published The Matzah of Zion. The book renewed ritual murder accusations against the Jews of Damascus. It has been cited by Syrian UN delegates and at October 2002 was into its eighth reprint and being translated into English, French and Italian
And on and on it goes. In 2003 a 29 part television series Ash Shatat ("The Diaspora") was broadcast in Lebanon by Hezbellah and since across the Arab world. The series is based on the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, (also now a staple across the Muslim world) depicts the Jewish people as engaging in a conspiracy to rule the world and presents Jews as people who murder children for their blood.
The Arab Muslim world, and Iran, and beyond, is drenched in the blood of the blood libel.
A hundred years ago the Jew haters only had the pulpit and the printing press to spread the hideous lie.
"Christians, take care of your children!!! It will be Jewish Passover on March 17"
They still have the pulpit and the press of course, but now they have something new and I don't mean just the internet. They have the entire Western left/liberal media at their disposal. Which brings us to the Netzarim Junction blood libel; the first fresh blood libel of the twenty-first century..
This was a blood libel in its purest sense and across the Muslim world it played as such as was intended. It has all the elements. The contemptible and sick lie in this case cynically staged. The irretrievably evil Jews forever condemned by God himself. The noble and innocent child martyr well on his way to sainthood.. The blood thirsty religion inspired cult and then the massacres of innocent Jewish people with a special emphasis on their children.
But at once, while this was going on in all its fury, in the West it was given just a very slight new spin by the self appointed high priests of this secular multicultural era; the progressive left intelligentsia in the universities and the left/liberal media. In an instant they grabbed the libel with both hands and in a frenzied mob rage they waged their own paper pogrom against the very concept of a Jewish state.
They took God out of it of course. It would have been unenlightened and embarrassing to leave him there and besides he was no longer needed. They knew you could get a perfectly good blood libel raging against the Jews without resorting to God, at least in the West. The Nazis and the Stalinists had proven that.
All you need is faith.
.
[To be continued]
Crossposted at Geoffff's Joint, Bar and Grill.
Thanks, Geoffff.
ReplyDeleteI would also remind people that the go-to guy on the al-Durrah blood-libel is Richard Landes, of Augean Stables fame.
http://www.theaugeanstables.com/al-durah-affair-the-dossier/
The al-Durrah blood-libel was used as a whip to incite Palestinian hatred for Jews during the second terror war (intifada) of the early 2000s.
Paul Berman has noted that it was during the height of the Palestinian Jew-killing frenzy that western progressives whipped themselves into an anti-Israel / anti-Jewish frenzy of their own, blaming the Israelis for the violence against them.
Thanks for posting.
Indeed Mike, and Augean Stables is an important resource and has been for years. It is on my blogroll.
ReplyDeleteIn the next part I intend to take aim at some of those "western progressives" with a special emphasis on the antipodean version many of whom are still around churning out their hateful stuff for the liberal/left media or sitting in "Peace Studies' faculties of major Australian universities where they sit on committees that award taxpayers' money to pro-war terrorist activists in the form of "peace prizes".
A world turned up-side down, my friend.
DeleteI have to say, this is very important material and I thank you for bringing it here. We have got a huge uphill fight before us. It seems to me that the Jewish community, or the pro-Israel community, is only now really beginning to respond to decades of anti-Jewish / anti-Israel Arab propaganda, much of it coming from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and G-d only knows wherever else.
If there is one thing that Bielak has got right it is the need to fight their bullshit with historical truth. And the truth of the matter is that we are now seeing just the kind of blood libels coming out of the Arab and Muslim worlds that we saw in Europe during the middle of the last century.
Anyone of us who is paying attention knows that, but we also know that world opinion is not particularly sympathetic and that the European and American left (and the Australian left?) are turning against us.