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Holocaust Education Needs Improvement
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ICC Ruling
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Chabad Rabbi Murdered in UAE
This past week, I was honored to speak to a group of 200 Holocaust educators. The Holocaust (Shoah) is not something I focus on through my Zionism education company. The teaching about the attempted extermination of the Jewish race should not be avoided, but my goal for Taking Back the Narrative is to fill in the 2,000 year ‘gap’ not usually shared regarding Israel, between the last Exile in 70 AD (after which 700,000 Jews were still left in Israel), and the liberation of Israel in 1948 (the 22% of which was available to be liberated), and of course usage of accurate, non-antisemitic terminology.
So, it was a pleasant surprise when I was approached by a Holocaust education group; the Director explained they are taking a bit of a sabbatical while the war is ongoing in order to re-group and hone their teaching about Israel as it relates to both the Holocaust and these times.
As with most speaking engagements, I began with why I was anti-Israel for nearly 20 years, despite growing up in a Zionist home. But, for this previous speaking engagement, I added my family history during the Holocaust — how my maternal late grandmother saved her entire family by insisting to her father that they should evacuate from Belarus to the Ural Mountains in Russia. My late great-grandfather was nonplussed about the thought of evacuation as he expressed that the Germans left Jews alone during WWI. Luckily, my grandmother succeeded in moving both her parents and her four sisters, as five days after they left, the Nazis invaded Belarus. On the other side of my family, half of my father’s family survived as they were able to escape to Uzbekistan.
On my father’s other side, both his great-grandparents were murdered by a trusted childhood friend of my great-uncle, who betrayed the family and turned them in, to the Nazis. When my great-uncle came back from the army front and found out, he killed the subhuman who was responsible for the murder of his family and was thus relieved from his duty as a Major in the army.
My maternal late grandfather’s family was not so lucky as my maternal grandmother’s. While my grandfather was conscripted to the Red Army when the Russians conquered Poland, the remainder of his family was left behind. The sole survivor of his family was his eldest brother, Solomon, due to him being a member of Jabotinsky’s Betar (a fact I found out only recently from a relative right before her 100th birthday), and it was through Betar that he left for Israel in 1936. To this day, we do not know if the remainder of his family was murdered in the nearby camps or dumped into ravines after being killed by locals, as happened in the infamous Lvov pogrom of 1941. During my two trips to Yad Vashem, I was unable to find the names of my relatives.
Naively, for years, i assumed that Jews who had reached Israel escaping the war, found immediate relief. Little did I know the actual history, until I learned the extent of the antisemitic British occupation in Israel, and how Jews returning back home, were placed in detention camps, the most infamous of which was Atlit.
The other topics I focused on were those I do not see much of within Holocaust education:
The Holocaust was not an anomaly; built on 2,000 years of Christian antisemitism:
When I was in school, we were not taught about the 2,000 years of virulent antisemitism that preceded the Shoah; rather, it was something that ‘happened’ due to the imbalance of German reparations post-WWI. Even after my school years, I have not heard this topic broached, Christian antisemitism, in any event lecture related to the Holocaust.
Sure, there were righteous Christians, and no one is denying those heroes, but to completely dismiss the first Inquisition (4th – 6th century, which spearheaded the Jews inviting the Moors (Islamic-converted Berbers) to invade Sepharad (Spain & Portugal), the countless pogroms across all of Europe from coast to coast – the first pogrom in Germany occurred in 800 AD. Jews were forced to live in ghettos in Italy; that is where the word originates from, to Jews being expelled from England, Jews being burned by the French during the Crusader years, Jews not being allowed to own land, Ukraine literally being founded as a Cossack state whose founder, Bohdan Khmelnytsky initiated the worst pogroms of that time-period (1648 – 1649):
“The first large-scale massacre took place in Nemirov , into which the Cossacks penetrated in the disguise of Polish soldiers. Jews died en masse as martyrs when faced with the demand that they convert to Christianity: “They arrived … as if they had come with the Poles … in order that he open the gates of the fortress … and they succeeded … and they massacred about 6,000 souls in the town … and they drowned several hundreds in the water and by all kinds of cruel torments. In the synagogue, before the Holy Ark, they slaughtered with butchers’ knives … after which they destroyed the synagogue and took out all the Torah books … they tore them up … and they laid them out … for men and animals to trample on … they also made sandals of them … and several other garments” ( *Shabbetai b. Meir ha-Kohen , Megillah Afah).
In 1650 the leaders of the *Council of the Four Lands “took upon themselves and their children after them to fast in the Four Lands every year on the 20th day of the month of Sivan, the day upon which the calamity began in … Nemirov.” The fortified city of *Tulchin fell at the end of June, after the Poles agreed to surrender the Jews to the rebels in exchange for their own lives. There is information on prolonged resistance by the Jews after they had been driven out of the fortress. At that time, all the Jews in the towns bordering upon Belorussia were massacred; only those living in the surroundings of *Brest-Litovsk succeeded in escaping.”
In Poland, 90% of Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, with many locals, just like in Lithuania, and in Poland, eagerly participating. That does not just happen overnight.
http://www.berdichev.org/a_brief_history_of_antisemitism_in_ukraine.html
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/slaughter-of-jews-in-ukraine-lviv-pogrom
Framing Israel properly regarding the Holocaust, how to address the lie that ‘there was a Holocaust because there was no Israel’
Just a few days ago, I corrected yet another fraudulent Jewish ‘influencer’ who stated that both Pakistan and Israel were ‘founded’ in 1947 – 1948 to give refuge to minorities. I am astounded how many do not know an iota of history, but these are the same names that make the rounds at Jewish organizations’ conferences. Pakistan is stolen Hindu land, given to the Muslims in India by the occupier British. Similarly, Jordan is stolen Jewish land, given to the Arab occupiers by the then British occupiers. 22% of Israel was liberated by Jews in 1948.
There has been an Israel for 4,000 years, since Jews literally emerged from the Semitic tribes in the Hill Country (Judea & Samaria) of Canaan. The reason Jews didn’t have their own army during WWII, was precisely due to the British occupation (not a Mandate, which ended in 1922 when Churchill stole 78% of the Jewish homeland and further violated the Mandate by issuing antisemitic White Papers, which grossly diminished immigration of Jews from across the Diaspora back to the Jewish homeland. The UN did not ‘establish’ Israel in 1948 nor was it ‘founded’ in 1948. The phantom notion that Herzl ‘founded’ Israel is also irresponsible to repeat.
If Israel was ‘founded’ or ‘established’ in 1948, how does one explain the incredible Jewish history in Israel for thousands of years? The centers for Kabbalah studies in the Middle Ages established in Tsfat; the artisans, the shepherds, or the rabbis across Israel who gave counsel to Jews in Egypt and Syria, the Jews who held back the Crusaders during the Battle of Haifa in 1100 AD, the Sephardim who held down the fort for hundreds of years, to the point that the Ottoman rulers upheld that Sephardim are the voices on behalf of all Jews.
And of course it is imperative to mention Jewish Gaza. Jews wrestled control of Gaza from the Philistines (not indigenous to Gaza, but were a seafaring Greek tribe), in fact did so twice, and since 145 BC established a presence. For nearly 1000 years, Gaza served as a major Jewish port, the port to which Jews from all over the Diaspora (due West and North) came to Israel, the port to which Sephardic Jews found safety after escaping the Second Inquisition.
Through the 1,812 years of Jewish life under occupation in Israel, not only were there thriving Jewish communities all over Israel, but the Judean culture and faith was able to enrich despite colonization. In fact, there were times that Muslim rulers asked Jews to rebuild and re-populate Jewish cities, such as Tiberias and Jerusalem (Saladin I invited Jews back to the Jewish capital once the Crusaders were defeated).
The need to shift more focus on the British occupiers, and how the antisemitic White Papers moved Hitler from deportation of Jews to extermination
In a previous newsletter, I shared the extensive history of the British occupation and how they did more damage than any Muslim occupier/ruler of Israel. An esteemed podcast guest, Ido Reif, whom I had on several seasons ago, shared that Hitler’s initial goal was to rid Europe of Jews, which, had the British adhered to the legal promises of its agreement to both the Zionist Organization and the League of Nations, would have come close to fruition. Extermination measures were in the plan, but only deployed once the British near-halted Jewish immigration. Jews were considered illegals in their own homeland, as mentioned above, inhumanely detained in camps, which were visually reminiscent of the concentration camps across Europe.
The already reduced number of Jews, mere thousands, who were allowed to return, trickled down to hundreds as the antisemitic White Papers increased. The British had also been fomenting Arab hatred towards Jews, something that was not prevalent in Israel prior to the British occupation. The family of the Grand Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, who is infamous for meeting with Hitler and pushing the Final Solution, along with training SS units in Muslim Bosnia, were actually Arab Zionists in Jerusalem for centuries, and the Grand Mufti himself had attended several years at a Jewish school.
Ido Reif stated that to incorporate the blame of the Holocaust on the British is not to diminish the role of Germany and its millions of Jew-hating allies across Europe, but to properly frame history.
No Jews are European – Imperative to explain who and what are Jews
I was personally guilty of this, that when I was asked what my background is, I would say Russian, not realizing when I was younger, that saying so completely erased my Jewish race and ethnicity. Also, my family, like most Ashkenaz Jews, lived all over Europe in recent times – Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, Belarus. Three DNA tests proved that I am 100% a Jew and not a drop of Slavic blood. No nation in Europe (or any Arab one) considered Jews to be an equal part of their population. Jews were always the other, punished for being Jews.
My people are not ‘from’ Russia or anywhere in Europe. All Ashkenaz Jews have Sephardic roots, as it was 20,000 Italian Sephardic Jews who first entered the Ashkenaz region, followed by other Sephardic Jews who were escaping persecution in environs further West in Europe. In fact, a town in Italy, Lucca, is considered by historians to be a location where there was a near 200-year bottleneck of Jewish history for Sephardim moving on to the Ashkenaz region.
All Sephardic Jews have roots in Israel, which is why Ashkenaz Jews’ DNA has Sephardic traces, but not with Europeans. My own three DNA tests showed that I am 92% Ashkenaz, 6% Iberian Jew, and 2% Italian Jew. Jews first arrived to Europe via Greece from the fourth century BCE onward in places as varied as Chios, Aegina, Attica and Rhodes and in Italy as early as the 2nd century BCE.There already was a Jewish presence in Rome well before Judeans were sent to Rome as slaves, post each of the Jewish-Roman wars. Syrian Jews were the first to live in southern France as early as the 5th century BC, arriving to Gaul as traders. There was no antisemitism in Europe when the locals were Pagans; similarly, Arabs did not persecute Jews when they were Pagans, pre-Islam. Zoroastrians in Persia were philosemitic prior to the spread of Islam into Persia.
Jews must not be fearful of the word, ‘race’ – Jews are not part of the White race, never were. The Nazis did not target Jews because we are a race, but because they evilly thought we are an inferior race. And that distinguished difference must be emphasized more strongly within Holocaust education.
The Notion of ‘All Hate’ is Diminishing Holocaust Studies
Today, with the ‘PC’ ‘woke virus’ many Holocaust institutions are invoking the false notion that ‘all hate’ is the same as what the Jews faced during the Holocaust, which is absolutely insulting to the Judean race. Jews were singularly targeted for extermination. Yes, the Roma were also killed, but the goal of the Nazis was not to wipe out the Roma. Hate against any group today is not the same whatsoever as what the Jews faced during the Holocaust years.
Of course, the few exceptions in recent times such as the Hindus in Bangladesh, the Christians in Sudan and Nigeria, and the Yazidis in Iraq are not paid any attention by those who say, ‘all hate.’ All hate to those groups means equalizing fear of Muslims to the murder of Jews en masse. In fact, it is still Israel that is facing such vile hatred that Jews worldwide are being killed, in addition to the Jewish genocide that just occurred.
More emphasis needed on Jewish Resistance during the Shoah
Of course, Jews were victims of evil subhumans during the Holocaust, but to portray (falsely) that Jews were merely hiding, like I was taught in school, is to erase Judean bravery. Over 90 Jewish ghettos had armed units, and like also mentioned in a previous newsletter, many women were physically fighting back against the Nazis:
“They hid revolvers in teddy bears, they smuggled explosives in their underwear, they flung Molotov cocktails, they bombed German supply trains, they distributed underground bulletins, and they organized uprisings in Europe’s wartime ghettos.”
https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2024/03/the-jewish-ghetto-girls-who-fought-back-against-nazis.html
The reason Israel observes Yom HaShoah in the spring is to commemorate the bravery of Jews during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. That is the only date I observe for Holocaust Remembrance, not the UN-pandering day at the end of January, where nations pretend to care about murdered Jews from WWII, but many of whom aid in the murder of Jews in Israel.
Why the war against Gaza is not a genocide and why October 7th was very much a Jewish genocide
Pro-terrorists are crying that Israel is committing a ‘genocide in Gaza.’ First, the Arab occupiers in Jewish Gaza should be lucky that any of them are even left breathing after the actual Jewish genocide on October 7th. All were complicit, directly and indirectly. Second, retaliating against terrorists is not a genocide as Israel is not targeting the occupiers based on race or faith.
Why the Jewish genocide is what actually happened on October 7th, and not just a massacre is because Jews were hunted, the subhumans were looking for Jews specifically.
The Czechs sent Israel weapons, purchased by the Jewish Agency, in 1947 when the U.S refused.
As for the ICC ruling, President Trump sanctioned the ICC because of its asinine rulings against Israel and the U.S. Jihad Joe then ended those sanctions against the ICC. Chuck Schumer and Blinken, the Hamas Jews, further blocked efforts of imposing sanctions on the ICC.
What the ruling means, in reality is a danger to the hostages and an increase in antisemitic attacks.
The ruling against Israel, now with the arrest warrant against both Netanyahu and Gallant, means that Hamas has absolutely no pressure, for now, before Trump resumes office, to release any hostages and in fact, with the backing of the ICC could even harm them more.
This also limits Israel’s capability of safeguarding Jews in the ICC countries who are adhering to the ruling, for instance, if an Amsterdam-style pogrom occurs again, where Israel needed to coordinate security and rescue its citizens, it will have trouble doing so.
Also, since other warrants for top Israeli officials are secret, fewer Israeli officials will be traveling to antisemitic nations where the most diplomatic work is needed.
Prosecutor Karim Khan, a Pakistani (shocker) could have moved against Hamas on October 8th, but decided that Israel, which was the target of a Jewish genocide, is causing ‘mass starvation’ allowing for airdrops, aid trucks, commercial aid, a humanitarian pier, and a humanitarian corridor.
Just shows that Israel should NOT have allowed any of the above because it makes no difference to antisemites. Trying to appease those who wish to murder your people always backfires. So, we now have more Arab occupiers in Gaza as the population increased by 2% this past year, and more accusations against Israel.
For years, the ICC was accused of always targeting African nations while avoiding Arab human rights violators along with Iran and China and Russia. So instead of switching gears to go after Qatar, Turkey, Syia, Israel became its antisemitic obsession.
Karim Khan is also facing sexual harassment allegations, so this could be all part of the distraction, along with them knowing President Trump is returning with full force.
And who brought the allegation to the ICC? Members of the terrorist groups, PFLP and Hamas.
This ruling will also increase justification to increase on campus antisemitism and may drive further BDS movements. January 20th, President Trump’s inauguration is still a while away, and cannot come soon enough.
Many of us were deeply worried when we found out about the disappearance of Rabbi Zvi Kogan, a Moldovan-Israeli, who was a Chabad rabbi in the UAE. Infuriatingly, overnight, it was shared that his body was found two hours north of Dubai, murdered by subhuman scum, an Uzbeki terror cell, prompted by Iran. Rabbi Kogan proudly served as a soldier in the Givati brigade of the IDF and was most recently assistant to the Chief Rabbi of the Jewish community in the Emirates. Just three days before being murdered, he opened the first kosher supermarket to exist in the UAE.
For those who have been to the UAE, know how much the now 2,000+ Jews who live there and the over 200,000 Jews who have traveled to the UAE since the Abraham Accords, respect the Emirates. Jews are not there to ‘convert’ anyone as Jews are not a religion, but an ethnicity with a proud Judean faith. Jews are in the UAE to help enhance ties between Israel and the UAE. They contribute greatly also to the business community in both Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
I remember being in the UAE, twice, in 2022, and the first time, when I arrived with a Jewish group, it was Chabad who warmly greeted us and hosted us for Shabbat. The Chabad villa is located in an Emirati neighborhood, which Chabad greatly respects and shared that they have excellent relations with their Emirati neighbors.
Therefore, merely catching the trio of terrorists who murdered Rabbi Kogan is not enough for the UAE. The UAE, like most other Muslim nations has strict punishments for murder, and since the murder occurred on their soil, we should expect that the Emiratis will incorporate capital punishment. Iran has been known to kidnap its own citizens from Dubai and then murder them back in Iran. But the UAE cannot turn into what Lebanon allowed itself to become, a launching pad for terrorism against Jews.
This is what happens when antisemites call to ‘globalize the intifada’ after a Jewish genocide. Pogroms in Western Europe, chaos in Montreal, NYC, Los Angeles with the pro-terrorist marching, threatening and harming Jews, and an innocent murdered rabbi in a country that is part of the Abraham Accords. In his merit, please do a mitzvah, and if you are not connected to Chabad, a group that brings out the best of what Jews are, please attend a local Chabad for an upcoming Shabbat or for an event.
May Israel avenge his blood.
