Circa 19../20..?
The place is Berlin. Angry crowds are mulling about outside of the Reichstag and elsewhere in the city, incensed at the actions and audacity of the people they've chosen to side against and place the blame on for a hundred crimes, real or imagined. The enemy are the Jews, or Juden. The eternal bogeymen of Europe, many Germans have had enough of them and their aggression. And with a loud voice, they proclaim their anger towards them."Jude! Jude! Etappenschwein!" they cried. "Jew! Jew! Cowardly Pig!" and "Come out and fight us!".
Berlin, Paris, London, Istanbul, Washington D.C., Cairo; protests abound calling for everything from diplomatic pressure on Israel to stop attacking Palestine, to wiping Israel off of the map and even going as far as killing every single Jew on the planet. In Paris, of all places, cries of "Hitler was right!" filled the air. Yet another conflict has been started by Hamas, and yet another wave of jew-hatred has commenced.
A common theme is that Israel "brings this upon themselves" by "occupying Palestine". Palestine, a faux nation to begin with, was given the borders it demanded almost a decade ago when Israel pulled every settlement out of the contested areas which it occupied as a result of several Arab nations attempting to invade and eradicate Israel decades earlier.
But the protesters refuse to acknowledge simple historical facts. Because calling the Jewish nation pigs and talking about killing them all is so much more fun. Don't be fooled, this sentiment is not isolated to the West and Arabs. Nor is it isolated to leftist/socialist ideologies either. There is a fair amount of people on the right who hate and distrust Jews as well. They talk of them with reference to "Zionism" and call them the "Zionists". It's the same sort of talk from the early 20th century, and just as delusional and hateful.
We thought we left this sort of craziness in the dust of 1945, and a few years later we, the western world by UN charter, established a plot of land around the site of Ancient Israel to be a new home for a much maligned people, the Jews. We were wrong. Even moving away form Europe, the Jews are still hated by many Europeans. It is clear that many people simply do not believe that Jews should be allowed to have their own country. And these same people do not want Jews in their country either.
Why am I harping on this topic again? I don't have a special love for Jews. I don't hate them either. I feel about them the same as I do any other people. And I find it disturbing that this apparently puts me in the minority. Not by PC standards of course. In the PC world, sure we all love Jews and they are great and the Holocaust was awful. But in the real world...it seems most people really don't like Jews.
But that isn't the reason I am harping on this. The reason is, I'm afraid of where it leads. I study history as a hobby. You know, most people watch whatever sitcom on a Friday night. I am reading a paper about what the colonists in New England made rope out of in the 17th century. The second world war is one of my favorite periods to study, and one of the most frightening aspects of that war was the completely illogical hatred towards Jews that was displayed by Germany. And further study reveals that the rest of the world didn't much care for Jews either at the time. It took the reality of the concentration/death camps to really shake a lot of Allies into questioning such feelings towards a people.
The raw shock of that wore off decades ago, and here we are again.The same scapegoat. Now a nation of their own, no matter what they do they are hated for it. If they simply let people shoot missiles at them, eventually those missiles get through and their people die. If they fight back, they are called murderers by the world. It is a lose-lose situation for Israel. And then people call Jews "pigs". In Berlin.
In 2014.
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