Communicated: TefillaChillul Tefila Bifarhesia, as well as halachicly challenged verbiage and dress, are external manifestations of a critical lack of personal yiras shomayim which has lethal consequences.
tell a friend“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Marcellus, the character in Hamlet who uttered those words, couldn’t have been more right. Things are indeed askew in Denmark – and in most of Europe, for that matter. Earlier this month the Muslim street went berserk with rage over several satirical cartoons that Muslims felt maligned Mohammad and disrespected Islam. Apparently, it’s acceptable for Muslims to trash the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, destroy revered ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, and desecrate Jewish burial sites whenever they get their hands on them, but woe to anyone who dares look at Islam the wrong way. Throughout the Arab world there have been calls to behead those responsible for publishing those cartoons. The more moderate only demand that hands be chopped off. Western embassies and buildings housing humanitarian organizations have been attacked and demolished, and European products are being boycotted. I can’t help but think the West is getting a preview of what life in Europe will be like in the not so distant future. Nominally Christian Europe is in free fall. Due to secularization and the rejection of Catholicism and traditional Protestantism with their restrictions on premarital relationships, birth control, and abortion, non-Muslim Europeans are failing to reproduce themselves in a significant manner. Their Muslim counterparts, however, who for years have freely been immigrating to Scandinavia, Germany, France and other European ports of entry, are having children – lots and lots of children. It’s just a matter of time before Christian Europeans become a minority in their own countries. And a despised minority at that. In what can only be considered an extraordinary irony, Christians will be the new “Jews” of Europe, especially as the real Jews of Europe, with their keener perception of the approaching storm, begin leaving in greater numbers. Even now, when the practitioners of Islam have yet to become the majority in their respective Western counties, they freely “express” their dissatisfaction with regional or federal governments – as they did in France with weeks of rioting after two Muslim youths were electrocuted while running from the police. Sooner or later (I think sooner), native-born Islamic fundamentalists in countries like France and Denmark will start making demands – that all women be covered from head to toe, for example, or that all newspaper articles and television and radio programs be filtered through Muslim censors – along with threats that their governments better comply lest they suffer the chaos and destruction the world has already been witness to. Kristallnacht, when Jewish-owned properties and synagogues in Germany were smashed and set on fire by frenzied mobs, will seem like a mild precursor to what Islamic fundamentalists are going to do to their soon-to-be “minority” neighbors. A malignancy has overtaken the body of Europe, and the continent’s days are surely numbered. Honestly, I’m not exactly shedding tears for Christian Europe, birthplace of the Crusades, the Inquisition, pogroms, ghettos, blood libel, forced exile, massacre, and of course the culmination of it all, the Holocaust. Despite Europeans’ past horrific treatment of Jews, I would be at least somewhat more sympathetic to Europe’s fate if not for the fact that ugly anti-Semitism has again become fashionable among Europeans – non-Muslim Europeans. And one can’t blame the resurgent Jew-hatred on ignorance or lack of education – indeed, it’s not the ignorant or the uneducated who are fostering the hostility but rather the academics in their ivory towers and the journalists in the print and broadcast media. In institutes of higher learning, in newspapers and magazines, on television and radio, the truth is being distorted and bias is being implanted, with millions influenced negatively against Israel and Jews. Murderers of Israeli children are called militants, snipers who shoot at cars are labeled freedom fighters, and Israeli retaliation after busloads of citizens are blown up is characterized as aggression and a threat to the “peace process.” There are calls for academic and economic boycotts of Israel (it’s ironic that Denmark is presently the target of an Islamic boycott, since it was Denmark’s largest trade union that was the first in Europe to advocate a boycott of Israel, in March 2002, just a month after 135 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks). Even Russia, a country that has suffered tremendously from Islamic fundamentalism, is making overtures to Hamas. The brutal colonizing countries of Europe that decimated and abused the native populations and plundered the natural resources of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Africa are pressuring Israel, a literal sliver on the map, to give up lands it acquired, not by aggression but in self-defense against enemies that have been determined to annihilate it since its birth. The double standard is alive and well across the ocean. Old World bias against the Jews is apparently so ingrained that the Europeans still haven’t figured out they’re picking on the wrong Semites. And that’s why this child of Holocaust survivors can’t get too distraught over the likely fate of Jew-hating Europe. Ultimately, you sleep in the bed you make for yourself. To the future “Jews” of Europe I say: Welcome to my world.
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Printed from: http://www.jewishpress.com/sections/magazine/the-new-jews-of-europe/2006/02/22/
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