Hal Colebatch, an outstanding conservative commentator and a regular contributor to Life News, died in September last year. I have a backlog of articles he sent me for Life News, and I hope to publish some of these in forthcoming issues. Although Hal wrote “Jews, Nazis and Muslims” in May 2018, it contains facts and insights of lasting relevance. — AL, Ed.
“Had Charles Martel not been victorious [against Muslim invaders] at Poitiers [Battle of Tours, 10 October 732]—already, you see, the world had fallen into the hands of the Jews, so gutless a thing was Christianity!—then we should in all probability have been converted to Mohammedanism [Islam], that cult which glorifies heroism and which opens the seventh heaven to the bold warrior alone. Then the Germanic races would have conquered the world. Christianity alone prevented them from doing so.” — Adolf Hitler
In The Australian last year Julie Nathan of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry wrote an article headed in the ink-and-paper edition, “Attack on Jews a threat to all society”. I agreed with that. An attack on Jews is a threat to all society. But I found very little to agree with in the emphasis of the body of the article, which focused almost entirely on right-wing and neo-Nazi groups. There was just one passing reference to leftism and Islam: “Jeremy Corbyn also has shamefully tolerated and been accused of condoning anti-Semitism among the far-left and Islamist groups he has courted.” That’s all.
This is firing the guns in the wrong direction. It all but ignores the most powerful, well-financed and murderous anti-Semitic force in the world today.
A few weeks ago, 3,000 Muslims outside the US embassy in London chanted the anti-Semitic cry, “Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud!” This translates as: “Jews, remember Khaybar! The army of Muhammad is returning!” This is a reference to the battle, constantly caressed in Muslim historical memory, when the last flourishing Jewish communities in Arabia, survivors of the Roman diaspora and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, were wiped out by Islamic warriors in 629.
Somebody mustered and organised these protesters, apparently quite easily. Somebody taught them that chant in London.
What if 3,000 neo-Nazis had gathered in London to chant, “Jews, remember Kristallnacht! Hitler and the SS are returning!” There would, quite rightly, be a demand from the community for police action. There would certainly be arrests (unlike the actual case in London).
However, it is highly unlikely that 3000 neo-Nazis could be mustered in the whole of the British Isles. There are some conservative patriotic movements but these are a very different thing and are often pro-Israel.
Conservative patriots were Hitler’s and Nazism’s first and most unwavering enemies, as even John Maynard Keynes acknowledged in the New Statesman at the time. The British Left were often anti-anti-Nazi at least until Hitler invaded Russia, and, as George Orwell documented, sometimes even after that. It was not left-wing, cosmopolitan intellectuals who provided the sacrificial pilots for the Battle of Britain. The great icon for most of these patriot-conservative groups today is Churchill, a philo-Semite and the supreme anti-Nazi. An executive of one of these patriotic groups was arrested in Winchester a year or two ago for quoting Churchill’s criticisms of Islam in his 1899 book The River War.
Julie Nathan’s article continued: “Many blame President Trump, whose rhetoric and behaviour have at times condoned and encouraged racist, sexist and bigoted sentiment.” I would like to see one proven example of this. It was Trump, virtually alone, who supported Israel’s claims to Jerusalem in the United Nations and Unesco and has toughened America’s stand against the crazy anti-Semitic mullahs of Iran. Indeed, at the time of writing it looks possible that his stand may inspire forces that will bring down the Islamic Republic. To cast him as a villain in an article deploring anti-Semitism is beyond absurd.
Despite the hysteria directed at him over the matter, President Trump was completely right to downplay the far-Right activists at Charlottesville. They were not important and should not have been given “the oxygen of publicity”.
Neo-Nazis worldwide are a pathetic bunch of losers, misfits and ratbags. Quite simply, after the evidence produced at the Nuremberg trials in 1946, and since, no mentally or emotionally normal person could be a Nazi or a neo-Nazi. The sort of losers who make up the tiny neo-Nazi movements in Western countries tend to be the kind of people who are not successful at anything. They aren’t clever. If they were, they would do something else.
Individually or collectively, the number of positions of power or influence neo-Nazis in the West hold in government, business and finance, the law, the armed forces, the media and academia, and in institutions generally, is vanishingly tiny.
Many Muslims, by contrast, have access to power, money and position. Osama bin Laden was a billionaire. They have international organisation. Extremist anti-Semitic Muslim countries have seats in the United Nations—where the recent anti-Israel votes proved the extent of their power. In the West, they now number millions in what has been called a demographic jihad.
In Australia, 5,000 Muslims were said to be ready to demonstrate violently against Ayaan Hirsi Ali if she was allowed to speak here. If it had been 5,000 Nazis threatening an anti-Nazi speaker, would the Turnbull government have looked-on in such craven inactivity?
Unpleasant and offensive as neo-Nazis are, it is a kind of fantasy to see them as a serious threat to Jews or anyone else in Western countries today. Defacing tombstones and memorials in the dead of night is about the limit of what they can do.
Canada is on the verge of criminalising criticism of Islam. The notorious Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR), a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has access to the US government. Muslims have largely succeeded in driving Jews out of Malmo and other towns in Sweden, as they have persecuted, driven out or killed the Jews and Christians of the Middle East, except in Israel alone. Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority are under siege and are frequently the victims of lethal attacks.
There have been thousands of sexual attacks on German women in cities like Cologne by Muslim “asylum seekers”. There are spreading [Muslim-controlled] no-go areas in France, Germany, Austria and Scandinavia. What if there were Nazi no-go areas?
Extremist Muslims and Nazis have an old alliance. The Mufti of Jerusalem was Hitler’s esteemed guest in the Second World War and is said to have visited a concentration camp or extermination camp and given his hosts friendly advice. Neo-Nazis still carry out anti-Semitic harassment and even violence, and should be dealt with by the full force of the law, but they don’t control nations, oilfields, or much of anything else, and they don’t park airliners halfway up buildings.
They don’t murder people who publish anti-Nazi cartoons, or, as happens in Pakistan, murder lawyers and officials who try to help Christians imprisoned and awaiting execution for “blasphemy”. In the case of Asia Bibi, a poor village Christian woman, the “blasphemy” stemmed from her unknowingly drinking from a Muslim cup on a scorching summer day.
Islamic State publishes an online magazine urging Muslims to kill civilians of the races of “Crusaders and Jews” wherever they are to be found. The tens of thousands of terrorist attacks and attempted attacks worldwide since 9/11 indicate that it receives a receptive audience. The huge overall failure (with a few rare and brave exceptions) of “moderate” Muslims to denounce the actions of the extremists speaks for itself.
Julie Nathan claims that “In far too many European minds, Jews are not seen as thinking fellow human beings.” I suggest that “European minds” are not the principal source of anti-Semitism today. Children in Muslim schools are being taught that Jews are the offspring of pigs and apes, and the principal enemy of the human race, to be eventually exterminated. They are also taught that one of the Hadiths states that at the end-times, “the Jews will hide behind the rocks and the trees, but the rocks and the trees will say: ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’.”
It is not neo-Nazis who receive fat grants from charitable non-governmental organisations that somehow end up financing terror-tunnels into Israel and rockets aimed at Israeli schools. They do not own their own bookshops, or radio and television stations.
In the US, according to the anonymous watchdog group Canary Mission, and illustrating the Siamese-twin partnership of leftism and anti-Semitism:
Multiple organizers, speakers, and workshop leaders at the 2017 National Students for Justice in Palestine Conference—which took place at the University of Houston this past October—have posted content featuring “anti-Semitism, incitement, threats of violence, support for terror and hatred of Israel across social media”. …
Yes, anti-Semitism is a huge threat. But European culture is no longer its wellspring.
First published in Quadrant.
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