This post stems from a twitter exchange I had with Yvonne Ridley. I say exchange, she hasn’t really answered my main points but we’ll get to that later. I want to make a specific point: why anti-Zionism which denies Jews the right to a state run for Jews, by Jews is Jew hatred (or antisemitism if you must use that term).
It’s quite clear that being an avowed “anti-Zionist” as Yvonne Ridley is, she doesn’t believe in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state even one that gives adequate rights for other religions and cultural identities.
It all started when I tweeted out a link to a new MEMRI article about growing Jew hatred in Turkey. I highlighted one part, a Professor of Physics who is really hoping that Turkey builds concentration camps and starts putting its Jews on trains.
Yvonne, after having my tweet drawn to her attention by a third party, said “horrendous” and proceeded to say “Come live in Scotland”. She also denied reports which had come out during the run up to the independence referendum, that Scotland was experiencing a surge in Jew hatred.
So I asked her the following three questions:
- Would Scotland welcome 23,000 Jewish immigrants tomorrow if Turkey persecuted them?
- Would Scotland send its army to rescue and even die for them?
- Or would Scotland let their blood flow in the streets and issue a condemnation?
One of the principal reasons for the existence of Israel today is to provide the safety net that we Jews lacked in the 1930’s. The answer to the first two questions, for Israel, is not just yes, but we have plans, planes and soldiers standing by to evacuate Turkey’s Jews tomorrow if need be. That’s just what we do.
People forget, but the primary role of The Mossad and the organisation it grew from is now and always was rescuing Jews. They are responsible for having a plan in place and the IDF will execute it.
Who flew to that mountain top to rescue the Yazidis? Which nation has sent its young men to fight and die with the Kurds as they try to hold onto their homes and lands? Are Scottish troops on the ground in Ukraine and should they be? Do you think the Jews of Turkey should rely on Obama launching air strikes against his friend in Ankara or sending in the Marines to rescue them and then granting them all citizenship? Oh, wait, yeah, he might just give them all citizenship, but the UK would certainly have a huge internal fight about granting citizenship to 23,000 Turkish Jews overnight.
And how could any nation (except Israel) grant citizenship to just the Jews of Turkey without having to explain why they won’t grant instant citizenship to everyone else in Turkey if they want to come? For Israel it’s easy: Judaism is our ethnicity, our culture and our religion. All three at once in varying degree for each individual. We are the ones, quite rightly, who decide who is Jewish just as the UK decides who is a British citizen and America decides who they should call a citizen.
Israel is the guarantor and protector of the Jewish people world wide. We in Israel feel a kinship with the worldwide diaspora of Jews (even the idiot ones who haven’t got a clue why Israel needs to exist).
Is there any way that Jews could rely on a State run by Mahmoud Abbas or any other Arab leaders that has ever existed to rescue them? Just think of what the Arabs have done to their own refugee brothers since 1948 (WSJ$), leaving them festering in refugee camps purely as leverage in their many failed attempts to destroy Israel.
Seventy years ago America, the UK and all the other nations stood by while six million Jews were slaughtered. Not only did they make immigration into their own countries difficult for Jews, perfidious Albion even closed Palestine to them.
Israel exists as a Jewish state and Zionism is the expression of this. It exists because never again is not a slogan for us Jews and we’re not going to put our faith and lives in the hands of the UN, the USA or even mighty Scotland to come save us ever again.
You can keep your strong UN condemnations, Israel will keep Jews alive.
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If you want to see the twitter exchange, here it is.
https://twitter.com/brianoflondon/status/535806008543965184
That was picked up and retweeted by one of my followers who specifically sent it to Yvonne Ridley, the reverted to Islam journalist who we’ve discussed many times here at Israellycool. The last we heard from her she was declaring Scotland to be a “Zionist-free zone”.
She agreed that the growing Jew hatred in Turkey was “horrendous” and then went on to say “Come live in Scotland; only place in Europe were Jews have lived peacefully”.
It was then pointed out to her that there had been a particular rise in Jew hatred in Scotland reported in the run up to the independence referendum. She proceeded to deny that there is any problem in Scotland.
So I made the following three responses:
https://twitter.com/brianoflondon/status/535868425160359936
No response as yet to these points.
