Stop Appeasing Anti-Semitism

So, to Israel Shahak, anti-Semitic movements that killed Jews in cold-blood were not bigots who killed innocent people for being the “wrong” race. But, to Israel Shahak, it was movements fighting for “freedom” from the Jews. And the self-hating Jews who make that claim “want to extricate themselves from the tyranny of the totalitarian Jewish past”. This is the kind of self-hating nonsense we hear from Israel Shahak. The fact that he even has Israel as his first name is a travesty.

The Haskalah was a movement in the 18th and 9th centuries that sought to appease anti-Semites through reforms. It was a movement of European Jews who sought to appease anti-Semites. When it came to Jews being attacked for being involved in trade and commerce, Haskalah sought to discourage Jews from being in those fields in order to appease anti-Semites. So in order to improve the conditions of Jews in society, Haskalah sought to do what it can to appease anti-Semitism.

The policy of appeasing anti-Semitism failed. It continued to be a problem. Whatever small sign of “success” from the appeasement policy, it’s clear that the “success” doesn’t help at all. All it is is some [occasional] praise of Jews for making that “concession”. It still gives legitimacy to the anti-Semitic libel. And, instead of anti-Semitism being eliminated, Jews even suffered through the Holocaust. After WWI, Adolf Hitler took power. He was elected because of his populist message, where Germany was the victim in WWI, and where Jews were among those to blame for the country’s problems. Hitler sought to kill every Jew. He did kill six million of them in concentration camps. The Haskalah movement was inspired by Moses Mondelsohn, who also sought to appease anti-Semitism. He even verbally attacked the Yiddish language. According to Kenneth Levin, Mendelsohn called Yiddish “a language of stammerers, corrupt and deformed, repulsive to those who are able to speak in a correct and orderly manner.”

He was concerned about the well-being of European Jewry and sought to achieve assimilation through appeasing anti-Semitism.

The Jews, who sought to appease anti-Semitism in order to assimilate and to get rid of it, were actually legitimizing anti-Semitism. Many Jews, who joined leftist groups including Socialist ones, also sought to appease anti-Semitism and embraced the accusations of the anti-Semites. These Jews embraced the anti-Semitic accusations, which had no basis in reality. Those slanderous accusations were used to deny the Jews citizenship rights. 

Appeasing anti-Semitism legitimizes anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is a disease. Who tries to negotiate with or appeases diseases. You try to kill diseases, not appease them in the hope of getting better. Anti-Semitism is the same thing. You don’t try to appease people who call Jews Pirates, who claim that Jews control the media and who uses anti-Semitic terms like “so-called Holocaust”.

As Israel’s heroic Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu said at the UN speech,” History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others”.

The only peace you can get with an anti-Semite is when that person is no longer an anti-Semite.