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We recognize Haman. But where are Mordechai and Esther?

We recognize Haman. But where are Mordechai and Esther? by Melanie Philips 2/25/21 in JNS.org

Author, Melanie Philips
 Today’s Persians running Iran’s Islamic revolutionary regime consistently declare their intention to annihilate Israel and are building the capacity for nuclear weapons to achieve that infernal aim. And then, there’s the Western media and academia …

 This week’s festival of Purim provided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an irresistible analogy.

Purim celebrates the deliverance of the Jews of ancient Persia by Mordechai and Esther—two Jews who thwarted the genocidal intentions of the Persian prime minister Haman through their courage, daring and strategic genius.

"Esther and Mordecai" by Arent de Gelder, 1675

Today’s Persians running Iran’s Islamic revolutionary regime consistently declare their intention to annihilate Israel and are steadily building the capacity for nuclear weapons to achieve that infernal aim.

Netanyahu warned this week that, just as “another Persian villain” tried and failed to destroy the Jewish people, so too would Iran’s “delusional regime” be prevented from attaining nuclear weapons.

But there’s another unsettling analogy to be made here. For the story of Purim tells us about the extreme perilousness of the Jews of the Diaspora who are inescapably vulnerable to never-ending attack.

Currently, the Western world is convulsing in a pandemic of brazen anti-Semitism, which draws upon imagery and tropes from early Christian theology, Nazi and Communist ideology and the modern variant of Jew-hatred, liberal universalist dogma that portrays Israel as a devil state.

Dov Hikind leads protest against NBC antisem
at 30 Rock NY during NBC's "SNL" broadcast

Participants: Yad Yamin NY, End Jew Hatred,
Americans against Antisemitism, Liberate Art



In America, comedian Michael Che promoted the Israel vaccine libel by quipping on the NBC show “Saturday Night Live”: “Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population. I’m going to guess it’s the Jewish half.”

In Britain, a Bristol university lecturer and pro-Palestinian Jewish-conspiracy theorist, David Miller, issued a diatribe last weekend in which he called for the “end” of Zionism as a “functioning ideology of the world.”

He launched a direct attack on Jewish students, claiming that they were “being used as political pawns by a violent, racist foreign regime engaged in ethnic cleansing,” and that Arab students on campus were unsafe as a result.

Outraged calls to sack both Miller and Che have predictably prompted their supporters to criticize as hypocrites those who condemn “cancel culture” while calling for these individuals to be canceled.

Anti-Semitism, though, is unique. It doesn’t just provoke contempt, fear or hatred. It presents Jews as uniquely evil and powerful, a global conspiracy to promote their own interests at the expense of everyone else. And the correct response to evil is to eradicate it.

Anti-Semitism is therefore innately deranged, dangerous and even murderous, unlike prejudice against any other group, people or cause.

After the Holocaust, it went underground in horror and shame, but in recent decades that social control has disappeared. This is largely because of the Marxist takeover of the left and its agenda of cultural revolution.

Anti-Semitism has thus been seeded throughout the West by Palestinianism, Islamism, black power and the left-wing “intersectionality” agenda, all making common cause with far-right anti-Semites who in numeric terms have been overwhelmingly eclipsed.

Moreover, it infuses Western culture itself. Among countless numbers of people, their only knowledge of Jews is drawn from such hateful and stereotypical figures as Fagin or Shylock. Many of the West’s greatest literary, philosophical and artistic figures were profound anti-Semites.

Clearly, though, these cannot and should not be banned. A difficult and careful line must be drawn.