The scrolls are burning

Christopher Hitchens writes, December 2011.

This is the situation. Antisemitism is back, and it’s back in quite a big way. It’s being preached with impunity and shown on screens in the United States. In Europe the situation is getting steadily worse. It’s eight hundred percent more likely, according to studies of public opinion, that if you are a Muslim you will report negatively on Jews than if you are a Christian.

I humiliated myself a few years ago looking at the list of names of people killed in—I should say murdered in, obliterated in—the World Trade Center. I’d read so many reports, not just from the Middle East, but from Europe too, saying that all the Jews had left the building just before the planes hit. And I thought to myself, “Why am I doing this? This is disgusting to be looking to see if there are Jewish names there.” Something in me made me do it: this is what I’ve been reduced to. And this is what I mean by the toxic nature of prejudice and the way it spreads like a weed. If I had been told that none of the Jews turned up to work that day, I suppose I might possibly have thought, well—it could bear checking. In fact it would be checkable. But millions of people around the world believe something that is literally and figuratively unbelievable—that all the Jews managed to leave just before the planes hit. They believed that the first time they heard it, and still do.

Oh how I wish Hitchens was alive today, with his brilliant mind.

The month is December 2024 and it is 13 years after Hitchens called this, and predicted this. However, let me take you back even further than 13 years. Let me show you something from November 1938. It is a letter from the Yad Vashem archive, from a father Arnold (Aharon) Rosenfeld in Vienna to his son Haim in Haifa, Israel.

The Synagogue was attacked, all the windows were shattered, the pews were smashed, the curtain of the Ark torn into pieces and a Torah scroll thrown outside. The entire contents of the synagogue were destroyed, Torah scrolls were thrown to the ground and torn and three scrolls were removed together with the Ark. The black memorial plaques on the walls were smashed.

Throughout the night until one o'clock the screams of people being attacked could be heard. Last night we visited Eugen Hess and the alleyway looked the way it does after a snowfall. Everything was covered with feathers that had been thrown from the apartments.

Is there a chance that Wilson will get involved when he hears what has happened? How can we hope for help if this is not made public?

The Wilson that Aharon is referring to in his letter was the US Ambassador to Germany, Hugh R Wilson, who sent a telegram to Washington to say that on the date we now remember as Kristallnacht (the incident Aharon is writing about in this letter) in the early hours of the morning, Jewish-owned shops had been shattered and major synagogues burned down.

Three years after this letter was sent, Aharon, author of the letter, was deported to Theresienstadt and it seems he was murdered there in 1943.

What’s all this doom and gloom about? It’s about what happened today. At 4am this morning, the main synagogue in Melbourne – Australia’s biggest synagogue – was set alight. There were people inside, two of whom are now being treated for serious burns wounds. The scant media actually covering this incident is describing this as an act of arson. Early in the morning, just before dawn, as it was on Kristallnacht, two Jew haters poured petrol on the Adass Israel Synagogue and lit it up. The two suspects broke into the synagogue through a glass window and were seen setting fire to flammable material inside, according to one eye witness.

It would seem that history is rhyming and they want to burn us alive again. Why? They always come for the Jews. I called it too, remember. The first week of the BLM riots when they graffiti’d the synagogues. I knew where that led. You can convince any movement, any creed, any societal grouping that it’s the Jews who are the real culprits, and without an ounce of proof they will believe it. Because they want to, because it’s easier, because to them it just makes sense. That’s why we don’t appease. We never stay silent. There is no de-escalation that comes from making friends with the people who want to incinerate your past, present and future.

“They believed that the first time they heard it, and still do,” wrote Hitchens. Indeed they still do. They always do.

"I unequivocally condemn the attack on a Melbourne synagogue," Australia's Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said. "I have zero tolerance for antisemitism. It has absolutely no place in Australia. The violence and intimidation and destruction at a place of worship is an outrage. This attack has risked lives and is clearly aimed at creating fear in the community.”

Words are cheap, however, because Albanese has allowed Australia to be a place where antisemitism is welcome in broad daylight by masses of people, in fact. This horrific incident is what Ausralian Jews have come to expect. After all, Australia is now an antisemitic country, mired by an educational system that teaches a binary worldview about oppressors and oppressed; a system that instills a deep sense of shame in Australians for their country’s original sin, and weaponizes that shame in dangerous ways.

A country where the leading feminist Clementine Ford, following this line of thinking, has dedicated her every waking moment on her social media pages and public platforms to spread as much anti-Israel, antizionist hate as physically possible, spreading every single modern blood libel known to man, because that is her duty as a white woman. It’s a country where repeatedly Jews have been driven out from local areas and businesses due to boycotts by progressives in their areas, who are relieving their guilt for what their ancestors did to the indigenous peoples of Australia this way, because that makes sense to them. It’s a country where there are mass displays of pro Palestine marches, including one just following October 7 outside the Sydney Opera House, featuring masked men carrying flares and screaming genocidal chants including “Gas The Jews!”, in jubilation for Hamas’s pogroms on Israel; a resistance they believe is justified. A country that has refused only weeks ago to grant a visa to a former Israeli government official, Ayelet Shaked, despite allowing in the aforementioned people who organize these antisemitic riots. A country that just voted at the United Nations for Israel to pull out of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which they believe is illegally occupied by Israel, with no word on a return of the 101 hostages.

The Aussie Jewish community has responded forcefully, decrying this as a blatant act of antisemitism, because the government is not doing enough in response. I know this, because Austrlian Jews flood my Instagram messages every single day, growing more and more infuriated and afraid. I have been to the thriving Jewish communities of Sydney and Melbourne only two winters ago, and both were two of the most Zionist communities I have ever visited around the world, teeming with pride and relisience. And while they are still tenacious in that passion, I can hear the fear, as Australia’s Jews are marooned on the edge of the world, but absolutely not forgotten by us here in the rest of the Diaspora.

The President of the Zionist Federation of Australia, Jeremy Liebler wrote: "The firebombing of a synagogue in Melbourne appears to be another shocking escalation of the hate that we have seen brazenly displayed on the streets of Melbourne every week for over a year. No one should be surprised; this violent attack is a direct consequence of words turning into actions. Jew-hatred, left unchecked, endangers all Australians. Enough is enough; this is a stain on our nation. It's time for all levels of government to turn their words into actions to stamp out this Jew-hatred.”

Hear that sound? The sound of broken glass. The sound of spitting fire. The sound of Jewish buildings burning. This is what Hamas did on October 7. This is what the Nazis did 90 some years ago. As we have said, ad nauseaum, words matter. It starts with words. It started in the memories of some still alive today with the burning of books by students at universities some ninety years ago. With signs and slogans and symbols. Then it led to firebombing Jewish villages, Jewish businesses, Jewish synagogues. It is nothing new. It is as old as Amalek. It is alive and well. It is here.

A day prior to this morning’s Melbourne incident, over in Sydney, the Great Synagogue was under siege, targeted by a pro Palestine mob – while people were inside. During this fiasco, a Sydney police officer detained a Jewish man for holding an Israeli flag outside the synagogue in the face of a hundred hatemongerers. The police said that the one Jewish dissenter was “antagonizing” those protesting the synagogue. The synagogue wound up being forced into lockdown.

What is there to do? Scream, yes. Gather, yes. Find the real friends who will shout next to you and hold your hand, yes. Read. I’ve found reading a great source of comfort. Some of the books I have read this year have kept me breathing. Books like Gad Saad’s “The Parasitic Mind”. Books like Douglas Murray’s “The Madness Of Crowds”. Books like “The Coddling Of The American Mind” by Jonathan Haidt. I’m reading so much about how we got here, and you should be too. Read and it will free your mind; untangle yourself from the insanity that has gripped our neighbors and turned them away from us. They are systemically chasing us out of our societies, and many of them are not even conscious of it. In fact, they’ve convinced themselves that we’ve gone insane. That we have joined a cult. While foregoing the notion that maybe they’ve been radicalized. They aren’t brave enough to read these books. They have already told themselves the content is dangerous and the authors extreme. In the last few business meetings I’ve taken in the past few weeks, I’ve been told that it’s becoming virtually impossible to be published if you’re Jewish. Jews are not eligible to write books any more.

Tracy Anne Oberman MBE, a British actress and a dear older sister of mine, wrote in the Jewish Chronicle this week in an op-ed about how Jews are struggling to find work in the arts right now: “Jews have given so much and yet we are slowly being erased.” She reports that half of British publishers are refusing to take books by authors who are identifiably Jewish, with many mainstream publishing houses deeming Jewish books off-limits.

“The British Jewish community is vulnerable today. It finds itself under attack and misunderstood, particularly for those of us who work in the arts or media, healthcare, education or the public sector generally, not to mention students and young people. We find ourselves marginalised and alone.

Supposedly, this is all about Israel, but in reality, it often crosses the line into the same vernacular, images and slogans of 1936, with Jewish school buses attacked, school children abused by adults and little girls pelted with glass in the East End of London. And that was just this week’s news.”

I don’t know if I will ever see a book in my lifetime with my name on it. I hope I will, but at this juncture, in the prime of my productivity and literary flair, I don’t know if I will be able to sit on the shelves alongside my heroes. The reason being that I am a Jew. A Jew who is feared. A Jew who is envied. A Jew who is despised. But what I have to say is so important that I will keep writing it anyway.

I will keep writing it and I will never stop writing it. And this is what I am writing every day: The Jews are being hunted and you’re all watching.

You always stand there, watching.