Haven’t You Learnt Anything?

My European Jewish brethren are in danger. Again. European streets are ringing with “Death to the Jews” and “Gas the Jews” – ugly mobs, salivating for Jewish blood. Again.

They have almost stopped pretending that Israel’s existence is the reason for this hatred. They hate Jews, pure and simple. But who are the “they”? German burghers, dreaming of re-living their grandparents’ glory days as Nazi stormtroopers? I don’t think so. Germany was thoroughly de-Nazified after WWII and has sincerely atoned for the Shoah. It is, apparently, a different nation.

Or is it hedonistic and pragmatic French gentiles deciding to actively  and energetically take up the anti-Semitic cause? I don’t think so. French life is too good to waste on anyone or anything, other than the pursuit of happiness and the elevation of indifference to the status of a presumed virtue.

Is it, perhaps, Spanish bullfighters, Italian pasta-makers, Portugese fishermen or Belgium’s rug-makers?  Not bloody likely. Those people are too busy, earning a crust, looking after their families and enjoying the fruits of their labours to worry about the mere handful of European Jews, the pitiful remnant of what was, once, one of the most productive  communities  in the world.

After the Shoah, the genocide of  European Jews, Europe is almost Judenfrei. Now, in beautifully maintained German streets, one can see, embedded in footpaths, only small brass plaques with engraved names. These are next to the buildings whence Jewish families were deported to the gas chambers. It  made my skin crawl when  I saw young men of distinctly Middle Eastern  appearance intentionally stepping  on them, laughing.

It is all well and good to remember one’s victims and to feel sorry – but how about not  letting people become victims in the first place? Who else is going to be commemorated in this way? Iraqi Yazidis? Iranian Bahai? Afghanistan Hazaras? How many more brass plaques with victims’ names would we have to embed around this planet’s killing fields?

I had truly thought that it would never happen again, that nobody in their right mind would attempt to repeat one of the most shameful episodes in history. I believed that World War II’s destruction, suffering and slaughter would  have inoculated all humanity against killing the weak and the vulnerable, be they European Jews and Gypsies, homosexuals, Rwandan Tutsis, carriers of genetic illnesses, the  mentally unwell  or Srebrenica Muslims.

I was wrong, because, with others , I believed in the inherent goodness of humans and the human ability to learn history’s lessons.

I was wrong, because the hatred and malice towards Jews, shown in the hearts of European civilisation in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Barcelona, London and Budapest have one unmistakable meaning indicative of a deep, recurrent malaise. If  European society has no problem with Muslim intimidation of Jews it can mean only one thing – Europeans are hoping that, by sacrificing their Jewish communities, they will avoid being targets of Muslim aggression themselves. By throwing Jewish citizens under the bus of the Muslim onslaught against  European civilisation, the Continent’s citizenry is demonstrating more than collective cowardice. It is also  prompting the contemptuous conviction amongst their future masters that the fall of Europe is just a matter of time and a bit more terror.

Since time immemorial, a  Jewish exodus and/or maltreatment of Jews  has indicated illness in any society where  Jews resided. There are so many examples I will not list  them. Let me repeat (however strongly it might rankle  and irritate), countries which mistreat their Jews are destined for trouble. That persecution spreads inevitably to the rest. Invariably, those who were jubilant at the attacks on Jews  find themselves, sooner or later, on the receiving end.

That is the reason why I  gave this piece its title. The defence of the rights of minorities’ is not a luxury, a cause of no concern to the mainstream. It is an insurance policy, taken out by a mature and civil society against being targeted as a whole by radical, aggressive elements. If  malicious left-wing ideology and petty anti-Semitism is enough to prevent the mainstream from taking out such an insurance policy, the coming conflagration will be devastating.

It is relevant to remember that France has a poor record when it comes to national resistance or a cohesive national policy.  It failed to resist the Germans during  the WWII;  it  collaborated with the Nazi occupation on a grand scale. Only Charles De Gaulle’s  Free French prevented France from being excluded as a founder of the UN — and an accused at the Nurenburg tribunal. France  betrayed its Jewish citizens by surrendering them to the Nazis en masse;  it betrayed its own by abandoning the pieds noir to rampaging Algerian mobs. Only the refusal of the French Army to follow orders and abandon their countrymen prevented a wholesale massacre.

In other words, the French record of looking after its own is pitiful. Today, what all this means is that  French Jews, in all likelihood, have no hope of remaining French.

I am as distressed at the plight of my brethren in France, as must all Jews. I share French PM Emmanuel Valls’s opinion that, without its Jews, France will cease to be France as we know it. The Jewish exodus from La Belle France will, in all likelihood, open the door to the further Islamisation of that country and might well lead to the loss of  French national identity.

However, by contrast with the times of the Shoah, French Jewry has an out: emigration to Israel. The French Jewish exodus, as a result of Muslim pressure, is gathering momentum. The impending result will be the loss of the intellectual, artistic, commercial and scientific Jewish contribution to contemporary French democracy.

And what will France gain?

It is impossible to tell how soon France (and the rest of Europe)  will become Judenfrei, but the process is  underway. The lesson of history is as unmistakable as it is worrying.

I ask my Gentile friends again, “Haven’t you learnt anything?”

Dr Michael Galak and his family came to Australia as refugees from the Soviet Union in 1978