…Yeah. The coverage today concerned “Palestinian militants,” “armed infiltrators,” “assailants,” “attackers.” Missing were the words, “Arabs, Muslims, Jews.”

Even the prime minister of Israel called the massacres in the south “a severe event that targeted Israeli sovereignty.”

That makes as much sense as waging a “war on terror.” A war on terrorists is possible but not terror which just means great fear exacerbated by a sense of helpless defenselessness. The Arabs like that, by the way. They like to combine humiliation with their murder.

It is unfortunate that Netanyahu cannot or will not see the age-old, independent of Zionism religious madness about Jews which burns in the breasts of these savage Arabs and other Muslims. Israel’s sovereignty was not attacked today. Attacked were Jews. The “assailants” wanted to kill Jews. That is a very big mitzvah in their universe, their moral universe of perverse, barbaric ethics.

Yesterday too the anonymous editorial in JPost missed the boat when charging the anti-Semitism in the Arab world today is due to its importation from the West.

What are implications of that belief? That before it was imported, there was no antisemitism in Araby? In truth, the Arabs, the Muslims, had no need of 19th and 20th century crackpot antisemitism to teach them to fear and to hate Jews.

The editorialist also seemed not to understand antisemitism in its own native habitat in the West. “Antisemitism is nothing if not a surpassingly expedient political fantasy and anti-Zionism is merely the most expedient form of contemporary anti-Semitism.”

To see in antisemitism an “expedient fantasy” is to mistake its surface for its depth. For sure dictators have long resorted to distracting the masses with Jew-hatred, as an expedient fantasy but it goes much deeper than that. As the Jews are a unique nation, so Jew-hatred is not your run-of-the-mill hostility between peoples. Jews in Hitler’s mind and in the minds of Catholic priests for centuries were configured as this supernatural power with supernatural malevolence.

Hostility to Jews is not like other ethnic frictions. The English and the French went to war against one another so many times over hundreds of years and snarled at one another and had nasty nicknames for one another; probably likewise the French and neighboring Germans too. The Poles and the Russians; the Russians and the Lithuanians, etc. The Japanese and the Koreans.

But nothing compares to the other-worldly intensity of Jew-hatred. The Post editorialist spoke of “classical anti-Semitism” by which he seemed to mean the 19th and 20th century variety: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Nazi propaganda stuff.

Missing here is the thousand and more years of Islamic culture in which the Jews were a perennial, daily object of abuse, humiliation and oppression. The Arabs, the Muslims are not known for their ecumenical kindness to minorities and non-believers.

Jews living in Muslim societies from the year 622 until 1948 lived on sufferance and often some protection for the local potentate who benefited by their skills. That is what the word dhimmi means. Bat Ye’or writes of dhimmitude. Dhimmi means in Arabic the “protected” ones, the protected communities. These were monotheists with a scripture. The Jews, Christians, now extinct Sabaeans, were entitled under Islamic rule to remain faithful to their beliefs; they didn’t have to convert. But otherwise they were an oppressed minority in a society that did not pride itself on how liberal it was to its minorities. “Protected” meant that the local potentate could tell the masses to refrain from killing the Jews and destroying their neighborhoods because the sheikh or pasha benefited from their presence.

Still, the Jewish community had to pay a yearly tax called the jezya and it is explicitly mandated in Sharia law to humiliate the infidel for refusing to convert. Muslims believe that everybody deep down knows the truth of Islam as the correct religion. But as infidels they stubbornly refuse to accept its truth. And for their stubborn resistance they must pay…