ANNE FRANK MUST NOT WEEP: POSITIVE JEWISH DEMOGRAPHICS, ZIONIST SELF-DETERMINATION, OFFSET REVIVED ANTISEMITISM

DEFYING DEMOGRAPHIC PROJECTIONS

Yoram Ettinger

Israel Hayom, April 5, 2013

On March 21, U.S. President Barack Obama stated at the International Convention Center that "given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine."

Obama has been misinformed by his advisers. The suggestion that Israel should concede Jewish geography to secure Jewish demography ignores demographic trends in Israel, in the Muslim world in general and west of the Jordan River in particular. These trends reaffirm that time is working in favour of Israel's Jewish demography.

Currently, in sharp contrast with the demographic establishment's projections, there is a 66 percent Jewish majority (6.3 million Jews) in the combined area of pre-1967 Israel (1.65 million Arabs) and Judea and Samaria (1.66 million Arabs), compared with a 40% Jewish minority in 1948 and a 9% Jewish minority in 1900. The Jewish majority enjoys a robust tailwind of high fertility rates and immigration, which could produce an 80% Jewish majority by 2035.

These 6.3 million Jews (including 350,000 new immigrants not yet recognized as Jews by the rabbinate) expose the systematic errors made by leading demographers. In 1898, the leading Jewish demographer/historian, Simon Dubnov, projected a meagre 500,000 Jews in the Land of Israel by the year 2000. In 1944, the founder of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics and the guru of contemporary Israeli demographers and statisticians, Professor Roberto Bacchi, projected only 2.3 million Jews in Israel by 2001, a 34% minority. In 1987, Hebrew University demographer Professor Sergio Della Pergola told Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth that no substantial aliyah (immigration to Israel) was expected from the USSR, but a million Soviet immigrants then arrived.

In a September 2006 article, Professor Arnon Sofer projected that by 2011 there would be 4.5 million Arabs in Judea and Samaria, almost double the actual number issued in 2011 by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics — 2.6 million. And, in fact, the Palestinian number was severely inflated: It included 400,000 overseas residents and a double count of 300,000 Jerusalem Arabs, who are counted both as Israeli Arabs and as West Bank residents.

In defiance of demographic projections, Israel's Jewish fertility rate of three births per woman is higher than any Arab country's other than Yemen, Iraq and Jordan. The modernity-driven downward trend of Muslim demography is highlighted by Iran's fertility rate of 1.8 births per woman, Saudi Arabia's 2.3 and Syria's and Egypt's 2.9. The Westernization of the Muslim fertility rate was triggered by the unprecedented expansion of education among women, urbanization and family planning. The surge of Israel's Jewish fertility rate was triggered by high levels of optimism, patriotism, collective responsibility, the stable economy and attachment to roots.

In contrast with conventional wisdom, Israel's Jewish-Arab fertility gap has been reduced from six births in 1969 to half a birth in 2012. Moreover, the fertility rates of Jewish and Arab women in their 20s and 30s — in Judea, Samaria and pre-1967 Israel — has converged at three births per woman, with the Jewish rate trending above — and the Arab rate trending below — three births. Furthermore, the fertility rate of Israeli-born Jewish women is already above three births per woman.

In defiance of the demographic profession, the annual number of Israel's Jewish births has surged by 62.5% from 80,400 in 1995 to 130,000 in 2012, while the annual number of Israeli Arab births has been sustained at around 40,000 annually. In 1995, there were 2.3 Jewish births for one Arab birth; in 2012 there were 3.2 Jewish births for one Arab birth.

In 1995 Jewish births amounted to 69% of total births and in 2012 to 77% of total births. In 2013, the Jerusalem Jewish fertility rate is currently 4.2 births, compared with the 3.9 Arab fertility rate.

Contrary to political correctness, Israel's Jewish fertility rate is surging at a time when the fertility rate of the ultra-Orthodox sector is in decline, due to its growing integration into the employment market and military service. The surge in fertility is produced by Israel's secular Jews, and mostly by the yuppies around Tel Aviv and the immigrants from the former USSR.

"The stronger the Jewish commitment, the more likely Jews are to have children. Living in the Land of Israel is one of the strongest manifestations of Jewish commitment … As unique as the Jews are among the world's people, their fertility in Israel is also unique among the nations, and cause for optimism about the future of the Jewish people," David Goldman, author of "How Civilizations Die," wrote (in Focus, Spring 2013, the Jewish Policy Center).

Anyone suggesting that Jews are doomed to become a minority west of the Jordan River is either dramatically mistaken or outrageously misleading.

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ANNE FRANK MUST BE WEEPING
THIS HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE WEEK

Rabbi Abraham Cooper

Fox News, April 10, 2013

This week, the U.S. commemorates Days of Holocaust Remembrance. Solemn ceremonies across the U.S. and around the globe are taking place against the backdrop of two deeply troubling developments. First: the last survivors and eyewitnesses to humanity’s greatest crime are inexorably leaving the stage of history. Israel's President Shimon Peres said that 1,000 Holocaust survivors and dying  in Israel every month.

Secondly: There has been a 30% spike in worldwide anti-Semitic hate crimes and attacks this past year.

Why?

In part, because we are witnessing the consequences of the dimming of collective memory. Holocaust denial, once the domain of the lunatic fringe, is the state policy of Iran and presented as fact in much of the Arab and Muslim world. Lithuania and Hungary are just two European countries who light a candle for their Jewish citizens mass murdered in the 1940s while simultaneously allowing the veneration of their own Nazi collaborators as national heroes.

Which brings us to two incidents in the Netherlands, whose World War II legacy is inexorably linked to the fate of a true hero of humankind: Anne Frank.

The municipality of Bronckhorst has chosen  who it will stand silent for. The town fathers have decided to honor the fallen soldiers of Nazi Germany buried there on Dutch National Memorial Day, May 4.

They originally hoped to have the ceremony last year, but a judge barred it. Now a higher court has cleared the way for the travesty. There are still a few people alive, Jews and non-Jews who survived wartime massacres by the German army. Simply put had Hitler’s Wehrmacht prevailed, no Jew would be alive today and democracy would have been relegated to an unused word in Third Reich dictionaries.

There is another reason why Anne Frank must be weeping—not over the insults to the dead but the danger to the living.

Meet Mehmet Sahin, a Dutch Muslim doctoral student, who volunteers to help youth in the city of Arnhem. A few weeks ago he interviewed a group of Dutch-Turkish youth on Nederlands TV2 during which several declared their unabashed hatred of Jews and open admiration of Hitler. “What Hitler did to the Jews is fine with me,” said one. “Hitler should have killed all the Jews,” said another.

While the youngsters were aware of the fate of Anne Frank, it did not deter these teens from expressing their outright hatred of Jews over and over again, insisting that everyone at their school harbored similar views.

As you can see, their smirks and body language confirm a deeply-embedded hatred as one teen declares: “What Hitler said about Jews is that there will be one day when you see that I am right that I killed all the Jews. And that day will come.”

When Mehmet Sahin reprimanded them and indicated that he was committed to debunk the young people’s hatred, here is how his neighbors reacted:  They collected signatures to demand he leave the area. And when Mehmet began to receive death threats, the Mayor of Arnhem, Pauline Krikke, advised him to go into hiding.

And that is where he and his family are today.

Is this the best solution that democratic Netherlands can come up with? A Witness Protection Program for a man guilty of fighting bigotry and standing up for the truth? Are there no consequences for the hate and threats emanating from adults?

One MP, Ahmed Marcouch said that he would raise the scandal in Parliament. “It is horrible that someone has to be afraid because he has done something that we all should do – teach children not to hate.”

Recently, Mehmet Sahin wrote these words:

“Within a couple of days, I will move to another city of the Netherlands. My personal situation/story is a shame of the European civilization because it is inconceivable that such barbarism can occur in this country. After what happened in the last three weeks, I understood the eternal loneliness and pain of the Jewish population. In the rest of my life, I will tell the whole world that we all must resist this aggression….”

I will be traveling soon and hope I may have the opportunity to meet with Mehmet in the Netherlands. Send your message of solidarity c/o information@wiesenthal.com and together we will let him know that he is not alone. After all, isn't that the message Anne Frank wanted the world to learn?

Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

PERSISTENT ANTI-JUDAISM

Editorial

Jerusalem Post, Apr. 8, 2013

The first ghetto in recorded history was set up in Alexandria in 38 CE at a time when Caligula was emperor of Rome, according to Robert Wistrich, an eminent historian of anti-Semitism. Ever since, and perhaps even before Caligula, anti-Semitism has been the most persistent hatred known to Western society. And this “lethal obsession” is not showing any signs of disappearing any time soon.

In 2012, there were 686 threats, acts of violence and vandalism, including physical attacks – with a weapon (50) or without (89) – perpetrated against Jews because they were Jews, according to a report published on Holocaust Remembrance Day by Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry.

As dependable as the changing of seasons, anti-Semitism may, like the weather, fluctuate, but never does it dissipate.

There are hotter years, such as 2012, when violent incidents rise, and there are years such as 2010 and 2011 when expressions of enmity for Jews fall.

The ebb and flow seems to have its own internal rules.

When Israel defends itself – whether against Hezbollah aggression on the Lebanon border or against Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in the South – Jews living in places like Toulouse or the Bronx are inevitably targeted.

And deadly attacks, like the one on the Ozar Hatorah School in Toulouse in which a rabbi and four children were murdered by Salafist Mohamed Merah, encourage more violence. The carrying out of such atrocities breaks a psychological barrier, paving the way for more.

The tradition of publicizing data related to anti-Semitism on Holocaust Remembrance Day is liable to lead to despair. Even the Shoah failed to shock humanity into abandoning its most ancient hatred. And a new book by historian David Nirenberg titled, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition, leaves little room for optimism.

In his work of extraordinary erudition, Nirenberg traces enmity toward Judaism from ancient Egypt through the modern era in thinkers such as Karl Marx. He chooses the term “anti-Judaism” as opposed to “anti-Semitism” because the deployment of Judaism as a force of evil that purportedly threatens Egyptian, Christian, Muslim and modern society, takes place irrespective of the existence of living and breathing Jews, whether in Shakespeare’s England, 16th-century Spain, Martin Luther’s Germany or elsewhere.

Manetho, an Egyptian historian who lived in the third century BCE, transformed Moses and the Hebrews into lepers who spread diseases as a means of making sense of his people’s history of subjection to foreign powers.

Early Christians used the term “Judaism” or “Pharisee” to describe those who rejected Jesus and who attached an overly literal reading of the Bible, in the process destroying the “spirit” of the gospels. Muslims portrayed Judaism as a force that corrupted holy texts. And when Luther rebelled against Catholicism, he attacked the church’s “legalistic understanding of God’s justice” as “Jewish.”

Nor did the age of secularism usher in a more positive perception of Judaism. Marx’s insistence on the abolishment of private property emanated from his desire to emancipate society from Judaism’s spiritual slavery and alienation from the world. It was, after all, the essential “Jewishness” of money and property that produced the despicable Jewish qualities in the gentiles who used them.

Anti-Judaism is, therefore, not solely a negative attitude toward Jews. Rather it has evolved through the ages as an intellectual apparatus for engaging with and/or criticizing the world. This negative mode of thinking about Judaism’s impact on perceptions has persisted after the Holocaust. As Nirenberg points out at the end of his book, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the arguments that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel.’”

Notwithstanding the calls to “combat” expressions of anti-Semitism throughout the world, the fight against hatred of Jews seems doomed to failure. Zionism’s response, tragically belated in implementation, was, and still is, the most pragmatic to this disheartening reality.

Jewish political self-determination has, admittedly, created problems of its own. But when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu vows, as he did at Yad Vashem on Sunday night, “never again will there be a Shoah,” even Israel’s most virulent detractors take him seriously – or they should.

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On Topic

PA Museum Invents 200-Year-Old Palestinian History: Tzvi Ben-Gedalyahu, Jewish Press, Apr. 12, 2013—The cornerstone was laid Thursday for a new museum north of Ramallah to show off 200 years of the culture of “Palestinians,” another Arab effort to invent a past that has no future. It is a lot easier to convince the world that Israel is “occupying its land” if Arabs can show that the “Palestinians” existed 200 years ago and were not invented by Yasser Arafat. 

Anti-Semitism is why the Arab Spring Failed: Ahmad Hashemi, Times of Israel, April 9, 2013—About two years ago, when the so-called pro-democracy movement, better known as the “Arab Spring,” began in the region, many commentators hailed it as “a great step forward,” “a turning point in the contemporary Arab world history”, and a “fourth wave of democratization.” I remember those days very well because my colleagues at Iran’s foreign ministry were very excited.

Israeli Firm Talks up Mankind’s Recovery from the Tower Of Babel: David Shamah, Times of Israel, April 9, 2013—You speak in your language but the listener hears you in his or hers — by phone, via the Internet, or even face-to-face. “We believe that our product is the harbinger of a revolution.” said Ike Sagie, the CEO of Lexifone. A step toward conquering the Earth’s linguistic cacophony, Lexifone lets you speak to anyone in English and (so far) seven other languages. The person on the other end (or right next to you, using an Android app) hears what you’ve just said in his or her own language. Right now, speakers of English, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, and Mandarin can call each other and have their conversations automatically translated.

Israel Vanishing from Scotland Libraries: Giulio Meotti, Israel National News, April 10, 2013—It does not matter what ideas are contained in these books, it is the bare fact of their origin which is enough for them to be banned. One of Scotland’s councils has just implemented a boycott of Israel after comparing the country to apartheid South Africa. The Clackmannanshire Council declared it would resist all economic and political support for Israel in order to “end suffering in Palestine”. In Scotland, once known as the only European country which has no history of state persecution of Jews, a region is officially dedicated to the eradication of the Jewish State as a malevolent, “settler” and foreign entity.

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