By Marion D.S Dreyfus
For those with a head for history, majored in symbolism or ethnography, or certainly, if you are a Jew, it is icily evidently just a baby step away that events of the past fortnight, following the unprovoked aggression of terrorist cancer Hamas against tiny Israel, evokes nothing less than a sad re-consideration of that historic nightmare called Kristallnacht. Night of broken glass.
Lest you dismiss this as overstatement, unfair hype, it is not.
The unheralded rise of mortal attacks against Jews worldwide, especially in the sole Jewish homeland, Israel–as well as in what we Americans briefly considered a safe haven after two millennia of fleeing from country to country, inhospitably unwelcome, dispossessed, our treasures appropriated, our homes taken without compensation, lived in by those who hated the former owners—is but 82 years distant from this nazi three-night pogrom of coordinated destruction of Jewish businesses, synagogues and institutions in November 1938.
The broken glass, alone, from Kristallnacht, was in the multi-millions of reichsmarks. Symbolically, after years of increasingly harsh anti-Jew impositions, this nazi military attack made clear that Jewish life to continue in Germany was, now. impossible.
Why bring this up? Because the latest of hundreds of heinous recent pop-up attacks against wholly unrelated Jewish people–men, women and children—took place in an area famed for “glass” of a different sort: Diamonds. This latest attack is evocative of the shards of glass that symbolized the destroyed thousands of lives in Germany in 1938, and thereafter, until the end of the war, in 1044.
Kristallnacht signaled the start of the Anschluss, where resident Jews all over Europe were rounded up, put on filthy, airless cattle cars without food or water or toilets, shipped to their deaths in concentration camps.
Sadly, recent spates of anti-Asian attacks, perpetrated almost wholly by blacks, not “Palestinians” or Hamas supporters in the US, has in a way de-sensitized the non-Jewish public to the densifying spiral of violence now bathing the internet and those few, very few, TV channels carrying videos of these attacks. being perpetrated from Los Angeles to the diamond district, its common appellation, in New York City’s West 47th Street.
Concerned with the wider effects on stores and people in the area, we consulted our colleague, Lateif Dickerson, founder and president of the New Jersey Firearms Academy in Jersey City, an expert on weaponry, shooting, grenades and firearms of all kinds. And a longtime instructor on firearms use and safety for police recruits and trainees in the Tri-State area. As well as an expert marksman who has won endless awards at gun meets and national contests.
Dickerson stated that most such weapons, occasionally available at Army & Navy Supply emporia, have been decommissioned to make them nonfunctional. But their range, if active, can be a blast area exceeding 20-25 feet. Worse than the actual explosion, however, is the damaging or lethal effects of the fragments ricocheting from hard surfaces, which can determine dozens of injured persons within a larger space than just the concussive explosive origination.
The famed street, staffed largely by Jewish shop owners and workers, was immortalized, one could say, in the “recognition” scene in Dustin Hoffman’s chilling 1976 suspenser, “Marathon Man,” written by William Goldman, where an elderly concentration camp Survivor in this diamond district, West 47th Street, recognizes nazi camp doctor Szell (played by Lawrence Olivier), “Der Weisse Angel,” hunting a cache of stolen diamonds secreted since the WWII nazi era. Szell thinks Hoffman, “Babe,” knows where they are.
Szell’s infamous line to Hoffman’s Babe, as Szell drills into Hoffman’s teeth–without benefit of anaesthesia, is “Is it safe?”
Symbolically, the broken glass of Kristallnacht marking the end of a long era of Jews living in Europe peacefully—or as close to that as draconian laws, pogroms and constant harassment can define, is perhaps chosen by the equally cruel Hamasite or Palestinian hooligans with weapons, alien flags and possible grenades, by one account.
Diamonds refract like broken glass.
Thankfully, nazis have passed into history as a force to be reckoned with, save for films seeking villains when Arab PR machines object to being portrayed as contemporary villains. But of course, they exist in pockets, neo-nazis in many countries, not least in the Northwest, where neo-nazis meet regularly, hang indicia of Third reich paraphernalia, and swear allegiance to their dead fuhrer. And to hatred unabated of the Jews.
So we can, even today, ask, in regards to being Jewish where we are once again the unremitting target of loathsome beings bent on hurting us, Is it safe?
Has our chief executive, Joseph R Biden, and his assigns in the alphabet agencies, made it clear that Jews, as well as Asians, are to be protected, left unmolested, and any wrong done to these minorities will be relentlessly punished and removed from the public sphere? You answer that. Based on your closest evaluation of any intel you can glean on TV,nradio, YouTube, Twitter, other popular social media –or wireless candygrams.
We can answer truthfully, tragically, No. Even in this great land of freedom and opportunity, once a welcoming beacon even to Jews expelled or unwanted elsewhere,
No, it is not, now, safe, to be a Jew. Even in 24-carat America.
