Op-Ed – How Many Times Do We Need to Bear Witness?

By: Ginette Weiner

Bearing witness in 2023 translates into thousands blaming Jews, blaming The Jewish State, for being butchered, raped, their children beheaded. If we thought humans couldn’t reach new depths post Holocaust, we were wrong.  From The Squad in America, to the Democratic Socialists in NYC, to student groups at many elite universities (including Harvard, Yale and Columbia, & especially CUNY) having come out in support of Hamas at a time when its terrorists have committed the most heinous of Nazi style atrocities. (https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20040/students-professors-support-hamas)

In 1969, age 18, I went to Israel. My aunt took me to Yad Vashem. I held my tears in until the very last exhibit. I saw a silent towering pile of children’s shoes, worn, scuffed, shoe laces torn. I broke down sobbing.  In 2015, I went through the Yad Vashem Children’s Memorial, again in Israel. It was hollowed out from an underground cavern, darkly lit, with uneven steps, keeping you unbalanced. The ceiling is filled with stars for each of these murdered children. As you walk slowly through, you hear the names of the 1.5 million slaughtered Jewish children called out, one by one. The unbearable ache never completely goes away.

This little girl stays with me. She is never far from my consciousness. The Holocaust documentary shows her trying to roll up the sleeve on her tattered coat, as she was asked to do, to show the tattoo of the number on her tiny arm. She did this with earnestness and intensity, as if to say to the world, to someone, to anyone, ‘if I do what I’m told, if I am a good girl, maybe this nightmare will stop’. It did not stop.

As I write this now, my tears welled up again, for this little girl, and the millions like her who were butchered just because they were Jews. I never thought in 2023, I would again be sobbing with rage and grief for Jewish Israeli children literally torn apart, beheaded, women raped, their naked, dead bodies stomped on, the dead paraded like war trophies, families trapped, their charred remains found and a video of a young woman, kidnapped and burned alive, as she writhed on the ground in pain.  At least the Nazis gassed us before cremating us, although towards the end, as the Allies were descending they threw Jewish children alive into the ovens.

“Where are you?”—a question that so many asked God during the Holocaust, and which so many of us have been asking God ever since, is not a question for us to ask God, but a question for God to ask us.  Where was the moral compass of the millions who simply looked the other way as the Nazis and their army of willing executioners perpetrated such monstrous evil. Rather than honestly confront this standing question, people instead tried to excuse their inaction. Too often, they justified their failure to accept our moral obligations to one another by hiding behind another question.” Elders of Zion

And now, we again hear those hiding behind more “questions” and false accusations. We bear witness to mainstream media calling Hamas “militants” vs. terrorists, and calling “Palestinian” terrorists “activists.” If beheading children is now under the amoral Orwellian definition of “militants”, what does this tell us about our future to remain civilized?

We witness worldwide rallies, once again blaming Jews, blaming the Jewish State for being butchered by Islamic Jihad Hamas whose charter and stated goals openly says it will rid the Middle East of all Jews, then go after us worldwide, yet somehow not mentioning the rocket attacks into Israel, for decades by Hamas, the brutality of life under Hamas as they now will begin blaming Israel for its self defense.

Some say, “Well, we don’t go along with what Hamas has done but we still blame Israel for what Hamas did.” That’s like saying, “We don’t go along with what the Nazis did to Jews but we support their reasons for murdering them. They deserved it”.

Still going further, they are now blaming Israel for the plight of Arabs in Gaza whose homes have been destroyed, instead of blaming Hamas and Gaza for brutalizing Arabs living in Gaza for years. The Gaza strip could have been a mecca by the sea, attracting tourists, building thriving communities of prosperity and peace. Instead Hamas and Fatah opted for more jihad, builds terror tunnels inside homes and mosques to plot kidnappings, smuggle arms and construct launch pads among UN facilities and schools.

It seems Jews can never do anything right. We are blamed for…being Jews. Period. The legal State of Israel was built with The Holocaust’s tattoos visible on the arms of Jewish survivors, truly desperate for a safe haven, who have extended the hand of peace to all its neighbors.

According to British writer and commentator Melanie Phillips, “The ignorant and malicious lie of Israeli “oppression” and injustice is embedded in western “progressive” circles. Totally ignoring the Palestinians’ genocidal anti-Semitism, this narrative has sanitized, emboldened and incentivized Palestinian incitement against Israel and the Jewish people for decades. Jews on the left, including those now wringing their hands over the massacre in Israel, are complicit in this malignant echo chamber.

They are part of a western culture that is no longer prepared to recognize evil. It seeks instead to ascribe it to motives like oppression.  It tells itself that every aggressive cause is amenable to compromise. It refuses to accept that sometimes there’s no alternative but to fight until the forces of evil are crushed by a military victory.

By refusing to accept this, such “progressives” sentence countless innocents to die. That is what has happened in Israel. That’s why yet more innocents there will be slaughtered, and yet more young Israeli conscripts are now being sent into the line of fire. Israel will fight to destroy this evil because it has no choice. Many western progressives have chosen to support evil instead.”

The world’s selective, morally bankrupt amnesia, repeating the worse of its own history deliberately ignores:

—Hamas co-founder speaks of a world with “no Zionism or treacherous Christianity,” says full Islamic control of the planet will ensure justice for all.

NOT JUST ISRAEL: Hamas vows to cleanse world of Christianity

—The filthy lies about Jews in “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” are a best seller and believed as truth in the Middle East. Egypt had a long running TV series enacting it.

-Arafat, who orchestrated the massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich to “put the Palestinians on the map,” speaking in Arabic, told his fellow Arabs that the Oslo Peace Accords is just a small stepping stone to buy time until we can rid ourselves of the Jewish State. But for Clinton and the West, he smiled for the cameras.

“Palestinian” Arabs have never once made a counter offer. Anyone who truly wants peace, sits down at the negotiating table, sweats it out, while building communities of peace. Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948 and reached out to its Arab neighbors for peaceful relations. The offer was met by five

Arab armies declaring war on the fragile, tiny Jewish state, vowing its total destruction.”   If the cowardly and ignorant West would have put immediate and consistent pressure on these so-called “Palestinian” Arabs to negotiate and accept the many fair peace offers, instead of falsely blaming the true victim, Israel, they would have been celebrating their statehood.  Truly desperate people have no choices or options. Yes, they are “desperate.” They are in desperate need of Islamic Imams who will stop preaching Jew hate on their official P.A. TV. Their children are in desperate need of parents and leaders who will stop sending their children to summer camps to learn how to kill Jews as a holy act of Islamic Jihad martyrdom.

So to all the media, who fail to do any fact based, objective research towards making conclusions using critical thinking skills and contextual history, to those who base their opinions on the Big Lies these Arabs put forth, and to all the just plain Jew haters out there, who have always needed a bogeyman to blame for their woes, do us a favor. Find someone else for a change to blame, like Abbas or Hamas or Hezbollah or Fatah whose collective and individual Jew hate are bottomless, violent and barbaric and who won’t stop until there are no Jews left on earth.

We’ve already been scattered to the ends of the earth, post Holocaust. We’ve had more than our share of the world’s hatred, from the Spanish Inquisition to The Holocaust, and now in 2023, butchering, burning, beheading Israeli Jewish children and adults.

Leave us alone. Never again means never again. This time, we will take you down with us if forced to.

Ginette Weiner, is a published commentator in Jewish and mainstream newspapers, and a lecturer on strategies for combating media bias, anti-Semitism, and BDS. She holds an MSW and a Certification in “Understanding Media Bias & Israel Advocacy: Defending Israel from Media Bias”, 23rd Mission to Israel, Honest Reporting: June, 2015. She resides in Arizona.