Saudi Arabia Reminds Us We Are All Jews

I grow weary of having to explain to people over and over again why defending Israel and confronting anti-Semitism are such high priorities in my writing and editing. It just seems like something so obvious. But still, “You’re not even Jewish!” or “You haven’t even been to Israel!” come too frequently.

Yeah, but that doesn’t matter because the Jew-haters want to kill me too. To them I’m enough of a Jew to be worthy of a beheading or gas chamber.

I’m an inter-faith mystic who pursues the Divine throughout the world’s religious traditions. This spiritual approach sits on top of Judaism’s foundation of ethical monotheism. And that’s all one needs to draw the violence of the anti-Semites because that’s really what they hate. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote, “The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses of society by the Jewish press.” Freemasons and the Roma people (known by the derogatory term “gypsies” and often stereotyped as fortune tellers) were executed alongside Jews in the Holocaust.

And today the same thing is happening again in the Muslim world on a smaller scale. But credit where due: The Daily Beast — certainly not mistakable for a conservative publication — didn’t have to make it the lead link in their daily email yesterday afternoon. But they did. Thank you.