Pages: 1 2
Israel continues to endure the fallout from the Mavi Marmara debacle; Israel gets blamed for defending herself even though Turkish hired assassins had come with the express purpose of assaulting and murdering Israeli soldiers.
In the teeth of this cruel public relations disaster, the indomitable Italian parliamentarian Fiamma Nirenstein, the chair of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians, asked me to write something that would be read at a massive pro-Israel rally that she, together with Giuliano Ferrara, the publisher of Il Foglio, helped organize.
The rally took place on October 7, 2010, in Rome. More than 3,000 people were present at the Temple of Hadrian. Among those present were Italy’s prime minister, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, president of the Senate, the mayor of Rome, the president of the Jewish community of Rome, the chief rabbi of Rome, and a former Prime Minister of Spain. Messages from Prime Minister Netanyahu and from a distinguished host of intellectuals and politicians were beamed in.
I am now holding a book that memorializes this event: Per La Verita, Per Israele: Mille voci al Tempio di Adriano (For The Truth, For Israel: A Thousand Voices at the Temple of Hadrian). Each contribution appears in both Italian and English. The pieces are passionate, sophisticated, and written by people from many countries, including Italy, Spain, France, Norway, Finland, Holland, the United States, and Israel, etc., including pieces by Iranian dissidents in exile, Iraqis in exile, apostates in Parliament (Magdi Cristiano Allam), the Association of Arab Women in Italy, and Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini. My most excellent colleagues Bruce Bawer, Melanie Phillips, Benny Morris, and of course Giuilo Meotti, all appear in the book.
Italy has a long and sordid history of persecuting its Jews. The word “ghetto” comes from the district in Venice in which Jews were forced to live and where they were locked in after dark. I recently took a tour of Jewish Rome and, since I love Italy, was especially saddened by the stories of repeated massacres, pogroms, and ritual persecution that afflicted the Jews of every region.
And still, a remnant of Italian Jewry survived. Alas, so does anti-Semitism.
Given the ongoing events, i.e. the flotilla and flytilla that failed, the hostile mass “surges” into Jewish Israel, the sabotage of the gas lines from Egypt to Israel, and the upcoming UN vote on Palestinian statehood—all of which amounts to the Third Intifada—I hope that Nirenstein is ready to rally soon again.
The 2010 rally in Rome, and now the book that memorializes it, parts company with Italian history. It is an act of profound resistance which I applaud. Here is what I wrote, and what was read for me at this rally.
*
The War In Jerusalem Will Spare Nobody. After the Jews, It Will Be the Christians’ Turn.
Without doubt, Israel potentially faces extinction, possibly a Second Holocaust.
Indeed, many Europeans continue Hitler’s Holocaust by supporting fifty-seven Islamic apartheid nation states against the single Jewish democratic state.
The worldwide media has become totally “Palestinianized” and Stalinized. Palestinians—even the haters, terrorists, and torturers, are naught but noble, innocent victims. Israel has literally become Orwell’s 1984 “Goldstein,” whom propagandized mobs are taught to scapegoat for their every conceivable sorrow.
The ideological assault against Israel has escalated. Daily, hourly, in every language, the media repeats Big Lies. Israel is the “Nazi, apartheid” state, the “colonial” aggressor; neat trick, that. Bloody Muslim imperialism and Islamic religious and gender apartheid are thus denied and projected onto Israel.
Israel is essentially, existentially, “evil.”
In 2005, Ahmadinejad said that Israel must be “wiped off the map.” In 2006, he said that the Middle East would be better off “without the existence of the Zionist regime” and that Israel would “soon be wiped out.”
President Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust, but really, he feels Hitler did not go far enough. Thus, he is taking up where Hitler left off—Amadinejad’s intention is a clearly stated genocidal one.
No one is stopping him.
Pages: 1 2





















