Dutch Treat
By Israel Shamir
On November 12, 2005, the
leading Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf published an article
Op kruistocht met de duivel by a Jewish writer Joost De
Haas attacking me, in the good company of the Dutch PM Dries
van Agt and the wonderful Dutch lady, a friend of Palestine
Gretta Duisenberg. The last two were condemned for keeping
in touch with me, while I was proclaimed guilty of being at
the same congress as the US right-wing anti-war activist
David Duke. Alas, this Talmudic construction of secondary
impurity collapses at the first fact check. I had no honour
and pleasure to meet with Mr van Agt or Mrs Duisenberg. As
for the congress in Ukraine I attended, it was not organised
by ‘extreme right’ but by the largest Ukrainian private
university, well recognised by UNESCO and Dutch
Universities. As a matter of fact, I sat at the presidium of
the congress, but not next to David Duke, as de Haas claims,
but next to the Palestine Ambassador in Ukraine, His
Excellency Walid Zakut. Here is an official photo of this
occasion:
Mr Duke was just one of many
participants of the congress, next to many writers,
diplomats, members of parliament. Anyway his views are quite
similar to those of the late Dutch politician Pym Fortuyn.
However, de Haas had no problem meeting with Pym Fortuyn and
writing about him. Neither was he ostracised by other Dutch
politicians and media. There is no problem for any Dutch
politician who would meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon, though he personally is guilty – not of some
unpleasant right-wing views, but of outright war crimes,
from mass murder in Qibie to Sabra and Shatila to siege of
Beirut to massacre of Jenin. Thus Mr. Duke is chosen as the
object of de Haas’ hate for something else – for his
stubborn objection to the US-led war in the Middle East.
Likewise, Mr de Haas and others of his ilk never minded Pym
Fortuyn, for he was an obsessive Islamophobe, and it fitted
into their plans for encouraging strife between the
Christians and the Muslims in Europe and elsewhere.
The rest of de Haas’ piece is
equally sloppy and dishonest. He says I wrote about the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Big deal! So did Umberto
Eco. Writers are, and will be interested in this political
pamphlet. In a bout of anti-Communist rage, de Haas claims
that the Protocols were published and used in the Communist
Soviet Union. It was the other way around! The Soviet
authorities punished the possession of this book by heavy
terms of imprisonment, and even by death. It was, contrary
to de Haas' claims, banned in Tsarist Russia as well. So,
the man really does not know what he writes about.
His complaint that my writing
appears on some right (and left-) wing sites can’t be taken
seriously by anybody who ever used the Internet. Everything
is linked in the World Wide Web, and just one step separates
de Haas writing from mine on this or any other site.
However, I do not mind: as a flower does not check
credentials of the bee coming to collect its nectar, I rely
upon various websites, left, right, green and multicoloured,
to deliver my message to as many people as possible, and
this message is: ‘there will be no peace until Jews are
considered equal to non-Jews, in Palestine and elsewhere’.
Now Jews are not equal: they may have nuclear weapons, while
their neighbours are forbidden, they may travel everywhere
in the whole of Palestine, while a goy has to use special
roads. Jews are not equal in Netherlands, either: Pym
Fortuyn was proclaimed (after his untimely death) ‘not bad a
guy’ for he was good to Jews. Never mind what he said about
the Muslims. Jews are not equal in neighbouring Denmark,
whose Queen Margareta said recently: “We have to show our
opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk
of having unflattering labels placed on us”. But what about
opposition to Judaism? One would be crucified for this very
thought.
De Haas condemns me for my
objection to Judaism. It was good that Spinoza who had
similar views did not survive to the present time. But
Spinoza was among the first Jews who rebelled against
Judaism for a good reason – until advent of freedom in
Netherlands, even in the 14th century, such
Jewish heretics were burned at the stake by decision of
autonomous Jewish rabbinical authorities. Such persecution
persists: in the Jewish state, propagation of Christianity
is punishable by five years of jail, while outside of
Israel, de Haas and others of his ilk are doing all they can
to make the life of a Jewish heretic unbearable.
De Haas objects to my call to
my fellow Israelis to accept Christ. He does not even
mention, nor object to, to the official plan of Israeli
government to convert 300,000 Israeli Christians to Jewish
faith within next five years, though this plan was made
public and the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption received
budgeted funds for it. Why is it permissible to spend
taxpayer’s funds to remove people from the church, and it is
forbidden to convince others to come to the Church? Alas, de
Haas and his ilk hate the Church and Christ as much as they
hate Muslims. Not in vain did his friend and associate Abe
Foxman of the notorious ADL recently publish a hysterical
piece on ‘excessive Christian influence’ in the US.
De Haas claims I consider the
Jews as ‘Christ-killers’. To the contrary, I wrote in
Galilee Flowers, that there is no more reason to blame
modern Jews for that crime than to blame French for killing
of Joan of Ark. But we may disprove those of de Haas ilk who
are proud of killing Christ and consider it their right duty
well done.
De Haas claims I called Jews
‘bacilli’. Let him quote verse and chapter from my writings;
he won’t find it. But he will find without effort that our
previous Prime Minister, whom he met and publicly admired,
Mr Barak, called the native non-Jewish Palestinians a
‘virus’ in an official interview in the Ha'aretz newspaper,
and Telegraaf did not call upon the Dutch prime minister to
cancel his visit.
He notes that my book
Galilee Flowers (called in French The Other Face of
Israel) was banned by a French court. This is true. I
find this verdict of the French court a compliment for me,
as I have now joined the great list of authors whose books
were burned and banished in France, from Voltaire to
Baudelaire, from Nabokov to Joyce, from Wilhelm Reich to
Vladimir Lenin, and I hope to come back to the French
readers out of this bonfire as their books did. However, I
find this court decision extremely shameful for France, as
instead of hatred and war, my books call for peace and
equality. Not in vain, my Galilee Flowers (buy it from
http://www.booksurge.com/product.php3?bookID=GPUB02699-00003
) has the subtitle “The Case for Israel and Palestine United
in Love to Their Land.” But this dream of peace can’t be
achieved until there is full equality, until a Muslim and a
Christian gets the same treatment as a Jew.
Yes, I do feel betrayed by the
French court. When Spinoza was condemned by Rabbinical
authorities, he knew that the Christian Netherlands wouldn’t
deliver him into their tender clutches. The French court
reverted back into the days of Pedro the Cruel who would
surrender a Jewish heretic to the Synagogue for its quick
justice. The French judges easily rejected the demands to
ban Salman Rushdie or Oriana Fallaci in the name of freedom
of thought. But why does this freedom stop at the Jewish
door? Last week when I was in France, many ex-Jews who came
to Christ met me and expressed their serious concern. Is
Christianity dead? Is the Church dead? Is there no
counterbalance to the Jewish influence? It is symptomatic
that the attack on me, published in the day of my
publisher’s trial by the French left-wing weekly Politis was
penned by a Frenchman, Jean-Yves Camus, a recent convert
into Judaism? Though he spoke at length about my baptism, he
forgot to refer to his apostasy.
De Haas makes a lot of mileage
out of old hat, that I supposedly do not live in the Holy
Land but in Sweden, and that my name is something else. This
silly stuff was first published by the ADL-financed Expo
website, whose ties with Israeli intelligence were made
public. Then it was republished by its sister publication of
Searchlight, which proudly describes itself as a ‘Jewish
antifascist magazine’. Somehow this nonsense never made it
to Israel. There, the right-wing, extremely nationalist
daily Maariv recently published a
five-full-pages-long expose of my modest self, which
included interviews with my elderly mother, a prominent
member of an Israeli nationalist party, and everybody who
had ever met me. But even this hostile article did not lower
itself to publish such obvious nonsense. In my home in
Israel, I receive visitors daily, including those from the
Netherlands; I feel comfortable enough, and if I am to be
tried for my betrayal of the Jewish cause, for my belief in
equality of Jew and goy, I’d rather be tried in Israel than
in once-Christian Europe.
As for the names I supposedly
use, I shall quote the Talmud, which I know better than de
Haas: “R. Joseph b. Judah was known as Joseph of Huzal and
as Issi b. Gur Aryeh and as Issi b. Gamaliel and as Issi b.
Mehalalel. What was his real name? Issi b. Akabia” (Pesachim
113b) Likewise, I may be known as Samir in Jordan, or Irmas
in Sweden, or Mirosami in Japan, or Smirnov in Russia, and
even as Jersma in the Netherlands, while my real name is
Israel Adam Shamir; it is quite irrelevant; as irrelevant as
the ‘real name’ of Leon Trotsky (Bernstein) or of Ariel
Sharon (Schneidman) or of Andre Maurois (Wilhelm Herzog) or
of Salman Rushdie when he was in hiding in Bienfait,
Saskatchewan, living under an assumed name. Usually such a
discussion is not considered comme il faut, especially
referring to Israel, where even an ex-Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu keeps an American passport on another
name. But apparently this game is crooked, and what is
forbidden to one side, is permitted to the opponent.
Israel Adam Shamir
