As is well known, between 1348 and 1350, perhaps half of Europe's population perished in the terrible pandemic known as the Black Death, which entered Britain through the Dorsetshire port of Weymouth in 1349, proceeding to spread through the country with all the deadly and demographic effects that it wrought on the Continent.
It's also well-known that, searching for an explanation for the then inexplicable Black Death, fourteenth-century minds selected scapegoats, and that the group primarily blamed for the Black Death were the Jews, who were assumed to have poisoned the wells.
In the insanity that ensued, innumerable Jewish communities were destroyed, and tens of thousands of Jews suffered horrible deaths. (There is a good summary of events here)
Skip to our own supposedly enlightened time, many centuries and several other devastating scapegoatings of Jews later, including the worst tragedy in Jewish history, and we find this loathsome article appearing on the website of Iran's Press TV.
Reminiscent of a Jew-baiter through the ages, including those benighted medieval folk who blamed the Jews of Europe for the Black Death, its author blames the Jews of Israel for the recent chemical attack on Syrians:
".... The chemical weapons attack in Damascus was obviously a Zionist ploy to drag the US deeper into the Syrian conflict. The Israelis, the world's grand masters at the game of false-flag terrorism, had the means, motive, and opportunity....
But now, a growing number of people around the world are rejecting the official story of 9/11. The inevitable exposure of the truth about 9/11 is a slow-motion earthquake that will bring down the US and Zionist empires.
So the Zionists are taking another massive gamble. They are hoping that leading the world to the brink of World War III - and possibly over the brink - will save their doomed “Greater Israel” project. A huge war would give the Zionists an excuse to expel non-Jews from historic Palestine, complete the ethnic cleansing that has been ongoing since 1948, and defuse the “demographic bomb.” And since the Zionists and their American stooges are losing relative strength each year, the hard-liners want to fight the big war now, while they think they still have an advantage.
The Syrian chemical false-flag appears to be Israel's biggest escalation of the “clash of civilizations” since 9/11. This time, the world must expose the truth rapidly, or risk the destruction of not just millions, but even tens or hundreds of millions of lives."The author of the above blood libel in modern dress is an American "Arabist-Islamologist" called Dr Kevin Barrett, author of Truth Jihad: My Epic Struggle Against the 9/11 Big Lie (2007) and Questioning the War on Terror: A Primer for Obama Voters (2009) who (hat tip: reader Ian) received a derisory share of the vote when he ran for Congress in 2008 and has claimed that the Boston Bombing was an Israeli plot.
What is surely very shocking is that (hat tip: Jonathan Hoffman: "Linked to by Stephen Sizer on FB. Of course.") the (avowedly non-antisemitic) Rev Dr Stephen Sizer was apparently low enough to link, on Facebook, to Barrett's disgustingly antisemitic article.
It would be pleasing to think that the Israel-obsessed Rev Sizer has realised that in promoting the ramblings of a man like Barrett he has truly scraped the bottom of the barrel and will remove/has removed the link.
[Update: Rev Sizer has now withdrawn the link h/t Anon; see Comments below]
As for all Christian clerical foes of Israel, they should take a look at this video, and reflect.
Your linked article on the Black Death suggests that Jews were singled out because they were not suffering to the same extent. The reason being the benign effect of the Levitical hygiene laws. According to the book 'None of these Diseases' by S.I. McMillen M.D. (and since updated), it was the application of the Levitical principle of quarantine that brought the disease under control. The mob blamed the Jews but there were cooler heads in the Church, only they had the power and the knowledge, who reasoned it out and enforced the rules. Grimly ironic that the Jews were blamed for being the cause when, in fact, they had the cure.
ReplyDeleteThanks for these interesting points, Ian.
Deletebtw, thanks for posting on The Almond Rod blog that CUFI video about how Israel is the only ME country in whih the number of Christians is rising.
DeleteDID yOU SEE THIS dAPHNE (fACEBOOK)!
ReplyDeleteStephen Sizer
6 hours ago near Camberley, England, United Kingdom via mobile
I removed the link to the article from Press TV posted this morning about possible Israeli involvement in the chemical weapon attack in Syria, not because I rule out that possibility (Haaretz are reporting speculations to that effect from US sources) but rather because I disagree with some of the pejorative language used which has antisemitic overtones and the insinuation of Israeli complicity in 9/11 which I reject.
Thank you very much, Anon.
DeleteOf course, given the widespread perception of him, Rev Sizer is anxious to exert his non-antisemitic credentials ...
Many people (me included) will be wondering, however, why he decided to link to such a repellent article in the first place, given its content that he now derides.
Good artile by Nigella Lawson's journalist brother, in whih he makes the point:
ReplyDelete'Forget the massacre of thousands in Syria and Egypt, whether by chemical weapons or more conventional methods of mass slaughter. The Middle Eastern issue galvanising some of our musical mega-stars and their followers, even now, is the treatment by Israel of Palestinians....
....
This tribal and sectarian dispute, which has the potential to become the Muslim equivalent of the Thirty Years War, has about as much to do with Israel as did the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. And the peoples involved care very little, if at all, about the fate of the Palestinians – certainly much less than do Nigel Kennedy and Roger Waters.
Yet some western governments still fall for the bizarre idea that if the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians were to be sorted, then this would help to solve all the other conflicts in the region. Thus the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius declared last week, following a meeting with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “The Israeli-Palestinian issue is …perhaps the central issue of the region.”....
To be fair to Fabius, that is the sort of thing visiting dignitaries are expected to say when in Ramallah. But, in the midst of the conflagrations in Egypt and Syria, it does bring to mind the remark of the late French ambassador in London, Daniel Bernard, who in 2001 delivered himself of the view that “all the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.”
Hyperbole has surrounded that little nation ever since it was created in 1948 and the secretary of the Arab League pronounced, as five Arab countries launched a joint attack on the one-day-old state: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.” Now the exterminations and massacres are Arab on Arab; but somehow it will still be said to be all to do with Israel.'
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/dominic-lawson-so-who-still-thinks-israel-is-the-root-of-middle-east-problems-8794664.html