Am Yisrael, Slavery, & The Greenslime Factor

Am Yisrael Chai  ("The People of Israel Lives") is of course an uttered reminder that Hitler failed in his intent to wipe every Jewish man, woman and child off the face of the earth.

It is an affirmation of life and of hope and refers to K'lal Yisrael, the entire community of Israel, the  remnant of the Jewish People who managed to survive the Shoah and the descendants of those survivors.

Shockingly, a certain British Jew has seen fit to observe:

Or perhaps not so shockingly to those au fait with the idées fixes of this Guardian-contributing "radical Communist" anti-Israel blogger, who has been cited by Professor Richard Landes here as being among the

"Jewish writers [who] don’t merely critique Israeli policy, but routinely engage in hyperbole, vitriol, and gross distortions.  Their rhetoric is often spewed with hate towards the Jewish state, all but ignoring the behavior of her enemies – the terrorist and reactionary movements who openly seek her annihilation.  Such commentators often infer that the democratic Jewish state (the most progressive nation, by far, in the region) is almost always in the wrong, is usually motivated by a hideous malevolence, and represents a national  movement which they, as Jews, are ashamed to be associated with."

That despicable tweet is, alas, seemingly representative of the mindset of Tony Greenstein, who's captured on camera below not by the BBC (which trots him out from time to time in discussion programs) but by Sussex Friends of Israel founder Simon Cobb outside Ecostream in Brighton.

 A couple of other very recent tweets from Mr Greenstein, who's evidently not shy of using the term "Zio" despite it's being used as shorthand for Jew by antisemites:

The admirable John Mann, of course, knows what antisemitism is as well as the vast majority of British Jews.  (Inter alia, he has said, "the threats" to Jews include "The British intellectuals who get nervous when I label them accurately, not as the anti-Zionists they wish to be known as, but as the racists that they have become."  Quite so, quite so.)

Despicably, too, Mr Greenstein has posted the following on Facebook (hat tip: reader P):

It is not necessary to hit back with reminders of the sorry story of the Arab slave trade, which over the centuries saw both black people and white deprived of their liberty under the most cruel and ferocious circumstances.

For those who hasten to comply with Mr Greenstein's  urgings to "Share" and "Share widely," thus further defaming da Joos, this book by Professor Eli Faber which refutes the odious slurs that are implicit in the above, ought to be mandatory reading.  I have it on my own bookshelf, and it's a work of scholarship and integrity that was written in response to ahistorical antisemitic calumnies.

This Kirkus Review piece appeared in 2010, and is a worthy introduction to Faber's book:

Despite the polemical subtitle, a scholarly and meticulously researched account of Jewish participation in the slave trade in the British colonies of the Caribbean and in the US.

In 1991, the Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam published an inflammatory document entitled The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which charged that Jews had financed and dominated the slave trade in the American colonies and early US.

According to Faber (History/John Jay College, City University of New York), this study’s conclusions have been widely accepted as fact, despite grave defects in historical methodology, with deleterious consequences for historical scholarship and race relations.

Here limiting his study to slavery in the British Atlantic colonies in the 17th through the 19th centuries, the author uses primary source material, including shipping and tax records and other commercial documents, to refute the anti-Semitic theme of The Secret Relationship.

Faber concludes that Jewish involvement in the Atlantic slave trade was exceedingly limited: by successively examining the small, (initially predominantly Sephardic) Jewish communities of Barbados, Nevis, and Jamaica, and mainland colonies like Newport and New York City, Faber persuasively demonstrates that Jewish participation in the slave trade in each area consisted of tiny percentages of slave sales and ownership, from the earliest years of settlement through the abolition of the slave trade in the 19th century.

A well-researched study that neither allocates blame nor exonerates the participants in the peculiar institution, but puts to rest a pernicious anti-Semitic libel of recent coinage.

[Emphasis added]

See also here