Will Europe become Judenrein? There is the Hitler method, and there is the non-Hitler method. Hitler went after Jews. The current anti-Semites prefers the non-Hitler method. It is seemingly so inoffensive, so extraneous to anti-Semitism that it manages to escape the label altogether, at least among its believers. The non-Hitler method doesn’t kill Jews, it kills Judaism.
The European Union upheld Belgium’s right to ban kosher ritual slaughter. Every other member of the EUwill have the same right. Given the constant demeaning of kosher slaughter in Europe for years, this could drive out of Europe all kosher-observant Jews (except, possibly, vegetarians). You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levi’s Rye, and you don’t have to be Jewish to see the anti-Semitic nature of the EU ban. The head of the Christian Democratic People Party in Hungary, Zsolt Semjen, said:
“Yesterday’s ruling by the European Court of Justice upholding a ban on kosher ritual slaughter in Belgium is a disgrace to the religious freedom and security of the European Jewish community and is yet one more sign of the total collapse of our traditional Judeo-Christian value system.”
But is it a fair charge to say that those who profess compassion for animals do so out of anti-religious animus or secularism? It is, because the European opponents of kosher ritual slaughter do not oppose hunting or factory farming. If they were interested in compassion, they would target these practices. But they do not. It is Islamic halal they target, with the targeting of the Jewish practice of shechitah as an inevitable corollary.
Make that plural — Jewish practices — that the non-Hitlerites target. Along with shechitah, it is circumcision they oppose, also on the seemingly neutral grounds that children should be old enough to make up their own minds. Funny, we don’t see the “old enough” argument applied to banning parents from making countless other decisions, including medical decisions, about their minor children. Face it, if circumcision of Jewish male children at the age of eight days is outlawed in Europe, Europe will become Judenrein, beginning eight days after the law and ending no longer than nine months later.
The non-Hitler method — go after Judaism, not Jews — would, if it comes to fruition, deny Europe a valuable constellation of inventors, scientists, financiers, philosophers, physicians and workers.
A ban on circumcision has been threatened in Scandinavian countries and in Holland. These countries came to their senses. The problem is, once the hatred is “out there,” once a ban on shechitah and circumcision become acceptable subjects of debate, they will be hard to stop. This is Europe, after all. It accustomed itself to the Hitler method. How much easier it would be to accustom itself to the non-Hitler method, with all of its attendant, non-violent rationalizations.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
