At least ten people were injured and three others missing in Amsterdam Friday, after rampaging mobs of Muslim migrants hunted down and beat Jews on the street after a soccer match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax Amsterdam.
Dutch politician Geert Wilders had an accurate assessment: “A pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam,” Wilders said. “We have become the Gaza of Europe.” The attackers were Muslim migrants whom the Dutch government, like governments all over Europe, have welcomed in large numbers in recent years.
The word “pogrom” in Russian means “devastation or riot.” The term was first used in the Russian Empire from 1881–1884, to refer to anti-Jewish violence by street mobs. Pogroms continued to occur in the early 20th century and during and immediately after World War II in Eastern Europe, Germany and beyond.
Most historians cite 1881 incidents beginning in Elizavetgrad (in present-day Ukraine) as the beginning of the Russian pogrom phenomenon. The Elizavetgrad violence spread rapidly throughout seven provinces in southern Russia and Ukraine, where peasant attackers looted Jewish stores and homes, destroyed property, and raped women. Many individuals were beaten and/or murdered in these pogroms. In 1881 pogroms also occurred in Kiev and Odessa among a hundred other locations.
In Hitler’s Germany, Nazi officials and soldiers supported and encouraged pogroms. From November 9 to 10, 1938, in an incident known as “Kristallnacht”, Nazis in Germany torched synagogues, vandalized Jewish homes, schools and businesses, and murdered close to 100 Jews. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht (“Crystal Night” or the “Night of Broken Glass”), some 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to Nazi concentration camps.
After World War II, pogroms continued in Europe. A pogrom occurred in 1946 in Kielce, Poland, against Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to the town, leaving 42 dead. These pogroms further motivated the already devastated Jewish population to seek refuge outside of Europe.
Today we refer to the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews by the German Nazi regime as “Holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), which historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sparked a wave of protests when he argued that the Holocaust was the brainchild of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who, Netanyahu claimed, suggested killing the Jews (rather than merely expelling them) to Hitler during a 1941 visit to Berlin.
Islam’s deep anti-Jewish bigotry dates to its earliest days, and indeed, to Muhammad himself. One imam claimed that “animosity of the believers towards the Jew is based on religious grounds.” An underestimated, unappreciated, and oft-denied cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is Islamic religious antisemitism. “Kill them wherever you come upon them and drive them out of the places from which they have driven you out. For persecution is far worse than killing. And do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque unless they attack you there. If they do so, then fight them—that is the reward of the disbelievers.” (Surah 191 in the Koran)
The silence and denial surrounding this phenomenon is as striking as Islamic religious antisemitism itself. Despite the repeated exposure of its principles by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the origins, structure and impact of Islamic antisemitism do not receive the attention they deserve. The western world has been duped to believe that Islam is a peaceful religion.
However, the fact is that Islamic terrorism continues to threaten Jews in Europe and other Western countries, even today.
Standing with Israel 