Are You Ready For A Pogrom?
The New, Yet Familiar Reality For Jews
With the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, the world is experiencing a resurgence of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli sentiment. Daily hate marches in London, New York and other major Western cities have become an everyday event. College encampments on major campuses worldwide call “From the river…” chants that we all, sadly, got used to. These college protesters keep claiming that being anti-Israel doesn’t make them anti-Semitic and then erect checkpoints and prevent Jewish students from entering. “Some of my best friends are anti-Zionist Jews…” they say and then spit the next anti-Semitic chant. The mask keeps slipping…
Online hatred towards Jews and Israel has become normal, “bon ton” if you like. The haters don’t discriminate between the two. They don’t care if you are an Israeli Jew, an American Jew, or from London, nor do they care whether you voted for Netanyahu (democratically elected BTW but even that is considered to be wrong now) or not. Here’s one comment from a self-appointed human rights expert I got from a “person” on the other side of the globe:
Check your arrogance!
This idea of Jewish 'superiority' that you all have is a figment
of your imagination. I think it comes from deep repressed feelings
of inferiority and insecurity --- history's rejects.
The arrogance is a cover. Poor little rejected Jews,
trying desperately to belong, to be loved.
Like children taking every criticism personal.
Everybody hates me. Life revolves around me.
Everybody hates us! Muslims hate us! Arabs hate us.
The whole world is against us.
We must take away their free speech, criminalize opposition.
Hide behind Anti-Semitism, the holocaust to deny free speech.The anti-Semitic genie is out of the bottle and it won’t go back inside.
Blood Libel
Over the past eight months, there have been disturbing instances of blood libel being spread in various forms. These false accusations were historically used to incite hatred towards Jewish people and justify attacks. Some old and new instances of blood libel:
Israelis are baby killers, indiscriminately bombing hospitals and schools. They are intentionally starving the Gazans to death. Jewish money finances AIPAC which in return controls US politics to the benefit of Jews and Israel. Israel is selling Palestinian body parts on the black market. Israel was intentionally slow to react on Oct 7 to have justification for the war.
The list of lies goes on endlessly.
One libel that backfired, thus you might not have heard about since it was hushed quickly, was spread by Al Jazeera during “Al Shifa hospital operation”. A woman called Al Jazeera claimed that Israeli soldiers were raping local women in the hospital. She didn’t provide any evidence but this news item spread like fire through the Middle East. What Al Jazeera’s “blood libels creative writing experts” didn’t count on was the panic that spread among Gazans. A raped woman is the one who is guilty of the rape according to the local tradition and is not “marriage material.” Thousands of terrified Gazan parents had to refute the claim that their daughters had been raped. Rumors ran crazy for hours with families losing their minds. After 24 hours Al Jazeera had to retract that, saying “They can’t verify the claim.” No apology was made. No one was fired. No investigation into the fact-checking is done even today. Why would they?
So… We have good old anti-Semitic hatred and blood libels. Now ask yourself what is the missing ingredient in this old anti-Semitic equation?
Pogroms
Some historical pogroms among thousands that didn’t make it into the history books:
- During the First Crusade, thousands of Jews were murdered all along the Rhine valley in 1096.
- Leo III the Isaurian force converted the Jews to Christianity as he blamed them for his military failures. Those who refused were slaughtered in the thousands.
- Jews in Blois, France were murdered when they refused to convert after a blood libel claimed they used blood in their religious rituals.
- During the Black Death epidemic, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells and this is what caused the sickness. Hundreds were burned in Basel and more were forced to convert in 1348 during the Black Death. Pope Clement VI decreed that Jews were not to blame and suffered from the epidemic too after thousands were killed.
- The Kishinev (Chisinau now) Pogrom of 1903 in which 49 Jews were killed, 92 were gravely injured, several Jewish women were raped and over 500 were injured.
- The massacre of Jews in the 1066AD in Muslim Granada. It is estimated that as many as four thousand were massacred on Dec 30 by a mob of local Muslims.
- Farhud - A pogrom against the Jewish population of Baghdad was carried out on 1–2 June 1941. Over 180 were killed and 1000 injured.
The last two are here for those who claim that “Jews and Muslims always lived peacefully under Muslim law and if it wasn’t for the Zionists…”
Dear reader, did you find your country’s pogrom on the list? If you didn’t then look online and you will find. Promise.
Wait…!!! stop with the alarmism, you are spreading unnecessary fear. These are all historic pogroms perpetuated by mobs in the past and are unthinkable in the modern era we are living in. It can’t happen in my Western state.
Tell that to my father-in-law who was mustering all his courage for a pogrom that never came in the not-so-distant 1991 in Leningrad, Russia.
Let’s disregard for a second the Oct 7 pogrom in Israel and look at a lesser known example in recent times.
Dagestan Pogrom
A region in southern Russia, mainly inhabited by Muslims, with a minor Jewish presence, of several hundreds of families. On Oct. 29, 2023, in the wake of the ongoing war, a popular Telegram channel, “The Morning of Dagestan”, called on the local Muslims to “come and prevent the arrival of Jewish refugees from Tel Aviv”.
Oh, yeah. All of us Jews have always yearned to live in Dagestan, a place where a young woman can be jailed for not respecting the wish of her parents to marry a stranger. “Next Year in Makhachkala” (the capital) is a traditional Jewish saying for the past two thousand years…
The Telegram channel sent a screenshot of the schedule when the plane from Tel Aviv was expected to land, before continuing to Moscow and called on the faithful to come and deal with the Jews, Allah Akbar style.
Hundreds came to “welcome” the flight. They broke into the airport and wreaked havoc inside the airport terminal, smashing and stealing equipment. Airport security ran away without any confrontation. It took the authorities several hours to restore order (the Russian police authorities are not shy about using the baton.)
While the rioters were engaged in a good old-fashioned Jew hunt, the passengers and crew, mostly non-Jewish were hiding. First, for their security, they were locked up in the airplane and then the airport buses moved them to a different plane. While on the bus, they were caught by the modern-day “Cossacks” and luckily the bus doors were closed. The rioters tried to break in but failed. The bus drove to a different location where the local police managed to keep the passengers safe till they flew safely to Moscow.
The rioters cornered an Uzbekistan national and threatened him with lynching. They were so disappointed when he proved he was a faithful Allah follower like they were.
Several rioters were hurt in the incident. None of the plane passengers were injured. There were over one hundred passengers and crew on that plane, several children and their parents flying back from life-saving treatments in Israel. This could have ended very differently with dozens killed!
Given that the Tsar authorities often instigated the 19th-century pogroms, I believed at the time that FSB or some other Russian security authority initiated this pogrom. There is still controversy as to who was behind it, with Russians blaming Ukraine (surprise…), however since there have been no follow-up pogroms since, I’m not sure whether it was instigated by authorities or someone’s private initiative.
Hey, reader, this did not happen in 11th-century Europe, it happened in our modern, cellphone, space-age, generative AI, and full of technological wonders times!!!
Just a day before this pogrom, the same Telegram channel called upon faithful followers to look for Jews in a local hotel. Dozens of rioters burst into that hotel, trashing the place and demanding the hotel’s staff give away the Jews. There were none.
Future Pogroms
Let’s examine the anti-Semitic recipe checklist we have:
- Incitement for hatred on the streets and online ✅
- Blood libel of all sorts ✅
- History of pogroms spanning hundreds of years ✅
- Far-right and far-left politicians alike are happy to spit anti-Semitism and incite their voters, while the moderate politicians are mostly silent so as not to anger the potential voters — I’m not going to name cowardly politicians that are silent on this issue but you, dear reader, know who they are ✅
- A modern pogrom that was instigated by some anonymous source on Telegram and caused hundreds to go on a Jew-hunting frenzy, never mind most Dagestans never met a single Jew ✅
With all these put in place, the world is ready for a good old-fashioned pogrom.
It could be a local event with only a few shattered windows, after which the Western governments would finally wake up (don’t count on that), or it could be a much broader set of pogroms spanning countries and several weeks until the authorities in the various countries shake off the slumber and take a much firmer stand.
Will it be a planned and coordinated attack or a spontaneous event? Which Western cities will this show be happening in? London which was said to be “Jew Free on the weekend”? New York City where students from NYU and Colombia University were encamping and harassing Jewish students for weeks and the academic year was completely ruined (along with Columbia’s reputation). Paris? Milan? Toronto? Moscow?
What will be the public’s response to the first pogrom? Will there be public outrage demanding swift action by the government against the pogrom’s perpetrators or weak, conditional condemnation?
What policies will the Western governments place as a consequence, if any?
Will this upcoming pogrom make the history books? We’ll have to wait and see.
If a pogrom can happen in Israel, it can happen to you too.
