Consider two important headlines (below) from October 7, 2024. The first focuses on antisemitism in the United States and the second zeros in on the global crises:

1. Antisemitism in US at all-time high as American Jews report ‘explosion of hate’
   A total of 10,000 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the US since October 7 – the highest number of incidents in the ADL’s history. 

2. One Year Later: The Oct. 7 Atrocities Triggered Heinous Global Antisemitism

 These headlines and the events of the last year raise the question: Why Are the Jews So Hated?

This series of blogs seeks to answer this question. What I am about to say will offend many, but needs to be said. We are facing civilizational war between the Judeo-Christian theism of Western Civilization and Neo-Paganism. In a resent lecture Bari Weiss describes it this way:

When antisemitism moves from the shameful fringe into the public square, it is not about Jews. It is never about Jews. It is about everyone else. It is about the surrounding society or the culture or the country. It is an early warning system—a sign that society itself is breaking down. That it is dying. [1]

I am not Bari Weiss. She is a brilliant thinker and a very gifted writer. Thankfully she has a large megaphone and when she speaks, she creates a stir. The fact is that if Western Civilization is going to be saved from the onslaught of paganism, we need to say in public what those in power try to forbid us to say.  The ugly face of antisemitism is the canary in the coal mine.

Why are the Jews so hated? In short, they are hated because of their ideas and worldview. Ancient paganism was first subverted by Abraham’s family.  Through Abraham’s lineage, God revealed Himself as the one true God and revealed that He had created a moral universe. These days, the world has forgotten the source of such principles as truth, freedom, justice, the dignity of each individual, and hope. Modern paganism is once again raising its ugly head. In order to combat the inevitably destructive consequences of this rise of neo-paganism, those who believe in the one true God along with Abraham’s children need to fight! Will you join the fight?

As we delve into this, please pray that the Lord would open your eyes to see the profound depth of this civilizational conflict. Please also pray that the Lord would empower you to courageously stand in solidarity with the Jewish people in this pivotal point in history.

Thesis: “Fascists hated the Jews not merely because of their race, but because of their ideas and their worldview. They sought to exterminate the Jews; they also sought to exterminate the Jewish influence on the Western culture.” – Gene Edward Veith [2]

Pagan culture allows for pagan sexuality. Most people want to deny God, not for metaphysical reasons, but to avoid morality. The Apostle Paul makes this argument in Romans 1:20-28. In this passage, Paul connects the dots in the downward progression of civilizations. He says that people forget to honor the one true God and thus start to worship other created things, then as a direct result of this idolatry, they begin to engage in sexual licentiousness, which leads to the degeneration of whole societies.

Dennis Prager in his essay “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution” makes a case for the positive compliment to Paul’s explanation of degeneration. Prager says that the Jewish sexual ethic, later promoted by Christians, to channel sex into monogamous marriage, changed the world. This sexual law commanded and inspired by the God of the Bible, fueled the momentum of Western Civilization!

There is a direct connection between the hatred of Jews and the hatred of God. People who hate Jews actually hate the God with which they are associated. This hatred is fueled by none other than Satan himself. Satan is after the demise of Jews and Christians, those who point to the one true God. If Satan can gather his hordes and build demonic strongholds in these people with regard to their worship and their sexual practices, then he has them. Their identity is solidly grounded in his demonic camp.  Furthermore, the existence of Jews and Christians is an abhorrent witness to “the law giving God of the desert” as Hitler disdainfully described whom they hate and want to eliminate. They cannot eliminate God, but they can attempt to rid themselves of the people whose lives are associated with the God revealed in the Bible and His moral universe.

A universe without God is a universe without morals. The definition of freedom then tragically becomes the license to do whatever one feels without any guilt or responsibility. Ultimately this lack of moral restraint bears horrible consequences on the central building blocks of society (marriage and families) and eventually on society as a whole.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in his book The Gay Science (1882), declares that “God is dead!” This statement marked a prophetic turning point for the growing atheism that was raging through Europe. Nietzsche understood that the denial of God, aka the “killing of the idea of God” by European intellectuals would eventually change everything. Without the Judeo-Christian God, the foundation of European Civilization would be destroyed, and yet people would no longer be troubled by a moral universe or a God who gives us limitations.

Nietzsche clarified this in Twilight of the Idols (1889):

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole. [3]

During the same period, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky prophetically wrote in The Brothers Karamazov (1879), “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” To put it a little differently, if “God is dead” then everything that has its existence in His existence is dead as well. Love is gone. Human beings are no different than animals therefore human dignity is gone. Justice is gone! Compassion is gone! The moral universe is gone! I contend that antisemitism is ultimately directly related to the “great exchange” of the worship of God for the worship of created things. This return to paganism gives license for pagan sexuality. People want nothing to do with the God of the Jews or a moral universe because they do not want to live in such a framework. If not stopped, antisemitism and eventually fascism will become an explicit movement to eliminate people who are associated with the God of the Bible.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana

In our day, antisemitism is on the rise at a rate rivaling Germany in the 1930s. This historic outbreak of antisemitism of course led to the Holocaust and the murder of 6,000,000 Jews. The tip of the spear for Hitler’s assault on the Jews were the Hitler youth known as the Storm Troopers or the Brownshirt youth.

Today’s storm troopers leading the fight against the Jews in the United States, Europe and beyond are the tens-of-thousands of college students and others who disrupt universities, block roads and bridges, take over buildings, attack Jewish men and women, and Jewish synagogues. Their rallying cry is the Hamas slogan: “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free.”

The elite leaders and funders of these disruptions know exactly what they are doing. They are the same people who hate the Judeo-Christian foundations of freedom under God and are working to rewrite history, redefine key language, and tear down the institutions of Western Civilization. They are the influencers and power brokers behind Antifa, BLM and other revolutionary groups.

However, most of the mobs who engage on the street do so without even understanding the full meaning of their cry. These “useful idiots” [4] as Hamas leaders patronizingly call them [5], are calling for the elimination of the Jewish State and for all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to be free of Jews.

This vision is nothing new. This is the goal of Hamas and other Political Islamists and vicariously those who support them even if they do not understand what they are saying. Their leaders know the fullness of their vision and it is like their Nazi forefathers, to rid the world of Jews completely. As Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and overseer of the death camps said, “I hope to see the very concept of Jewry completely obliterated.” [6]

This hatred for Jews is fueled by Satan himself. Satan recognizes the people of Israel and their existence today as evidence for the Creator God. Satan understands more than most that the Jews bear witness to the activity and revelation of God throughout history. So, Satan would simply like them destroyed.

Satan may not be able to wipe out the evidence of God in Creation (Romans 1), but he could certainly weaken the evidence for God’s work in history if he wiped out the Jewish people. Therefore, Satan has engendered hatred for the Jews throughout history in a futile effort to end their presence as a living witness of the work and revelation of God. This is currently manifested in Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and growing antisemitism in the rest of the world.

We remember Hitler’s Holocaust but hatred for Jews goes back as far as their enslavement in Egypt (1880 –1450 B.C.). Following God’s divine intervention, the Jews became a free people and established the nation of Israel from 1020 – 922 B.C.

In 922 the nation was divided between the ten Northern tribes of Israel, and the two Southern tribes of Judea. The tribes of Israel were taken into captivity by Assyria in 722 B.C. and the Babylonians took the two tribes of Judah into captivity in 606 B.C. In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great conquered the holy land and subjugated the Jews and in 63 B.C., Rome conquered Israel. In 70 A.D, the Romans destroyed the 2^nd Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and killed 1,000,000 Jews and made 97,000 slaves.

Through the centuries, we see hatred for the Jews collectively manifested In Spain, France, England, Germany, Russia, Syria, Algeria, Palestine, Belorussia and Ukraine. There are extensive records of persecution and pogroms against Jews.

Jewish communities were targeted throughout Europe during the Crusades. Some 510 Jewish communities were destroyed in 1348-49.

Between 1903 and 1906, about 660 pogroms were recorded in Ukraine and Bessarabia; half a dozen more in Belorussia, carried out with the Russian government’s complicity.

Antisemitism is found among Christians, Muslims, and Atheists. One can find it in the children of the Enlightenment, Marxists, Socialists, and of course Fascists.

Today this vitriol pointed at the Jews is led by Political Islamists / Jihadists and their co-conspirator Postmoderns, as expressed through university students and pro-Hamas demonstrations in the United States and Europe.

There is a myriad of reasons given for the hatred and persecution of the Jews. Some justify their hatred by resenting the fact that the Jews claim to be God’s chosen people. Others reason that Jews are to be hated because of their success financially and politically. Jews are often used as scapegoats for society’s ills. Jews tend to have a very tight cultural identity that results in a lack of integration into their nations.  People often label Jews as “not like us,” judgmental, and hostile to those outside their communities. While on the outside, these justifications for antisemitism might carry some weight, it’s my conviction that these are not the deepest reasons for people’s hatred of the Jews.

The Jews, God’s Chosen People

The world knows of the Jews because of God’s great promise to bless all the nations of the earth through Abraham and his children (Genesis 12:2-3 ESV).

And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

Note that the blessing given to Abraham was not just for Abraham, nor only for the Jews; it was for all the peoples of the earth. They were not merely to be the recipients of God’s blessing but a channel of that blessing.

This promise marked the beginning of God forming a people through Abraham. Later, He would rescue them from slavery and make them into a free nation that would bless all the nations of the world. They would become His holy people. Why did God choose the Jews? The answer is revealed in Deut. 7:6-8 (ESV):

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

 Why did God choose the Jews? Not because they were great in number. They were among the fewest of all people. It was not because they were a rich and powerful nation. No, they were an impoverished slave people with a slave mentality who were in Egypt for 430 years. Why did God choose the Jews? He loved them (Deut. 7: 6-9)! He was fulfilling the oath he swore to Abraham to make his seed a great nation. God determined to use the Jews as a model for cultural transformation. Through the Jews, God took a slave nation and turned it into a free nation for the purpose of blessing all nations that He loves.

Make no mistake about it, this narrative and framework of understanding is seared in the minds and hearts of the Jewish people. Whether religious or non-religious, Jews generally understand their place in the world through the biblical lens of the promises God gave to Abraham. Rabbi Moshe Taragin, author and lecturer on the Torah and Jewish history shares his insights on the significance of the Books of Moses, also known as the Pentateuch, on shaping the mind of the Jewish people, especially since the events of October 7, 2023:

Even those who may not follow a classic, halachic lifestyle still view their lives and our national struggle through the lens of biblical narratives. Our ongoing effort to settle the land and control international hostility is viewed as a chapter within a sacred book which is just as compelling now as it was thousands of years ago.

It is important to understand that the choices made by the Israeli people are made because of the story they’ve been told for generations upon generations. This story is God’s true story, and a beautiful story of redemption promised for the whole world through the Jewish people. This is what spurs them on.

This is true no matter who thinks otherwise: God wants to bless all the nations of the earth. He wants to do it by giving the world a real-life example through the family of Abraham. This blessing was never intended to be contained to the Jews. It was meant to be given away!

[1] https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/20/speech-ages-bari-weisss-battle-cry-save-west/

[2] Veith, Gene. Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1993) 43-44.

[3] https://bigthink.com/thinking/what-nietzsche-really-meant-by-god-is-dead/

[4] From Wikipedia: A useful idiot or useful fool is a pejorative description of a person, suggesting that the person thinks they are fighting for a cause without fully comprehending the consequences of their actions, and who does not realize they are being cynically manipulated by the cause’s leaders or by other political players.

[5] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/hamas-defector-tells-pro-palestinian-activists-they-belong-in-a-mental-asylum-in-brutal-debate/ar-BB1leorD

[6] (23 March 1941) Quoted in Benno Müller-Hill Murderous Science” (1998), p. 48

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