Moving to Israel

There’s a wonderful and sobering article out this week in Arutz Sheva that I wanted to share with you. The article is written by Prof. Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa and runs in parallel with the anti-Semitic propaganda play, “My Name is Rachel,” currently playing theaters around the world.

Plaut makes the case that the plays subject, Rachel Corrie, serves as the Horst Wessel of the anti-Israel Left. Wessel was an idealistic young German active in the Bismarck Youth organization, a nationalist youth group in post-WWI Weimar Germany. At 19 years old he joined the Nazi Party and, like Corrie, wrote poems and music, and he played the oboe. In 1930 when he was 23, he got into a dispute with his landlady, whose husband was a communist party leader. Probably in response, on  January 14, 1930, Wessel was shot in the face by Albrecht Höhler, an active member of the local Communist Party. This is where Plaut draws the analogy as the Nazi Party decided that Wessel would make a brilliant martyr figure, and his tragic death could be exploited as political ammunition to promote the agenda of the party.

He goes on to say that Horst Wessel was obviously the Rachel Corrie of the anti-Jewish movement almost 80 years before Rachel Corrie played a similar role and I’ll quote him in his explanation: “In both cases, their “martyrdom” was in fact a pathetic death due in large part to their own stupidity.  In both cases the death of a naive young person involved in extremist politics was exploited by the pro-terrorism groups to which they belonged.  In both cases the “martyrs” were beatified by those seeking the murder and annihilation of Jews.”

I highly recommend reading the whole article as Plaut does a fantastic job of identifying the utter disdain of those behind these farcical martyr shows and properly condemns them to what they truly are: more anti-Semitic rubbish.

Ari