Pogroms: Live Streamed

Pogrom is a Russian word meaning “to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.” Historically, the term refers to violent attacks by local non-Jewish populations on Jews in the Russian Empire and adjoining countries like Poland and Ukraine.

Although the first such incident labeled a pogrom was the riots in Odessa in 1821, attacks on the Jews go as far back as Egypt’s enslavement of their entire Jewish population, Spain’s deportation of their entire Jewish population, and Germany’s eradication of all Jews as their “Final Solution.”

Before Islam got into the game, Christianity cornered this market with the claim that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus, and the accusation that Jews were performing rituals using the blood of Christian children (a charge known as “blood libel”).

From the Russian pogroms leading up to the First and Second World Wars to Kristallnacht in Germany, from the recent barbaric Hamas attack on Israel to this week’s airport incident in Makhachkala on the southernmost tip of Russia, the targeting of Jews has served as the canary in the mine. What happens to the Jews one day portends what will inevitably happen to the rest of that population in the near future.

What’s different today is the way such barbaric acts are flaunted. Why would jubilant Hamas terrorists, high on synthetic amphetamine, record and stream their evil acts on their Go-Pros? What message did these terrorists mean to convey by openly debating on tape who would get to decapitate a baby in a crib or a Thai guest worker, proclaiming “Allahu akbar” with every swing at the neck?

Here is my theory. The Bible tells us God created the earth with light and dark, good and evil. Judaism stands for light, life, and freedom. Evil thrives in darkness and worships death and tyranny. Every dictator and two-bit despot who represents evil is threatened by that for which Judaism stands. The fact that 3500 years of such evil acts have not been able to eradicate Judaism is proof that, in the end, light conquers darkness, and good overcomes evil.

Here is Mark Twain’s take on the Jews, and Lance Morrow’s take on Evil.

— Sina.