‘The banality of evil’ – ignoring Radical Islamist Jew-hatred

Sadly, Jessica Knoll, who lives in Israel, refused to recognize the source of the evil that ended the life of her 85-year-old grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, in Paris.

By Daniel Krygier, World Israel News

Mireille Knoll, who survived the Nazi Jew-hatred during the Holocaust, was brutally murdered in Paris recently by Islamist Jew-hatred. Sadly, in a poem, her granddaughter, Jessica Knoll, who lives in Israel, refused to recognize the source of the evil that ended her grandmother’s life.

“No, I’m not like that, I don’t generalize. I don’t hate people. I hate fanatics!” While downplaying the Muslim background of the perpetrators, Jessica Knoll lashed out at Israel’s Prime Minister with the words, “I still hate Bibi,” and claimed that life is not better in Israel than in France. In other words, Israel’s prime minister, who is in charge of defending Jewish lives, is equaled with Islamist fanatics who are bent on ending Jewish lives.

Covering the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, the late leftist Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the infamous phrase “the banality of evil.” According to Arendt, Eichmann was not a fanatic but an average person who was driven by personal interests rather than ideology. This Orwellian denial of reality was contradicted by Eichmann himself, who expressed no remorse over his role as a key architect of the Holocaust. Quite the contrary. Until the very end, Eichmann passionately embraced the Nazi ideology that was the driving force behind the annihilation of six million European Jews.

Today, Islamism has replaced Nazism as the main threat to the Jewish people. Unfortunately, instead of learning from history, too many Jewish and non-Jewish “liberals” follow in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt by refusing the recognize Islamist ideology as an evil genocidal threat to Israel and the Jewish people. While it is true that most Muslims are not terrorists, it is equally true that most terrorists today are Muslims, and Jew-hatred is far more prevalent among Muslims than among non-Muslims.

The elephant in the room

Today, like yesterday, genocidal ideologies exist not in a vacuum, but in an ecosystem that nourishes it. Most Germans were not active participants during the Holocaust. However, the Holocaust was made possible due to the silent majority that either supported or ignored the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. Islamist extremists who attack Jews constitute a small minority of the world’s Muslims. However, they are part of a wider Muslim ecosystem that nourishes and justifies this fanaticism that seeks the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. This includes political and religious leaders, media and school systems throughout the Islamic world as well as within the growing Muslim communities in Western societies.

The are several reasons for the refusal by many Western liberals to recognize radical Islam as the big elephant in the room. One important reason is that an increasingly nihilist West refuses to realize that the ideology remains a key force in the Muslim world. Another reason is the emergence of post-colonial identity politics, which judges individuals based on their religious and ethnic background rather than their ideology and deeds. According to this leftist worldview, Muslims are Third World people who are eternal “victims” incapable of being perpetrators and committing evil. As long as this theatre of the absurd continues, liberals will continue obsessing about fringe right wing Jew-hatred while ignoring mainstream Muslim Jew-hatred.