Death by Prejudice

Diabolical hatred wrapped in the mantle of anti-Semitism is alive around the world once again. September 11, 2001, intensified a growing trend. “I will say to you without hesitation that I am convinced we are facing a threat as great, if not greater, to the safety and security of the Jewish people than we faced in the ’30s,” stated Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League last year.

The last global outbreak of anti-Semitism began with the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe prior to World War ii. That wave of mass hatred resulted in the deaths of approximately 50 million people, including 6 million Jews. Added to that is the little-reported fact of a Russian holocaust, during which Jews and other minorities, the numbers of which are impossible to estimate, were killed in the Stalin era.

As horrendous as that memory is, today’s rising level of worldwide hatred will prove to be far worse. It promises to explode into a global holocaust of such impact that its result will dwarf all past events of man’s inhumanity to man. This is a time of suffering that will directly impact you, unless you take action.

The Resurgent Plague

Almost a year ago, a museum in Germany honoring Jews who died in the Nazi death march was firebombed. Attackers destroyed the main exhibition, which detailed how concentration camp victims were driven deeper into Germany by the Nazis, as the Soviets advanced, with over 700 dying of exhaustion and hunger. Vandals painted large red swastikas and SS symbols on a memorial, and a 3-by-18-foot anti-Semitic slogan at the base of it.

At the time, this was the worst such vandalism in a decade. Since then, such attacks have become common across Europe. Open hatred is once again being directed at Jews. Schoolchildren, Jewish worshipers, rabbis and people presumed to be Jewish are increasingly assaulted by attackers shouting Nazi slogans. Jewish buildings are desecrated with anti-Jewish slogans and swastikas, and windows smashed. Synagogues and Jewish shops are firebombed.

U.S.News & World Report commented that in France, where a major swell of anti-Semitism has occurred, walls have been defaced with slogans such as “Jews to the gas chambers,” and, in Germany, Jews have been advised not to wear anything in public that could identify them as Jewish for the sake of their safety (Oct. 7, 2002).

Politicians throughout Europe and the world are being forced to recognize the growing anti-Semitism problem and the need to curb it.

In June, the world’s largest regional security organization, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (osce), held its first-ever anti-Semitism conference. Delegates from the 55 member nations of the osce met in Vienna to seek solutions for the recent “worldwide surge in anti-Semitic violence,” as the head of the U.S. delegation, Rudolph Giuliani, put it, comparing the anti-Jewish sentiment to the hatred that produced 9/11.

Following on from this conference, at a July session of the osce parliamentary assembly in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the need for action against anti-Semitism was further addressed. In recognition of the intensity of the plague, European lawmakers resolved to lobby their home legislatures to “take action against rising anti-Semitism and hate crimes” (Associated Press, July 6).

Two months earlier, an international conference on intolerance, specifically addressing hatred against Jews, was held in Paris. The conference, organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, together with a Jewish rights group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, opened with a warning that “acts of hatred against Jews, particularly in Europe, have reached their highest level since World War ii” (Associated Press, May 12).

At the same time, an international meeting of prominent writers, historians, intellectuals, social scientists and Jewish leaders from around the world convened in New York to address the anti-Jewish problem. As Newsday (New York) put it, it “is a sign of the times … that there were two high-profile conferences [in one] week to try to understand the resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world” (May 24; emphasis mine throughout).

Last year registered the highest number of violent anti-Semitic acts in over 12 years, with this year undergoing a further wave of anti-Semitism, according to the 2002/2003 anti-Semitism survey published by Tel Aviv University. Since 2001, France alone has seen 1,300 anti-Semitic acts, as documented by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

These statistics reflect an anti-Semitism mood smoldering around the world, and particularly in Europe, where, in five countries surveyed, 21 percent of the population have strongly anti-Jewish views and 49 percent believe Jews still talk too much about the Holocaust (58 percent in Germany).

The Barometer of Hate

What does the rising level of anti-Semitism indicate?

An article in the Washington Post warned, “Throughout history a constant barometer for judging the level of hate and exclusion vs. the level of freedom and democracy in any society has been anti-Semitism—how a country treats its Jewish citizens. Jews have been persecuted and delegitimized throughout history because of their perceived differences. Any society that can understand and accept Jews is typically more democratic, more open and accepting of ‘the other.’ This predictor has held true throughout the ages” (June 27, 2002).

The renewed intensity of anti-Semitism in 2002 and early 2003 has been concentrated in Western Europe, North America and Russia. “[I]n recent years, there has been a clear shift in anti-Semitic activity from totalitarian states to Western democratic ones” (Anti-Defamation League, May 6).

Last year, a U.S.News & World Report article warned, “Europe is sick again. The memory of 6 million murdered Jews, it seems, is no longer inoculation against the virus of anti-Semitism. It has taken hold, on the supposedly liberal left as well as the xenophobic right, all too long unchecked by feeble political leadership with one eye on the vengeful sentiments of millions of anti-Zionist immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East” (Oct. 7, 2002).

Yet, anti-Semitism was not born with the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948. It has a long history. It has surfaced continuously in priestly and political circles, within, especially, the Roman Catholic Church and the murky corridors of political power in Europe—from the time of the first Roman Empire to the current European Union.

It was a militarized Catholic Church that mounted the Crusades of the Middle Ages and slaughtered countless non-Christians in the name of religion. In fact, some maintain that these Crusades had their genesis much earlier, in a.d. 614, when the church fought the Persians and Jews. Suffering defeat and the loss of possession of Jerusalem left the Catholics extremely bitter against the Jews. Thus, anti-Semitism in Vatican circles has a history extending at least 1,380 years.

In the 14th century, the Vatican blamed the Jews for the great plague that swept Europe, claiming they had poisoned the wells. Since then, many paranoid delusions have heaped a blood libel on the Jewish people, blaming them for all sorts of phenomena, from the “threat” of corrupting national bloodlines to the failure of national economies. Some of the most venerated saints of the Catholic Church were among its most vociferous Jew-haters. Indeed, as historian Robert S. Wistrich states, “Nazi anti-Semitism could never have aroused the response it did had it not been planted in groundwater poisoned by Christian theology … and in satanization of the Jews over many centuries” (Commentary, April 2001).

Thus Wistrich links the priesthood with the politicians. “The emergence of political anti-Semitism in parts of Europe in the late 19th century afforded many Catholics yet another opportunity to revive the church’s declining fortunes” (ibid.). All this hatred of the Jew consummated in the engulfing of millions of them in the gas chambers of the great Holocaust during World War ii. A plethora of documentation now exists linking church and state with this horrifying slaughter, by either benign neglect or outright complicity.

One would think that both priest and politician would be eternally repentant for this massive blot on the history of man. But no! That would require a memory of past events, and that is what is, too often and too quickly, disappearing from the public conscience.

That’s one reason the old anti-Semitic rhetoric is back in Germany. The astonishing fact, however, is that it is not just directed against Jews. There is something far more sinister at work today—a rising swell of hate and violence that targets not only Jewish elements, but other nationalities as well.

Assault on the West

Many acknowledge anti-Semitic hatred is rising to new levels, but what the world does not realize is its new direction.

Anti-Semitism today, in its broadest sense, and in its newest form, fuels terrorism around the globe. As anti-Semitism increases, so grows the terrorism it spawns—a terrorism that includes America and Britain as its target.

While anti-Semitism is the voice of the problem, terrorism is the fist. And what the world at large does not realize is, hatred is rising to a level never before seen in human history.

Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips reinforces the fact that the bull’s-eye of anti-Semitism rests directly on the West. “The [recent] Jerusalem conference [on anti-Semitism and the media] heard chilling presentations about a phenomenon barely discussed in Britain: the virulent Arab and Muslim hatred of the Jews. This goes far beyond even the desire to finish off Israel as a Jewish state. Anti-Jewish hatred plays a crucial role in the fanatical jihadism that now threatens all of us in the West, pouring out in television programs, newspapers and religious sermons throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and amounting to a new warrant for genocide. …

“These sick outpourings are not so much religious or even fundamentalist doctrines as rooted in a fanatical totalitarian ideology.

“As [Holocaust expert Professor Yehuda] Bauer observed, the driving aim is the Islamic dictatorship of the world. Realization of this utopia necessitates the destruction of the foundation creeds of Western culture, Judaism and Christianity—and especially Israel, the supposed personification of Western global power-lust, which was planted as an incubus on Arab soil as a result of the Holocaust” (Spectator, March 22).

As that article correctly states, the new direction of anti-Semitism is pointed at Western culture. Phillips concludes, “The result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction, and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face” (ibid.).

The Spiritof Hate

The hatred and destruction wrought by anti-Semitism will never be fully understood until we realize its spiritual origin.

There is an invisible spirit realm! The Bible reveals that mankind is fundamentally swayed by Satan the devil, the god of this world (ii Cor. 4:4), who has tangled the minds of “the whole world” in deceit (Rev. 12:9). This supernatural being hates human beings, because it is in our human race that God has planted the seeds of the eternal future—a transcendent potential that far surpasses any that Satan was ever offered.

In past Trumpet articles we have spelled out scriptures that show how God will one day unite all the nations of Israel—and eventually the world—under the throne of David, the Jewish king (Jer. 33:14-16). God will accomplish this by grafting the Gentile nations into Israel (Rom. 11:17). Jesus Christ Himself said that salvation is of the Jews (John 4:22); yet elsewhere, the Bible shows that God wills that all men be saved (i Tim. 2:4). In short, the biblical teaching is that in God’s soon-coming Kingdom, people of every nation and race will become spiritual Jews—which has nothing to do with physical race (Rom. 2:28-29). That is our future! This remarkable truth requires much biblical proof, which may be found in our book The Key of David (request your free copy).

It is Satan’s hatred for that truth that fuels his hatred for the Jewish race today—as well as the Anglo-Americans.

Herbert W. Armstrong accurately foretold the worldwide result of anti-Semitism in the 1930s—World War ii. He also clearly saw the prophesied next round of anti-Semitism: “The Bible foretells that third round—and it spells doom for us, as God’s punishment, because we, as a nation, have forsaken Him and His ways! The third round is termed, in prophecy, an invasion by ‘Babylon’—a resurrected Roman Empire—a European Union. I have been proclaiming that since 1927. …

“This Nazi underground will introduce a new kind of internal warfare and sabotage, to divide and conquer! It will stir race hatred, class prejudice, strife among ourselves, religious bigotry while professing to champion religious tolerance—especially toward the religion of the coming United States of Europe” (Autobiography of Herbert W. Armstrong, vol. 2).

Obviously, a new kind of internal warfare—race hatred, class prejudice, and strife—would include anti-Semitism on a new, more deadly level, one that extends beyond Jews to threaten much of the English-speaking world.

Is it happening? Yes it is, and at a rate that should alarm the world!

Far worse than the destruction of the Twin Towers, we are talking about nations falling. Yet the international agencies set up after World War ii to prevent any future holocausts are not doing the job of stopping its advance.

Good News Coming!

This world denies the authority of God, but only God can solve its problems. Unless the world begins to listen to God and stops rebelling against His laws, there is no course left to mankind. Anti-Semitism and terrorism will have their way, and—just as the work of God has warned through the years—we are heading toward a great tribulation such as this world has never seen. It will be far worse than World War ii and the concentration camps. The level of anti-Semitism—the barometer of a future disaster—is reaching new heights! It is just a matter of time before the explosion.

While America becomes increasingly embroiled in the Middle East, a European consortium of nations continues to grow. Soon, a power that Mr. Armstrong identified as a “United States of Europe” will rule again in the manner of the ancient Holy Roman Empire. Once again, the propagators of anti-Semitism, terrorism and cruelty will march across Europe. At that time, anti-Semitism in its broadest form will come to bear on the nations—especially America and Britain.

The real final solution to the sin of anti-Semitism will be the institution of a new government, built on the foundation of outgoing love to all peoples, and the abolishment of hate. Under this government, Satan the devil—the source of all hate and violence—will no longer have influence over humanity. His rule over this Earth will be over.

Speaking of an event following the destruction of the final resurrection of the Roman Empire, the Prophet Daniel wrote, “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever” (Dan. 2:44).

Mankind is not going to be destroyed—God is going to save us from ourselves. How? By sending Jesus Christ back to the Earth at the head of a perfect government. That government is being formed right now. Write for your free copy of The Incredible Human Potential, which will open your eyes to your incredible future.