Haven’t we seen this before? Because it sounds very reminiscent of a much different Germany, circa 1936.
The Jerusalem Post reported on Wednesday that members of a Jewish community in the German town of Bochum won’t continue to wear the traditional kippot, commonly known in the U.S. as yarmulkes, out of fear of retaliation from the Muslim community simply for being Jewish.
The associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Rabbi Abraham Cooper told the Jerusalem Post, “Germans, more than any other people in Europe, should understand what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews.”
Cooper is referring to the countless number of non-Jews that were also persecuted and killed during the Holocaust for not sympathizing with the Nazi cause.
The claim is that young Muslims who have sought refuge in European countries, like Germany, have a particular disdain for the Jewish members of the specific society that are now inhabiting.
While the Jewish population in Bochum is small — only 1,000 out of a total population of 365,000 — there’s a reason for that.
According to the same Jerusalem Post report, “most of Bochum’s Jews were murdered by the Nazis in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz” during the second World War.
Germany and Islam have had a shaky past, as it was genocidal maniac and Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler’s biggest regret that he couldn’t mobilize more Muslims to join his cause of eradicating the world’s Jewish population.
According to a 2014 Financial Times' book review of David Motadel’s “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War”:
Hitler saw Nazism and Islam as natural allies. Though he considered most of its practitioners to be racially inferior, he admired Islam for its perceived martial qualities and its contrast to effete, “meek” Christianity. Most importantly, he hoped that the Muslim subjects of his enemies — the British and French empires and the Soviet Union — might be induced to rise up and wage jihad against their rulers.
If we're not careful, history could very well repeat itself.