Features
Anti-Semitism and genocide in Europe
PALESTINE and IRELAND: UNITED BY PARTITION – I
by Jayantha Somasundaram
“Partition is the Englishman’s favourite way out of a difficulty. But it is a confession of failure” Irish Independent Dublin.
On Sunday, 15th December, Israel’s Foreign Minister closed their Embassy in Dublin. The following day The Jerusalem Post pointedly remarked that “if Israel were to close embassies in all countries that are diplomatically hostile, its number of representations would be dramatically reduced…Norway and Spain have also recognised a Palestinian state, and their criticism of Israel is often as equally harsh…the same is true of Belgium and smaller EU states such as Malta and Luxembourg.” Interestingly Dublin did not retaliate and closed its Embassy in Tel Aviv. Ireland had recognised Israel in 1963 and they exchanged Ambassadors in 1996.
The Irish Army has, since 1978, participated in the UN peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon, named UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), as does the Sri Lanka Army. On three occasions UNIFIL was commanded by Irish Army officers. Not only has the Irish Army suffered 48 fatalities, the most casualties of any of the UNIFIL participants, but they claim that in 1987 Corporal Dermot McLoughlin was deliberately killed by Israeli tank fire.
Though the Tel Aviv-Dublin diplomatic standoff may seem trivial, and marginal, given the brutality, the intransigence and the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian War, the Irish sideshow throws up a plethora of issues relating to history, religion, nationalism and conflict that impact on the main drama.
Though Jesus of Nazareth and His disciples were Asian, His most influential follower Paul, through his missions to Turkey and Greece in the first century, took Christianity to Europe. There, with the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in AD313, Christianity became the religion of the Empire and consequently of Europe. And, in time, traditional European religions and local beliefs disappeared.
As early as the 4th Century missionaries to England established churches along the Bristol Channel; while St Patrick is revered as having Christianised Ireland in the 5th Century. Though England would become Protestant during the reign of King Henry VIII in the 16th Century, Ireland remained faithful to Roman Catholicism despite English persecution. But over the centuries many people in Northern Ireland did adopt Protestant Christianity.
The Irish War of Independence 1919-21 led ultimately to the predominantly Catholic southern counties becoming the State of Ireland in 1937. While Ulster, the predominantly Protestant counties of the north, remain part of the United Kingdom.
Jews in Europe
The Jewish presence in Europe preceded the rise of the Roman Empire. Once Christianity dominated Europe the Jews remained the exception, a conspicuous minority who rejected Christianity. Moreover, Jewish contemporaries of Christ had listened to Him, seen His miracles and yet refused to acknowledge Him; and succeeding generations in Europe, living among Christians, continued to deny Him. This refusal to accept Jesus as the Messiah long promised to the Jews was construed not as ignorance, but diabolical obstinacy.
In fact St. Augustine (354-430) the most influential Christian theologian of his time, argued that Jewish communities should be allowed to survive in conditions of degradation and impotence to underline the failure of Judaism and the triumph of the Church. Consequently Christian attacks on Jewish Synagogues in Europe began as early as the fourth century. Soon the Jews would be denied all rights and access to office in Christian Europe.
The Greek Christian John Chrysostom in his ‘Sermons against the Jews,’ delivered in Antioch, presented the Jews as murderers of Christ. Thus by the 5th Century anti-Jewish pogroms spread even to Palestine resulting in the burning of entire villages. And in 629 when Emperor Heraclitus retook Jerusalem from the Persians, there was a massacre of Jews by Christian Rome.
In Spain, Jews were forcibly converted to Christianity on pain of death, and the Inquisition was established by the Church to uncover under torture, those Jews who remained secret believers. When the Moors from North Africa invaded Spain in 711 the Jews welcomed them because under the Caliph, Cordoba became a centre of Jewish learning, a city of Jewish scholars, philosophers, poets and scientists. By the 11th Century the Muslims had created an Islamic Commonwealth that stretched from Spain to India. To the Muslims, Jewish monotheism was as pure as their own.
Rumours that Christians were being ill-treated in Palestine by Jews and Muslims, fuelled hostility in Europe and sparked the Crusades. The first Crusade was launched in 1095, and as they marched across Europe these ‘holy warriors’ targeted the Jews. “Marauding crusaders on their way to the Middle East in 1096 stopped to slaughter Jews in the Rhineland. One crusader account recalls thus: Behold we journey a long way to seek the idolatrous shrine and to take vengeance upon the Muslims. But here are the Jews dwelling amongst us whose ancestors killed him and crucified him groundlessly. Let us take vengeance first upon them – let us wipe them out as a nation,” records Collin Hansen in the journal Christian History.
Martin Luther
Anti-Semitism
By the 15th Century Jews had been expelled from all major west European areas: Vienna in 1421, Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442, Milan in 1489 and Florence in 1494. And in Venice, in 1541, the term ghetto nuovo was applied to the area in which the Jews were confined. European Jews tended, therefore, to move east into Poland, Lithuania and Russia.
In comparison to continental Europe the Jewish presence in Ireland was not significant, but when all Jews were expelled from England, in accordance with the Edict of Expulsion of 18 July 1290, a Jewish holy day (the ninth of Ab, commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple in AD70), it is believed that Jews in the English Pale in Dublin would have been also evicted.
Initially, European Jews had welcomed the Protestant Reformation in the expectation that the persecution they had endured for centuries at the hands of the Roman Church would end. Martin Luther in turn expected the Jews to voluntarily accept Protestant Christianity. When he realised that the Jews still remained faithful to their own beliefs, Luther turned on them with fury in his 1543 publication On the Jews and their Lies. “First their Synagogues should be set on fire…their homes smashed and destroyed…they should be put under one roof or in a stable like Gypsies…banned from roads and markets…their property seized…drafted into forced labour.” The Holocaust had been chartered!
Not only Karl Marx but Eduard Bernstein in Germany, Rosa Luxembourg in Russian Poland, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria and Leon Trotsky in Russia dominated revolutionary politics in Europe. Jews like Martov, Dan, Radek, Zinoviev and Trotsky were conspicuous in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. The Russian Revolution prompted the creation and dissemination of a forged document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion about an international Jewish conspiracy. The ‘Revolutionary Jew’ became a further excuse for Europe’s Christian establishment to persecute Jews.
Holocaust
Race theories that Nazi intellectuals were formulating concluded that as Teutonic Aryans, the Germans were inherently superior to the Jews of Semitic ancestry. Even before the Nazis took power in 1933, Jewish lecturers and students were being driven out of German universities. Adolf Hitler himself was explicit – as early as 1922 he said: The annihilation of the Jews will be my first and foremost task. Paradoxically, there is reason to believe that Hitler’s own father may have been the illegitimate son of a Jew.
Once they took power, the Nazis used the 1935 Nuremberg Decrees to strip the Jews of their basic rights. On the Kristallnacht or Crystal Night the Nazis attacked and looted Jewish shops and burned all the Synagogues. Hitler had promised a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Jewish problem.’
Himmler responded by opening the first concentration camp at Dachau. By the end of World War II in 1945, of the eight million Jews in German-occupied Europe, six million had been killed.
Not far from the Dachau concentration camp is the Bavarian village of Oberammergau. Because its inhabitants believed they were spared during the Bubonic plague of 1634, they enact a now world-famous passion play every 10 years. In 1934, having witnessed the performance, Adolf Hitler said, “it is vital that the passion play be continued; for never has the menace of Jewry been so convincingly portrayed. There one sees Pontius Pilate, a Roman racially and intellectually superior, who stands out like a firm, clean rock, in the middle of the whole muck and mire of Jewry.”
At the height of the Holocaust, in 1942, when the Papal Nuncio – the Pope’s Ambassador – in Slovakia was asked to intervene on behalf of Jewish children destined for the gas chambers, his response was: “There is no innocent blood of Jewish children in the world. All Jewish blood is guilty. You have to die. This is the punishment that has been awaiting you because of the sin of deicide (the murder of God).”
A contrite Pope John Paul II admitted in 1997, that many Christians had looked the other way during the Holocaust because in their estimation, the Jews were getting what they deserved for rejecting Christ.
At a time when the US is veering towards a policy of international isolation, it augurs well for international growth that Africa is emanating signs of stepping up intra-continental cooperation. Above all, Africa is in the process of proving that she could ‘stand-alone’ and be relatively autonomous in her ground-breaking growth drive.
Of course such epochal developments should not be construed as meaning that Africa would sooner rather than later be rid of the socio-political and economic bottlenecks that have been dogging her at heel for decades. What they mean is that she is managing these problems in a consistently constructive fashion currently.
We in South Asia in particular need to take note of these developments. This is mainly in view of the fact that SAARC is non-functional. It is not ‘dead’, as a former President of Sri Lanka tried to have us believe, but its virtual paralytic state at present should have discerning sections in the region concerned. It is robust regional cooperation in the fields that matter that helps a country in its growth and development and if SAARC is dysfunctional this is a serious setback for Sri Lanka and the region.
Closer integration into BIMSTEC and ASEAN is certainly desirable but if governments are having Sri Lanka’s best interests at heart it is primarily to the SAARC region that they need to look. For instance, how Sri Lanka is hoping to further its growth prospects by not factoring in stepped-up and positive economic interaction with India and Pakistan, for example, is incomprehensible.
There is a strong regional dimension to any country’s economic growth and unless the relevant regional cooperative mechanisms are rendered operational, the desired level of national development could not be achieved in full. Hence the need to render SAARC fully operational once again.
However, unless and until governments of the region realize the urgency of meeting the above challenge, SAARC would remain in a state inertia. The pressing need is visionary political leadership at the regional level. Right now this is seriously lacking.
It would seem inappropriate and misleading at first blush to attempt to draw comparisons between the vast continent of Africa and the South Asian region in view of the latter’s comparative geographical smallness, but this is more so why Africa’s present exercises in intra-continental cooperation need to be positivey assessed. If Africa could be making some headway in intra-regional cooperation, given her ‘Giant’ status and her seeming unmanageability as a collectivity, why can’t South Asia, a comparatively physically small region? ‘This is the Question’.
While the above and connected matters of importance for regional growth need to be seriously studied by political leaders and policymakers of South Asia, they would be acting in the regional interest by taking a leaf or two out of Africa’s book of cooperative growth and development.
All watchers of international development should feel compelled to take a hard, discerning look at the 38th African Union (AU) Summit held in Addis Ababa, beginning February 15th this year. Interestingly, the Summit theme was, ‘Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations.’
Coincidentally, erstwhile Namibian leader Dr. Sam Nujoma passed away on the eve of the Summit. Nujoma was perhaps the last of those prominent leaders from Africa who doggedly championed the cause of the libration of his country and of the continent from the shackles of colonialism. More leaders of his ilk are required by the South in general and Africa in particular.
While the acquiring of ‘reparations’ for colonialism’s ravages could prove a very long-gestation project, it is vitally important for Africa and other regions that came under colonial control to keep the issue constantly in focus.
Meanwhile, Africa’s gains in economic cooperation under the AU need to be studied appreciatively by the South and other regions in their interests. Some of the achievements of the AU under the aegis of the African Development Bank (ADB), as outlined by outgoing president of the Bank, Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina at the Summit were: ‘515 million African lives were transformed over the past decade, including 231 million women, 127 million people gained access to better services in terms of health, 61 million people gained access to clean water, 33 million people benefited from improved sanitation, 46 million people gained access to ICT services, 25 million people gained access to electricity.’
Reports said that the Summit also, among other things, adopted the ‘African Financing Stability Mechanism’. Under this arrangement, $20 billion in debt refinancing will be provided for African nations. This will happen alongside the adoption of the ‘Strategic Framework on Key Actions to Achieve Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development in Africa Report’.
The Report outlines key actions for Africa to ‘Achieve and sustain an annual growth rate of at least 7% of GDP over the next 5 decades.’
The above are a few aims that the AU intends to achieve going forward for the whole of Africa. But they are sufficient evidence of the current effectiveness of the collective organization. We see here a notable example in South-South cooperation which is a dire need today in the developing world.
South-South cooperation is the way to go particularly in consideration of the US’ current policy of virtually ridding itself of the past policy of helping the South by way of development assistance. Instead of bemoaning the fact that institutions, such as USAID, will be almost no more, the South would do well to take a hard look at Africa’s success stories in helping itself with little or no external assistance.
The discontinuation of US assistance needs to be seen as the proverbial ‘blessing in disguise’ by the South. Here is an opportunity for the Southern hemisphere to finally rid itself of those neo-colonial umbilical binds that have been preventing it from achieving genuine national liberation.
To be sure, the South is not going to meet with spectacular success by adopting the African model in the near term. But if the model is doggedly persisted with by enlightened governments of the South some success is certain to accure to the hitherto ‘Wretched of the Earth’, going forward.
While most of our pageant winners get involved in frivolous activities, during their reign, the 40th Mrs. World pageant winner, Tshego Gaelae, from South Africa, is keen to bring into the spotlight her country’s potential.
Before her departure for the Mrs. World pageant, held in Las Vegas, in the USA, in January, the Lawyer, Entrepreneur, Model and Digital Creator, said:
“I’m so excited to be sent not only as a delegate but a representative of those hopeful hearts that always want to see South Africa’s potential shine and win. I stand on the shoulders of icons, world champions, the Queens that have gone ahead of me, and of the world leaders that continue to ensure our global participation and impact.
“Thank you everyone for the support so far!”
A coke and a smile…with Sprite Cucumber her pick
Referring to the interview for the position of Mrs. World, Gaelae said: “We get to bring our most authentic self to advocate for the causes we want to advance through the most prestigious platform that is the Mrs World Pageant. What an honour to have such experienced judges who care to hear about what I want to achieve.”
The lead up to the prestigious Mrs. World event was doubly exciting for Gaelae as she got the opportunity to display not only her country’s creations but also check out certain nostalgic venues.
“We received the honour of being at the Elvis penthouse suite, at the Westgate Vegas! The space is spectacularly filled with iconic and historic presence, fit for the king that was Elvis Presley.”
The Mrs World participants spent an evening honouring Victoria’s Voice Foundation and Gaelae’s gift to the Foundation was a canvas shirt with President Nelson Mandela’s face printed on it. The shirt can either be worn or displayed in a frame, and Gaelae says she is so glad to have had the opportunity to present a piece of her beloved South Africa.”
The bangles she gifted to all the participants at the Mrs. World pageant
Gaelae went on to say: “I always joke about being Zulu in my past life, but on a serious note, I love the Zulu Culture so much, that I gifted my Mrs. World Pageant Sisters some beautiful bangles.”
They also visited the special Coca-Cola Store in Vegas, and got to taste some interesting flavours. And Gaelae’s pick … “Sprite Cucumber definitely wins for me.”
Mrs. World enthusiastically said that one of the biggest gifts she received out of her Mrs South Africa journey was that of sisterhood, “and it’s so amazing to come to the Mrs. World pageant and find it once again,” she went on to say.
“My roommate was the gorgeous Ishadi Amanda from Sri Lanka! We bonded with no delay, and laughed till we cried! I was literally paired with a sister from another mother.”
Tshego Gaelae also had a special comment to make regarding the article we published about her in The Island of 6th February, 2025.
“Thank you so much for the beautiful article and coverage.”
Hi! This week, too, I’m giving you some easy to prepare tips to help you achieve all that is good for your skin.
* Cucumber and Lemon:
Mix equal parts cucumber and lemon juice and apply the mixture on your face (avoiding eyes). Allow it to sit for 10 minutes and then rinse it off. This natural face beauty tip will brighten your skin tone and lighten blemishes, if used on a regular basis. The best aspect is that it is appropriate for all skin types!
* Tomatoes:
Scoop up the pulp of one tomato and apply it evenly on your face. Allow it to dry for 15 minutes before washing it off with warm water … to reveal a naturally radiant skin.
* Green Tea:
After steeping green tea in hot water for about 05 minutes, allow the tea to cool. Transfer the tea to a spray bottle and spray, in short bursts, or place a little amount onto a cotton pad and pat on your face after thoroughly cleaning it.
* Chilled Tea Bags:
A chilled black or green tea bag does wonders for your skin. This natural face beauty technique may rapidly reduce puffiness around the eyes, making them appear brighter and more alert. Place the tea bags on your eyelids and relax for 05 to 15 minutes while they perform their magic.
* Honey:
Applying a small amount of honey to your face every day is an excellent approach to getting healthy, bright skin. Honey’s absorbing properties draw out pollutants from skin pores and help completely cleanse your skin. Honey’s antibacterial effects heal and prevent acne. Honey’s antimicrobial qualities soothe skin irritation and protect skin from bacterial infections. Honey, has remarkable moisturising effects and is also a terrific relief for dry skin.
* Coffee:
Exfoliating on a regular basis improves the appearance of your skin, making it look younger and healthier. For those who enjoy coffee, a homemade coffee scrub is all the weekly nourishment your skin requires. Coffee’s anti-inflammatory qualities minimize redness, irritation, and acne. All you need to do is mix freshly ground coffee beans, coconut oil, and brown sugar to your desired consistency in a bowl. Massage gently in circular strokes over your face, then rinse with warm water. After using an exfoliant, always moisturise.
This year’s budget was formulated to augment state revenues within limited fiscal space – SASA
Proper Economic Management Expected to Restore Debt Repayment Capacity by 2028 – President
Batticaloa – Colombo train hits herd of elephants in Galoya
-
Sports5 days agoRemarkable turnaround for Sri Lanka’s ODI team
-
Business5 days agoUN Global Compact Network Sri Lanka: Empowering Businesses to Lead Sustainability in 2025 & Beyond
-
Features5 days agoScammed and Stranded: The Dark Side of Sri Lanka’s Migration Industry
-
News6 days agoSpeaker agrees to probe allegations of ‘unethical funding’ by USAID
-
Features4 days agoDon’t betray baiyas who voted you into power for lack of better alternative: a helpful warning to NPP – II
-
Features4 days agoTwo films and comments
-
Features7 days agoClean Sri Lanka and Noise Pollution (Part II)
-
Editorial6 days agoCoal giant awakes, but uncertainty prevails