It’s all over my Facebook news feed and has invaded YouTube like a plague. People posting the same one minute video over and over again. Unabashed and unrepentant anti-Semite, lover of all anti-American and anti-Israel tyrants, in George Galloway walking out of what was supposed to be a debate at Oxford University with a Jewish student who was originally from Israel. Galloway was not informed that the student, who had an unmistakably British accent, was originally from Israel but he did know that the student was Jewish. The fact that Galloway agreed to debate a Jew to begin with should have been the shocking part.
Throughout his career as a British MP, Galloway has gone out of his way, whether intentionally or not, to further the case that anti-Zionism is just a thinly veiled formed of anti-Semitism. That the old and tired line of “I’m not against Jews…I’m against Zionism and the apartheid state of Israel” just doesn’t fly. It’s either the sentiment of a complete ignoramus at best or a Jew-hater at worst. More often than not, it ends up being the latter.
Since were on the topic of his ‘outlandish behavior’, Galloway has done everything from: praising Hezbollah and Hamas—even requesting Palestinian citizenship from Hamas—to openly supporting Saddam Hussein during both Gulf Wars. From suggesting that Tony Blair be put in front of the International Criminal Court at the Hague and being especially supportive when Saddam was lobbing rockets at Tel Aviv, to being an ardent supporter of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran and the Assad regime in Syria.
But he has never uttered these words…at least not with a video camera present: “I will not debate an Israeli”.
So while George Galloway’s sentiments shouldn’t come as a surprise to us, one thing we as Jews should be taking note of is that this happened right before the holiday of Purim. Purim is the story of how a man by the name of Haman wanted nothing more than to wipe out the Jewish people from existence, and yet was undone by the very plot he was attempting to hatch. This Haman was a direct descendant of Amalek.
Amalek is the eternal and perpetual enemy of the Jewish people. He hates us for no other reason than our very being. And it’s not merely on this planet. If all 14 million of us got on a spaceship and moved to the Moon, he’d follow us there and accuse us of occupying the moon, right before he attempts to wipe us out. We exist; therefore he hates us. We have survived; therefore he still plots against us. We have fought him at various points on the space-time continuum; therefore his mere essence continues to haunt us. While one of the Ten Commandments instructs us not to kill another human being…there is also a strict and direct commandment, out of our 613, to remember and wipe-out Amalek wherever and whenever we come across him.
Unfortunately, these days it’s hard to identify who Amalek is. For example, many great rabbis of the 20th century identified the Nazis to be Amalek. Stalin, who actually died on Purim, was thought to be Amalek. But besides being a group of people or one man, it can be an idea, an abstract entity, a movement, all of the above…and lastly, ourselves—the Jewish people—can be Amalek. We can be our own worst enemy. We can hate ourselves for no rational or logical reason. In this case, we have an example of something that has in fact become an abstract entity.
Over the past two decades, we have witnessed the undue courtship and subsequent marriage of the international leftist movement and fundamentalist Islam. Two groups, who couldn’t be more different in terms of their values, yet who have been united by a common enemy. “Western capitalism and Imperialism”. And since both of these groups have a virulent hatred of America, in their eyes, Israel is nothing more than America’s bidder in the Middle East. The former claims that it wants nothing more than “freedom” for people of all persuasions and socio-economic backgrounds…especially freedom from colonization and oppression. The latter wants nothing more than to colonize and convert the entire world to its ideology, this time more so via silent cultural usurpation and less by the sword. Whether they realize it or not, the majority of the left serve as ‘useful idiots’ of the Islamist movement.
