Adolf Eichmann Believed the Muslim World Would Complete the Task He Failed to Finish

In Eichmann before Jerusalem, Bettina Stangneth analyzes the Nazi official’s interviews and writings from the time he spent in Argentina between the end of World War II and his capture by Israel’s Mossad. Besides decisively refuting Hannah Arendt’s celebrated thesis that Eichmann was a mindless bureaucrat, Stangneth uncovers his burning admiration for the Islamic world, and his belief that it would pick up where the Nazis left off. Douglas Murray writes:

Eichmann [wrote in his unfinished memoir] that if he himself were ever found guilty of any crime it would only be “for political reasons.” He tries to argue that a guilty verdict against him would be “an impossibility in international law” but goes on to say that he could never obtain justice “in the so-called Western culture.” The reason for this is obvious enough: because in the Christian Bible “to which a large part of Western thought clings, it is expressly established that everything sacred came from the Jews.” Western culture has, for Eichmann, been irrevocably Judaized. And so Eichmann looks to a different group, to the “large circle of friends, many millions of people” to whom this [memoir] is aimed.

That “‘large circle of friends’” comprised, in Eichmann’s words, “the 360 million Muhammadans” whose Quran he much preferred to the Jewish and Christian scriptures. And here, writes Murray, we confront “the only strain of Nazi history which really remains strong to this day.” He concludes, quoting Stangneth,

Eichmann refused to do penance and longed for applause. But first and foremost, of course, he hoped his “Arab friends” would continue his battle against the Jews who were always the “principal war criminals” and “principal aggressors.” He hadn’t managed to complete his task of “total annihilation,” but the Muslims could still complete it for him.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Adolf Eichmann, Anti-Semitism, Hannah Arendt, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Islam

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society