Last week, Denmark announced that it would cease its funding for the Ramallah-based Human Rights International Humanitarian Law Secretariat, which for the past five years has received millions of dollars annually from a group of European governments. In turn, the Secretariat uses the money to fund some two dozen nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), all of which are connected either to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—a Leninist terrorist group—or to the BDS movement. The move by Copenhagen is a small but important step toward dismantling a large network of European-funded anti-Israel NGOs that engage in incitement and support terror, and have disproportionate clout at the UN and with the media, as Gerald Steinberg explains. (Interview by Ruthie Blum.):

NGO funding—under the banner of “development” and “civil society”—has been a major part of West European foreign policy for the past two or three decades. In addition, many countries give money to NGO networks because they see that other countries are doing so. They figure that if others are doing it, it must be good for Europe. Moreover, much of the system is faith-based, in the sense that all a group has to say to garner the support of many European politicians is that its mission is to promote human rights. . . . [G]roups that claim to promote values seen as universally good—such as peace, human rights, justice, and coexistence—are automatically perceived as credible and above criticism or investigation.

Moreover, the money is not tracked; it is funneled into large and powerful mechanisms that serve as distributors for what are considered worthy causes. . . . In most cases, the government ministers and directors-general of ministries responsible for signing off on pledges do not have the time, the resources, or the inclination to follow up, particularly as they accept and trust that the “positively motivated organizations” receiving money will use it for good.

Another key factor is that many of the annual reports submitted by NGO-funding networks [like the Human Rights International Humanitarian Law Secretariat] are extremely brief and vague. Such reports will say something like: “We help NGOs in the following 45 countries in the pursuit of opportunities and fairness.” A perfect example is the governmental Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA), which has a huge budget and signs off on funding for all kinds of radical groups. . . .

In Europe, the images of Palestinian suffering, and the overall sympathy for Muslim victims in general, are so strong that it is very hard to cut through the myths and slogans surrounding them. This is true across the board, even in the British Conservative party. It is so deeply embedded in the culture that any criticism, including of NGOs with links to terrorists, immediately becomes labeled “Islamophobic.”

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.