Not long after Riyadh rebuffed the White House’s entreaties to pump more oil to offset the economic effects of sanctions on Russia, reports emerged that Saudi Arabia has entered into negotiations with China to begin selling oil in yuan. Such a shift to Chinese currency would undermine the dollar’s dominant status in global petroleum markets. Ed Morrissey observes:

This isn’t an energy problem, so it can’t be fixed by rapidly increasing American production—at least not directly. This is a diplomatic and strategic issue, one that Joe Biden’s pursuit of a renewed [nuclear] deal with Iran has exacerbated, if not almost entirely created. The Obama administration also bent toward Tehran at the expense of the regional Sunni states, but the Saudis et al. benefited from Donald Trump’s rejection of the [2015 nuclear agreement] and a focus on U.S. alliances [with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel].

That’s the strategic outlook from the Saudi [perspective]. The strategic outlook from China is just as obvious, although an attack on the dollar would be risky for Beijing. They hold a lot of U.S. currency in reserve, after all, and that is one way they manipulate the yuan.

China could decide that the strategic value of dismantling [the global monetary policy established in 1944 at] Bretton Woods outweighs the damage they could do to themselves in the short run. As for the Saudis, they might end up noting that China has been facilitating the Iran deal, as noted by Putin’s interlocutor in the talks, Mikhail Ulyanov. [The Saudi discussions about the yuan] could just be a shot across Biden’s bow to deflect the White House from a very bad deal with the mullahs of Tehran.

As if to underscore Saudi grievances, yesterday Iran-backed Houthi guerrillas in Yemen launched missile and drone attacks at several fossil-fuel and water-desalination plants in the kingdom.

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.