On December 11, Belgian police arrested Eva Kaili—one of the EU parliament’s fourteen vice-presidents—on charges of “criminal organization, corruption, and money laundering” involving accepting funds from Qatar. Such criminal involvement might explain why Kaili recently termed the Gulf emirate, which employs tens of thousands of foreign workers as virtual slaves under appalling conditions, a “frontrunner in labor rights.” The small monarchy’s efforts to buy influence in the West are extensive. And that’s not all, writes Fiamma Nirenstein:

For example, the chair of the European parliament’s subcommittee on human rights, Maria Arena, has now been forced to step down due to corruption accusations, and it is likely no coincidence that she has tweeted militant declarations of support for the Palestinians and vicious attacks on Israel. This is not simple avarice: it aids and abets an enemy of the West that is pursuing a grand strategy that is a threat to us all.

The most public aspect of this strategy is, of course, the Qatari network Al Jazeera, which has the facade of a legitimate news outlet, but is in fact a mélange of disinformation and incitement. [Moreover], Qatar has long supported terrorism. For decades, it has opened its doors to Islamist terrorists, Taliban warlords, and African insurgents who have taken innumerable innocent lives. Qatar also gave sanctuary and succor to the late Muslim Brotherhood leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi, along with a platform to spread his radical message to the entire Muslim world. This shouldn’t have been surprising, given Qatar’s longstanding support for the Brotherhood.

The leaders of the terror group Hamas, a branch of the Brotherhood, are regular guests in Qatar, and one of them, Ismail Haniyeh, has established permanent residence in hotels and villas worthy of a multimillionaire. Millions of Qatari dollars flow into Gaza, no doubt to be diverted towards terrorist purposes. Clearly, Qatar is playing the same game with Hamas as it did with the Taliban, which opened a political office in Doha and used it as a base to take back control of Afghanistan.

The U.S. has also credibly accused the Qataris of harboring members of Iran’s terrorist Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC).

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.