A very depressing story: Men shouting about killing Jews end London Kristallnacht vigil.

A vigil held by pro-Israel activists on Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park is interrupted by men shouting in Arabic on November 9, 2018.

A vigil held by pro-Israel activists in London for Jews murdered in Arab countries was dispersed violently by men shouting about killing Jews in Arabic.

The event Wednesday by the Israel Advocacy Movement was held on Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park, which is known for its culture of free speech and passionate street preachers championing various causes.

A few dozen people holding Israeli flags and candles gathered there ahead of Kristallnacht, the name of Nazi pogrom perpetrated in 1938, to highlight the suffering and slaying around the same time of many hundreds of Jews who were killed and wounded in pogroms across the Arab world….

“As if on cue, before we’d even begun an extremist began screaming a death chant of Jews,” Cohen said. “The vigil went from bad to worse, they shouted us down, they would not allow us to remember our dead until we had to call off the vigil,” he added. The occurrence “goes to the heart of the matter we’d gathered to commemorate in the first place,” he also said.

A German woman who witnessed the event said: “A Christian was preaching and the atmosphere was friendly, a Muslim was preaching, and there were shouts but the atmosphere was still friendly but as soon as Jews wanted to honor their dead a whole of crowd appeared out of nowhere, as soon as the flags appeared, the cursing began against people who only wanted to honor their dead.”

Janet Albrechtsen describes a meeting at the University of Sydney about a series of academics ganging up on Western Civilisation. Of course, depressing, but this did make me smile. It is a quote from someone opposed to the introduction of this course in Western Civ:

“We have a moral obligation not to allow ourselves to become Trojan horses for political agendas of any kind, least of all supremacist ones,” she said. The Ramsay proposal is “part of the worldwide rise of aggressive racial and cultural supremacism”.

Just what kind of horse is a Trojan horse, and what exactly are we being warned not to become? If you don’t do Western Civ, you will never know! Laughably ironic in their ignorance, but a tragedy to find into whose hands the university system has fallen.

From David Harsanyi: The Left’s Response To The Mass Shooting Of Jews Is An Act Of Bad Faith. His sub-title is, “How are Americans ever going to ‘come together’ if the first thing a political party sees when it sees dead Americans is a partisan cudgel?” It is for this very reason that I did not blog on this myself. There ought to be no politics in this, not for Trump or against him, nor in relation to any other political aspect. Anti-semitism is an old and deadly story for Jews and no family is without a story to tell, though thankfully in my own lifetime there has been virtually none in the places I have lived. Even the story of the Holocaust has been universalised, about the all forms of prejudice even though it was specifically directed against Jews, with anti-semitism still very much alive and in evidence everywhere. And there is no doubt that Trump’s philo-semitism, while welcomed by me is not welcomed by all. An interesting article, reprinted in full.

It was ironic to see many of the same liberals, who recently fought to prop up the world’s most powerful Jew-hating terror state, lecturing us on the importance of combating anti-Semitism. But there they were yesterday.

The same Voxers who had long rationalized, romanticized, and excused the Jew-killing terror organization of the Middle East were now blaming the existence of the evil, anti-Semitic Pittsburgh shooter on Republicans. The same Pod bros whose echo chamber deployed anti-Semitic dual-loyalty tropes to smear critics of the Iran deal were now incredibly concerned about the Jewish community.

There were many others, and that was bad enough. But others decided to dip into a little victim blaming, as well. Hadn’t American Jews been little too Jew-centric and pro-Israelfor their own good?

Franklin Foer of The Atlantic demanded that Jews finally dispense with their faith, adopt his, and start expelling co-religionists for their political opinions. (If you want to read about the left’s co-opting of American Judaism, I recommend Jonathan Neumann’s excellent book, “To Heal The World?”) Wire creator David Simon went bold, embracing a transparent anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, accusing the Israeli government of intervening in the American democracy.

For those who confuse progressivism with Judaism — which is to say many — it might be difficult to understand that undermining the Democratic Party isn’t an act of anti-Semitism. The Trump administration, in fact, has been the most pro-Jewish in memory.

Every Jew who’s ever prayed understands the importance of Jerusalem in our faith, culture, and history. It was President Trump, not any of the other presidents who promised the same, who recognized Jerusalem as the undisputed Jewish capital, putting an end to the fiction that it’s a shared city.

It was Trump who withdrew from the Iran deal and once again isolated the single most dangerous threat to Jewish lives in the world, the Holocaust-denying theocrats of the Islamic Republic.

It was Trump who cut more than $200 million in aid to a Palestinian government that was not only inciting terrorists (including the murder of a Jewish-American citizen named Ari Fuld; but since he never wrote for The Washington Post, you might not have heard of him) but also rewarded the killers’ families.

It was his administration that kicked the Palestine Liberation Organization, the most successful Jewish-civilian murdering organization of the past 60 years, out of DC. It was the Trump administration that cut funding to the anti-Semitic U.N. Relief and Works Agency. It was also the Trump administration that turned around the unique Obama-era legacy of standing against Israel at the United Nations. And it is his administration that cracked down on anti-Semitism on college campuses and that deported one of the last real-life Nazis.

At the same time, the liberal activist resistance wing is being led by a couple of Louis Farrakhan fangirls, and most Jewish Democrats are scared to death to say a single word in protest. But that’s another story.

Anti-Semitic shootings aren’t new, and anti-Jewish hate crimes have long dominated religious bias in this country. This ancient hatred comes from both fringes and runs through presidents of both parties and occurs in nations across the world. Yet what was the most vital lesson partisans could derive from the massacre of elderly Jews attending a bris in Pittsburgh? Stop saying mean things about billionaire progressive sugar daddy George Soros.

As a Hungarian Jew who is a descendant of Holocaust survivors and victims, I am wholly comfortable attacking Soros, who is both a hard-left activist and a funder of the anti-Semitic boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement. Now, there are surely anti-Semites out there peddling conspiracy theories about Soros, just as there are people peddling anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Sheldon Adelson and other wealthy Jews who involve themselves in politics. It’s often overdone, and often by Republicans.

But if you’re not upset about the vile accusations that are incessantly thrown at someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, while you think calling out Soros is de facto anti-Semitism, your main concern is liberalism, not the Jewish people.

If you think Trump should bring down the temperature, you have a point. If you think Trump should turn down the temperature but you fail to mention that a progressive yelling about “health care” tried to assassinate the entire GOP leadership on a baseball field, you don’t really care about the temperature.

If you fail to mention that Democrats have been accusing Republicans of wanting to the kill the poor and young, of trying to destroy the planet, of being “terrorists” after every school shooting, you don’t care about the temperature.  If you rationalize mob behavior every time you don’t get your way in the electoral process, you don’t care about the temperature. And if your first instinct is to play politics with tragedy for partisan gain, you are part of the problem.