Dear Disillusioned:

A little bit of history is imperative:

"Poland's large Jewish population can get traced back to the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, which existed from 1569 to 1795. The commonwealth was far more religiously tolerant than most of its neighbors, even granting formal religious freedom as early as 1573."

Don't want to repeat myself but here goes:

Worked beside Holocaust survivors at Kifar Giladi in 1972, stunned into silence and awakened by nightmares after visiting Yad Vashem.

Returned home disillusioned and so studied everything I could get my hands on regarding anti-semitism, Zionism, the Balfour Doctrine and the Sykes-Picot agreement.

Of course I studied the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Final Solution...the complicity of my own country's anti-semitism leading up to WW II, indeed even after!

The point?

The middle east, for the most part, was the playground of empires, from the Egyptians to the Assyrians to the Babylonians to the Greeks and Arabs and Christian Crusaders and Ottomans and lastly the British.

Palestine was always at the crossroads.

But it was not the bastion, the fountainhead of anti-semitism. Did not lead pogroms in Russia, did not aid Hitler, as some spurious historians have suggested. Please, the Mufti, like any leader facing terrorist organization like the Haganah and the Irgun, would look for allies.

My point?

Being a victim does not grant anyone the right to victimize others, especially those who had nothing to do with the Holocaust.

Even worse?

Practicing the same horrors visited upon those who once found themselves held behind barbed wire and walls, forced to consider themselves 'untermenschen'.

If that sounds like the protagonists once living on Warsaw's Mila Street 18, perhaps then you will hopefully see how others, those who are forced to bear witness to all kinds of multi-generational war crimes, find the label of anti-semite, applied to all who dare to criticize Israel, to be a spurious epithet.