The Kosher Red Pill

About a month ago in Strasbourg, @Herbert_Kickl, chairman of Austria’s Freedom Party, delivered a speech that broke a decades-long taboo in the relationship between Israel and the FPÖ. The party unanimously adopted the full IHRA definition. Kickl defined October 7 as “a crime against humanity, not resistance.” He stated that “the security of Jewish citizens is the benchmark for the freedom of the entire republic,” and pledged that a government under his leadership would recognize the Jewish people’s deep historical connection to Judea and Samaria and move Austria’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This statement marked a historic turning point in a process of building trust that began roughly two years ago. Today, on the eve of the Kristallnacht memorial, I am summarizing a short visit to Austria led by my friend, MEP @vilimsky. In the Austrian Parliament in Vienna I met with National Council President @WalterRosenkranz and with Styria Governor and former Defense Minister @MarioKunasek. The visit concluded with a Kristallnacht memorial ceremony at the synagogue in Graz, in the presence of Jewish community chairman @ElieRosen and members of the community. At the ceremony in Graz I said, among other things: "In Europe today there is great respect for dead Jews. As for living Jews, in large parts of the continent the attitude has not changed". In the Netherlands, where roughly 75% of the country’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, anyone who dares to buy wine or any other product from a Jewish community in Judea and Samaria faces up to six years in prison. Only recently, at a screening of an antisemitic propaganda film in the Netherlands, the bereaved mother Sabine Taasa who lost her husband and son on October 7 cried out. The Dutch audience shouted back at her: ‘We don’t care.’ The situation is similar in Belgium and Britain. The voices seeking to deny Israel’s right to exist are growing stronger, in a combined assault by two forces: Palestinian Islamo-Nazism and the progressive left. Palestinian Islamo-Nazism sees the Jewish state as a foreign implant in the Islamic space, an implant that must be erased from the face of the earth, just as Hamas terrorists tried to do on October 7. The progressive left sees Israel as a different kind of foreign implant: an implant of confident nationalism, opposed to the cosmopolitan and globalist spirit that seeks to erase nation-states and replace them with supranational entities in which thought police, political correctness, and open immigration policies prevail. Understanding this challenge is the foundation of our partnership with the Freedom Party and with other conservative parties in Europe. They are the last chance for European nation-states to stop the slide before reaching the point of no return. Anyone who thinks the lesson of the Second World War is that we must deny the peoples of Europe the German, Austrian, French or English the right to sovereign national life, and replace that life with some progressive post-national mishmash, will bring ruin upon European civilization. We, the Jewish people, learned the lesson in the hardest way. Our lesson is to build a nation-state confident in its identity, based on strong communities and strong families. We have no intention of giving up our state. We have no intention of stammering about our right to our homeland. We are deeply grateful to the members of the Freedom Party, who, alongside adopting the IHRA definition, chose to emphasize the Jewish people’s connection to all parts of its homeland, especially Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. I very much hope we will meet at the Austrian embassy in Jerusalem as soon as possible.”