Book Review: A New Shoah By Giulio Meotti
by DR. RACHEL EHRENFELD
December 24, 2010
Giulio Meotti’s book, A New Shoah, The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism puts human faces on the devastating numbers that would otherwise represent the amorphous Jewish victims of current, rampant anti-Semitism by Muslims against the Jews in Israel. His subject is daunting, heartbreaking and difficult to read, but Meotti passionately sheds light on Israeli victims of terrorism. He gives a voice to the thousands who were killed or maimed, the people the media neglects acknowledge. In a sobering and unusual fashion, Meotti gives vitality to those victims. The very act of living and persisting is the power behind the Jewish people.
Meotti skillfully connects and parallels the atrocities of the European Holocaust sixty years ago to the aggressive and devastating terrorism that has been occurring in Israel since its inception. Meotti said it himself, “A New Shoah is not an archival reminder but rather the reliving of a smaller-scale Shoah - a Shoah not of millions of Jews killed merely because they were Jews living in Europe but a Shoah of thousands of Jews killed simply because they were Jews living in Israel”.
The personal accounts presented in the book are graphic, raw, and heartbreaking. A New Shoah not only shows that Israel, a country the size of New Jersey, is up against the world, but also champions the heroism, persistence and bravery of its citizens. It is not only the Jews in Israel that are targeted by radical Muslims. Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl was murdered by al-Qaeda saying, “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish”. His life ended but his legacy as a Jew, we hope, lives on in his son, Adam, born in 2002.
Meotti criticizes the world media and its willful blindness to the memories of the murdered and injured. Meotti stresses that Anti-Semitism was not only a contained act evidenced by Hitler and the Holocaust; rather, it is an ongoing and ontological attack on the Jews.
Meotti, not a Jew, is an Italian journalist and author. He is a man obviously full of compassion, and an innate thirst for truth and justice, Meotti has recognized the contemporary and horrifying truths about terrorism today: “I had to resurrect the events not as something from the past but as the horror that still exists in the minds and souls of those who witnessed and survived. Israel's Ground Zero is not limited to a building or plot of land. It is an immense black hole that in fifteen years has swallowed up 1,557 innocent men, women and children and left more than 17,000 injured”.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy. She is an expert on terrorism and corruption-related topics such as terror financing and narco-terrorism. She has helped to change New York state law, when the Libel Terrorism Protection Act (pdf) was passed. Similar laws have been passed in other U.S. states, and a federal law known as the SPEECH ACT which is due to be signed, follows the same principle - that First Amendment guarantees should protect authors and publishers against foreign libel judgments from countries with poor free speech protections.
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