Shameful Overuse of Words in History Without Knowing Their Full Meaning Must Cease Immediately
The word "pogrom" has a specific meaning.
When you misuse it – it’s meaning is cheapened, even completely diluted.
As of late, we are hearing the word "pogrom" too often.
Too highlight a recent example, the mayor of Amsterdam, Femka Halsema announced that the attack on Jews in her city after the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer match against Ajax on Nov. 7 was not a pogrom.
In fact, the attack was specifically against Israeli fans all over downtown Amsterdam even inside their hotels.
The Israeli fans traveled to Amsterdam from Israel.
They are diehard soccer enthusiasts.
The mayor said that it was not a pogrom.
Yet, at the end of that fateful night 10 Jews were brutally hurt.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent two 747’s with search teams and medical teams to first find and then evacuate the Israelis safely back to Israel.
The mayor apologized for using the word "pogrom" in the first place.
She explained that the word is now being used by Israeli leaders and Dutch politicians to discriminate against Muslims particularly from Morocco — in her city.
How incredibility absurd.
This was her apology: "Boys on scooters crisscrossed the city in search of Israeli soccer fans, it was a hit and run . . . I understand very well that this brings back the memory of pogroms.”
The mayor then adds, "I saw how the word 'pogrom' has turned very political — into propaganda, in fact … the government of Israel speaks about a 'Palestinian pogrom' on the streets of Amsterdam."
Mayor Halsema didn't not stop there.
She continued and condemned Dutch politicians by saying: They "use the word 'pogrom' essentially in order to discriminate against Moroccan, Muslim residents. I didn’t mean for that and I don’t want that."
The mayor of Amsterdam went from absurd to ridiculous.
We can debate how many Jews need to be attacked to qualify the event as a pogrom. But, to then invert on its head and re-interpret the entire set events of as a pogrom against Muslims living in Amsterdam is playing fast and loose with the term with truth and with history.
Annually, I re-read Frederich Nietzsche’s inspiring essay, "The Use and Abuse of History."
The title encapsulates Nietzsche’s thesis. That, people use history for their rhetorical ends and as a result, they abuse history.
Nietzsche’s thesis is perfect when applied to today’s language of hyperbole.
If, for example, every massacre or murder is a Holocaust — then the meaning of the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by Hitler and the Nazis — Holocaust — has little meaning.
The same is the case with regard to word pogrom. The word is first found in English in 1882. It comes from the Russian "po gromeit" to destroy.
From there the word immediately jumps into Yiddish as "pogrom." The word was used to describe the murderous riots against the Jews mostly in the Russian Pale of Settlement in 1881-1883 where Jews were forced to live.
The best way to define a pogrom is a violent and even murderous mob attack on a specific group most notably Jews.
There have been famous pogroms the results of which changed history.
In 1903 in Kishnev which was then in the Russian Governate of Bessarabia on April 19-21, the Jews of Kishnev experienced the brutal riot, rape, murder, and burning of their homes and their community. All this happened while the Czar Nicholas II's army surrounded the city preventing Jews from escaping.
Eventually — the army stepped in and stopped the pogrom.
The news of this horrific, murderous pogrom spread throughout Eastern Europe.
It stimulated a massive exodus of Jews from Europe, many of them went to the U.S.
In the 11 years between the Kishnev Pogrom in 1903 until the start of world War I in August of 1914, 1.5 million Jews escaped Europe for the freedom of the U.S.
To this day it was the largest single immigration of Jews to America in U.S. history.
The Jews from Tel Aviv who went to The Netherlands to cheer for their soccer team knew full well that there was some degree of danger. They knew there would be anti-Jewish vitriol but riots and violence against them — that was an entirely different level of hatred.
What happened in Amsterdam was horrific, viscous, brutal, cruel, targeted and pre planned attack on Jews.
Despite the mayor’s apology and protestations, it was a modern-day pogrom. The Amsterdam Pogrom of 2024.
Micah Halpern is a political and foreign affairs commentator. He founded "The Micah Report" and hosts "Thinking Out Loud with Micah Halpern," a weekly TV program, and "My Chopp," a daily radio spot. Follow him on Twitter @MicahHalpern. Read Micah Halpern's Reports More Here.