I am sometimes asked, sometimes kindly, sometimes less so, why a Danish Christian man uses his voice to defend Jews and Israel, in the way I occasionally do in my posts.
It is a fair question.
But let me first clear one thing out of the way, so you have context.
I am not part of any media landscape. I appear nowhere, I give no interviews, and I speak on behalf of no one. I am not a member of any party, I belong to no church, and I work for no state, no organisation, no movement. There is no one behind me and no one above me - no person and no circle has ever dictated a single word to me, and no one has ever paid me for one.
I write. As a private person, on my own account, driven by the only thing no one can own in me - my Conscience.
That is the entire apparatus.
A man and his words.
And with that cleared away.
Here is the answer. I know it is long, because it goes deep. Perhaps you can use some of it yourself.
The Western World is not a geography. It is an architecture. And the foundation stones are Hebraic.
Take them up, one at a time.
'That Man is created in the image of God' - hence the inviolable dignity on which everything from human rights to equality before the law rests. Not because man is strong, useful, or productive - but because he bears an image he did not himself produce.
'That the Law stands above the King' - hence the rule of law. When the prophet Nathan stood before David and said "You are the man", the king bowed to the law. NO other ancient culture knows that scene. Everywhere else the king WAS the law.
'That the Prophet can speak against power without becoming either God or Slave' - hence Conscience, Criticism, Free Speech. The idea that Truth is not owned by the throne, but can dwell in a single voice in the desert.
'That a People carries its Scripture and its Memory through three thousand years, through exile, dispersion, and ash' - hence book culture, and the idea that every child must learn to read, because every child must be able to stand face to face with the word.
Dignity, Law, Conscience, Word.
All of it brought forth by one small people on the edge of empires. That is the foundation. All of it Hebraic, all of it older than us - and all of it still in use.
Christianity did not reject this. It carried it out to the nations of the whole world. Christ was a Jew. The apostles were Jews. Half our Bible is Israel's book. Paul says it without evasion to us who are grafted onto the tree -
"It is not you who supports the root - it is the root that supports you."
So much for the foundation. Now for the second question - why does the Jew always stand first when Darkness comes?
It is not a pleasant answer, so you may need to squint, as you do at a horror film on television, if you do not like reading it. But read it.
They do because the Jewish people are the living witness to this entire architecture. As long as that people endures, the claim endures - that Man is God's image, that Law binds Power, that Conscience cannot be owned.
And therefore every project that wants something else with Man must first be rid of the Witness.
Read that passage again.
Look at history. Every single totalitarian system has begun in the same place - by revoking the divine image from one group. By declaring some people to be something other and less than human. And again and again the Jew has stood first in that queue - god-killer in the Middle Ages, well-poisoner during the plague, capitalist in the communist's eyes, communist in the fascist's, globalist in the nationalist's. The accusation changes costume with the era's fear. But the address is the same.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has said it quite simply, so anyone can understand - the hatred that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. History has receipted that sentence every single time.
Add to this Hatred's grammar. Conspiratorial antisemitism cannot imagine that a Man freely loves something and therefore defends it. For within that worldview there exists no conviction, only agents. No one speaks because they believe in something - everyone speaks because they serve someone. The question is therefore never "is he right?" but always "who is he working for?"
But see what that grammar actually does.
It reduces Man to function. And a Man reduced to function is a Man stripped of the image. Conspiracy thinking is not just an error about Jews. It is the very revocation of the view of humanity that made us free - applied first to the Jew, then to anyone who speaks.
That is why it is one and the same struggle.
I do not defend Jews because Jews are worth more than others. I defend them because the attack on them is always the first act in the attack on Man as such. Jew-hatred is civilisation's seismograph. When it rises, it is not the Jews who are in danger. It is the premise beneath us all.
None of this is a free pass for any government. Not even Israel. States can and must be criticised - the right to criticise power is precisely part of the inheritance.
But understand what is at stake when someone wants the source extinguished - a premise that can be extinguished at the root can be extinguished at the branches.
And there exist strong actors in our time - Islamism and technocracy - who would more than gladly see the Western world abandon its deepest foundation, so they could rewrite the reality you live in according to their own narrative about who and what we are.
One wants to place Law above Conscience in God's name - the other wants to place System above Conscience in Reason's name - and both need the image in Man first extinguished in order to get away with their undertaking.
I stand up for Jews because I stand up for Man.
And I do not back down on that - on the contrary.
I will continue.
Because it has never been two different things.
❤️🔥🪽
