R for Reparations, also for Revenge

In this installment of my exposé of the Left-Islam unholy alliance, I show how the Left’s demand for “reparations for the wrongs of colonialism” serves as its connection point with Islam, how it is fundamentally irrational, and how it truly precludes any possibility of permanent peace.

I do not give colonialism a moral clean bill of health; there were wrongs, injustices committed by the Western colonial powers, that is a matter of historical record. But then those powers did some good things as well to the peoples they ruled, and those peoples in turn were not always the innocents the Leftists portray them (see for example the article The fraud of primitive authenticity, by Spengler of Asia Times). And whatever the case, it is irrational to hold the West guilty and obliged to atone for its past deeds, for no good is served by that—not to the former colonized peoples, nor to the West itself, which by that attitude is driven to suicide through self-loathing. My theme here is the great distance between rationality and the Left’s view of identity politics.

I used to be enthusiastic about opposing colonialism, back in the 1990’s, when I was a Leftist. I haven’t changed to pro-colonialism, but my enthusiasm for that issue has been all but dampened ever since the anti-colonialist narrative started to be applied to Israel, framing Zionism as a colonialist movement and the “Palestinians” as the indigenous people of the land. For that reason, I will demonstrate my point not from the Middle East, but from Africa, where I am relatively free from the coloring of opinion that closeness to home brings.

It is argued that the effects of European colonialism in Africa are still in force, long after the cessation of European rule of the lands and exploitation of them and their inhabitants. The European powers in the 19th century divided Africa into provinces whose borders cut across tribal boundaries; those provinces, once granted independence, became the states of present-day Africa, but those states still suffer from the problem of aggregating different, often conflicting, tribes in them, hence the frequent rise of dictatorships in Africa as a last-ditch effort to give those European-imposed borders a real-world meaning. I am inclined to agree with that analysis, not having found evidence to the contrary so far. However, the things the Leftists demand from the West as reparations to this state of affairs cannot address it, and are driven by an irrational desire.

What are the demands? First, apologies from present-day Western leaders for the past colonialism of their countries. Second, aid from the same Western countries to their former colonies. The first demand, if it has been complied with once, has no redeeming pragmatic value (I mean one apology is sufficient; the Left’s demand for constant apologies, and remembrance of the past wrongs, brings no gain to those countries). The second demand could be helpful, but that is not self-evident, and indeed the representatives of many pan-African groups have pleaded with Western aid funds to stop sending money, because it was both fattening corrupt rulers and inhibiting Africa’s economic self-sufficiency. For Leftist groups to comply to such a request, however, would be deleterious to their myth of the perpetual guilt of the West.

They call apologies and economic aid, “reparations”. They are not—they are compensations, substitutes for something lost and unrecoverable, like someone remarrying and having new children after losing the family in a disaster (far be it from us). To repair means to bring a broken object to its former state, or as near to that as possible with regard to usability. Reparations for the past European colonialism in Africa would be to repartition Africa according to its tribal boundaries. But considering the Left’s frenzied opposition to such ideas, for example when proposed by the Project for a New American Century or even on a single country like Iraq, there is vanishingly little chance that we would ever hear the term used in its proper meaning. Instead, we get from the self-professing “reality-based community” a host of irrational demands, demands that have nothing to do with actually making the world a better place, and everything to do with revenge, or retribution. Let me quote a passage from the article Revenge of the Indians from the Israeli newspaper Yediot Achronot, from issue #2239 of the Friday addendum “7 Days”, dated December 22, 2006:

(Reporter speaking about a Native American flute-player from Arizona) Perhaps because we were foreigners or because we listened to him, his heart and mouth were opened swiftly, and when we told him about what Si Teeshire said about the Gringos, the flute-player said clearly and plainly that the World Trade Center tragedy was “the day of reckoning and retribution for the wrong done to the Indian nation. They started paying now. The 9/11 was the payback”.

Since this article is from the Mainstream Media, which in Israel as everywhere is not to be trusted to report things as is, and furthermore its author is Yig’al Sarane, a well-known and stubborn Israeli Jewish Leftist, some creative interpretation and interpolation may have been involved in this quote. But to its credit, I do not find it hard to imagine the flute-player saying those things. People might tell me to cut him some slack, for he is a Native American and his nation suffered true wrongs; my reply is that this post is not for dealing with any specific group perceiving itself wronged, but with the Leftist ideological stance on the issue of past wrongs, and I regard the flute-player’s sentiment, whether made rightly or wrongly, and whether actually voiced or fabricated by Sarane, to be the authentic echo of that Leftist stance, the stance of seeking revenge.

The desire for revenge is intertwined with the view of the world as fundamentally just. It is compatible with the view of a personal deity and with the view of karma (“reaping what you sow” as a natural law), but not with materialism. If there is neither a personal deity to dispense justice nor a natural law to work it—and that is indeed what the materialist view entails—then the view of the world as fundamentally just is irrational, and with it, by necessity, the desire for revenge. Under Karl Marx’s view of historical materialism, which underpins most of the Left today, even, on an unconscious level, many of those of them who are not Marxists, the just world view and the desire for revenge ought to be scoffed at as primitive ideas originating from religion, the “opiate of the masses”. Yet they are not scoffed at; far from it, almost every Leftist I know claims to hold justice, justice worldwide, as his most important political belief.

Yet the Marxist belief in justice worldwide is different from the Bible-based or even the karmic one. The Native American flute-player expressed a karmic belief; the Marxist agrees with him that 9/11 was fitting payment for a “long history of the USA being the world’s bully”, but he is not content with being an onlooker, waiting on the sidelines for karma to work its effect. The Marxist believes in active application of justice, by individuals. Whereas karmic justice is passive, and whereas the Biblical concept of justice is active but confined to institutions of law, the Marxist concept of justice rests on the idea that the uprising of the oppressed (“proletariat”) over those who wrong them (“bourgeoisie”) is an inevitable occurrence, and should be seized upon by the revolutionary as soon as he can. And that is where Marxist politics meets the politics of Islam.

Is Islam not a theistic religion like Judaism and Christianity? Surface appearances do not reveal the truth deep down. Yes, Islam does hold the god of the Koran to be the supreme ruler of all his creation, but in actuality it delegates that rule to men, to the Muslims. Whereas the observance of G-d’s commandments in Judaism is for crowning Him as a prelude to His coming to rule the earth, the Muslim’s observance of Islam has the purpose of letting the Islamic god rule. The goal of instituting shariah law over the whole world is not merely one of maintaining civil order or sanctifying people, but, as many an Islamic site will say clearly, it is that of “giving Allah the right to rule”; and any state not ruled according to shariah law is guilty of “denying Allah the right to rule”. Where Islam is not the law, the god of Islam is not the ruler; this in contrast to Judaism and Christianity (or most of it; the Dominionists are a fringe sect with an Islam-like mindset), which hold that the Creator rules His entire creation whether humans keep His laws or not.

So the Islamic god needs shariah law to be instituted by humans in order to rule. As a natural consequence of that, Islam offers the option of delegating the job of dispensing divine justice to individuals. This is not to say there are no courts of law in the Muslim world; but, in contrast to the Biblical worldview, which says it is sinful for an individual to take the law into his hands, the Koranic worldview leaves much room for it, and even commends it in many cases. Hence the cataclysmic effect assassinations have had on the Jewish psyche, such as that of Gedaliyahu ben Achikam in ancient times and of Yitzchak Rabin recently, while in the Islamic world these are so commonplace as to be shrugged off every time they happen.

“Resistance to oppression by any means possible” is both a Marxist and an Islamic tenet. Western Marxism has in our day fallen in love with Islam because of that shared trait, going so far as to treat the Koran as a Communist manifesto. Above all, the Western Left sees Islam as a valuable agent of fulfilling the goal of global justice, with revenge and retribution for past wrongs and all. To them, who are timorous to wreak revenge on the “powers of oppression” themselves, the Muslim suicide-bomber brings the benefit of having global justice dispensed by individual humans, without themselves (the Marxists) being held accountable for it. All they have to do is give aid and comfort to the Muslim enemy by fighting its propaganda war, serving, as Daniel Pipes said in his recent article for the New York Sun, as “the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahedeen”.

Actual peace and prosperity for all are not the goals of the Marxists, nor of the Muslims, as the case of the “Palestinians” shows: to paraphrase Abba Eban, they have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, preferring the destruction of the other side over the life of even their own children. Peace and prosperity for both Marxism and Islam have the precondition of removing all opposition to them first, even if it means destroying their means of achieving peace and prosperity in the here and now. With the individual being empowered to dispense global justice, there has never been a chance for democracy or for lasting treaties with the other side, and always been the threat of internecine warfare, among the adherents of these dysfunctional ideologies. In contrast, the Biblical view of the mandate for worldwide justice is put forth eloquently by Tolkien in his Lord of the Rings, in the mouth of Gandalf:

“Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment.”

Very many people know the Hebrew word for “G-d”: E-lohim (I have written it thus, with a dash, out of the requirement of Jewish law). Not so many know that that word is used for a certain group of human beings: judges presiding over a court of law. G-d is E-lohim, and a judge sitting at a court of law is E-lohim, going to show the seriosity, the weight of the task of deciding the fates of people. To be a judge at a court of law is the closest possible in action a human can be to G-d. It is no wonder, then, that the Biblical tradition prohibits humans from wreaking revenge. This is not out of a fluffy, kumbayistic belief that “war is not the answer” and that dialog and appeasement of the aggressor are the right way to achieve peace; it is because, if every human acted upon his perceived grievances, the result would be war of all against all. We can see right now, before our very eyes, the results of individuals acting upon their perceived grievances; such that all non-Muslims worldwide have to fear their every use of an airplane, and to check their art and literature seventy-seven times before publicizing it, to make sure it does not offend the Muslims. Because the Muslims believe in the individual’s right to dispense justice on behalf of the deity, and the Western media and academe and policymakers are either appeasers cringing with fear (that is: dhimmis), or worse, Marxists glad to aid and abet those whom they have found to share their judicial worldview.

“I bid you stand, Men of the West!” Revenge is not permitted to the individual, only to courts of law and, of course, the Judge of All Judges, G-d Himself; but self-defense, in contrast, is not only the individual’s right but his duty, a duty which, if neglected, if relinquished in favor of mercy toward the cruel, will necessary lead to cruelty toward the merciful. The West is duty-bound to defend itself, its values, its civilization, from those who would murder it, and from those who would facilitate that murder by bringing it to suicide. Under those circumstances, the demands for “reparations” should be ignored, rejected for the Marxist sedition they are. As I said, this is not pro-colonialism or pro-imperialism; this is anti-colonialism (i.e. against Islamic colonization of the West) and anti-imperialism (i.e. against Islamic institution of shariah law over the whole world). As I have written before, the Marxist anti-colonialist narrative is an archaism, unsuitable for coming to grips with today’s challenge, and useful only for pricking the West’s conscience away from taking the necessary steps to defend itself. This war is the war of the true rule of law against the threat of systems that disguise lawlessness under the mask of law.

Same Road, Different Vehicles

Among Jews who call themselves progressives, there is one trait that stands out in irony to their self-description. They may argue that their pacifism is progressive (while war is primitive), that their recognition of the “Palestinian” grievances are progressive (while daring to assert that all of the land, including Judea and Samaria, is actually ours is a result of “the primitive attachment to material things like land as opposed to spiritual things like books and works of philosophy and ideas of universal morality”—very Gnostic, that), and that their elevation of Judaism’s moral imperatives (including the imperative to help those who want to destroy you, even though that’s not a Jewish imperative) above “the ancient, outdated laws like kashrut, which were good for their time” is the natural outgrowth of being progressive, of being with the times. In all those arguments, there is nothing that cannot be refuted, but at least they have their initial credibility before the refutation begins.

The one trait, however, of Jewish Leftists that does not have any initial credibility, for it stands contrary to progressivism and therefore refutes itself when coming from them, is their view with regard to anti-Semitism. In that, the so-called progressives are stuck in the days immediately after the Holocaust. On sites like Jewschool and Tikun Olam (of Richard Silverstein, of whom I have written quite a lot on my blog), the obliviousness toward the mortal threat (G-d forbid) made on us by the Muslims and their fictional narrative of the “Palestinian people” is matched only by the paranoia they display about Holocaust Deniers, racists like David Duke and—yes, they do lump the following with the preceding—Evangelical Christians (Christian Zionists). They adhere to old characteristics of non-Jews in order to decide who is our friend and who is our foe. This leads them to hit a false positive (the Christian Zionists) and, on the other hand, some false negatives (the “Palestinians” and useful idiots of theirs like Carter).

What are their criteria? David Duke and his type are like the Nazis, haters of Jews on a racist basis (I agree with that—that’s a true positive). As for the Christian Zionists, say the Jewish Leftists, they’re firm believers in their End Times scenario, in the necessity of furthering the second coming of Jesus, like the Crusaders, and anyone who’s just a little versed in Jewish history knows what the Crusaders did to the Jews on the way to the Holy Land. So it is that Jewish Progressives, when reporting a parade in Jerusalem of Christian Zionists in support of Israel, pepper their reports with comments as to their being wolves in sheep’s clothing.

This attitude is old, as in 1946 rather than 2006, and yet it is not the traditional Jewish view of anti-Semitism. If any Jewish Leftist claims that his mistrust and contempt for the Christian Zionists is rooted in Jewish tradition throughout the ages, then he, and all those who listen to him, must be told that that is not the truth. The traditional Jewish view does not adhere to their idea of, “once an anti-Semitic group, always an anti-Semitic group”. In fact, quite the opposite: the traditional Jewish view has it that Jew-hatred is independent of any particular group of people; that it is a self-sustaining, or more accurately G-d-sustained, ideology capable of latching itself into any group (and even leaving it sometime) and, more importantly, changing to fit the times.

Hatred of the Children of Israel is a divine institution, decreed by G-d, and capable of being ended only by G-d (speedily in our days, amen). Why has G-d, who loves us, set up such an institution? For keeping His people an eternal people. To quote Spengler of Asia Times, quoting theologian Franz Rosenzweig, “The love of the gentiles for their own ethnicity is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death”. Or in other words: all nations are destined to fall to oblivion after their meteoric rise. The success of a nation brings it prosperity, but that causes it to “wax fat and kick” (Deuteronomy 32:15). It ceases to be powered by its animating ideology, and then implodes—it is either riven by infighting or, as in the case of Europe today, emptied through the lack of will to make the next generation. In both cases, Arnold Toynbee’s dictum holds that, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder”. Actually, the common case is for a nation to be so weakened by internal hemorrhaging that the outside enemy’s work is cut short—or as our sages said about Nebuchadnezzar, “You have destroyed a ruined building”, meaning that the First Temple had already been ruined (spiritually, by the Israelites’ transgressions) before the Babylonian king destroyed it (physically).

But the sages say, En mazal l’Yisrael, meaning, literally, “Israel has no sign of the zodiac” (that is the original meaning of the word, “mazal”; the meaning, “luck” as in the well-known “mazel tov” is secondary). It means the Jewish people, in contrast to any other nation in the world, is not subject to the laws of nature, the laws that have each nation rise and shine for a time and then fade into the history books at best. Many Jews over the ages—the Progressive Jews are only the latest in this line—have desired to become a normal nation, a nation like all the others. Israeli Leftist writer A. B. Yehoshua even wrote a whole article in that view, titled In Advocacy of Normality (Hebrew: Bi-Zchut Ha-Normaliyut). But there is what people want, and there is what G-d wants. And G-d said, through His prophet Ezekiel (20:32–33:

“And that which cometh into your mind shall not be at all; in that ye say: We will be as the nations, as the families of the countries, to serve wood and stone. As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with fury poured out, will I be king over you.”

That “fury poured out” need not be that of G-d directly; in fact, it usually turns out that G-d rules over His people, when they are wayward, by means of the fury of the other nations, those same nations to which the Jews so want to be like. And that is Jew-hatred, Judeophobia, anti-Semitism. Every other nation that achieves prosperity is allowed to follow the regular course of fattening and self-skepticism at the end of which is its death; not so the Jewish people. Whenever the Jewish people abandoned their belief in their chosenness, G-d sent them signs from the non-Jews to dissuade them from that belief. Anti-Semitism, and that is not to deny its painfulness, is G-d’s way of keeping His people His people. Thus, after in the 1990’s a lot of Israeli Jews think permanent peace is just around the corner and pronounce Zionism dead and rush to pursue each his own selfish goals, G-d fills the next decade with hostilities from outside—from the Muslims physically and from the Leftists mentally—to persuade them to unite and renew themselves. I am among those whom He has thus converted, praised be His name forever.

Since anti-Semitism is an instrument of G-d and not an inborn trait of any human being, it can afflict any group of humans and take any form. For centuries, Jew-hatred had been most found in the Christian world, and had a Christian character, being based on the “Christ-killer” accusation. It was in that form that havoc was visited upon the Jewish communities of Germany during the First Crusade (1096–9). Nor is this form of Jew-hatred completely dead yet, as the case of Mel Gibson shows. Yet it is not the dominant form it once was.

The Jewish Progressives loathe the Christian Zionists because they think traditional, scripture-believing Christianity is inherently anti-Semitic. If that were so, then anti-Semitism would have had to be in constant decline in Europe from the 18th century (beginning of the period called the Enlightenment, or skepticism of religion) onward, and then be totally absent today, in a Europe that is near-totally secular. Yet, as we all know, anti-Semitism was more virulent in Europe in the 20th century than in any other period, and it is now in vogue also, with British papers like The Guardian hosting shamelessly the view that the state of Israel is responsible for all hatred of the West emanating from the Muslim world and that all criticism of that idea is being suppressed by the Israel Lobby.

No, anti-Semitism is not inherent in Christianity; not in Islam or Leftism either. It is latent by G-d’s decree, and He uses a different vehicle for it every time, to fit the circumstances. So from the 18th century to the middle of the 20th, when religion was on the wane and the “Christ-killers” argument sounded just too old-fashioned, Jew-hatred, instead of dying out as one would expect, assumed a new form: the racism-based one. For an age that had replaced religious, supernatural narratives with scientific, natural ones, hating the Jews came to be based on racial theories regarding them, instead of the former Christian-based accusation. It was in that period that the term, “anti-Semitism” was coined, by Jewish convert and self-hater Wilhelm Marr (the Noam Chomsky of his day). That term, now clearly a misnomer (as in, “I’m an Arab, and Arabs are Semites, so how can I be called an anti-Semite?”), symbolizes the protean nature of Jew-hatred, changing with the times. That new form of anti-Semitism ended in the Holocaust, the victims of which were many Jews who had converted to Christianity and renounced all ties to Judaism.

After the Holocaust, racism was out, decried by all, with the result that the likes of David Duke, once considered to be normal people, are now considered to be the refuse of society. Surely anti-Semitism should have died out then? Maybe “anti-Semitism” in Wilhelm Marr’s original sense, but Jew-hatred most certainly didn’t. It changed once again, and to the form acceptable to the times again. Since the “Christ-killers” accusation is long outmoded, and since saying the Jews are by nature inferior people is racism, the acceptable form of Jew-hatred today is the inversion that has it that the Jews are doing to others what was recently done to them. Describe the state of Israel as “a colonial outpost stealing the lands of an indigenous people”, and you make it acceptable to say the Jews deserve to die at the hands of Muslim suicide-terrorists (G-d forbid). Describe the self-defense actions of the state of Israel as “apartheid”, “ethnic cleansing”, “genocide” and kindred charged terms, and everyone will nod his head in agreement when you say the only Jewish state in the world should be dismantled (G-d forbid). Say all efforts to curb “Israel’s attempts to obstruct world peace” are being obstructed by AIPAC or the Israel Lobby, and people call you a “courageous man of peace speaking truth to power”. Say 9/11 was the end-result of the USA’s support of Israel, as is all “Islamist” terrorism, no matter that totally unrelated states like Thailand and Ethiopia have been on the receiving end of the same kind of terrorism for years, and no matter that we have all seen it takes just a few cartoons to ignite the Muslims everywhere, and people commend you for your “reality-based approach”.

There is no denying it: anti-Zionism is the form of Jew-hatred of our day, just as surely as raced-based anti-Semitism and the the “Christ-killers” accusation was in ages past. Binyamin Ze’ev Herzl of blessed memory, otherwise so perceptive, made his greatest mistake in that regard. He astutely observed the change of religion-based anti-Semitism to the racism-based one, both on part of the mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, and in “enlightened, enlightened” France during the Dreyfus Affair, and realized there was no safe future for the Jews among the other nations. But he predicted the exodus of all Jews from their host countries and into a state of their own would solve the problem of Jew-hatred once and for all. There he was spectacularly wrong, as he could not help being, for he was a non-religious Jew (but, in contrast to many other non-religious Jews both in his time and today, full of love and sorrow for his people); it takes belief in the religious Jewish worldview to know that the problem of Jew-hatred does not have any human solution. Jew-hatred has been transfered from their historical guilt (“Christ-killers”) and from their inborn degeneracy (race-based anti-Semitism) to their world politics, to the state of Israel and all who support it.

And the hatred of the Jews on the part of the Muslims is also a relative innovation. Mohammad hated the Jews in a Luther-like way, outraged at his failure to convert them to his new religion, hence the passages against the Jews in the later parts of the Koran. However, the full cream of Nazi-like, genocidal Jew-hatred is a recent phenomenon, and an import from Europe at that. The Koran says there was a group of Jews whom Allah turned to apes and pigs because they did not keep the Sabbath; that story, while perverse, is not so much an incitement toward Jew-hatred as it is an exhortation for people to obey Allah. But Muslims today call Jews, all Jews, “sons of apes and pigs”. The blood libel of Jews baking matzos using the blood of non-Jewish children is without any shred of doubt an import of a Christian European libel going all the way back to 11th-century England. The imports started in the 19th century, in European colonies in Islamic countries, and culminated in the cooperation, ideological as well as physical, between Hitler and Mufti Hajj Amin El-Husseini of Jerusalem. The genocidal Hamas charter is a lineal descendant of that cooperation, as is the education toward Jew-hatred given to “Palestinian” children each day.

This is the landscape of Jew-hatred today: Muslims eaten with genocidal hatred toward the Jews as a result of sticking European imports onto their homegrown base of jihad ideology, and Leftists justifying the Muslims by equating Zionism with racism, colonialism, apartheid and Nazism, and by blaming the conflict between Islam and the West on the Israel/“Palestine” conflict. This Jew-hatred is no less real and no less dangerous than all the previous forms, and the fact that it cloaks itself as anti-Zionism and “criticism of Israel’s policies” (not Jew-hatred per se, but it is when it flows from an anti-Zionist viewpoint) makes no difference.

On the other hand, Bible-believing Christians are among the best, truest friends of Israel and the Jewish people today. They believe in the New Testament, but they themselves have answered Gibson by saying, “It was not the Jews who crucified Jesus, it was each and every one of us, by our sins”. See, there is a way to counter Jew-hatred even when based on scripture. The Catholic Church too has repudiated the Christian accusation of the Jews, with a series of declarations, many of them formulated by Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI). They are the only non-Jews who fully believe Israel has rights to all the lands promised by G-d in the Torah, and who see the “Palestinian” fakery for what it really is, a disguising of the Islamic jihad against the Jewish state as a nationalistic struggle. Bible-believing America is the safest among non-Jewish states for Jews today, while secular, Leftoxicated, dhimmified, Islam-infested Europe is now a place where Jews relive the feeling of impending doom they had in the 1930’s. Jewish Leftists can talk of Carter being a friend of Israel (with friends like these…) and of Israel/“Palestine” being solvable through hip-hop get-togethers between members of the two sides, but those eyes, those lying eyes of mine, can see well who is the true friend, who is the well-meaning but misguided friend, who is the true foe who wishes all Jews dead (G-d forbid), and who is the deceptive foe who disguises his Jew-hatred under the mask of “solidarity with the struggle of the indigenous Palestinians against colonialist oppression”.

“Happy Holidays” in a true, non-PC sense from Infidels Bloggers Alliance, Kislev 5767 / December 2006.

It is important for us Jews to discern between good and evil, between right and wrong, between friends and foes. We have been given the best tool for that by G-d Himself, the Torah. Many, perhaps even most, non-Jews hate us, but many are those who truly love us and support us, and although we trust in HaShem for the salvation of the Jewish people (speedily in our days, amen!) and not in any human being, it is G-dlike to repay those who love us with gratitude. We should regard as our friend anyone who believes our existence and our return to our land is all fair and not foul, whether he be a Christian, an atheist or a polytheist. But the Christian Zionists are the truest non-Jewish friends of ours, for their belief in the rightness of Israel and Zionism is rooted in their belief in G-d’s promises in His Torah. And whoever of the non-Jews thinks any or all of the state of Israel is “stolen land”—that is an enemy of the Jewish people.

The road to the End of Days, when HaShem will save the Jewish people from their would-be destroyers and put an end not just to the physical but also to the spiritual exile of His people, is replete with enticements for the Jewish people to take wrong turns. For any other nation, G-d leaves them to run their course, to wither away in the sands of history. For us, who are His people, each wrong turn is promptly answered with a police vehicle telling us to retrace our steps to the original path. It need not be the same form of vehicle, but it is always the same phenomenon inwardly: Jew-hatred, the hatred of the truth G-d brought to the world at Sinai, the truth that He will one day establish His kingdom on earth, as in the quote from the prophet Zechariah (14:9) at the end of each daily prayer: “And the LORD shall be King over all the earth; in that day shall the LORD be One, and His name one”. The return of the Jewish people to their land, a watershed event in the fulfillment of HaShem’s prophecies, means that Jew-hatred, now in its form of opposition to the state of Israel, can only intensify more and more, until Israel is left a sheep surrounded by seventy wolves, and then there will be only one Shepherd for her to turn to. Let us keep that in mind and not try to win the hearts of those who hate us. Those who love us will love us even more when we behave as Jews are expected to behave, in the Hashmonean way of physical fortitude standing on a base of spiritual confidence; and those who hate us will always hate us, no matter how hard we try to minimize the number of civilian casualties on the other side or how much land we concede. The highest of our considerations should be what HaShem thinks.

That “Ancient Palestinian Refugee”

Just when you thought you’d seen it all…

British magazine The Independent, the one that revived a long-forgotten theme with its cover showing the flag of the United States of America with Magen Davids substituted for the normal stars, over the title, “United States of Israel?” (April 27, 2006), the one that featured a cover two months later with an IDF tank standing for “War” and the flag of Hamas standing for “Peace” (June 29, 2006), has now outdone itself for Christmas with an article, an “appeal”, called, “What would happen if the Virgin Mary came to Bethlehem today?”, by Johann Hari.

The subtitle for that article is, “Johann Hari on the plight of pregnant women in the West Bank, where babies are dying needlessly”. If the article were as described by the subtitle alone, then it would merit no more than the usual fact-correcting fisking that anyone on our side would give it: pointing out that all the security measures taken on the border by the IDF, including the “Apartheid Wall”, are for keeping terrorists from passing the border and blowing up Israeli Jewish women and children; that the women would not have to suffer from malnutrition and disease if their leaders, those leaders who have for ages waxed lyrical about “fulfilling the dream of a Palestinian homeland”, spent their money (including millions in foreign aid!) on self-constructive rather than Israel-destructive purposes; that the total lack of scruples by that same society, having no compunction about smuggling weapons and suicide bombers in ambulances, and other types of operating under the cover of humanitarian services—which they know that the Jews, like all non-Muslims in general, would hold sacred, untouchable—was what had led to this unfortunate turn of events; and that the fact that those women bear children for the sole purpose of raising them as suicide bombers has made the Israeli Jewish side a little less caring about the need to protect them. All in all, those are cries of the sort of one who has murdered his parents and claims he’s an orphan. Thus much for the surface of the article.

But there is the depth of the article, something appearing right at its beginning, and that is what has caused me to say The Independent has outdone itself, and indeed to write this post at all. There is here a deep ideological issue, and, as I have spared no effort in mentioning, I specialize in looking at the ideological roots of this regional and global conflict. Here is the first paragraph:

In two days, a third of humanity will gather to celebrate the birth pains of a Palestinian refugee in Bethlehem—but two millennia later, another mother in another glorified stable in this rubble-strewn, locked-down town is trying not to howl.

What are they saying here? What is it here that merits the deepest of our—specifically Zionist Jews’—attention?

They’re saying that Miryam (Maria, Mary etc.) the mother of Jesus was a Palestinian. A Palestinian refugee living under the occupation of a foreign power.

First a preliminary note about the Jewish view of Jesus. The non-Christian views of Jesus are legion (pun intended), ranging from the Islamic “stunt double on the cross” view through the New Age neopagan mystic-crystal-revelation view put forth in The Da Vinci Code to the view popular in secular humanist circles that Jesus was a myth and never really existed as a person at all. The Jewish view holds Jesus to have been a historical person and actually crucified; the difference from the Christian view is the rejection of his claim of being messiah, not to mention deity, as well as the rejection of the claim of the virgin birth. We believe Jesus to have been born as everyone was, by sexual intercourse between a man and a woman; the man is the subject of debate, often censored (especially from those copies of the Talmud used in Christian countries up until a few centuries ago), some saying Joseph, some saying it was a Roman soldier. But that doesn’t matter to this discussion, because the mother was Jewish, making Jesus a Jew. I go from here.

Mary and her son were Jews living in what is now called the West Bank. As far as I’m aware, Jews living in the West Bank today are called, “settlers” and they are the subject of constant, no-holds-barred demonization by the Western Left. It’s fast turning to a concensus that all Israeli Jews, even in Tel-Aviv, are “colonialists participating in a land-grab of Palestinian lands”, but we’re still not at the point of hearing it said out aloud everywhere—give it a little time. The Jewish settlers in the 1967 territories, however, are long held by concensus of the Left to be “stealers of others’ lands”. Mary and her son would be told by the writers of The Independent that they were an obstacle to world peace and should evacuate their homes for the good of all humanity. Also, as Jewish settlers in the West Bank they would be targets (G-d forbid) for the “Palestinian refugees” Johann Hari writes so tearfully about. As commenter The Other Les says on the thread on LGF (comments #7 and #8): “If Mary went to Bethlehem today she would be shot in the head by the Palestinians. And they would empty a 30-round mag into her abdomen just to be sure”. And none of the people at The Independent would, if they got to hear it all, shed a tear for her, for she deserved it for stealing an other people’s land—such, dear brothers and sisters, would be the reaction of the world to a Second Holocaust (G-d forbid), after decades of having been primed for it by the Leftist media.

But Hari does not call Mary a “Jewish settler”, he calls her a “Palestinian refugee”. I called her a Jewish settler because she was a Jew like me today and because she lived on lands taken by the state of Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967. On what basis does Hari call her a Palestinian refugee? On the basis that she lived on lands taken by the state of Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967 and on the basis that she lived under the rule of a nation not her own. In other words, the location gives Hari the starting-point to make any comparison at all (the same thing I just did), but while I chose to base the comparison on Mary’s ethnicity, Hari chose to base it on her situation. It is indeed a case of that which Ramzy Baroud talks about in his lament I quoted on December 5: “[…] No other national struggle in the world has assimilated itself, or has been inadvertently assimilated, to symbolize so many things to so many different people, as has the Palestinian struggle”. I don’t know the exact nature of the ax Hari has to grind with his article, but this I do know, that, like so many others before him, he has taken the Israel/“Palestine” conflict as his launching ground. From such a source as The Independent I suspect a general “struggle against colonialism” motive; and what better way is there to further that goal than by taking the Christian “Birth of the Prince of Peace” narrative and tagging it onto the “oppressed Palestinians, suffering under the Israeli jackboot”? Even if it means turning the truth, the truth of both Mary and her son Jesus having been Jews, on its head.

So Mary was a Palestinian refugee, according to The Independent. Palestinian refugees, the Left has it, are suffering under Israeli occupation. We just have one more empty square to fill: what is Mary’s time’s equivalent of the Israeli occupation? Yep, you got that right: the Romans. If Mary was a Palestinian refugee, then Israel is Ancient Rome (or at least the doers of the command of Rome, which will be the United States of America—as you can see, I’m very well-trained at Left-think, after all those reads), and the Israeli Jews the Romans, Roman colonials keeping their oppressive on a land that belongs to another nation. It dovetails with the “Muslims are the new Jews” line that’s all the rage now.

Truth turned on its head again—so what else is new? But there’s more to it here than that. Ask yourself, gentle reader: What happened to the Romans? Right: they no longer exist as they did, their descendants now separate nations (Italians, French, Spaniards and so on), their original language likewise split into its derivatives and, most importantly, their empire, their state, no longer existent. Therein lies a subtle message: as the Roman political entity disappeared, so will the state of Israel (G-d forbid).

Think this is paranoid Jewish hyperbole? Well, think again, because no less a “man of peace” as former South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu said, in 2002:

People are scared in this country [the US] to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful—very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God’s world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Look what company the good Archbishop has placed the Jewish state in. He, and most of the Left—more than we hear, for there is still reluctance about saying so publicly—are of the opinion that the state of Israel has no right to exist. Or he says the state of Israel can exist (why, thank you!), but as “the state of all its citizens” and not as a Jewish state—in other words, he doesn’t mind a non-Zionist Israel, an Israel where Jews could be subjected to the very anti-Jewish discrimination that the secular founders of Zionism intended to prevent. Just how is that different from what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens, that “the Zionist entity” would disappear from the face of the earth (G-d forbid) just as “other oppressive regimes before it” did?

The importance of this article from The Independent, and specifically its first paragraph, in its implicit positing of the Zionist state to be equivalent to the Roman Empire, is in the insinuation that Israel is an historical wrong initiated and perpetuated by brute force. The deep meaning of construing Mary as a “Palestinian refugee” is that, once again, the “Palestinian” issue has been used to make the Jewish people the oppressors, to say that we have become like those who once wronged us. The “Palestinians” are there for the Leftists to say to us, “You have become like the Nazis”, and now, “You have become like the Romans”, the common thread being: “As those oppressive, ill-conceived powers have disappeared from the face of the earth, so will you”. (Dust to those mouths who say that.)

Now I have reached the heart of the matter: the inherent Jew-hatred in the use of the term, “Palestinians”. I have belabored enough the point that they are a fake nation, a recently-invented “ancient people” disguising the Islamic intent of destroying Israel (G-d forbid) under the Left-friendly cover of an “anti-colonial nationalistic struggle”. Many sites on our side do the righteous work of refuting the accusations of Israeli oppression and intentional wrongdoing toward them. Their work is all-important, and may G-d shower His blessings upon them for it. But as for me, though I have not always stayed my hand from such fact-correcting activities, I am not of the best at them. They are exposés and treatments of the symptoms, while I fare better at exposing and (G-d willing) treating the causes. I say to you that, while showing to the world that we are not behaving like monsters toward the Palestinians is well and good, the very fact of using the term, “Palestinians” constitutes fighting abroad rather than as a home team. The mere fact that we recognize the nationhood of the “Palestinians” gives the enemy a big advantage.

All the Gentiles, including Leftists, know, in their heart of hearts, that without the claim of “the Palestinian nationhood”, all this land falls as per the rights of indigenous peoples (an important Leftist tenet, at least on paper) to us—to the Jews. Time and again I have written that the most ancient indigenous people of this land still in existence is us, bar none. For all the period between circa 135 CE (the end of Bar Kochba’s rebellion against Hadrian) and the 19th century, this land was without a people (again, for any Leftist reader: without a people, meaning without a nation—not without people meaning uninhabited). So it isn’t as if someone could say we have “lost the lease on the land” because someone else inhabited it while we were absent. But that’s what the Leftists are saying. In the view of my previous point, how can they say that? Answer: “the Palestinian nation”. Concoct an ancient nation with a history of inhabiting this land all along before we returned, and there you have the cause to justly and righteously evict (at best) us Jews out of it as “reparations of past wrongs”.

The lie of the “Palestinian nation”, a Big Lie on a scale that would make Goebbels proud, is more dangerous to the Jewish people than is any Holocaust Denial Conference. Such conferences deny only past history, while the Fakestinian Fiction denies not only the past but also the present and future for us Jews. It is the linchpin of the current form of Jew-hatred, namely anti-Zionism, which aims to rob us—and only us, no other nation—of our right to have our own sovereignty on our land and to inhabit the whole of it. This is the lie that makes possible the outrageous equation of Zionism with Nazism, with South African apartheid and, as we can now see, with ancient Roman imperialism. This is the lie that lulls to sleep any conscience that might balk at demonizing the Jews a mere 60 years after the end of the Holocaust.

We must use the name of that fictional nation in scare quotes or not at all. Any other use is a recognition of its legitimacy, and by extension the legitimacy of evicting the Jewish people from half their land at the very best case. We must hammer the point home, without fail, without cease, that we are the ones still here after the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Mongols, the Turks and the British, well over three thousand years of unbroken Jewish history, praise be to our mighty G-d, while those people claiming to be an ancient nation, the “Palestinians”, are just another in the line of invaders and usurpers of this land, this land which G-d has given to us and to none other, and the only land which G-d has given to us (so the entirety of the rest of the world is there for all non-Jews to squabble on; leave us and our land alone).

To the Christians who support the Jewish, Zionist state of Israel I send holiday greetings and a wish for your safety as you celebrate the birth, 2,000 years ago, of a Jewish baby to a Jewish woman in the Jewish town of Bethlehem. Although I do not believe about that baby what you do—and I am not ashamed to say so, for that is the truth and I am not among the politically correct—I am from the same nation as him, here in this same land, back after an exile of 2,000 years, as promised by G-d in the book we both believe in.

A Few Odds and Ends

I’m again busier than usual lately, but things don’t stop popping up, so here’s two urgent things to address for the weekend.

First, a piece from our outstanding Jewish kumbayista Richard Silverstein. His post Tzedakah for Peace, from yesterday, is a graphic example of Perchikian use of Jewish precepts to anti-Jewish ends. Tzedakah, as he rightly explains, is the Jewish duty of giving alms to the needy. He adds, again rightly, that the word tzedakah in Hebrew, being derived from the root for “justice”, has not the connotation of doing a favor like the English world “charity” has. So far so good.

But now you would expect the post to end with donation links to organizations that give poor families, widows and orphans the opportunity to be joyful on Shabbat with chicken, wouldn’t you? You’d expect encouragement to donate to people in need of covering onerous loans and mortgages, right? Naaaaah! Silverstein is way above those petty things. Here’s where he says your money should go:

So I hope even though you may have little, that you’ll preserve a small amount to help those who may not have your advantages in this holiday season. The following is a short list of worthy Israeli and Jewish groups promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace which are worthy of your giving. A few years back, I wrote an expanded version of Israeli and Palestinian online peace resources. You may find many more ideas for giving if you visit those posts:

Parent’s Circle
Americans for Peace Now
Israel Policy Forum
Brit Tzedek
Jewish Voice for Peace
Neve Shalom
Jewish Peace Lobby
B’Tselem
New Israel Fund

Forget about those widows who want to make a pleasurable Shabbat for their children with a nice meat meal. For Silverstein, the important thing is to promote the efforts of “peace”, no matter that those organizations, upon checking their websites, are all active in portraying Israel as an oppressive state, thus following, even if not intentionally, the Big Lie of “Zionism = Nazism” which serves as justification for the haters of Israel to murder us (G-d forbid). A donation to those organizations would be not just a waste of money, but far worse: it would be a donation for the spilling of Jewish blood (G-d forbid). Yes, as usual, those who donate to them or encourage such donations are usually well-intentioned and sincere but, as I said time and again, sincerity is not enough.

On the subject of sincerity and donations, a recent news story that shows decisively why extreme caution and scrutiny should be exercised before donating to an organization is the one about the donations sent to Aceh, Indonesia (links: Dhimmi Watch, LGF, Hot Air). Sincere souls in the West donated for the earthquake recovery efforts of Aceh, believing their money would indeed be used in that way, but it ended up funding Islamic oppression, especially of women.

Similarly, but now having gone for so long that it goes unreported, the millions funneled as foreign aid to the “Palestinians” would, if divided equally among them, make each “Palestinian” a Rothschild, but instead have gone partly to the coffers of Abu Mazen and Haniyeh and Souha Antoinette and partly to the purchase of weapons for terrorizing Israel. Again: money not just wasted, but given to an evil cause.

Tzedakah is an obligation. But be sure to give to those who are really in need and will not use it for other, evil purposes: the poor in need of a Sabbath meal, young couples steeped in debts, and kindred things. Leave your politics—and I’m talking of mine here as well—out of it.

Second, a peace on Israel on Daily Kos from (who else?) Shergald, called Happy Hanukkah from Bil’in Palestine, also from yesterday. As usual, Shergald’s words aren’t anything new, he just brings examples from the Israeli Jewish Left to show how Israel still has a “soul” in it that is opposed to the “brutal occupation”. It’s the quotes and comments that count. The Hanukkah ceremony at Bil’in began with the words of Uri Avneri (no introduction needed about him):

“Perhaps it seems strange that we light the candles of a Jewish holiday at this place, but we are standing here on the land of the Maccabees. It is here that they were born and here they started their revolt. The rebellion of the Maccabees is not only a Jewish symbol. Long ago it has become a world-wide symbol of the struggle against oppression, occupation, and injustice. The people of Bil’in are the Maccabees of these days, and the occupation is Antiochus.”

(All emphases mine —ZY)

That’s how Leftists think. They hate traditional religion with a passion, except for using it for their ends. Every particular of a religion is generalized, universalized (“not only a Jewish symbol”), every action and guideline assimilated to the Marxist narrative of the warfare between oppressors and oppressed (“a world-wide symbol of the struggle against oppression, occupation, and injustice”), and the truth turned on its head in the process (“The people of Bil’in are the Maccabees of these days, and the occupation is Antiochus”, on a par with construing the “Palestinians” as David and Israel as Goliath).

Shergald goes on to describe and quote eight activists lighting torches with statements:

“I light this torch for the fighters against occupation and oppression, in the spirit of the Maccabees, who were the sons of this soil!”

We Jews are the sons of this soil, and we are fighting against the occupation of this land by Muslim invaders, and this single Jewish state was set up in the first place as a solution to oppression of the Jews over the ages. If you oppose the right of Jews to inhabit all their promised land, then you are an enemy of the Jewish people.

“I light this candle against injustice and discrimination, in the spirit of the best spiritual leaders of Judaism throughout the ages!”

The best spiritual leaders of Judaism throughout the ages did not support fighting injustice and discrimination by means of suicide martyrdom and the sacrifice of the nation’s women and children. Nor would they regard Israel’s actions today as anything but legitimate self-defense from those who would destroy it (G-d forbid). Turning the other cheek is not a Jewish value.

“I light this candle for human dignity and human rights!”

Human dignity and human rights are the things stripped away entirely from non-Muslims in Islamic countries, as well as from the man in the streets of “worker’s paradises” like Cuba and Venezuela. Not from any citizen of Israel. Human dignity and human rights, however, cannot be given to those who have it in both their words and deeds to eliminate us.

“I light this candle against the settlers who take by force possession of the land that belongs to others, contrary to the Jewish values they profess to honor!”

This land is ours entirely, including the territories taken in 1967. Among Jewish values is belief in G-d and His statements, including His statement that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people and no other. Other nations have the whole of the rest of the world to inhabit.

“I light this candle in honor of the State of Israel within the Green Line, a state of liberty and justice!”

Silly Israeli Leftist, don’t you know the whole of the State of Israel was “born in sin”, and is illegitimate even within its 1949 Armistice borders? The only reason your non-Jewish Leftist and Muslim “friends” are still telling you otherwise is they value you as a useful idiot of theirs. Such a situation can only be temporary.

“I light this candle against the hooligans who cut down Palestinian trees and steal the olives, and who last year destroyed 5000 Palestinian homes, who besmirch the honor of Israel.”

Better you should light the candle against those who, when given all they need to build a prosperous state, destroy what is given to them out of sheer, blind hatred and exchange its greenery for a desert with holes through which weaponry is smuggled. Know what true evil is.

“I light this candle for the love of human beings, wherever they are!”

First human beings for one to love: one’s own offspring. Those who do not love their children, so that they gladly use them as suicide bombs, do not deserve to be accorded the rights of ordinary human beings. They should be killed, and their children taken away from them to be raised in a healthy environment, in order that they may live.

“I light this candle for peace between the two peoples, sons of this country!”

The Jews are the sons of this country, and as long as they keep Torah and Mitzvot, G-d permits, nay, commands them to inhabit the country, which He has given to them as He says in His Torah. No nation is permitted to obstruct the inhabitation of the Land of Israel by the Jews.

Finally, here is something from the comments on that Daily Kos thread, from the honestly, openly anti-Semitic Christopher Day:

Sadly, Gush Shalom’s statement for the fifth candle, made in the spirit of evenhandedness (“I light this candle in honor of the State of Israel within the Green Line, a state of liberty and justice!”) rests on an erasure of the experiences of Palestinians living as second or third-class citizens within the Green Line and self-deception about the viability of the two-state solution implied by the statement given Israel’s massive dependence on the West Bank aquifer for any reasonable prospects of future population or economic growth. The truth is that the “State of Israel within the Green Line” is an imaginary entity, and the actual existing State of Israel is not a state of either liberty or justice for the Palestinians who live on either side of the Green Line.

Hmmmmm. So, Israeli Jewish Peacenik standing against the “Occupation”: do you accept that you’re no better than a West Bank settler even if you live in Tel-Aviv? Christopher Day isn’t in a minority for thinking that way, he’s just in a minority for voicing it publicly. And considering that, just 20 years ago, thinking that way was taboo, but now it’s all the rage, it will not be long before saying it out aloud is perfectly acceptable. If you’re already as good as any West Bank settler in Leftist and Muslim eyes, then you might as well drop the delusion of being in their good books through your anti-settler actions. Take, all of you, your own side in this war for a change. You won’t regret it.

Happy Hanukkah, happy Rosh Chodesh (beginning of the month) and Shabbat Shalom!

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Updated (December 22, 2006, 01:15) to add a sentence to the part about human dignity and to fix typos.

Potentially A Great Generation

For December 7, 2006, the 65th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, LGF had the thread Anniversary of Another War, as well as a thread pointing to a Cox & Forkum cartoon, Then and Now. In both threads, the commenters are agreed in their depression over the contrast between the American fortitude and tenacity of 65 years ago and the current state just five years after an attack on a greater number of American civilians. I too agree on the contrast and the shadow it casts upon our times; however, I do not agree in writing this generation off as lost. There is today a lost generation, but it is a generation which we have long known to be so, while the coming generation, the generation that will probably tasked with the trials of World War III, has yet to be known, to fulfill its potential.

The “Signs of the Times” are of interest to both amateur and professional historian alike. Both search for them in the artefacts of the day, particularly written ones, but not only those. The mainstream media of each day can record societal changes even unconsciously: for example, taboos like profanity can be seen to be broken, while new taboos like racist descriptions can be seen to be established. The art of the day can reflect change: the witches’ “Fair is foul and foul is fair” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth reflects the growing doubt and confusion caused by the Scientific Revolution, especially the demise of the geocentric cosmology. Language itself can tell us of the times: the decline and fall of the Roman Empire is marked by the increase in the number of spelling mistakes in written Latin, until, when we reach the Middle Ages, the mistakes suddenly cease, for the spoken tongue is now too different from Classical Latin to influence the writer. But whatever the signs of the times, one fact must be taken into account: they reflect the generation in current standing, the adults, and not the generation that is going to take the stage a few years from now.

In times past this fact was not very important, for generational changes were slow and few, so that signs from a certain generation would usually hold true for the generation after that. In recent times, however, meaning from the 18th century and up to now, gathering speed with the passage of time, societies undergo copious and rapid changes that can make a generation very different from the preceding one. Even a single event can be enough to show that the young generation, hitherto thought to be the same as that of the adults, is something else.

What could be more appropriate than TIME Magazine for demonstrating that point? In 1938 it featured Hitler as its Man of the Year. Appeasement was in full tempo then, with Britain and France shamefully betraying Czechoslovakia. From that cover of TIME Magazine and from the disgraceful moves of the public in Britain, France and the United States, one could be forgiven for regarding that generation as lost, as lacking any discrimination between good and evil, not to mention the will to fight. Yet just one year later, in 1939, the generation was jolted by the reality of a power whose hunger the mere Sudetenland would not sate, and the “warmonger” Winston Churchill was raised to be the leader of Britain in the West’s fight for survival. And the USA too, having been isolationist since the departure of Woodrow Wilson, helped Britain in the first years of the war, and in 1941, following the Japanese attack, joined it actively with resolve, until the total unconditional surrender of all Axis powers.

TIME Magazine wanted to make Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the Man of the Year for 2006, but the editors probably felt it could be going too far, so instead they settled for an idea which is no less a sign of the times than the choice of Ahmadinejad would have been: to declare everyone Man of the Year. It was under the pretext that “everyone now participates in the flow of information that changes the world”, yet Robert Spencer had words cutting behind that mask:

This monumental bit of silliness on Time’s part is just another illustration of the West’s failure of will. We have no longer any standards, any distinctions, any excellence, because we are pathologically afraid of branding anyone a failure.

Along with this wholesale leveling comes an unwillingness or inability to declare any model of society or any belief-system superior to another, which saps all our will to fight against the encroachments of the Islamic jihad ideology. […]

Thus has Robert Spencer analyzed TIME Magazine’s peculiar choice as a sign of the times. I agree with his analysis; however, again, this does not teach us about the coming generation any more than did TIME’s choice in 1938.

The signs of the 1960’s have become legendary. We can now recall them one by one: the flower children, the emergence of the birth control pill, the Cuban Missiles Crisis, Vietnam, the first man to set on the moon, and so on. But the mainstream media of the 1960’s was not markedly different from that of World War II and the 1950’s. This is because the generation of that day (now called The Greatest Generation, and hailed by all LGF lizards, including me, as one whose example we need to follow if the West is to survive the coming war) was still in power. Conversely, the 1960’s were the decade in which “radical” ideas like Political Correctness, Occidentalism (denigration of the West), Indigenism, Multiculturalism, Radical Feminism, Anti-War Activism, Radical Environmentalism (an ideology, going beyond mere care for the environment and into the view of humans as a blight on Mother Earth) and other examples of “questioning all authority” and “breaking every taboo”, yet they have come to take control of our societies, or more dangerously, of the policies of our states, only in last few decades, from the 1980’s to this day; this because the college kids who hatched those ideas in the 1960’s are now adults in positions of power. Those facts are always to be remembered when evaluating a generation in our times.

One can point to the Mainstream Media of our day and lament, “Our generation is unfit for the coming World War!” But he would be wise to remember that his “Our generation” is not the youngsters coming to adulthood today, but the 1960’s kids who have grown up to be the policymakers and leaders of our day. Thus it is clear how we have an increasing number of people who are becoming aware of the threat of Islam while the leaders are stuck in Cold War thinking and appeasement of the ideologically-driven aggressor with material incentives. The aging hippies of today, reeling from their “success” in forcing the pulling out of US troops from Vietnam, see Vietnam in any US military intervention abroad. So with whoever laments that the wrong people are in positions of influence and power I agree, but I hold that the sorry state of our leadership and academe is only the generational fulfillment of the mindset that was incubated in the 1960’s—not that the coming generation is lost. The coming generation is, at worst, an unknown variable, for it has not yet had its opportunity to show how it is.

But it is not a completely unknown variable.

Why are World War II comparisons so abundant? I am of the opinion that those comparisons have been overdone; although the similarities are there, the settings of today are different from those of World War II in some important ways, not least of which is the fact that World War II, like World War I, was built upon and sustained by the aggression of nation-states fueled by totalitarian ideologies, while in the current conflict the totalitarian ideology (Islam) is perfectly capable of operating without a nation-state, as heads without bodies. As Victor David Hanson puts it:

But there are significant differences between the “global war on terror” and World War II that do explain why victory is taking so much longer this time.

The most obvious is that, against Japan and Germany, we faced easily identifiable nation states with conventional militaries. Today’s terrorists blend in with civilians, and it’s hard to tie them to their patron governments or enablers in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Pakistan, who all deny any culpability. […]

Indeed. To point at Iran, though deserved, is so convenient, because it’s a tangible threat; to point at an ideology, all the more so an ideology masked under the mantle of religion, is much harder. With the authorities in the West—kids of the 1960’s now in positions of influence and power, that cannot be stated enough—so careful not to break the taboos of multiculturalism, it is no wonder that a criminal can get away with his crime by being veiled and no-one would dare to do a thing about it. The adult generation, if not treasonously sympathetic to Islam, is accommodating of it, quick to defend it in the name of that Sixties idea, echoed by TIME’s choice for this year, that no value can be judged better than another.

What about the coming generation, then?

It was raised by the 1960’s kids, who in turn had been raised by the World War II generation. The Greatest Generation, because of the circumstances of the age (the Depression and then the War), raised their kids on frugality and on conservative (meaning non-permissive) values. As even the flimsiest survey of the 1960’s shows, their kids rebelled at all their values, and when the time came for them to shape the world, they had to give their kids all their parents had never given them: lavishness and permission.

A whole cadre of educators adhering to the humanist school of psychology saw to the application of the dictum that a child’s feelings must not be hurt under any circumstances, else they would stunt his or her psychological growth. There grew a generation of children without borders, knowing to ask but not to give. Their parents were all so very “open” and “frank” with them on the subject of sex, such that the kids reached their teens with an extensive knowledge of the relevant anatomy and… almost zero experience of even the concept of commitment to a long-term relationship. They were educated on the absolute sanctity of respecting the “other”, to such an extent that oneself was marginalized and left without an identity of one’s own.

Not all children of the Sixties Radicals were educated so explicitly, yet the influence was always behind the scenes. From Zombie’s photo report Anarchist Bookfair, San Francisco, March 18, 2006.

We’re talking about the kids of the 1970’s, 1980’s, 1990’s and even today. I’m one of them. Although the 1970’s kids deride the “computer game kids” of the following decade, and those in turn ridicule the “Internet generation” of the decade after that, all those kids were raised by that famous generation of radicals and taboo-breakers who “questioned all authority”. What happened to those kids—to us?

Understandably, there were different ways to go. And yet, not many were those who followed in the footsteps of their Sixties parents, just as not a lot of the Sixties kids copied the way of the Greatest Generation.

You have probably heard of the “modern, middle-class metrosexual who goes searching for himself”. It’s an apt depiction of us who inherited an identity void to be filled. Most of us have undergone at least one instance of that stage in life in which we have searched for “our true home to which we will return”. In that search, many are blown like straws along any wind that feels a little fair. I am not saying this in disparagement, I am saying this in understanding and in pity.

Some have aimed for the utmost in exoticism, and can be found today in the streets spreading the message of ISKCON or Raël, or in the woods, beating the tom-tom drums as part of the authentic practices of the ancient Smelihipi tribe, stretching all the way back to 30 years ago.

Some have gone the route which at first may have shocked their parents, but then actually made them sigh with pleasure, for it still kept to the hallowed goal of “Sticking it to The Man”. The likes of Adam Gadahn may have an adopted an ideology diametrically opposed to that of their parents, but then the parents realized it was just as effective, if not more so, in the way of smashing “Western Imperialism” and “American Hegemony” and “Patriarchy” and the rest, and accepted it as a wise choice. What a magnet Islam is for today’s children of the Sixties Radicals, letting them both rebel against their parents’ void of authority and identity and still be in their good books by fighting against their Devil!

And some have said to themselves, “Who are you to tell me to question all authority?” They have realized the error of both absolute doubt (nihilism) and absolute certainty (fascism); of both absolute permission and absolute prohibition; of both absolute temporality (the overabundance of earthly pleasures that leads one to vomit) and absolute spirituality (the escapism that leaves evil unopposed and the world unpopulated).

They have understood that the commercial globalization with a McDonalds in every spot is not the spirit’s highest aspiration, yet they have also been discerning enough to realize that Luddism is not the antidote.

They have discovered that the treasures of “free, happy living”, which their parents had coveted in the “Noble Savage”, dressing themselves up as Native American or Arab Bedouin tribesmen, were already available, and in abundance, in their own heritage. That they no longer need to stand the identity crisis of being students of every other culture but not able to be studied.

How many of those are there? Naturally, I don’t have numbers. But, even from my own setting, I know many who were raised on some kind of “child’s guide to nihilism”, even implicitly, but have found that way. They, in contrast to the elder generation behind TIME Magazine, have a clear idea of what they stand for and why they need to fight for it.

The unknown variable is their exact number. But whatever that is, they are the ones who will be on the fighting lines of World War III. The current state of leadership and academe in the Western world does not reflect them, just as TIME’s cover from 1938 did not reflect the heroes that would emerge just one year afterward. World War III’s “Greatest Generation” is presently hidden, a potential force, but I have no doubt of its existence. My prayer for it is that it should unleash its potential before the crisis is too great.

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P.S. This post is part of my effort in doing sanegoria for this generation. May HaShem judge us mercifully, amen.

Response to “Bolton Refuses to Shut Up” on Daily Kos

Thursday, December 14, 2006 saw the posting of a particularly short and unsweet diary among the Israel/“Palestine” diaries on Daily Kos. Most of the “I/P diaries” (DKos terminology, showing just how frequent they are—the same cannot be said for any other conflict in the world) are vile, but there’s not much for me to respond to in them, because they’re comprised of a host of quotations from sources like Electronic Intifada and Gush Shalom. I’m interested in diaries that show the problem in the form of its ideological roots, and this one shows them starkly.

The diary is “Bolton Refuses to Shut Up”, by Chief Thinking Officer (that’s his or her Daily Kos username), on the following address:

www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/12/14/225356/29

And here is a screenshot, in case it gets deleted—the DKos admins sometimes delete such diaries (like the one from October 8 I responded to) because of their fear (rightly) that they might draw Jewish votes away from the Democratic Party (by exposing its true, Carterian colors).

And now to the response:

Reuters is reporting that […]

In this particular case, the Reuters report is true. However, we know only too well that it needn’t be so. The news we get from Reuters on the Israel/“Palestine” conflict merits great suspicion, especially when you consider that most of those items have an Arab name at the end (an Arab name means a high chance of the reporter being Muslim, and therefore anti-Israel). Yet the Kossacks drink up every Reuters report about Israel without a hint of hesitation or criticism. That fact should be kept in mind every time an anti-Semite like Shergald or Mattes brings up a Reuters news item as proof of “Zionist brutality”.

[…] the outgoing temporary US Ambassador to the UN, ineffective bully John Bolton, […]

Yes, of course John Bolton, the American anti-Dhimmi for the Year 2006, will be called an “ineffective bully” by those, so-called “voices of reason” and “members of the reality-based community”, who think 9/11 was “the sigh of an oppressed people” rather than the first statement of intent by those who want the whole world under their law. Bolton is hated by the Leftists for his stance that there is good and there is evil and that, even more outrageous, Western Civilization (of which the USA and Israel are at the forefront) is the good and Islamic barbarism is the evil. It’s in the two articles of the Postmodern Occidentalist Creed:

1. Non-dualism is good, dualism is evil.
2. Take care, when fighting monsters, lest you become a monster like them, even if that care means you have to lose your life. But the monsters are allowed to behave like monsters, because that is their nature.

Continuing with the diary:

[…] is calling for charges to be levied in the UN's International Court of Justice against the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahamadinejad, for "inciting genocide."

Why not? Why are only Israeli generals required to be brought to that International “Court of Justice”? Especially when Ahmadinejad really did call for the end of the Zionist state (G-d forbid), with all that that entails? Oh, don’t tell me there’s debate about his statement that Israel would be wiped off the map (G-d forbid), I know that already from just a cursory look at the diaries in the /tag/israel node. Even if you take his statement as “metaphorical”, as “Oriental rhetoric” (hmmm, I wonder what Edward Said would have said about that…), as theorized by that learned fool Juan Cole, that’s irrelevant, because this is an issue on which one cannot afford to do any guessing games, one must err on the side of caution. After all, Hitler’s (shr"y) rhetoric just before the Holocaust was dismissed with the same scoffing air (“Do you REALLY believe…) and interpretative assurances.

Bolton claims that because Ahamadinejad has, by stating his opposition to the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people and the existence of a Jewish state in historically Arab/Islamic territory.

Something in the above sentence is lacking in the syntax department. For that reason and because it contains two points I need to address, I will now split it into its two relevant parts:

[…] by stating his opposition to the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people […]

Two points: 1) Israel is not oppressing them any more than is necessary to defend itself; 2) They’re not a real people.

First: you may regard the border checkpoints as oppression. I think it’s already way over the top that Israel lets them cross the borders into our territories at all—I mean, aren’t they supposed to be independent, self-sufficient, self-determining and all that stuff? Anyhow, the checkpoints, just like that “apartheid wall” (a fence for most of its extent, but “fence” doesn’t have those “Berlin Wall” connotations the Leftists want so much), are there for preventing those people from entering with suicide vests into our cities. But, as the last Lebanon War taught us so graphically, the thing the world most hates seeing is Jews defending themselves. Tough…

Second: those people are not a nation, and never have been, except as an ad hoc device for ridding the Muslim world of the Jewish state (G-d forbid). Before the 1920’s, the Holy Land was as Mark Twain found it: not totally without people, but nearly so; desolate, with a few villages sparsely distributed along the G-d-forsaken (literally so!) land, and a few old cities fallen far below their ancient glory, especially Jerusalem. Like that sword which could not be pulled from the stone except by the true king, the Holy Land could not bloom except under the hands of its real owners, the Jewish people. They came in the late 19th century, and the land started to bloom subsequently; as a consequence, in the first decades of the 20th century, there began an influx of Muslim immigrants from the neighboring countries, attracted to the new prosperity. You see, therefore, that even from the materialistic, economic point of view, the “Palestinians” are reapers of the fruits of others, usurpers of an other nation’s true possession. All the more so from the divine, scriptural point of view: the nation of this land is the nation of Israel, the Jews, while the Arabs have 22 states of their own to choose from, and the Muslims even more than that. But their greedy eyes cannot stand the sight of even one small Jewish state in their midst. They are to blame, and we Jews are blameless.

[…] and the existence of a Jewish state in historically Arab/Islamic territory.

See above. And to add: make that, “historically Jewish territory”. We were there before the Arabs/Muslims arrived. And, as the indigenous peoples existing in the Land of Israel are no more, and the Jews are the most ancient indigenous people of this land, we are the people whom supporters of indigenous peoples should support, not the Muslim invaders.

Now, my grandfather barely escaped the Holocaust as a young boy and I am ethnically Jewish on my mother's side, […]

If your mother is Jewish then you’re a Jew. In effect, that puts you in the same class as Noam Chomsky and Uri Avneri: you’re a self-hating Jew, a Jewish quisling. The distance from you to the Neturei Karta traitors who were photographed embracing Ahmadinejad isn’t all that great.

[…] though I do not practice Judaism.

All Jews are obliged to practice Judaism, but even if you don’t yet, then at least refrain from doing things that are getting your Jewish brothers killed. Like writing such diaries, for example. The stuff you write ends up on Muslim media as justification for carrying out a Second Holocaust (G-d forbid), and on Western Leftist media as “proof” as to why that would be justice done (reparations for colonialism, yada yada).

I have many Jewish friends.

“Now, don’t get me wrong! Some of my best friends are…”

However, I see Ahamadinejad's point.

Why do I feel like quoting something from a movie from last year? “From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!” “Then you are lost!”

No, you’re not lost yet. I was not that far from your views in the 1990’s, and here I am now. But you’re pretty far gone, and the crucial point is—I cannot state that enough—your words are getting your brothers killed. Think about it. Please.

The creation of Israel did take over land which was Palestinian. (Emphasis original —ZY)

I refuted that lie above. But there is here something deeper: note that he wrote, “The creation of Israel”. He did not write, “The 1967 war”. That’s a very important matter. The Israeli Peacenik Leftists still remaining (the Kassams from Gaza and the Lebanon War have decimated their ranks—one can only resist reality so much) have it that Israel’s “sinfulness” began in 1967, in conquering Gaza, Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights in the Six-Day War. It is very instructive, then, to see how behind the times they are—to see how world opinion, not just in the Muslim world but in the West, has shifted to seeing Israel as having been “born in sin”, and saying so without a hint of shame. This diary is representative of the divinely-inspired shifting of the world toward acceptance of the justice of a Second Holocaust (G-d forbid), leading to their having a clear conscience in supporting the Muslim goal of dismantling the Zionist state (G-d forbid).

HaShem wants us praying to him a little more. And my obligatory warning to the Leftists: keep this up and you’ll find a Kahanist elected Israeli Prime Minister in a landslide a few years from now.

The Israelis have not been peaceful neighbors to the Arabs, and have often attacked Arabs militarily, […]

How richly aggression is rewarded, how mercilessly meekness punished in our day and age! See how it never crosses the minds of Americans from the Old World to give their lands back to the Amerindian Natives, or of Britons descended from the continental Angles, Saxons and Jutes to end their occupation of Celtic lands, all because the Native Americans and the Welsh, Scots and Irish don’t blow themselves up in their malls. This for the same reason that a writer can publish a book titled, “Jesus: the First Suicide Terrorist” without fear, while a commercial for meat using a mediocre pun is banned because of potential threat to life. And the Leftists dare to say they stand for “speaking truth to power” and against “might makes right”.

We Jews gave them the opportunity to share our (emphasis on “our”) land with them in 1947 although we had no obligation whatsoever to do so. They refused, and raised armies against us, so we fought back. We defended ourselves from further attempts of theirs to wipe our state out in 1967 and 1973. We invaded Lebanon in 1982 in order to remove the threat to peaceful life on our north. We made a second attempt at sharing our lands with that fake nation from 1993 onward, culminating in making the whole Gaza Strip judenrein. For all that, we got Kassam rockets fired on Sderot (within the 1949 Armistice Borders—but that’s not relevant anymore, because “Israel was born in sin”). The summer of this year (2006), we did similarly to what we had done in 1982, for the same purpose. All our military actions have been in self-defense, and for countering situations no state should have to endure (if you have no problem living with rockets falling on your town every day, then I can’t help you).

[…] as they did this summer with their unprovoked invasion of Lebanon.

“Unprovoked”. Some high-impact stuff you’re smoking there, aren’t you?

“Unprovoked”, my foot. Last time I checked, crossing another country’s border and abducting its combatants was an act of war. “But it was only three soldiers, for which you flattened Lebanon—disproportionate response!” Yes, you would have liked a much bigger number of soldiers to have been abducted (G-d forbid). But it would have been “disproportionate” even then. The only “proportionate” Jewish response is to lie down and take whatever comes. Never mind that we don’t have any command or even suggestion from the founders and sages of our religion to turn the other cheek.

Iran has a point!

Iran has a point, the point of Jew-haters worldwide. I make what I believe to be the point for Jews worldwide. If Jew-haters make their point and we Jews make our point, we can win. But when Jew-haters make their point and Jews make the Jew-haters’ point, as you’re doing now in your entire diary, then the scales are tipped against us. When the attorney for the plaintiff brings the case for the plaintiff and the attorney for the defendant brings the case for the defendant, the judge will consider them both and weigh their evidence; but when both the attorney for the plaintiff and the attorney for the defendant bring the case for the plaintiff, the judge has no choice but close the case in favor of the plaintiff.

The obligation of every Jew, even if he or she does not yet keep Torah and Mitzvot: to be for his people an attorney for the defendant. That is why the Naturei Karta “rabbis” who embraced Ahmadinejad, for all their observance of the Torah, are traitors and await serious punishment from G-d, while secular Jews who speak for Jews and Israel like Ben-Dror Yemini will have their religious transgressions, while not completely discarded (for G-d does not let people go scot-free for their sins), greatly mollified.

So why is Bolton acting as if somehow Ahamadinejad is doing some great evil?

Maybe it’s because Ahmadinejad is doing some great evil. Maybe it’s not because “the tail of Israel is wagging the American dog”, but because it really is in the best interests of the United States of America, a Western democracy, to stand with the only real Western democracy in the Middle East, against one of the most despotic Islamic theocracies in the region. Maybe it’s because the USA is [still] led by people who take G-d’s Word (the Tanach) seriously, and see it as an obligation to support a country that shows His promises being fulfilled in real time.

When will the United States stop unfalteringly supporting Israel's encroachment into Palestine?

When the likes of Baker, Carter and you take the reins of power over the United States. When G-d decides we’re trusting too much in the United States and too little in Him. As a believing Jew, I don’t take the US support of Israel for granted. But if you think the US lifting its support of Israel would bring it peace and the cessation of all hatred toward it, then you’re wrong. The US would continue to be hated by the Muslims, for being a state ruled not according to Islamic law, and it will have less peace than before, for, as we can see now from the reaction to the report of the Iraq Surrender Group, it will be seen as weak and ripe for takeover.

And again: it’s not “Israel’s encroachment into Palestine”, it’s the Jews lawful inhabitation of lands that belong to them, as stipulated by G-d in His Torah, and on which a foreign people sets their eyes. The Land of Israel, including Judea, Samaria and Gaza, is ours, entirely, as long as we follow G-d’s mitzvot; the “Palestinians”, having rejected our repeated offers to partition it between us and them, will be resisted for the Muslim invaders and occupiers they are.

Wake up folks! If a bunch of foreigners just arrived in your city and announced that they were just going to remove it from the United States and become their own country, and that they were going to oppressive to the native citizens of that area, I think Bolton would complain.

Aha. So you would give the Native Americans a free pass to perform terrorist attacks in your cities? No? Why not? Is “Palestinian” blood redder than Native American blood? Not to mention that the Native Americans are a real people, unlike the Fakestinians, who no heritage to do remembrance of other than their anniversaries of “being oppressed by the Zionists”.

So why is he shocked that the Arabs are upset about Israel?

“Upset”. This from the same people who routinely say things like, “Your feelings on the Holocaust don’t justify your behavior toward the Palestinians”. I have two questions: why bring feelings to this debate at all, and if we do bring feelings here, which feelings count and which don’t? When a rapist says he did it because of his hard childhood, why do his feelings count while the feelings of his victim don’t? We Jews don’t inhabit our lands as some kind of retribution or redress for the Holocaust, we do it because we believe G-d has given us this land. The “Palestinians”, and all the Muslims worldwide, on the other hand, carry out suicide operations against us (G-d forbid) because of all manner of “past grievances”. If they were really after a state of their own, they would not have destroyed the greenhouses given them as gifts in Gaza; the fact that they did proves that they, unlike us, do not have a positive goal of building their own state, but the negative goal of destroying the state of another nation (G-d forbid). That alone strips them of all rights to be taken as equal partners sitting at the negotiations table. That is the truth. But some people prefer to talk about feelings instead, such as being “upset”.

Here ends this diary. I now wish to draw out the big picture and conclusions from it. Just 60 years after the end of the Holocaust, the Jewish people is being drawn away, apart from the rest of humanity. It is being held to standards which no other nation would accept, namely, the notion of regarding a ceasefire as “we cease and they fire”. The Western world itself is too soft to carry out a Second Holocaust itself; instead, today the Muslims are the ones imbued with the necessary barbarity for that task (G-d forbid). But the Western Left has the important function of making such an event acceptable, setting the stage for it by framing it as yet another “nationalistic, anti-colonial struggle of resistance for the sake of self-determination”. Baker and Carter (may they both rot in hell soon, amen) would, just 30 years ago, be regarded the same as David Duke; nowadays, they’re hailed as saviors, both for cloaking their Jew-hatred in the mantle of a formula for world peace. Israel’s attempts to the defend herself physically are shouted down by all except a few stalwarts (like the outgoing Bolton); and her attempts to defend herself ideologically are silenced by the libels of Walt and Mearsheimer, by which every such attempt is decried as being “an action of the Israel lobby to stifle all criticism of Israel” (the reality, as usual, is the other way round).

What do we do? First of all, trust in G-d more. Because the help of none of the nations can be taken for granted. There are righteous Gentiles who will always be with us, but they are not guaranteed to make policy. We have a strong army, thank G-d, but it will not help us as long as we have weak, ineffective, appeasing leaders who keep giving it orders to stay silent, nor will it be of much avail in the face of an unconventional threat (G-d forbid). We will maintain the army and we will keep seeking support from outside, but we must remember, day after day, reminded by all the signs, that we are at the End of Days, at the time of which our prophets said G-d will be revealed as our only true Savior.

Second, following on the point that we are still to keep our efforts at ideological warfare, it is time for us to stop mincing our words and call a spade a spade on every occasion. To wit:

1. The Muslims are the Nazis of our day. (Exceptions exist but are a tiny minority.)
2. The Western Leftists, such as Carter and Alexander Cockburn and Paul Preston (as well as leftovers from the Old Right such as Baker and Pat Buchanan), are the Nazi sympathizers and enablers of our day, just like Charles Lindbergh was then. (Exceptions exist but are a minority that is shrinking every day.)
3. Israel-berating, “Palestinian”-supporting Jews like Noam Chomsky and Uri Avneri and the Naturei Karta “rabbis” are the capos of our day, willing to save their skin by climbing on the dead bodies of their brothers (G-d forbid). They’re quislings and should be exposed as such. They should not be done any form of violence, for that could be a slippery slope onto Jewish internecine warfare (G-d forbid), but they should not be allowed to get away with their carrying themselves as representatives of the Jewish people on media channels worldwide.
4. The entire land, including the territories we took in 1967, is ours. No distinction is to be made between the 1949 Armistice Line territories and those taken in 1967. The land is ours not because of the Holocaust, not even because we made them bloom, but because G-d says it is ours. The Muslims inhabiting the land consistute a foreign occupation of it, an occupation that is to be resisted. The only nation that can truly be considered to be the Palestinian nation, both by divine decree and by the fact of being the most ancient indigenous people of it still in existence, is the Jewish nation.
5. That “Palestine” is at the height of Muslim concern is not because of the Jewish reclamation of it, but because it is now a non-Muslim state on what was once under the rule of Islam, and because it has reached great prosperity with few resources, which is a red carpet in front of the eyes of the Muslims, who languish despite have numerous states with plentiful resources.
6. Nor is there permission for any nation or individual to attempt to achieve world peace by appeasing the Muslims on our expense.
7. The state of Israel is not beholden to international decrees that forbid it defending herself from her enemies. All international organizations, including the United Nations and the European Union, are accountable to G-d and His law, as indeed are all nations and individuals.

Those points are to be made as long as we still can. It would not be realistic to think they could sway world opinion wholesale—only G-d can do that. They could turn a few individuals, but their main purpose is to serve as a case for us in our job as attorneys for the defense of Israel and the Jewish people. World opinion wanted us out of Europe and into British Mandatory Palestine 70 years ago, but now wants us out of “Palestine”, our historical homeland, given to us by G-d Himself, and into… into nowhere, just out of the world, because the message we’ve been giving mankind ever since the Stand at Sinai is so offensive (as our sages say: it is called Sinai because from it hatred [sin’ah] went forth down to the world). They are directing their anger at the messenger, while they really ought to take up their issues with G-d.