Standing for Nationalism

The right-wing blogosphere is now awash in the issue of racialism and ties to Nazi and Nazi-like movements, the greatest salvo being the LGF thread about Vlaams Belang and the Swedish Democrats. By sheer coincidence (or maybe not; an Orthodox Jew ought to believe there is no coincidence, only HaShem’s hand), this started just a few days after my spat with the racialists on Gates of Vienna. I didn’t have anything to do with the LGF thread; it was part of Charles’ reaction to a post on Atlas Shrugs. But this topic looks like staying on for a few weeks at the very least.

On that last LGF thread, in a discussion with Fjordman, I tried to outline both the agreements and disagreements I had with the European branch of the resistance to Islamization. I wrote (comment #257):

[…] Let me try to draw a few common, undisputed arguments:

1. Islam is a mortal threat to all non-Muslim host states.
2. National sovereignty should be defended from the encroachment of superstates.
3. The governments are no longer in any synchrony with the people they are supposed to represent.
4. Uncontrolled immigration is disastrous and should be done away with.

To contrast, the disagreements:

1. The role of race in shaping human cultural differences.
2. The idea that each culture fits its race of origin best.

It appears to me that the greatest agreement we have (in general, and between Fjordman and me in particular) is #2: national sovereignty is a must, and superstates like the European Union are to be fought until they are toppled (or nipped in the bud if they are in their formative stages). I may disagree with the guys of The Brussels Journal on some or even many things, but I agree 100% with their overarching goal: the protection of the sovereignty of individual European nations from the absorption into the EUSSR Borg. I can identify with that goal fully, because I am a doctrinaire, self-conscious nationalist. And, because my nationalism, Jewish nationalism, also known as Zionism, isn’t entangled with the consideration of race as in the European case, I can offer a defense of nationalism against the Leftist device of conflating it with racism.

The Left is internationalist by doctrine; John Lennon’s “Imagine no countries” is a succinct description of Marxist sentiment. The phrase, “rootless cosmopolitan”, which Stalin (long may he roast in hell) used to depict the Jews of the USSR, is ironically an accurate depiction of what the Marxists wish for all humans to be: citizens of the world, shorn of all nationalistic ties.

It was the main point of contention between Trotsky and Stalin, as it is now among Leftists, even on officially non-Marxist sites like Daily Kos, to what extent the reality of human nationalism should be cut slack. Trotsky wanted to export the Russian Revolution to outside Russia, while Stalin insisted Russia wait with it until more favorable times. In like manner, on one of the Daily Kos Israel/“Palestine” threads, one of the commenters expressed the wish humanity would “grow out of artificial distinctions such as ‘Israelis’ and ‘Palestinians’ and see ‘human’ as their only identity”; to which another commenter grudgingly agreed, but then said humanity was not ready for that yet, so the next best thing was to support “justice for all indigenous peoples” in the meantime. They were both agreed that the final goal, their Messianic vision for the End of Days, was a world without states, countries and national divisions.

So, regardless of the dispute between Trotsky and Stalin as to the tempo, the Marxists have always had their sights on nationalism, and striven to discredit it. They received their golden, unrepeatable chance to do so in the aftermath of World War II, and they did not fail to seize on it: from 1945 to this day, the Marxists (and other Leftists influenced by them—an increasing number since the 1960’s) have not ceased to use Nazism and World War II as “proof” that nationalism is by necessity a force for evil.

Today, however, it is important to defend nationalism, because it is very much the only stop-gap against the encroachment of superstates, whether nanny-state socialist like the European Union or Islamofascist like the planned Caliphate; superstates which, by nature, would spell the death of civil liberties to all those who fall under their jurisdiction. It is necessary, first of all, to clear nationalism’s name from the Marxists’ post-WWII narrative, and then to show how nationalism, when properly done, is the best fit for the human race.

“Nazi” is short for “National-Socialist German Workers’ Party”, a name containing two red herrings one after the other. The “Socialist” part was a relatively standard socialism for the 1930’s, a far cry from Communism: Hitler and FDR had similar programs for responding to the Great Depression. But my subject is nationalism, and here the inaccuracy is of a different nature: not that the Nazi Party’s platform was not nationalistic, but that it went far beyond nationalism. In fact, it went beyond mere racism as well. For all my loathing of the Stormfronters and other such racialists in Europe, they differ from the Nazis in one crucial aspect: their stated platform is only “Defending White Europe from the wave of non-white immigration”, while the Nazis’ goal was to make the Herrenvolk the masters of the whole world. What made Nazism such a force for evil, then, was imperialism. Mere nationalism, even mere racism, would never have driven Germany to opening a world war and exterminating millions (Jews, Gypsies, Slavs and more). The idea of entitlement to the whole world was the vital ingredient here. And this—a point that cannot be stressed enough—is something Nazism has in common with the non-nationalist ideologies of both Communism and Islam. Answer to Leftist anti-nationalists: Nazism was imperialism; non-imperialist nationalism is clean of the atrocities Nazi Germany committed.

And now to the explanation why nationalism is the best fit, or perhaps I should say, as it is said regarding democracy, the least bad model for human political organization. The explanation is as follows: human differences become less manageable the more individuals are involved, until there is a level at which the gaps can no longer be bridged; based on history and current events, the nation is the highest level where the differences can still be managed.

Without shared values there can be no cohesive society. That sounds obvious, but so many unifying paradigms have been tried that give no sustainable shared values. For example, the patriotic ideal, according to which two different nations can be united by virtue of sharing history on the same land. This has failed everywhere: Yugoslavia, Rwanda and now Iraq, to name just three examples. It is failing in Lebanon as we speak, and the One-State Solution proposed for the Israel/“Palestine” would, should it ever be implemented, fare just as disastrously (which is why I insist on treating anyone who advocates the Binational Solution as if he had called for a Second Holocaust). In a past post, I cited Belgium as the only example I could find of the success of the patriotic ideal, but since then the secessionist strife between the Flems and the Walloons of Belgium has come to the fore, crossing off Belgium as a success story as well. In all the failed examples, the differences were too great to be reconciled, so that, as soon as the temporary unifying factor vanished (for example, the iron-fisted ruler in the case of Yugoslavia and Iraq), there was nothing to hold the factions any longer. True nations are capable of holding together without such a factor.

Granted, there were supra-national organizations long before the current superstates. The Catholic Church was the one for Western Europe, as it still is for millions of Catholic Christians worldwide. However, the limits of such supra-national structures in motivating political actions have been apparent since the early days; already in 1096, when the pope called for the first crusade, he had to appeal to nationalism (“the acts of God through the Franks”) in order to rally the necessary troops. Organizations like the Catholic Church provide for ideological unity and inspiration, and the Islamic aspiration of the Caliphate shows how potent they can be, but they cannot hold diverse identities together politically. Nations are in enough danger of civil strife themselves, but the reality of national identity means this is not inevitable; whereas Christian Europe and the Islamic Caliphate in the Middle Ages were destined to break up into individual, often warring, states from Day One.

In the modern world there is a possibility for a supra-national state to hold together. The method of doing so was covered most extensively, I think, by George Orwell, especially in his book 1984. The short of it: only by totalitarian rule can a superstate be sustained, be prevented from breaking up into its individual nation-states. Only through the crushing of civil liberties can the consequences of such great differences be contained. Superstates, then, are anti-liberal (the “liberal” part being in the classical sense) by their very nature. Barring a basic change in how humans think, internationalism is a pipe-dream, all attempts at its implementation necessary leading to disaster, such as the 100,000,000 deaths that Marxism has so far left in its wake.

With my talk of human nature, I tread into religious territory. I write from the Torah-based point of view now, so non-religious readers might wish to skip this paragraph. It would seem that only God can truly bring an age of internationalism. That is true, strictly speaking, but we have it on the authority of HaShem’s prophets that He will not do so. Look at all the prophecies regarding the End of Days, i.e. the Messianic Age, and you will see a vision of peace, plenty and brotherhood of man, but not the end of human nationalities. “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation”, says the prophet Isaiah (2:4)—no more war between nations, true, but that means there will be nations! For the Bible, being the only authoritative source on human nature, tells us, in its first chapters, how humanity could not hold on to its pristine state of being unified, without national divisions. It does not matter if you take the first eleven chapters of Genesis literally or allegorically (I do the latter); the message about humanity is the same: human beings are too weak to rise above such divisions. Therefore HaShem, in His great favor, gave indulgence to nationalism, and made it an eternal institute for mankind. HaShem will only end wars between the nations (speedily in our days, amen), not the nations themselves. When the Marxists envision an End of Days without nations, they are being, how shall we put it, plus royalist que le roi. And the results, as we all know, have been disastrous.

So I, as a Jew, am totally unfazed by the argument that the Jews were victims of nationalism in 1939–45. This argument only serves as a starting-point for the main thrust: that Zionism, Jewish nationalism, is as equally detrimental to the Jewish people (with the standard “Jews are doing to the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them” soon to follow). Nice try, but no: Nazism is not exclusively a member of the set, “nationalism”; it belongs to another set in addition, called “imperialism”, which is what made it so destructive a force. Jewish nationalism is both Biblically-derived and sound from a general human, non-religious point of view. And the struggle of Israel against the Muslim sedition in its midst is one of the best demonstrations of why nationalism must be defended.

The Muslims of Israel (as well as a few non-Muslim Arab useful idiot allies of theirs) demonstrate excellently why nationalism is required for cohesion. One might point out the divisions among the Jews (secular, Modern Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox; in the past the racial divisions were also of importance, but not so now, despite the attempts of Leftists to describe it so), but even in the thick of the sharpest divisions, there has always stayed the constant of the idea of Ha-Am Ha-Yehudi—the Jewish nation; such that, as we saw during the Lebanon War of summer 2006, times of trouble could bring all the factions to set aside their differences. The Muslims of Israel, in contrast, have never been part of this unity. Fear had them lying low in the first decades of the state of Israel, but when that fear dissipated, their typical Muslim insolence surfaced. Not only do they not share the nationality (which is true for non-Muslims in Israel like the Druzes, who do not display those seditious tendency, except for a few who have been Leftoxicated into the Post-Colonial paradigm), they have an active, conscious nationalism of their own, a nationalism rivaling the Jewish one. (A supra-nationalism, to be more accurate—the idea of the Islamic ummah.) There cannot be lasting peace inside a state under such a state of affairs.

So too in Europe, the accumulation of rival nationalisms under the same roof is not making for a peaceful existence. Note that this has little to do with race; this has to do, foremostly, with an uncontrolled flood of immigration that is not beset by any demands upon the immigrants to make steps toward naturalization. In the past, it was unheard of that an immigrant would permanently reside in the host country without learning the language. Nowadays, a call for insisting that Mexicans immigrating to the USA (whether legally or not) speak English earns you the worn-out epithet, “racist” from the self-righteous Leftist establishment. Between today’s extremes of not making any demands upon immigrants and the idea that only people of a particular race can be real citizens, in the past there was the middle road of accepting anyone but on condition that they assimilate themselves to the host culture. This necessarily cut down on immigration, for only those who were serious about it immigrated. And most importantly, it preserved the national cohesion of the state. No “nations inside a nation, rivaling the host nation”—immigrants had to adapt. The Hispanic immigrant did not have to cease speaking Spanish among his family, but he did have to learn English, and totally absent was the situation that he would ask others to speak Spanish to accommodate him. He would find immigration difficult at first, as all immigrants do, but afterward he, or if not he then his children, would be an integral part of the fabric of the American nation. That was until recently, until it became “culturally imperialist” to make such demands of immigrants.

The Left will never be pleased by anything short of its internationalistic goal. In the meantime, all the efforts to placate the demands of Political Correctness are taking their toll on states worldwide. People of all nations worldwide need to realize that the phasing out of nationalism and the dropping of all national demands can have only two possible results: civil war or superstate tyranny. Two evils to choose from. Nationalism is the only way out, because the national level is the highest in which the differences between individuals can still be managed. The Leftist Big Lie that nationalism was the cause of World War II and its atrocities must be demolished, in order to make room for the truth that nationalism is today’s self-defense measure against both anarchy and totalitarian rule. All who stand for civil liberties must demand national homogeneity; a homogeneity that does not mean ending all immigration and deporting all immigrants, only enforcing the demand that immigrants accommodate themselves to the host state, and deporting all those who refuse to do so.

May peace both within nations and between them arrive soon, amen.

The Banality of Moral Generalities

The title is obviously an allusion to Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase, “The Banality of Evil”, which she said regarding Adolf Eichmann after seeing him sit inside the glass box in his trial. Arendt, together with Orwell and a host of others, is one of the post-WWII thinkers on morality whose pronouncements have the distinction of being quoted extensively on political blogs on all areas of the political compass. This fact illustrates two notable points: 1) The practical uselessness of moral generalities; 2) The grip that Nazism, or more accurately its aftereffects, has on people today, particularly on their moral judgments.

A writer whose deep and clear thinking about totalitarianism is invaluable, yet does not guard against the possibility of inverting the good and the evil.

I will begin with the second point. That Nazism was evil is one of the few points of concensus extant between Right and Left today (not the Muslims, however—for much of the Muslim world, Hitler was a divine emissary who didn’t finish his job). But this concensus is of no utility in reaching a concensus in moral judgment, for each side uses Hitler and the Nazis for its portrayal of what is wrong with the other side. Hitler was an atheist, a Christian, a pagan, a homosexual, a vegetarian, a harborer of sympathy with Islam, a scientific fundamentalist, a cloudy-eyed mystic, a corporatist, a socialist, a Luddite, a techno-utopianist—you name it, the allegation has been supported by selected quotes of his and used as ammunition against the other side, as in, “Hitler was X, therefore X is evil”. Much as I loathe Godwin’s Law as an easy pretext for silencing arguments (a feature it has in common with the term, “troll”), it is not difficult for me to understand why there came a need for that law to be formulated: comparison to Nazism and Hitler is such a lazy way to win the argument.

Orwell’s 1984 can be used by conservatives against the creeping socialist totalitarianism of the European Union, but also by the progressives against anti-terrorism measures (foremostly the PATRIOT Act). Pastor Niemöller’s “First they came for the Jews…” is now the paradigm of “speaking against evil, speaking truth to power”—equally useful for supporting cartoonists who draw disparaging images of Mohammed, and for bolstering one’s fiery insistence on comparing Zionists to Nazis. And anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan described the rank and file functionaries sustaining the “capitalist war machine” as “little Eichmanns”, which Ward Churchill, a university professor of honorable Native American pedigree—the ancient and most noble Wannabi Tribe—was only too eager to take in describing the people who jumped to their deaths from the windows of the burning World Trade Center towers. I think the case for the bankruptcy of moral generalities is one of the easiest to make.

Those generalities are the Cliff’s Notes and fast food of morality today: they alleviate people of the hard work of making judgments on a case-by-case basis, by giving them catch-alls. The generalities are conclusively proven to be useless by the fact that they are postdictive rather than predictive—it is not from them that one comes to make his moral pronouncement, but the opposite, one first has his moral conviction and then uses the generalities in order to give weight to them. An anti-Islam activist publishing a book exposing Islam and an anti-Zionist academic publishing a book “exposing the all-pervading influence of the Israel lobby” can both quote Orwell’s, “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act” to hammer home the moral rectitude of their endeavors, but it was not Orwell’s quote that led them to it. Conversely, moral generalities stemming from the aftereffects of Nazism can be used to nip sane and vital measures in the bud. None other than the branding of activities for stopping the Islamization of Europe as “racism” is the best example of that today. Nazism as a viable force is long gone, but it looks as if ideologues on all locations on the political compass are still in the thick of fighting it.

Analogies as guidelines and aids for clarity are good and useful, and I have made them myself quite a few times. But like wine, they can be harmful unless taken in moderation—morally deleterious if one sinks into them, if one is immersed in them to such an extent that he can no longer distinguish between the analogy and the real. In the view of how so many political bloggers tend to wallow deep in historical comparisons (not necessarily to Nazism—the Left’s favorite is the Vietnam War), I often feel like quoting that classic line from Spaceballs: “We’re at now now”. Yes, there are historical similarities galore (not least of which the repeat of 1930-ish appeasement), but the present, it must not be forgotten, still speaks in a voice of its own, with things that are not exact repetitions of what took place in the past. Even if the Leftist is right in comparing the rhetoric of some right-wingers (for example, my own calls for mass expulsion of the Muslims from within and near all non-Muslim states) to words from 70 years ago, the comparison does not cement his argument, for the situation is not what it was 70 years ago. The Leftist may compare the Israeli security barrier to the Berlin Wall, using the coinage “Apartheid Wall” to make his point, but that entire analogy comes to nothing in the face of the situational reality, the reality that the Berlin Wall was erected to keep people in whereas the Israeli security barrier is there to keep suicide-terrorists out.

I have emphasized the word, “situational”. This word, especially when part of the term, “situational ethics”, has gotten a bad reputation, and undeservedly. Undeservedly, because that reputation stems from a serious misconception: that “situational ethics” and “moral relativism” are synonymous. Not only are they not synonymous, but also, Jewish law is based on the former while being most emphatically in opposition to the other. I don’t know when the misconception started—it seems to me that the pivotal point for it was when, in the 17th century, King James’ translators committed the error of translating Exodus 20:12 as “Thou shalt not kill”, instead of the correct “Thou shalt not murder”. Did they make that choice because they wanted to prove God speaks only in moral absolutes? Maybe. Whatever the case, that may well have been the beginning of the downward slide of the reputation of situational ethics, ethics that are the mainstay of traditional, orthodox Torah legislation. Ethics which, if they came back to be applied today, could haul us out from the moral quagmire and every-man’s-land of generalities. An antidote to generalities through casuistry.

“Casuistry”. Yet another term whose reputation has declined over the ages. In this case, the decline is partly deserved, but its extension to morality is not. Deriding casuistry in philosophy is appropriate: as philosophy deals in generalities, going into particulars only in attempt to generalize overarching truths from them, the use of casuistry (case-by-case determination and analogical extension) in it is an exercise in futility. Casuistry in philosophy was once as damaging to it as postmodernism is now. But the world of morality is different. It is different because, while philosophy treats the universe as a giant abstraction to be made sense of, morality deals with a multitude of entities and ever-changing realities. Far from being damaging, casuistry in morality is the only sustainable method, for, as my above survey of the effects of confining oneself to moral generalities shows, generalities are useless in capturing all the permutations.

Yes, there are guidelines in Judaism. “‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’—that is a great rule in the Torah”, says Rabbi Akiva. I did not say guidelines are useless, only that guidelines alone are such. Guidelines are vital in order to maintain the spirit of the law. Comprised of decrees alone, a system of law could easily degenerate into a bureaucratic code, followed spiritlessly without regard to conscience. The Second Temple, our sages tell us, was destroyed because the Jews ruled according to the Judgment of Torah—according to it alone, the letter of the law alone, turning God’s Law into a technical manual, without ever walking the extra mile to accommodate the calls of conscience. Had they paid heed to the guidelines, that could have been prevented. The guidelines are the watchdog of the spirit of the law.

But that was the problem then, while now we have the opposite problem: moral guidelines are either used alone or, if accompanied by case-by-case laws, the guidelines are invariably used to support the laws rather than to correct them. So the sentiment of the day is either, “Leave out all those laws, all you need in order to lead a clean life is a few guidelines”, or “You should do as this law says, because it is according to the guidelines”. Of the first position I have given many examples in this post. The second position underlies the calls (from the anti-Establishment hippies, no less!) to respect laws when they are in accordance with their principles, such as laws criminalizing “hate speech”. Or witness how the Leftists use the generality, “No peace without justice”, in order to invoke the United Nations and international law when calling for the Jewish State to capitulate to the demands of the “Palestinians”, while castigating the same United Nations and the same international law when they think it is being “subverted by corporate America’s interests”. This is where the death of moral casuistry leads.

Moral generalities are such a pitfall that they can lead even to heresy. Take the aforementioned mistranslation, “Thou shalt not kill”. From even a cursory reading of the first book of the Bible, it is easy to see God has killed, and killed many. Thus, in the name of warding off situational ethics, you get a God who doesn’t keep His own word. With the correct translation, “Thou shalt not murder”, this is rectified. Oh, but you say it makes God’s ethics situational? So what? There is an idea here that many people today are either ignorant or unaccepting of: “Situational ethics” and “moral relativism” are not synonymous terms. When this truth is understood, it changes everything. And I mean everything. It changes your moral view of the world into something saner, and something—dare I say it?—much more reality-based.

For example, if you are shackled to the generality that mass expulsion is an evil act, absolutely, unequivocally, irrevocably, with no room for debate, then you are liable to get into a situation where you cannot employ the only means that could possibly save you from a life of serfdom (at best). But under casuist law, you can evaluate criteria according to which mass expulsion is good or evil. We can thus distinguish between those who wish to keep their fishbowl free of piranha (good) and those who want their fishbowl to have only one type of fish, their own type (bad). This way the moral generality that sweeps both under the rubric of “racism” (“Evil, evil, evil! And don’t you dare to even think otherwise!” /moonbat off) is kept at bay, and in its stead comes a judgment that is much more cognizant of the facts at hand. This is just one example of how the casuist view changes everything.

Jewish law strives to cover everything, just as HaShem is the creator of all things. The Halachah, in contrast to the Aggadah (Jewish lore; of which our sages say, “From reading it, you get to know the One who said and the world came to be”), deals in cases everywhere, from the individual’s first actions upon waking up in the morning to the laws of statecraft, laws which are only now, after 2,000 years of statelessness, in the process of being reactivated. Halachic debate from the Talmud onward is about covering all the possible cases, much as a programmer, even after having designed his program with the best of forethought (“guidelines”), still has to spend time tracking bugs (“cases”). Casuistry does not always lead to a unanimous verdict; however, unlike generalities, even multiple decrees take the facts at hand into account. This has special merit today, in guarding against the misapplication of generalities to situations where they are not appropriate.

(An aside: To the argument, “Halachah, as you describe it, as an all-encompassing law, sounds just like Islamic shariah law”, my answer is, “The original author is not to be blamed for cheap imitations others make of his work”.)

I can still quote Arendt and Orwell if I so wish. However, my political readings of just the past year alone make one thing clear to me: they are not a sound basis for deriving moral decisions. My choice will therefore be the tried, true, traditional Jewish one: the case-by-case morality of the halachah. God created His world complex and full of variations, therefore His law too, though absolute (indeed the only absolute and authoritative source of law there is), is complex, taking into account the situation in front of us.

On Richard Dawkins’ Statement

From Daniel Finkelstein on Times Online blog comments, via Melanie Phillips, a statement by atheism evangelist Richard Dawkins that recently made the waves:

When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence, the world would be a better place.

The comments for that post have focused on the question whether Dawkins is anti-Semitic (=Jew-hating), with many commenters saying on the lines of, “It’s not anti-Semitic to point out the Israel Lobby’s influence on American politics”. What is my take? Is Dawkins a Jew-hater? Is this another example of a “Progressive, rationalist” (the self-styled king of rationalism, no less) succumbing to the irrational tide?

My take consists of two parts:

1. In all honesty, I don’t know. A record of more such statements by Dawkins is necessary in order to determine the truth.
2. It is worse for us Jews if the answer is, “No”. Much, much worse.

If this man Richard Dawkins is not a Jew-hater, but has merely given in to the wind of the age; if this professed paragon of rational thinking has but jumped on a bandwagon; if this writer of numerous essays stressing the importance of believing things on the basis of evidence alone, never on the basis of tradition or revelation or faith, has not seen any problem with voicing a stance that has not been subjected to any kind of rigorous evidential examination; if the flame of anti-Zionism has gripped such an ostensible cedar of sanity—

—then the final hour is upon us!

I cannot cease stressing this point, nor can I emphasize it too much, that the issue is not, and has never been, Jew-hatred per se, but its coming into acceptability. I cannot stop pointing out that the alarm bells should not be sounded over ravings and rantings about “crooked-nose Jews” voiced by speakers at an Aryan Nations convention, but should be sounded over slick, rational-sounding, intellectually-formulated essays, articles and remarks about “Zionists leading the world to war” and “Jewish colonialist settlers perpetrating a genocide of the Palestinians”. Acceptability must always, always be the operative word, the criterion to watch for. Respectability of such sentiments, so that a self-described “guardian of reason” like Dawkins has no qualms about making them, ought to have the Jewish klaxons blaring worldwide.

If Richard Dawkins is not a Jew-hater, then his making of that statement means those sentiments now flow freely in the bloodstream of everyday discourse. What more, then, can now have already embedded itself in the structures of everyday discourse?

Could it be the idea that Israel is a mistake that needs to be corrected is already part of mainstream thought?

Could it be the idea that Zionism is an inherently racist and unjust political movement that needs to be “wiped out from the pages of time” is already part of mainstream thought?

Could it be the idea that every Jewish man, woman and child in Israel is a land-thief and oppressor whose killing (God forbid) is absolutely justified is already a part of mainstream thought?

And could it be the idea that any Jew who supports Israel is a Zionist agent is already a part of mainstream thought?

How much more could be lurking under the surface, beyond the slight hint that Richard Dawkins, if indeed he is not an anti-Semite, has uncovered for us?

How much more evidence do we need against the canard, “Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism”? How much more redressings of sentiments from the 1930’s in anti-Zionist garb, in the clothing of “criticism of Israel”, do we need in order to realize this is the real deal? How much more? How long?

Brothers and sisters, how long do we give a moral blank check to the New Anti-Semitism, this new torch of the old hatred, now carried by the alliance of Crescent with Sickle and Crescent?

How much will some of us try to apologize, in the form, “No, I assure you, I do not support Israel’s policies!”, or worse, even hold competitions with each other as to who is the more pro-“Palestinian”?

When will we all come to the understanding that we are condemned for not accepting the Marxist Cacangelium, which sees all Judaism pre-Marx as naught but a foreshadowing of that Cacangelium, now made null and void (chas v’shalom) by it? That “in Zionism’s fall we Jews fell all”? That, because of what we did in 1947–9, during the war in which the Jewish State was born against all odds (thanks be to God), “their (=the ‘Palestinians’’) blood be upon us and our children”? And that, unless we become “complete Jews” by accepting the all-new, internationalist vision that Marxism preaches, we will be justly condemned to burn in the fires kindled by the proxy enforcers of the Marxists’ wrath—the Muslims? That is the narrative!

Neither apologies nor concessions, neither compromises nor capitulation, neither gestures of goodwill nor outright selling of our birthright, neither “showing respect for the other side’s story” nor going into treasonous standing with the other side—nothing will sate the demand of the Jew-haters, which is total: “Leave us alone to ignore the truth you have been bringing for over 3,000 years”, the truth that HaShem is the God.

It was inevitable for anti-Zionism to become the newest form of Jew-hatred, for Zionism represents the last stage in Jewish truth-bringing: the reactivation of Jewish Law. Jewish truth-bringing had hitherto been concerned mainly with the philosophical truth: that there is one deity and not many; that He is a Person and relates to all His creations personally; and that the universe is His creation and not an eternal entity, nor a spontaneous emergence from nothing. But now comes Zionism, the beginning of deliverance, in which all the Jewish laws that had been put on hold for 2,000 years are being reactivated, one by one. Laws which go against the institutional lawlessness of both Marxism and Islam—against immorality enshrined in law just as things were in Sodom and Gomorrah. Now comes the time for the final truth: It is God, not man, who makes the rules.

The United Nations building will be burned to the ground, as were Sodom and Gomorrah back in the day. This corrupt organization, mired in scandals, totally ineffective in stopping true oppression, serving as a platform for the most unjust rulers of the world to legalize their injustices, has no right to exist. Politically Correct “law”, having criminals roaming free on the streets while the innocent have to seclude themselves in their homes in fear, will be abolished, for it has no right to exist. All that which usurps God’s law will vanish, for by nature it has no right to exist.

The UN represents the interests of its constituent members. A bad idea from the start.

If this man Richard Dawkins, this fanatical caller for rationality, can lend his pen to the service of a reworking of an ancient conspiracy theory, then all faith in human-conceived “rationality” needs to be abandoned. The human mind, be it that of even the most sane and balanced person, can always be carried over by the wind of the time like a straw in the wind.

In naught but HaShem and His Torah is there salvation from that predicament.

Repent. For the end looks near.

Talmudic Does Not Equal Socratic

On the Leftreasonous rag The Guardian’s online forum, Comment Is Free (which I usually call, “Grauniad Ciff”, as anyone who’s seen my linkfests on LGF knows), Seth Freedman brought another of his anti-Israel articles dressed as “concern for Israel’s future”, No Peace, no prosperity, from September 18, 2007 (subtitle: “All the money spent on war, walls and West Bank expansion is taking its toll on the sectors of Israeli society that badly need state assistance.” The fact of Israel having to spend on defense even within its 1949 Armistice Line borders is conveniently ignored). Once again, the more interesting stuff goes in the comments. Here’s the first, from “TheKingOfDoubt”:

/YAWN/ One more "gig" for Freedman to draw silly moral equivalences between Palestinian terrorists (whom he calls "militias") and Israeli settlers (whom he calls radicals).

Freedman, one of the reasons I would never convert to Judaism is that there are people like you within this prestigious religion, making a mockery of your own heritage, and slandering their own people under the excuse of a phony "objectivity". It's a bitter "gesheft," to be sure.

Shame.

It never ceases to amaze me how non-Jewish pro-Israel commenters tend to be much bolder, and furthermore, much more Jewish in their stance than a lot of Jews. On the later thread Life behind the wire, by Chris Doyle, another piece hammering home the “Israel = Apartheid South Africa” libel, a commenter named “RowdyDragon”, who says of himself that he is “neither a Jew nor an Evangelical”, posted three comments advocating mass expulsion of the Muslims from Israel! (The second comment was deleted—the “free” in “Comment Is Free” obviously refers to price, not to freedom—but as always when I catch them in time, I save them for posterity.)

But back to Freedman’s thread. A commenter named, “figliomedio” answered “TheKingOfDoubt” thus:

[…]

Another reason that you would never convert to Judaism is that you do not appear to know that when two burglars drop down a chimney it is inconceivable that one will be clean and the other covered in soot.

Argument, debate, turning and turning it and turning it again goes to the very essence of Judaism. People like you who would merely stifle debate do not have the necessary qualifications. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

[…]

This point needs addressing, because one of the charges of “Progressives” (in reality, cultural-Marxified religionists) everywhere is that “the true spirit of the religion” is about absolutely open debate, and moreover, is about asking questions for the sake of asking questions.

With all due respect to the Socratic method, which has its uses and might be beneficial in certain situations, it’s not the traditional Jewish way. The Talmudic method asks questions, sure, but that’s just about what it has in common with the Greek philosophical tradition. And if anyone says the Talmud is based on asking questions for the sake of asking questions, he couldn’t be more wrong.

Let me open with the Mishnah, Brachot 2:1:

From when do you say the Sh’ma in the evenings? From the hour that the priests enter to eat in their offering.

“Until the end of the first watch [of the night]”, [those are] the words of Rabbi Eliezer. And [the other] sages say: “Until midnight”. Rabban Gamliel says: “Until the column of dawn rises”.

A story [goes] that his sons came from the house of feasting, and said to him: “We did not call the calling of Sh’ma”. He said to them: “If the column of dawn has not risen, you must call”.

And not just this did they say, but also, in all places where the sages said, “Until dawn”, their mitzvah is until the column of dawn has risen. Incense the fats and the body parts—their mitzvah is until the column of dawn has risen. And all that which is eaten in one day, their mitzvah is until the column of dawn has risen. If so, why did the sages say, “Until midnight”? So as to distance a person from transgression.

This mishnah begins with a question, but there are many things here that go against the “Progressive”, or the Socratic, tradition.

First, far from the Socratic-Progressive tradition of putting everything up for grabs, we can see here an assumption, taken for granted, that a Jew must say the Sh’ma (Deuteronomy 6:4) in the evenings. Were that debate along the Progressive lines, there would be the question, “Who says the Sh’ma must be said in the evenings at all?” In fact, the Progressive way of “questioning everything” (everything except for the newly-hatched orthodoxy of Progressivism, that is) would lead to such questions as whether there is any divinity in the Torah, or whether God exists at all, until one is far gone in the depths of estrangement from everything that has defined Judaism for over 3,000 years. No, in the Talmudic method there are some truths that are given and are not to be questioned. Progressives may not like it, but that’s the way traditional religion, as opposed to the New Age deviations, goes.

Second, the questions are not for the sake of asking them—they are for the sake of coming to a conclusive answer. The whole of traditional Jewish discourse is purpose-driven, something that flows from the above fact of buying into the divine assumptions: Talmudic debate is for the purpose of finding the halachah, the religious decree which every believing Jew must follow. The Torah was given in order to be performed; in the Talmud, our rabbis elucidate the details as to how. And though the rabbis may go on wild tangents, the debates often looking like today’s jumps from hyperlink to hyperlink, in the end they come back to the goal: “Halachah k’Rabbi ploni”, meaning, “The religious decree is as Rabbi so-and-so said”, and then the debate is closed.

The aversion to questions for the sake of questions is most illustrated by the Aramaic phrases, “Mai nafkah minah?” (“What goes out from that?”) and “nafkuta hilchatit” (“Halachic consequence”): whenever a question is asked that does not seem to have any consequence to the final verdict, to the religious decree that will be the final outcome of the debate, our sages ask what difference that question makes. The sage who raised the original question is then called to justify it, showing how his question makes a difference as to the final decree. If he does not succeed in doing so, the question is discarded—the Talmud is deeper than the sea in extent, but it has no time to waste on mere philosophy. The purpose stands above all: How to do the Creator’s will.

The New Age, meaning the Primitivist and Cultural-Marxist mindset applied to religion, is about remaking all religions in its obligation-free, faith-free, fluffy and above all heretical image. To be sure, the basic questions that the New Agers ask (mostly concerning the attributes of God) have their place. But not in the Talmud and its tradition, which is beholden to the view that those questions are already behind us, and now the only real question is how to serve God according to His will. And by the way, like all “rebellions against the Establishment™” that have only spawned new orthodoxies, often far worse than the ones they rebelled against, the New Agers are pretty much set on their dogmas: it’s settled for them that, for example, prayer is a means of focusing oneself and does not effect any change in objective reality, or that reward and punishment are systems flowing on a natural, “You reap what you sow” basis rather than meted by God. They display little skepticism for those dogmas.

Beside my encountering of this issue on a forum of the anti-Israel Guardian, this point is important for the defense of Zionism on two counts: because part of the same Progressive tradition is the denial of Jewish nationalism, i.e. of Zionism; and because the Progressive mindset of putting everything up for grabs is the engine that powers the debilitating movement of Post-Zionism, which in the name of “slaughtering sacred cows” has made it fashionable to view the whole Zionist project in doubt, and thus serves as ammunition for those who call for the dissolution of Israel as Jewish state (God forbid). Without that excessive doubt which leads to questioning one’s core assumptions—to sawing the very branch on which one is sitting—and then turning its “skepticism” into the orthodoxy which one must accept or else suffer opprobrium, the preposterous idea that the Jews of Israel are settler-colonialists, rather than a nation returning to its homeland, could never have taken root as such is the situation now. And on the international stage, excessive doubt is the root cause of the pathetic dhimmitude we see all over the non-Muslim world today. Such are the fruits of self-doubt to the point of nihilism.

There are some materials that have to be handled with care, and there are some questions that, if asked at all, must not be asked in a cavalier manner. Doubts and questions are necessary for pruning branches that have not grown the right way; it is when doubts and questions are applied to the roots, to one’s core assumptions, that great caution must be taken, for the results could be disastrous. Many isolated tribes have been blighted by an epidemic of suicide ever since they were first exposed to the changed world outside them. That is because the exposure challenged all the assumptions that they had held until then. Confidence in one’s way, in one’s purpose, is the key to survival. The Muslims have that, and that is why they are able to inflict damages on non-Muslim states way out of proportion to their military capabilities. It is only when we regain our confidence that we will be able to fight back.

A Persian Letter

O people of Persia, this is a letter
From a member of a nation as ancient as yours;
Written in the hopes of a small improvement
Before the guns of war drown all out with their roars.

In the days of king Koresh
You were most blessed.
In an age of ruthless empires,
You are still numbered among the best.

We, the nation of Israel, still remember your king,
As does all the world, for he is in the Bible recorded;
For his tolerant rule, granting us return to our land,
God him the status of anointed accorded.

We remember you for good, except for one period
When you let a non-Persian go against your needs.
God be thanked, Haman ended up hanged, and his family,
But everyone is condemned to repeat history unless he its lessons heeds.

People think of Persia, and they imagine:
The carpets, the cats, the courtly festivals of wine;
The rich ornamentation of Khosro’s palace,
With its golden halls and dresses of silks fine.

Iran is known for its gardens, so much so
That we have from Persian the word, “Paradise”;
Gardens of beauty, the envy of the world,
Looked upon by desert nomads as the afterlife prize.

And even after those nomads took what was not theirs,
Persia still maintained its creative pulse, its original rhythm,
Providing the world with poets and scientists,
Innovators like Al-Khwarizmi, for whom is named the algorithm.

But ever since the people of the desert robbed yours
And placed you within their caliphate’s pale,
O people of Persia, can you not see?
The best you can hope for under them is to be the lion’s tail.

It is better, of course, to be the fox’s head, as you were,
Than the lion’s tail, or even a human riding a camel;
Far worse, then, O people of Persia, is what Islam has for you:
Not to ride, but to be ridden by the camel!

Is it becoming for Koresh’s nation to prostrate
In the direction of a small, black cube in the desert?
Is it the fitting destiny of Ardashir’s descendants
To carry out tasks to the Arabs’ whim and comfort?

HaShem is our guardian, He does not sleep,
He executes judgment on those who assault his city, Zion.
He told Abraham, after Ishmael tried to murder our father Isaac:
“Drive him out as your wife says—I will make another nation his scion.”

And now the Muslims repeat their forefather’s transgression:
Attempting to murder those who came out of his half-brother;
Why should you, O people of Persia, be entangled
With the ongoing feud of a family other?

Come, O people of Persia, return to your former glory,
Leave subservience to interests not yours, to purposes foreign.
Abandon enmity toward those who need not be your enemies,
Stay away from a conflict whose end could only be barren.

Iran was once master of a vast area of land,
Its culture radiant, its achievements legion,
But now, for over centuries thirteen, it is in slavery,
To the black stone in the desert, to Ishmael’s religion!

Such would be one of history’s greatest tragedies,
If Persia is used by Islam to its demise.
It need not be so: if only you throw away those alien chains,
Iran will live in peace, in prosperity—a paradise.

---

[UPDATE, October 31, 2007]: Happy Cyrus Day to you too, Mr. Imani! May Iran soon be ruled by true Iranian, non-Islamic leaders of her choosing, instead of people who serve Ishmaelite-Islamic interests.

Yom Kippur: Leaving Today’s Mind-Fashions

Jewish folk-tales endure, often taking new relevance in each age. The stories of “the wise men of Chelm”, simple-minded Jews who attempted to solve problems by means not thought out to their conclusions, are now metaphors for political and bureaucratic bungling; for example, the story of how the sages of Chelm ordered to build a hospital under a bridge with a hole from which wagons would fall finds its grim counterpart in the modern reality of a government that decrees that the basic training camp that was hit a few days ago by a Kassam rocket, resulting in many casualties, be given improved armoring, instead of the better-conceived move of showing the senders of the rockets that they’re better off cracking pistachios.

This coming Yom Kippur falls on Shabbat, and on this subject there is another folk-tale, of a Jew who gives excuses for his transgressions of the day before his rabbi, but makes his position worse with each excuse given:

Rabbi: Why did you drive on the Sabbath?

Jew: There wasn’t any Jewish restaurant open.

Rabbi: So you ate treifes at a Gentile restaurant?! Why couldn’t you ask for some food from one of your neighbors?

Jew: There was no one to ask from, because it was Yom Kippur.

There are variations to this tale, some making it much longer, but that’s the gist. I bring it here not only because of the date, but also because I remembered it when I read an oft-made but incorrect interpretation of Phinehas’ act (Numbers 25:10–15). A while back, having finished reading the seventh and final Harry Potter book, I did as I always do on such occasions and dove into further reading (by “on such occasions” I mean the occasion that now I have no spoilers to watch out for). On Phineas Nigellus Black, the former Hogwarts headmaster who delivers his insistent words of wisdom through his portrait, the Harry Potter Wiki has this to say (version of September 4, 2007):

In the Bible, Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, is an extremely controversial high priest who murders two persons because they were having sex on the steps of the Tabernacle (the building containing the Holy Ark), and because one is Jewish and the other is not. His example has been used to justify attacks on interracial couples over the centuries. [Emphasis mine. —ZY]

I’m skeptical of that last sentence (it always pay to be skeptical of what is written in any chmod 777 encyclopedia). As for the part I emphasized, it is most instructive of the seeping of the tenets of Cultural Marxism into the subconscious of the public today. Melanie Phillips gave her analysis of the Harry Potter books as a feast of counter-postmodernism, and I find that agreeable; all the more saddening, then, if Rowling chose the name, “Phineas” as a symbol for fanatical devotion to blood-purity. For the fact that Zimri had sex with a Midianite woman was merely the culmination of transgression, à la the above Jewish folk-tale, and even then, it was not about what Leftists today call race.

Portrait of Phineas Nigellus Black.

In Jewish law, sex is allowed only in the bounds of marriage, and then on certain conditions, such as purity, both bodily (pertaining to women’s specialties) and externally (for example, there must not be a Torah scroll in the room at the time). And it must, of course, be l’shem shamayim, for a divine purpose, for the purpose of bringing forth a new Jewish family. Zimri failed on all counts:

1. His act was extramarital—Cozbi was brought to him as a sacred harlot.
2. Since she was not Jewish, she did not observe the Jewish laws concerning women’s bodily purity. So Zimri had sex with a woman who was in a state of impurity.
3. As she had seduced him, it is clear Zimri had done it only for pleasure, and not for the purpose of bringing Torah-observant children to the world.
4. She had been sent to drive the children of Israel to idol-worship, of which extramarital sex was an integral part. So Zimri ended up performing a pagan ritual in the vicinity of Ohel Mo’ed (the Tent of Meeting), then the one and only holy site of Judaism!

What we see in this analysis, which is from the Orthodox Jewish point of view, is how “race” barely figures into it, if at all. That the seducing woman’s ethnicity is mentioned is not because she was “born inferior” (that is what racism really means and why racism, if it is really racism that is the issue, is so pernicious) but because the Gentiles posed a cultural threat to the Jews, seducing them to a way that is apart from HaShem’s will for them. Had Cozbi done as Ruth, leaving the idolatry of her people and embracing HaShem, and married Zimri, and consummated the marriage with him according to the injunctions of the Torah, the account of that would be featured prominently as an example of righteousness, and the couple might have brought forth the greatest in Jewish history, as Boaz and Ruth became the ancestors of King David.

The watchword, “diversity” is raised by the cultural Marxists as a banner to rally under and to die in its defense, but in reality, the religious wing of Marxism, better known as the New Age, aims to assimilate all religious traditions to its overarching agenda. So it is that, for the Religious Left, Judaism is reduced to the mistranslation of tikkun olam (“mending the world”; the real meaning of that phrase, as I said in a post months ago, is “preparing the world [to be in the Kingdom of God]”), making the world a better place by purely human efforts, often kumbayistic and socialist; Christianity is reduced to the “Social Gospel”; Hinduism and Buddhism become nothing but their doctrines of ahimsa (non-violence; though Marxists are very, very far from non-violent when given the chance); Native American traditions become nothing but paths for “finding oneself”, though vision-quests and drug-taking and the like; and even Islam, that untouchable darling of the Left, the one and only religion which they seem to respect, is reduced to a creed of “socialist resistance against the unjust oppressor”, and its book to a Communist manifesto.

Under this view, interpreting the story of Phinehas as an example of racism is the obvious path to take. What is lamentable is how those assumptions, the subconscious worldview of Cultural Marxism, has crept unawares into the best and brightest minds. If the analysis is correct, even a relatively sane (as much as one can be in today’s Marxified and dhimmified Britain) author like Rowling can be seduced, without even knowing it, into that way of thinking. And, relevant especially to Zionists, another part of this worldview is the framing of Zionism—the Jewish nationalist dream, and one of the longest-running examples of such dreams—as a “White European Colonial Settler Movement”. The best and the brightest can be, and have been, seduced into that vile and Jew-hating lie.

[…] What’s objectionable about Zionism is not the desire of Jews to live in Palestine. It’s the desire to live in Palestine as a majority and exercise sovereignty as Jews.

– commenter “Ernie” on Left I on the News

Just so: single among the nations, the Jewish nation is the one that is expected to wander the world to the end of days. This view, an old one, having roots in medieval Christendom, has subconsciously been taken over by the so-called Progressives, dressed in the modern, new and improved finery of Cultural Marxist discourse. As is also this:

From the Age of Hooper. Note “Zion” and not “Zionism”. Apparently Doc Emmet Brown built a new Delorean and brought this man to our time from 1907.

Yom Kippur calls every Jew to remember God’s Midat Ha-Din (measure of justice) as well as His Midat Ha-Rachamim (measure of mercy). Today this is more important than ever, because it is this twofold idea, namely that God is a judge (contrary to the New Age’s pantheistic “Love, Love, Love…” spirit to which they append the name, “God”), and that the fate of the world ultimately rests with Him (contrary to the stance of both Marxism and Islam, that the world can be made a utopia by human efforts alone—hence the modern-day rivalry between Marxism and Islam as to who will attain the highest innocent body count, HaShem guard us), that guards against assimilation into the spiritual, and then physical, gulag of this evil ideology, an ideology as seductive as were the Midianite women and their idolatrous practices in Biblical times.

G’mar chatimah tovah!

On Standing With Israel

“Why should I stand with Israel? I’m not Jewish, and it’s a faraway country that has as much significance to my life as Burundi.” In giving the answer, an answer which is probably not what the reader expects, I speak for myself only, though there may be many of my peers who think the same.

My obligation is to a Jewish State, governed by Jewish law, in the borders promised by HaShem. I cannot compromise on that, especially not now that I have seen past compromises lead to only more bloodshed. I believe that the Land of Israel is Jewish land, as affirmed in Jewish sources throughout, and that none of it should be conceded to a fictitious nation that was concocted for the sole purpose of usurping our rightful claim to it.

On the one hand, I aspire to hold to the Jewish doctrine that only HaShem is to be trusted, not human beings. Therefore I reject putting all our trust even in a malchut shel chesed (kingdom of grace) like the United States of America. Those Jews who say, “America will save us from our enemies” or “If the USA doesn’t do something about Iran, we’re doomed”, are in the wrong; if the USA turns its back on us one of the coming years, it will be because of that way of thinking, for HaShem wishes us to trust in Him and not in mere men.

On the other hand, Zionism is regarded (by Religious Zionists like me) as the beginning of our salvation because it marks our return to history. For 2,000 years of exile, we were in the sidelines of history, except in the many conspiracy theories that were hatched about us. Now we are back to taking a real (and central, thanks in no small part to our enemies) part in world events. We are not isolated from world events; we are one of the eyes of the storm, of the current global conflict between Islamic imperialism and the non-Muslim world.

That, the balance between the Jewish particular dream (Zionism, Jewish sovereignty on the Land of Israel) and our return to world history (Israel as one of many non-Muslim states under attack by Islam), prepares the way for an answer:

If you support Israel out of belief in HaShem’s word, His Torah, as the Noahides and the Christian Zionists do, then may HaShem bless you abundantly. This Jew, if not many others, bears you his deep gratitude.

If you support Israel out of a pragmatic motive, such as a Hindu having realized that Israel and India are facing the same enemy, or an atheist reasoning that a small Jewish theocracy on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean is preferable to a worldwide Islamic one, just as I stand with Thailand because of my view of the Southern Thailand “ethnic Malay separatism” as being of the same nature as the “Palestinian national struggle” in Israel (that is, a cover for the local branch of Islamic imperialism), then may HaShem bless you also. HaShem desires the act first, for whatever motive, while the righteous motive can come later.

And now to the stance of which I said that it could sound surprising: if you say, “Israel does not concern me, neither for good nor for bad; I harbor neither like nor dislike toward it, my feelings toward it are neutral; let the two sides there sort things out on their own, and I have no desire to intervene for either side, neither militarily nor diplomatically”—if you say that, then that too is good! As I said, I trust in HaShem for help, therefore the neutral stance toward the Israel/“Palestine” conflict is no skin off my nose, in fact it is quite good in comparison to those stances whose holders I consider to be our enemies. Which are:

If you say, “Israel is endangering us and world peace, and support for it brings hatred and terror threats upon us, therefore we must pressure Israel to sign a negotiated, conceded peace treaty with the Palestinians”, then you are no longer neutral. You wish to appease the Muslims on Israel’s expense, and that makes you opposed to the imperative of Zionism, namely Jewish sovereignty on the Land of Israel. If you insist on believing in the Two-State Solution, despite all the evidence given that the Muslims (not “Palestinians”—there is no such nation) have no intention whatever of stopping at the territories taken in the 1967 War, because you think the interests of appeasement should take precedence over the harsh reality, then you are at war with Israel, even if only on the ideological level.

And yet, that position is next to nothing in comparison to the following:

If you are a doctrinaire believer in the wrongness, ab initio, of the Jewish State of Israel, talking of the “original sin” of its birth in 1947–9, calling for the application of the “Palestinian Right of Return”, and for the dissolution of the Jewish State into a binational Jewish/Arab state, then you are a sworn enemy of Israel, of Zionism and of the Jews in general. If you believe the existence of Israel as a Jewish state is a wrong, and that that existence is the major cause of the current worldwide conflict, and that the key to solving this conflict is the abolition of Zionism, and that every suicide attack and Kassam rocket (God forbid) on Israeli Jewish women and children is “blowback” or “resistance”, then I regard you as a modern-day Nazi-sympathizer (the modern-day Nazis being the Muslims), and I want you dead. By that, I do not mean assassination as the Muslims do in their lawless way, but I will pray for the rise of the Sanhedrin that will carry that out, at least on the more high-profile among those who are opposed to the Jewish State. We read in Pirkei Avot that Rabbi Hillel once walked along a river and saw a skull floating on it and said, “Because you drowned [a man], you were drowned; and those who drowned you will end up being drowned”. Why will those who drowned him end up being drowned, and how can such a chain ever end? The commentary says: they will be drowned because they took it upon themselves to drown him, instead of bringing him before the court to carry out justice. Enjoy, then, all you enemies of Israel, the period of grace you have until HaShem raises our Sanhedrin again (speedily in our days, amen).

In summary: I for one do not ask that you support Israel, only that you not stand against it. If you support it, for whatever motive, then may HaShem bless you. If you are neutral with regard to Israel, then there is peace between us. It is only if you wish to gain peace from the Muslims at our expense that you become our enemy. And if you are ideologically opposed to the very existence of the Jewish State, then we are openly at war, to the bitter end.

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may they prosper that love thee.” (Psalms 122:6)

Zionism: An Integral Part of Judaism

When I first heard of the canard that Zionism is a 19th-century movement, I was shocked. Time has passed since then, but to hear Jewish nationalism framed as a “White Colonial Settler Movement”, and more seriously, that Jewish nationalism as a whole had no existence before the 19th century, still shakes my nerves, and it is only my knowledge of humanity’s inclination toward evil thoughts that fills me with the understanding of how people can believe such an egregious lie, an understanding without which I would probably have joined the Human Extinction Movement long ago, out of sheer despair of humanity.

That is because one does not have to be a religious, Orthodox Jew, or even with a thorough Biblical education, in order to be utterly dumbstruck by the idea that Jewish nationalism dates from the 19th century and no earlier. There is not a single Jewish child in Israel, even from the most anti-religious family, who has not imbibed the historical connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel together with its mother’s milk. Secular Zionist historiography de-emphasized the 2,000 years of exile, but regarding even that, it never denied the yearning of Jews throughout that entire period, in prayer and song, for returning to the Land of Israel—Jewish nationalism. I, like all my friends, both from the past and now, knew that the Jewish nation had its nationalism, its well-developed and canonized nationalism, back when the ancestors of both the Ishmaelite imperialists and the British boycott-proposers were still bands of loosely-related tribesmen. To hear now that Jewish nationalism is recent, a stepping on the 19th-century bandwagon, and that at least half of the Jews in Israel have no connection to the land, and to top it all the denial of the centrality of Jerusalem (Zion) in Judaism! Diabolical.

For 2,000 years that Jews were absent from the Land of Israel, the land did not cease to form an integral part of their day-to-day, religion-dictated lives.

A Jew would wake up in his morning and don the tephillin (phylacteries). Immediately after putting them on, he would read Exodus 13:1–16, which deals with HaShem’s commands to the Israelites to be carried out once they have entered the Land of Israel. That is Zionism. “The land of the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite, which He swore unto thy fathers to give thee”, it is written there (verse 5)—giving the Israelites land currently inhabited by other nations. I guess the left-wingers are now going to call for hauling God to the International Court at The Hague…

Each day, he would say the Sh’ma in the morning prayer, in the evening prayer and before going to sleep. In the Sh’ma, Deuteronomy 11:13–21 brings the message that doing HaShem’s word is necessary if the Israelites are to say on the Land of Israel. Numbers 15:37–41 speaks of the deliverance of the Jews from the land of Egypt. Stressing the historical Jewish connection to the Land of Israel—that is Zionism.

The heart of each daily prayer (morning, afternoon and evening) is the Sh’moneh Esreh (Hebrew for “eighteen”; it contains 19 blessings, because one was added during days of hardship under the Romans). Just before it, the Jew says the portion, “Ga’al Yisrael”, meaning “Savior of Israel”, where God is praised for bringing our forefathers out of Egypt and into the Land of Israel. That is Zionism.

In the Sh’moneh Esreh itself, here is one of the blessings:

Blow a great shofar to our liberty, and raise a banner to assemble our exiles, and assemble us speedily from the four corners of the earth to our land.

For 2,000 years, Jews have prayed for being assembled back to the Land of Israel. Most of the time they did not believe it was a call to action, but never did they abandon the view that the Land of Israel is the Jews’ only homeland! That is Jewish nationalism.

Here is another blessing from the Sh’moneh Esreh:

And to Jerusalem Your city may You return speedily, and may You dwell in it as You have spoken; and build it soon in our days an eternal building, and prepare the throne of David Your servant speedily in it.

2,000 years of praying to return to Jerusalem as our capital, and for rebuilding the Temple in it, no matter what any other people had built on top of its ruins in order to cover its Jewish history. Jerusalem is Zion. That is Zionism.

Neither were mundane activities free of Jewish nationalism. After eating a meal, a Jew would say Birkat Ha-Mazon, the Blessing of the Nourishment, one of whose passages is the following:

We thank You, HaShem our God, that You have given to our fathers as inheritance a pleasured, good and large land, and that You have brought us out of Egypt, out of the house of slaves.

Given the Land of Israel as inheritance. Brought out of Egypt to it. Jewish nationalistic ideas dating to the time of the Babylonian Talmud, when the Roman Empire was still at its height.

Another passage from Birkat Ha-Mazon:

The Merciful—He will break the yoke from over our necks and He will lead us upstanding to our land.

Yes, long before the “Spring of Nations” in Europe in 1848, this indisputable expression of nationalism had been recited daily by Jews everywhere.

There is more from the prayer-book than I can list here. There is the Passover Haggadah with its famous “Next Year in Jerusalem!” (famous, therefore all the sharper a condemnation of those who deny the antiquity of Jewish nationalism), and the recurrent comparisons, made during the Jewish marriage ceremony, of marriage to the re-inhabitation of the Land of Israel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem.

The Jew is commanded to study the Torah. The Written Torah itself is full to brimming with the connection of the Israelites to the Land of Israel, and has many mitzvot that cannot be carried out on any other land (but don’t expect the world to show consideration for that; only those who are ready to blow things up in a temper tantrum get their wishes aplenty, such as a foot-washing basin in every Western university). The Oral Torah and the rabbinical commentaries are not lacking either:

The Holy One, Blessed Is He, will in future assemble all of Israel from the four corners of the earth; like that gardener who plants from bed to bed, so will the Holy One, Blessed Is He, plant them from an impure land to a pure land. (Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, 19; 1st century CE)

Again the idea that all the Jews will one day return to the Land of Israel. Zionism.

And here is a commentary explaining why the king Omri, otherwise remembered as a bad king in Jewish tradition, was given the favor of ruling the Kingdom of Israel:

For what did Omri win the kingdom? For his adding one town in the Land of Israel, as it is said: “And he bought the hill Samaria of Shemer for two talents of silver; and he built on the hill, and called the name of the city which he built, after the name of Shemer, the owner of the hill, Samaria”. (Sanhedrin, 102, p. 2)

For building a new Israelite town! For acting to make the Land of Israel more inhabited with Israelites! That king was more Zionist than the crop of weak, world-praise-craving and Jewish-settlement-destroying “leaders” the state of Israel has now.

From the day-to-day life of rabbis in the Land of Israel at the end of the 2nd century CE:

Rabbi Hiyya the Great and Rabbi Shimon ben Halafta were walking in the valley of Arbel and saw the light of dawnbreak. Said Rabbi Hiyya the Great to Rabbi Shimon: “Such is the deliverance of Israel: at first it is little by little, but the more it goes the more it gets stronger”. (Yerushalmi, Brachot, 81, Halachah 1)

A foreshadowing of the Zionist movement that came to be in the 19th century: starting with a trickle, then ending up as a magnificent edifice. And the anti-Zionists dare to imply that Zionism arose in the 19th century from scratch.

And finally, lest you think Jewish nationalism is all confined to the realm of prayers and blessings and dreams, here is a halachah (Jewish religious edict, meaning that it is a requirement for Jews to go by) regarding Jews who reside in the Land of Israel:

It is prohibited to go out from the Land of Israel to outside the land, ever, except for studying Torah or marrying a woman or saving from the Gentiles; and he [who goes out for those reasons] must return to the land [after that]. And so too [if] he goes out for trade, he must return [afterward]. But to go out of the land and reside abroad is prohibited. (Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, Chazon Ish’s addendum of Laws Dependent on the Land of Israel, 42).

The background here is fascinating: Kitzur Shulchan Aruch is an abridged form of the Shulchan Aruch, the comprehensive codex of Jewish law compiled by Rabbi Yosef Karo in the 16th century CE. Because the Kitzur is an abridged form, this halachah does not appear in the original, the version by Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried from the 19th century. It, along with all the injunctions pertaining to the Land of Israel, was added by the Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Avraham Yeshaiah Karelitz (1878–1953; also known as the Chazon Ish), when he saw the number of Jews residing in the Land of Israel had become considerable.

It is fascinating for two reasons: first and obvious is that the Shulchan Aruch predates the modern Zionist movement by three centuries; second is that Rabbi Karelitz was an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi at a time when the Zionist movement and traditional Judaism were in a great clash, and the Ultra-Orthodox universally considered them irreconcilable (still the view held by Neturei Karta; it is a testimony of our times that the NK’s are now pariahs in the Jewish world. Blessed is this nation that can overcome internal strife). And yet, if you were to read this halachah before someone who didn’t know, without giving him that background, he would think it a piece of Zionist legislation. Again, the inherent, integral Zionism of Judaism is demonstrated.

This survey was brief, very brief; you could spend long months cataloging all the Jewish nationalist rules and sentiments in the traditional, orthodox sources of Judaism. With such a great amount of material, even a Jew of secular upbringing gets the idea that Jewish nationalism is ancient. Now you now why I—why most Jews—find it shocking to hear that we are “colonialists” on the Land of Israel, and that there is another nation that deserves to be called its “indigenous people”.

What is our enemies’ answer to such a mountainous corpus of evidence? The Muslims usually turn to accuse us of what they specialize in: forgery, fabrication and revisionism. They, believers in the wildest of conspiracy theories, are beyond reason; there is no choice—not just for us but for all non-Muslims—but to fight them, for they know no other language. Their sympathizers in the West, mainly the Marxists, are sometimes a little better—at least they couch their Zionism Denial with intellectually-sounding arguments.

Some of them try to play God, saying we’re not worthy of returning to the land of our forefathers (strange, then, that HaShem let the modern Zionist movement pass through all the hurdles, not least of which was the war with five Arab armies in 1948–9). Others try to invoke the Torah against us, usually plagiarizing the Neturei Karta, and always arguing that “Thou shalt not steal” means the whole setting up of the Jewish state on expense of “the indigenous Palestinians” was a violation of the Torah. They conveniently overlook the many parts in the Torah where God tells the Israelites to take the land from the Canaanites, and by force at that. One wonders if they’d act as advocates for Esau in his case against Jacob, who “stole” his birthright.

But the argument from the Left I have encountered with increasing frequency over the last few years is the argument that Jews of European origin are not ancestral Jews at all—our old friend the Khazaria Hypothesis. Those ever-moral people, ostensibly so intent on making racism history, think Jewishness is a racial matter, a genetic matter, something dependent on DNA. Do they not know that that argument still leaves millions of Israeli Jews who are (according to their twisted, profoundly racist view) eligible to “Semitic inheritance”? I think they probably do, but they maintain that argument nevertheless, because it supports their entire house of cards: Ashkenazis are not real Jews but converted Khazars; Zionism in the 19th century was started by Ashkenazi Jews; therefore Zionism is a European, non-white, non-Semitic colonialist movement, on a par with the French colonization of Algeria. The enthusiasm which Leftists take to show how non-white Jews suffer discrimination in the state of Israel (something that’s been history for about 30 years now) lends support to my theory. The idyllic portrayal of past Jewish–Muslim relations is another lynchpin here, implying that Zionism was foisted upon unwilling Jews in all the Muslim countries.

The quotes above, when presented before an anti-Zionist, can serve as litmus test, to check if he holds his position out of mere ignorance—which is no sin per se, only the refusal to educate oneself is—or out of a vested interest. Those who keep their Post-Colonial hypothesis, of Zionism being a 19th-century white colonial settler movement, even after being presented those quotes, are the latter. Here is the difference between those who are “pro-Palestinian but also pro-Israel” and those who are anti-Israel.

Sentimentally, it is possible to be both pro-Israel and pro-“Palestinian” at the same time; in practice, it is not. What I mean is: when people say, “I’m both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine”, they are usually telling the truth, their sincere stance. But what they do not know is that they have been duped—that there is no concept of a “Palestinian nation” apart from the plan to destroy the Jewish state (God forbid).

You saw that sampling of quotes of above. Now try compiling a similar sampling for the much-touted “Palestinian nation”. I’ve seen attempts at that, and they go like this: the love of the “Palestinians” for olive trees; the Arabic script; the Al Aqsa mosque; a few cartoon characters like Handala; the kefiyyeh; and resistance, resistance and more resistance. No list of “Palestinian” kings. No scriptural quotations about the significance of this land, except some damning passages in the Koran saying Allah has given this land to the Jews (one day, HaShem willing, this will be Ishmael’s way off his high horse, and on to repentance), and Jerusalem is not mentioned even once in that book. Not a single demonstration of how, before the 20th century, the Arabs of the Land of Israel differed markedly from those of Syria, for example, or how they could be considered a group of any cohesion at all. My brief collection of quotes from Jewish sources has made it patently clear that there is no other homeland for the Jews than the Land of Israel; the “Palestinians”, in contrast, have failed to even begin making such a case. And if “Palestinians” are strangers in other Arab lands, this is for the same reason that Iraqi refugees today are shunned in Syria: Arab society is a hypertribal one, to the point of insane xenophobia toward anyone outside one’s own tribe.

And if, God forbid, the “Palestinian” dream were to come true, with the demise of the hated Zionist entity, what would be of the “Palestinian nation”? It would be absorbed into the larger body, that of the Arab nation or (more likely today, now that pan-Arabism has fallen out of fashion) the Islamic collective, the ummah, like water dropped out of a bucket into the sea. The fact is, the idea of the “Palestinian nation”, from the early 20th century onward, has been maintained only for its usefulness as a tool against the Jews returning to their land. As a tool for contesting the historical connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel. And how well it has worked. So well that even good-intentioned people have quaffed the Kool-Aid cup.

I have coined the term, “Zionism Denial”. If more Jews had eyes to see the present, instead of being stuck in past paradigms, they would lessen their obsession with the Holocaust, Holocaust Denial and imprisoning Holocaust Deniers, and wake up to the far more dangerous fact of Zionism Denial, this denial of the connection of the Jews to the Land of Israel, this twisted idea that the Jews are colonial invaders while the “Palestinians” are the indigenous people of the land. Oh, I do not disagree that Holocaust Denial is malicious, offensive, preposterous and a sin against truth; but, unlike Zionism Denial, it is not life-threatening. Remember: Jew-hatred is dangerous only when it is in a form acceptable in polite, cultured society. Holocaust Deniers are condemned universally, even on far-Left, anti-Zionist sites like CounterPunch. Zionism Denial, on the other hand, is all but acceptable—acceptable, moral, progressive, enlightened.

Zionism Denial is, whether intentionally or not, incitement to murder of Jews (God forbid). By construing the Jews of present-day Israel as colonials, the “Palestinians” are given the moral right to murder Jews, be it even tacitly. Tom Paulin’s statement, that the “Brooklyn-born Jewish settlers” (again the angle of, “white colonial invader robbing the indigenous brown people”) in Judea, Samaria and Gaza “should be shot dead” (God forbid), because “they are Nazis, racists”, is an instance of saying out aloud what a lot of people who have bought into the “Palestinian nation” narrative think in their hearts. And even Paulin was being reserved, because today this sentiment is no longer confined to the 1967 territories.

Forget David Irving. Forget Ernst Zundel. Leave them all, they’re just distractions. Turn your eyes onto Desmond Tutu, onto Jimmy Carter, onto Bill and Kate Christison, and onto all the rest of those who not only adhere to, but also preach to the world, the Big Lie of Zionism Denial, the fiction, fakery, fraud, forgery and fabrication of the “Palestinian nation”, and its accompanying false narrative of Zionism as “a 19th-century European, White colonial settler Blut und Boden nationalism”.

The Holocaust is applicable today in one thing: it has taught us that such a horror can happen. It has taught us, then, that we must never, ever take threats lightly. How many of us would have given everything to go back in time and make all effort to forestall the Holocaust that was? That isn’t possible, but it is possible to act now, against a gathering of clouds that looks mighty similar. Consider the Muslims who call for a full application of “The Right of Return” (70 percent of all the “Palestinians”, according to Ali Abunimah’s latest screed) as Nazis, and the non-Muslims who support that as Nazi-sympathizers. Treat the callers for boycotts of Israel as equivalents of Tom Paulin in support for the murder of Jews (God forbid). And, more and more as the means become more plentiful, do everything to silence the opposition to Zionism. Maimonides described the Messianic Age as one that differs from all others in only one thing: the absence of subjugation, meaning the Jews are totally free to lead the Jewish life. The goal, then, implied by the deeply Zionist Maimonides himself (one need only read his writings regarding the future sovereignty of the Jews on the Land of Israel—an example of Jewish nationalism dating from the 13th century), is that there be no contest to the idea that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jews, by divine right and ancient historical connection, and that their laws are the only acceptable laws for the land to be governed by.

Since the source and powerhouse of all opposition to this claim and idea and goal comes from the “Palestinian nation” narrative, it is clear that the great Jewish war of this age is the war against Zionism Denial. It is the war of minds for the Jewish moral right to the Land of Israel (even by force if need be, as it was in the case of the Canaanites) and against the Fakestinian Fraud. The first historical recording of the name of Israel by another nation is Pharaoh Merneptah’s Stele, saying, “Israel has been wiped out, its seed is no more”; it encapsulates the reality that all the various kinds of anti-Jewish theories, whether the Protocols or Zionism Denial, never had a chance against the truth, which is protected by a mountain of evidence, but were there only for that purpose, expressed in the words of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh and a modern Muslim Iranian president, that Israel be wiped out, God forbid. Our ancient nationalism cannot be compromised even just a little, for the purpose behind the present assault on it is nothing less than total.