For Zion's Sake

New Blog

2010-03-28T11:05:00.001-07:00

I've moved over here.

Not an Arab Problem

2010-02-07T18:02:00.000-08:00

Israel is suffering from a crisis of faith. Whereas Zionism was once at the center of Israeli society, today is has been replaced in many quarters by apathy and cynicism. Israel is at a crossroads, perpetually fighting an enemy that will not tire or cease, unable to win but with too much at stake to concede defeat. Israel is besieged and surrounded by enemies on all front- Hamas in the south, Hizbullah in the north, proxies of Iran and Syria. Its detractors spend most of their energies coming up with new and innovative ways to kill Jews and delegitimize the Jewish state. Israel's response is one of confusion, resignation and despair.

Israel is a country that desperately seeks international acceptance and legitimacy. It is a country that is trying to flee from its heritage and its destiny with every ounce of its fiber. Nothing epitomizes this more than the insane and suicidal obsession with creating a Palestinian terror state in Judea and Samaria. In order to gain the love of a fickle world whose love for Jews has run out 60 years after Auschwitz, Israel is willing to surrender its biblical homeland to a people committed to its destruction and to create another Arab terror state on the ashes of the resettlement of half a million Jews.

Never was there an Arab nation or country in Judea and Samaria. The "Palestinians" never had a sovereign state or self-rule in these lands. However, it was in these lands where the Jewish nation was born and developed. There the Patriarchs roamed, the Kings of Israel fought and the Prophets rebuked the people. There the Maccabees began their struggle against the Greeks and it was there where Bar Kochba and Rabbi Akivah roused the nation to throw off the yoke of Roman tyranny. Thousands of years after the first Jew had pitched his tent in the hills of Hebron and Shechem, after the Jewish people had conquered and divided up the Land under Joshua, had seen the rise and fall of two independent kingdoms, two exiles and the destruction of two Temples, was the name 'Palestine' first uttered. After the Romans brutally suppressed the last Jewish revolt and carried the Jewish freedom fighters into captivity, they decided to rename the land 'Palestinae' in order to erase all Jewish ties to the Land.

The Palestinian nation is a lie and a fraud, swallowed whole by the world and those poor Israelis, devoid of roots and heritage. In 1967, following the defeat of 3 Arabs armies determined to throw the Jews into the sea, Israel liberated Judea and Samaria. Once again we were reunited with Hebron, where our Mothers and Fathers are buried, with Bethlehem, comforting Mother Rachel with the realization of the divine promise that "there will be a reward for your works... and your children will return from the lands of the enemy." Beit El, Shechem, Jericho- these lands where once again Jewish. The world literally shook with the earth-shattering cry: "The Temple Mount is in our hands!" And yet, incredibly, instead of annexing these lands that had been cut off from the reborn Jewish state 20 years earlier, Israel did nothing. And it still does nothing.

The reason for Israel's non-action is not because of international pressure, or for fear of the Arab reaction. Israel does not rightfully annex Judea and Samaria because of what that would mean: the return of the Jewish people to the lands of the Torah. Sadly, Israel desperately wants with all of its might to be Tel-Aviv and Herzliah, to be Dizengoff street and the beach. A return to Hebron would also mean a return to the lifestyle of those who are buried there. Judea and Samaria is too powerful a wake-up call to the secular assimilationists who rule and direct the state.

This brings us full circle. As long as Israel refuses to claim Judea and Samaria, it will continually to be faced with constant Arab attacks and harassment, with world legitimacy ever more elusive. That is the cause of all of our problems, and the reason why the new generation of secular Israelis is at a loss for direction. Judea and Samaria are destiny. They tell the Jewish people, a people who wants so badly to be normal and to be accepted, that they cannot be normal. It reminds them of their innate difference, of their mission purpose. For Israel was not created so that Jews can eat falafel and go to the beach. If that is the case, certainly there are better beaches elsewhere, ones which are not bought with bloody wars and constant terror attacks. Certainly, a million Israelis feel this way and have made their homes elsewhere- in New York, in Los Angeles, in Toronto, in Miami, etc.

If so, for why was the State of Israel founded? The State of Israel was founded only because the G-d of history, the G-d of Israel, promised the Patriarchs of the Jewish people that He would never abandon them or allow them to assimilate among the nations. It was founded because G-d took one people out of bondage in Egypt and brought them close to His service. It was founded because G-d chose the Jewish people, separating and elevating them above all of the nations and giving them a land where they could dwell, free of the influences and foreign cultures of the goyim. It is from this land where holiness and G-dliness shall spread. "For out of Zion will come Torah, and the word of G-d from Jerusalem".

It is this which so terrifies the assimilated sabra, cut off from Torah and its teachings. At the same time, without it, he is lost and has no sense of direction. Is Israel a Jewish state or a Western state? A Jewish state or a state of all its citizens? For this he has no answers, and the future is bleak. In short, Israel does not have an Arab problem, but a Jewish problem. A leader led by Jewish values would have no trouble taking control of what is rightfully his, and telling those who squat on his land and seek to kill him to please find their new homes elsewhere.

Almost 63 years since the rebirth of the Jewish people from the suffering of the exile, we can no longer waver and hide from destiny. The destiny of the Jewish people is knocking. Either we embrace it willingly, or we will be forced to do so.

The Curse of Exile

2010-01-19T14:44:00.000-08:00

Dedicated l'ilui nishmata shel Tamar Dina bat Smadar

על נהרות בבל שם ישבנו גם בכינו בזכרינו את ציון. על ערבים בתוכה תלינו כינורותינו כי שאלונו שובינו דיברי שיר ותוללינו שמחה. איך נשיר את שיר ה' על אדמת נכר

"By the river of Babylon - and Monsey, and Toronto, and Boca Raton, and London and Paris- we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. Upon willows we hung our harps because our captors asked of us words of song, and our tormentors joy. How shall we sing HaShem's song on foreign soil?" (Tehillim 137)

Whenever a Jew has finished eating a meal, he sits down and reminds himself that he is a stranger in a strange land. He reminds himself that he was exiled so long ago forcibly from his home. He thanks G-d for the "the desirable, good and spacious Land" that He gave his forefathers. Three times a day, he turns in longing and fervent prayer to Jerusalem and pleads with G-d that "his eyes should behold in mercy [G-d's] return to Zion".

The Jewish people were chosen by G-d to be a holy people living in a holy land. We were chosen in order to bring light, goodness and G-dliness into the world, as evident by Israel's incredible Sanctification of G-d's Name in Haiti. Unfortunately, many Jews do not understand the greatness or the loftiness of our role. They do not know the Jewish people's mission or task. Throughout the long and harsh years of exile, many have forgotten or do not know what it means to be Jewish. They believe that being Jewish is simply a matter of personal conscience comparable to being a Christian or a Buddhist. They do not realize that to be Jewish is to be part of a nation.

In G-d's infinite mercy, He returned sovereignty to the Jewish people over 60 years ago and has begun the process of our Redemption. In His eternal kindness, He has brought the masses of the Jewish people back home. Entire communities en masse have made aliyah and have returned to the Land of Israel. Eastern Europe, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Russia, practically all of the Jews of the Islamic world, have come back to Israel. The remaining Jews in many small and isolated communities are joining their brethren in Israel. As anti-semitism rises in France and the rest of Europe, many are beginning to come back.

And yet despite 62 years of Jewish independence, a free and prosperous Jewish state boasting one of the world's most flourishing and resilient economy, booming enterprises, a powerful army and plenty of opportunity, close to half of the world's Jews choose to live in exile. When the Jews were trapped and prevented by their gentile persecutors from making aliyah, they wrote songs of longing for Eretz Yisrael. In cellars and dark rooms, in secret, hiding in fear from Romans, Crusaders, the Inquisition, Nazis or Soviets, they declared with complete confidence and faith "Next Year in Jerusalem!". At every Jewish wedding, they crushed a glass (and continue to crush a glass) and pledged: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem..." Now, however, that the doors of aliyah are wide open and the Land is calling out, ready to take in her long-lost sons and daughters, only a trickle decide to return home.

The Jewish people's destiny is in the Land of Israel. Only in the Land of Israel can the People of Israel achieve their true potential, to live completely Jewish lives, free from interference or insecurity. Many of the Torah's commandments can only be performed there. It is only there where a Jew does not have to live in the unnatural role of minority, with all of the insecurities that accompany it. There he is free of self-consciousness, of the ever nagging "What will the goyim think?" It is there that the Jewish people can build a Jewish society based on Jewish values. It is there that Redemption is not just a dream but a living reality.

In this week's Parsha, G-d brings upon the Plague of Darkness upon the Egyptians. Rashi explains that in that generation there were wicked Jews who did not wish to leave Egypt and that they died during the Plague of Darkness. What is the reason that these Jews did not want to escape the torment and affliction of Egypt? The Midrash Tanchuma provides us the answer: they had Egyptian friends and enjoyed honour and fortune in Egypt. These Jews felt properly at home in the idolatrous and perverse Egyptian culture and did not wish to leave in order to receive G-d's Torah and to settle in the Land of Israel. In our own generation, we see the same phenomenon repeating itself. Many otherwise good Jews, many of whom stringently keep the Torah, are simply too comfortable in the lands of their dispersions. They have their synagogues, schools and communities in Toronto, New York or Los Angeles. They are content to stay in exile and have exchanged Miami for Jerusalem.

The Jewish people must open its eyes and remember that its home is in the Land of Israel. Only there can we fulfill the prophecy that "out of Zion shall come forth Torah, and the Word of G-d from Jerusalem". No matter how comfortable exile is, it is nonetheless a punishment and a curse. A Jew should never be content living as a minority in a strange country. He must remember the lament of the Jews being taken captive to Babylon: "How shall we sing HaShem's song on foreign soil?" May Hashem open the eyes of His people that they return to their own soil, speedily in our days.

The Road to Assimilation

2009-10-22T17:58:00.000-07:00

Every American Jewish establishment leader is aware that the rate of intermarriage among American Jews is at 50%. Every second Jews that gets married opts to marry out of the tribe. They accept that assimilation is widespread and that the Jewish people is disappearing as a distinctive entity in the United States. Even as they frantically try to keep Jews Jewish, apathy and indifference remain and more Jews are lost. Despite billions of dollars spent on bringing Jewish teenagers to Israel for free on Birthright, most Jews are disconnected from Israel. Jewish organizations invest tons of money into new Holocaust Museums even as young Jews suffer from Holocaust fatigue and overload. Why is it that the brightest leaders and thinkers of the Jewish establishment cannot find a way to sustain the newest generation of Jews?

The simple reason is because these people who are completely alienated from Torah and Jewish values have nothing to offer young Jews. Their ideology is completely bankrupt, with not a shred of spirituality or meaning. Bagels and lox provide no answers for a Jew seeking truth. The "Judaism" that these Jewish establishment leaders are peddling is a mixture of Holocaust victim syndrome, lame Jewish jokes and cultural quirks, knishes and kugel, with some watered down Zionism, cemented by getting Jewish teens drunk on the beaches of Tel-Aviv.

The modern zeitgeist is one of bringing people closer, of breaking down walls and barriers. The new world is one without tribal identity or religious affiliation. In such a world, one need only be a good person. What reason does this "Judaism" give to young Jews for setting up false obstacles and differences between themselves and the rest of society? These youth are given no positive reason to be Jewish, and a myriad of reasons why they should simply be human beings. The "Judaism" that they are taught is emptiness and vanity, devoid of G-d and His commandments, empty of commitment and devotion, without any holiness or reverence. The establishment leaders emphasize the "Jewish" qualities which we share with the larger society: democracy, tolerance, pluralism, etc. Little do they realize that what these assimilation-bent Jews need is to know what makes us different than, not the same as, everyone else. If being Jewish is only about being a good person, why not marry a nice Catholic or Chinese or Greek girl?

The essence of Judaism is that G-d publicly revealed Himself before the entire nation of Israel at Mount Sinai and made an eternal covenant with us. He became our G-d and we became His nation. At Sinai, G-d gave us His plan for life, the Torah, which contains His commandments. These commandments have been the mainstay and foundation of Jewish life for thousands of years. When the situation seemed hopeless, when the desperate Jew in Spain or in Russia was ready to break, it was G-d's promise to Israel that gave him strength. Living in terrible conditions, in the ghettos of Europe or the mellahs of Morocco, the Jew clung fiercely to his G-d and to his faith, with complete trust in G-d's revelation at Sinai and believing fully in the coming of the Redemption.

When Jews keep the Torah, they can overcome Crusades and Inquisitions, pogroms and Auschwitz. When they stray from G-d's Torah, they are left without a basis and are lost. It is time for the Jewish leaders to admit that "cultural Judaism" is a dead end. We have tried to raise a generation on nostalgia, Holocaust guilt and Seinfeld and have found that this is a path to assimilation and spiritual destruction. Without a solid foundation in Judaism, forget about getting Jews excited about Israel. The Jewish pride and identity that these leaders so hope to instill in young Jews must have a basis in Jewish belief, values, ritual and practice.

A whole generation of Jews have been robbed of their heritage. Tragically, they are completely ignorant of the faith of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and of the countless millions of Jews who have preceded them. It is time to return the core of Judaism to what it always was- the Torah and mitzvot. Otherwise, we march down the road to assimilation singing and dancing to the tunes of Fiddler on the Roof.

Shoah or Sinai?

2009-10-04T17:12:00.000-07:00

The mass murder of one third of world Jewry was one of the most traumatic events in Jewish history, an event which almost completely wiped out Jewish life in Eastern Europe. It is an event which has no parallels in history, and stands alone in infamy by its sheer scope, the depth of hatred and the level of horror and barbarity perpetuated by man with the help of modern technology. In the aftermath of the carnage of the Holocaust, survivors arrived on the shores of America and the Holy Land determined to rebuild the life that was callously snuffed out. In defiance, the Jewish state arose, its rallying cry, "Never Again!". The vow was that never again would Jewish blood be cheap, that Jews suffer in silence, that they should be powerless to defend themselves.

As the years progressed, many Jews lost their connection to Judaism, yet the raw emotions aroused by the Holocaust stirred their hearts and feelings. For Israelis, surrounded by a sea of hostile nations determined on destroying the Jewish state, the specter of the Holocaust hovers in their minds. The State of Israel, according to many, is the insurance policy of the Jewish people in case of another Holocaust. For American Jews, the suffering and pain of their Europeans forebearers colours their identity. They are even on the look-out for signs of impending disaster, of anti-semitism, resolving never again to be caught off guard.

For many Jews, Judaism is synonymous with Holocaust. The Holocaust occupies a significant amount of curriculum in the Jewish schools. For those with little or no formal Jewish education, their first Jewish emotion is often a visit to the Holocaust museum. At every Jewish event that they attend, whether it be the occasional "temple" service, bar mitzvah or celebration, the Holocaust is mentioned and commemorated. A new (and frightening) practice has arisen where bar mitzvah boys are paired up with a child murdered in the Holocaust who did not have a chance to celebrate his bar mitzvah.

The transformation of Judaism into a cult of the Holocaust should repulse and shock every observant Jew. It is a recipe for disillusionment and assimilation, as Judaism becomes something negative, a burden of anti-semitism and tragedy. The Holocaust provides no reason for an unconnected Jew to remain Jewish, to marry a Jew and lead a Jewish life, besides possibly guilt. The Holocaust tells us nothing about Judaism, about the beauty and depth of it's spiritual teachings, or the profoundness of its moral legacy.

Similar to their American brethren, many Israelis believe that the State of Israel exists only because of the Holocaust. Every single foreign delegate is taken to Yad VaShem to bear witness to the destruction of the Jews of Europe, the subtle message being that this is Israel's alternative to fighting. It is in this climate that the dictator of Iran, as well as many educated and sophisticated Arabs, deny the Holocaust with impunity, believing that without the Holocaust, the whole edifice upon which Zionism stands will collapse.

The memory of the six million holy Jews murdered in the Holocaust must be perpetuated and remembered. However, it must be stressed over and over again that Yad VaShem is not Israel and Auschwitz is not Judaism. There was a Judaism long before 1939, and that persecution and oppression need not be an integral part of our identity. The Jewish state exists not because of the Holocaust, but in spite of it.

The heart of Judaism is, and must always be, the public revelation of the divine at Sinai, and the eternal covenant between the Jewish people and G-d. Judaism lives and dies on the fact that G-d revealed Himself before millions of people at Mount Sinai and gave the people of Israel His Torah. It is G-d's instructions manual for life, a guide to live a life of goodness, blessing and meaning. Every single Jew is bound by its commandments and dictates, and must follow its precepts and teachings. By living by the Torah's laws, a Jew reaches holiness and G-dliness. It is this belief that kept Jews strong despite centuries of terrible conditions. When their situation could be alleviated by baptism, conversion or assimilation, they clung tightly to their Torah and to their G-d. This is what prevented the Jew from disappearing among the nations, because His G-d spoke to him from the fire and bound him to Him in an everlasting contract.

Our right to the Land of Israel comes from Sinai and not from Wansee. The same G-d who proclaimed to the Children of Israel, "I am the L-rd, your G-d", promised them Land of Israel. By His word, the Jewish people entered the land and conquered it, by His word they were exiled after rebelling against His commandments, and by His word they are returning to reclaim their stolen heritage. By basing Israel's right to exist on the Holocaust, we provide an opportunity for Ahmadinejad to ask rhetorically why the Germans shouldn't compensate the Jews by giving them land for which to build a state. If Israel is simply meant to be a haven for persecuted Jews, there is no reason why the Arabs should suffer for the crimes of Europeans. Israel draws its legitimacy from Sinai and the modern state is simply a continuation of the kingdoms of David and Solomon, and the Hasmonean dynasty, resumed after a 2000 year hiatus.

The focus of the State of Israel cannot simply be defiance to Hitler and the Final Solution. We must always remember the Holocaust and fight to prevent it from ever occurring again, yet it cannot be the focal point of the Jewish state. To silence our haters and critics, we must embrace our deep roots in the Land, and re-affirm our commitment to the values of Sinai. Yad VaShem should not be the first and only stop for visiting diplomats, but one of many that showcase the complexity of Jewish history, the highs and lows of our people. Diplomats should be taken to Jerusalem, the rebuild capital of the Jewish nation, about which our ancestors wept as they were led into captivity, vowing, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand lose its cunning!". They should be taken to Hebron, the home and burial place of our Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. They should visit Masada, where the brave Judean warriors took their own lives rather than be taken as slaves by the Romans. They should see the synagogue and yeshivot of the Old City, to demonstrate how Judaism has come home to its birthplace.

The legacy of Sinai must prompt us to be a Light unto the Nations, to fight for freedom and human rights and dignity. The Holocaust and its horrors can only be understood through the traditional framework of Judaism. Alone, it provides us nothing of value about Judaism, and gives us no sense of direction or meaning. Only by embracing Sinai can we hope to build a society based on morals, ethics and the values of holiness. It is Sinai that will re-energize the apathetic masses, that will re-invigorate the disconnected Jewish youth. The Torah, and not the Nuremberg Laws, will stop the tide of assimilation and spiritual oblivion. It is what will give us the courage to fight for our land, and the strength not to bend and apologize in the face of the haters. It is Sinai which is the core of authentic Judaism.

Hasbara Goldstoned

2009-09-30T16:51:00.000-07:00

At the very inception of the Zionist movement, Herzl understood that Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel would take place with international support. One of the tenets of Zionism has always been that by creating a Jewish state, anti-semitism would disappear and that the Jews would take their rightful place among the family of nations. As such, public opinion has always played a very significant role in the Zionist project. From Ben-Gurion's policy of havlagah, restraint, in response to Arab attacks and provocations, to today's hasbarah efforts, Israel has always wanted to win the favour of the international community.

With the release of the biased and factually incorrect Goldstone report, which labels Israel an aggressor for responding to over 10 000 rockets fired from Gaza, and finds it guilt of "war crimes", Israelis have set upon presenting their case clearly to the world. We want people to understand the pain and suffering of the people living in Sderot, a city where practically the entire population suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, to know what its like to have 15 seconds to flee for your life to a shelter before a Grad missile lands on your house or workplace. Responding to international criticism over the IDF's actions in Gaza, Israelis appeared before the news cameras and asked the world what options they had, what other country would tolerate so many repeated attacks on its sovereignty and citizens and waiting so patiently. "What choice do we have? Would the United States allow Mexico to fire 10 000 rockets into California before it responded", they asked, pained by worldwide callousness. For the world, the issue was settled: the Jews were the initiators and firing missiles at civilian targets was a legitimate reaction to an Israel occupation of Gaza which has ended 3 years earlier. The international jury has decided that Israel had no right to defend itself and stood with the brave freedom fighters of Gaza who hid weapons in mosques and hospitals and used their own wives and children as human shields. We tried so hard to convey our story to the world, only to be slapped in the face with the UNHRC's farce of a report. And again, like a broken record, we try to explain ourselves to the world and to justify to them why our children deserve not to be blown up in their schools and playground.

I have had enough of apologies, explanations and justifications. It is time for Jews to stop being ashamed and to lift our heads up high. As if to absolve Israel for its crime of existing, Jewish apologists repeat like a catechism that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle-East and that Arabs in Israel enjoy more rights and freedoms than in any Arab country. To counter the malicious lies and slander spread against our brave soldiers, we say ad nauseum that Israel has the most moral army in the world, and then explain, as if it is a badge of virtue instead of a sign of utter insanity, how Israel endangers its own soldiers rather than harm enemy civilians.

Lovers of Israel would do well to listen to Jabotinsky's words, written in 1911 but still so true today. In his classic essay Instead of Excessive Apology, he explains that the Jewish world does not owe its enemies any moral diatribes or lectures about our own righteousness. "We constantly and very loudly apologize... Instead of turning our backs to the accusers, as there is nothing to apologize for, and nobody to apologize to, we swear again and again that it is not our fault... Isn't it long overdue to respond to all these and all future accusations, reproaches, suspicions, slanders and denunciations by simply folding our arms and loudly, clearly, coldly and calmly answer with the only argument that is understandable and accessible to this public: 'Go to Hell!'?... Do our neighbors blush for the Christians in Kishinyov who hammered nails into Jewish babies' eyes?" Not in the least,-- they walk with head raised high and look everybody in the face; they are absolutely right, and this is how it must be, as the persona of a people is royal, and not responsible and is not obliged to apologize... We do not have to account to anybody, we are not to sit for anybody's examination and nobody is old enough to call on us to answer. We came before them and will leave after them. We are what we are, we are good for ourselves, we will not change and we do not want to." How many times have the Arabs apologized for murdering and maiming Jews sitting in cafes and restaurants? Do they blush for the terrorists who shot 10 month old Shalhevet Pas, sitting outside her home in Hebron, or for shooting in cold blood 8 teenagers studying Torah in a Jerusalem yeshiva? I have yet to see one international condemnation of the daily incitement against Jews in the Arab media, or the hatred and anti-semitism taught in Palestinian schools.

Operation Cast Lead was the very definition of a just war. Since the Gaza Withdrawal, life in southern Israel had become virtually impossible. The Red Alert siren and having 15 seconds to run for cover had became a routine part of life in Sderot. Those who were silent while Kassams fell on homes, schools, synagogues and workplaces in Sderot have no right to express any opinion about Israel's response. The hypocrisy of demonstrators worldwide, outraged at Israeli "atrocities", knows no bounds. Israel has an obligation to protect its people - end of story. The responsibility for any innocent civilians killed lies solely with the people who used their houses of worship as weapons storage and admit without any shame to using women and children as human shields. As was said time and time again, if you go to sleep with rockets in your house, don't expect to wake up in the morning.

I refuse to explain and to justify Israel's right to exist any more. Israel exists by right, like any other country in the world. Only Israel is constantly questioned and delegitimized. Instead of appearing before the world to present our story and to convince them of our justness, we must answer the only way that the world will understand. "Dear world, Go to Hell!"

An Interview with Richard Goldstone

2009-09-30T13:58:00.000-07:00

War Crimes!!!!

The world is upside down. B'Tselem defending Israel? Goldstone omitting testimony of a Grad rocket victim?

An Evil Settler Speaks

2009-09-23T14:05:00.000-07:00

Watch this amazing video of a 94 year old evil Israeli occupying settler, born in Gaza, expelled by the Turks 90 years ago, visiting the Gush Katif museum.

Next Year in Gaza!

Setting the Record Straight on International Law

2009-09-21T17:51:00.001-07:00

Master of propaganda, the "Palestinians", an artificial entity with no historical veracity, have convinced most of the world that the State of Israel is illegally occupying their country, known as "Palestine". They have used the language of international justice to point their desire to annihilate the Jewish state as a human rights crusade. It has come to the point where even the President of the United States refers to Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria as "illegal". It is necessary for every support of Israel, and decent human being, to set the record straight about Jewish resettlement in the Land of Israel.

Jewish resettlement in the Land of Israel, including Gaza, Judea and Samaria, exist as of right and are completely in accordance with international law. In fact, it is the repeated attempts to prevent Jewish resettlement that is in violation of international law. The Mandate for Palestine, set out by the League of Nations and later enshrined in the United Nations, set out the right for Jews to settle in the entire Land of Israel. The legally binding document was conferred on April 24, 1920 at the San Remo Conference, and its terms outlined in the Treaty of Sèvres on August 10, 1920. The Mandate’s terms were finalized and unanimously approved on July 24, 1922, by the Council of the League of Nations, which was comprised at that time of 51 countries,4 and became operational on September 29, 1923. The Mandate clearly distinguishes between political rights for Jews and civil and religious rights for non-Jews. Article 2 of the “Mandate for Palestine” explicitly states that the Mandatory should: “... be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish National Home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.” At no time in the Mandate document are the Arabs referred as a people, or given the right for a country within the boundaries of Palestine set aside for a Jewish National Home.

The claim that Israel is some sort of Holocaust consolation prize to assuage the guilt of Europeans completely disappears when one considers that this document was internationally ratified 30 years before World War Two and explicitly states that Jewish settlement exists by right and not sufferance. The preamble to the text states: "Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country." In other words, the soon to be established Jewish state derives its legitimacy from the fact that the two previous Jewish commonwealths existed in the Land of Israel, and that it is the birthplace of the Jewish people. Surrendering any inch of this land to a foreign power is a betrayal of the ancient Jewish ties to the land, and to terms set forth by the Mandator document.

The document, valid until this very day according to international law, sets out that "The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes." The document does not take into account the existence of any "Palestinian Arab" people and does not distinguish in any way between central Israel, the Galilee, Negev, Judea, Samaria or Gaza. The policy of denying Jews the right to settle in Judea and Samaria simply by virtue of their being Jewish is a blatantly anti-semitic policy, one completely illegal. As Yehuda Z. Blum, Israeli ambassador to the UN, explained: “A corollary of the inalienable right of the Jewish people to its Land is the right to live in any part of Eretz Yisrael, including Judea and Samaria which are an integral part of Eretz Yisrael. Jews are not foreigners anywhere in the Land of Israel. Anyone who asserts that it is illegal for a Jew to live in Judea and Samaria just because he is a Jew, is in fact advocating a concept that is disturbingly reminiscent of the ‘Judenrein’ policies of Nazi Germany banning Jews from certain spheres of life for no other reason than that they were Jews. The Jewish villages in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district are there as of right and are there to stay."

Zionism has become a very dirty word recently. Jews must stand up and say that Zionism, supporting the right to Jewish self-determination in the entire Land of Israel, and its practical applications such as resettlement and rebuilding, is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Anyone who opposes Zionism is an anti-semite because he denies Jews the right of self-determination which is accorded to all other peoples. Whenever somebody ignorantly repeats the slander about "illegal settlements" or "outposts", he must be reminded that international law demands that the trustee of the Mandate for Palestine, in the modern world, the State of Israel, encourage "close settlement by Jews on the land" and makes no mention of any other group with political rights in Israel. There is an illegal occupation in Palestine- but it is certainly not a Jewish one.

Israel On Trial

2009-09-17T15:14:00.001-07:00

By now, the conclusions of the Goldstone report should come as no surprise to anyone. Goldstone found that "Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity," during Operation Cast Lead. The report is quite damning in its portrayal of the Israeli army as a murderous, genocidal force in Gaza. Here is yet another example of anti-Israel bigotry masquerading in the guise of human rights. Supporters of Israel must realize that this report is no simply a denunciation of specific Israeli actions but rather a denial of Israel's right to self-defense.

The conclusions of the report were a foregone conclusion. According to Israelis who testified before the commission, the situation was hopeless. Their testimonies were largely ignored. Noam Bedin, a resident of Sderot and the manager of the rocket-ridden city's communications office, recounts, "when I stood up and started to testify before the judges, Justice Goldstone fell asleep in front of me. It was an embarrassing moment but I continued talking, realizing that I should not have high hopes," he added. Bedin said the testimony had felt pointless. "One of the judges on the committee had already expressed the very clear opinion that Israel was committing war crimes against the Palestinians," he said. Dr. Mirela Siderer, a resident of Ashkelon, was injured by a Grad missile fired at her by Hamas. She claims that her testimony was completely left out by the commission. In it, she had explained that she was a doctor who often treated Palestinian patients.

Much of the "facts" in report are based on unsubstantiated claims by anti-Israel NGOs. The 575-page Goldstone report is primarily based on NGO statements, publications, and submissions (70 references each for B’Tselem and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and more than 30 for Al-Haq and Human Rights Watch). In its analysis of NGO submissions and testimony, NGO Monitor found numerous false and unsubstantiated allegations. Nevertheless, the Goldstone committee simply copied the NGO biases, flawed methodology, and false claims, rendering the entire report invalid.

Israel's actions in Gaza were certainly legal, and in fact were its moral obligation. The hypocritical marches and protests that follow only demonstrate how the world rejects Israel's right to fight back. In early November, Israel discovered that Hamas had dug a tunnel into Israel and was preparing to kidnap more soldiers. As a result, the IDF carried out an operation which eliminated seven Hamas terrorists. Hamas never respected the ceasefire from the very beginning. When the Hamas-imposed six-month deadline expired in December, Israel hoped an agreement could be reached to extend the cease-fire. Instead, Hamas began firing what would be hundreds of rockets into Israel. The sophisticated rockets smuggled in from Iran had put 1-in-every-8 Israelis in mortal danger, forcing hundreds of thousands of Israelis living in the south to have 15 seconds to run to their lives to take shelter before the rocket hit. The Goldstone commission was based on a false premise of equating perpetrators of terror with its victims. During Operation Cast Lead, Israel, a sovereign democratic state, was responding to hundreds of attacks on its citizens and their homes by a terrorist organization.

The world is ready to accept any libelous claim when it comes to Israel. Recently, Sweden's leading newspaper published an article claiming that Israeli soldiers intentionally killed Arab children in order to harvest their organs, a modern reincarnation of the medieval blood libel. This was despite the fact that the writer of the article, Donald Bostrom, acknowledged that "he has no idea whether the accusations are true." Of course, when it comes to slandering Israel, truth need never get in the way. Similarly, the Goldstone report, based on the biased claims of Palestinian sources and NGOs, is short on facts but full of rhetoric.

Article 51 of the United Nations Charter reserves to every nation the right to engage in self-defense against armed attacks. The only nation to whom that doesn't apply, it seems, is to Israel. The world cannot abide by the idea of Jews defending themselves. In 1967, Israel lost the brief amount of goodwill the world afforded to Jews after the Holocaust, precisely because this was the first time in 2000 years when Jews were no longer the victims. This hideous report is only the beginning of a new wave of anti-Israel sentiment, one which exonerates terrorism and its perpetrators and blames the victims. Israel can look to no support in the international community. Maybe this report is actually good, as it lays bare something that all supports of Israel have known all along: the world does not believe that Jews have a right to exist and to fight back to protect their existence.

On the eve of the Jewish New Year, Rosh HaShana, this teaches us a very important lesson. We have no one to rely on except our Father in Heaven. Israel believed that its withdrawal from Gaza would bring in its wake international support and sympathy. Instead, it brought rockets upon our heads and even more intense hatred against Israel. With a new anti-Israel administration in Washington, Israel's list of friends is growing increasingly shorter. As Rosh HaShana approaches, Israel must rely on itself and turn to G-d for strength to defeat its enemies and fulfill its destiny.

Shanah Tova. May 5770 be a year of blessing, goodness, prosperity, success and the Complete and Final Redemption. May all of Am Yisrael be inscribed in the Book of Life.

Does Everybody Really Want Peace?

2009-09-10T13:01:00.000-07:00

Image: A Palestinian man making the traditional Middle-Eastern symbol for peace.

Cal Thomas writes that the failure to understand that the Arabs are more interested in destroying the Jewish state than building a Palestinian one has "been the fundamental flaw in American foreign policy for decades". The American government simply does not understand that the goal of the so-called Palestinians is not to create a 23rd Arab state but rather the elimination of the Jewish state, and the massacre of its people. For those who would dispute this honest assessment of the conflict, a look at the history that is all too often ignored, denied and revised, is in order.

In July 1922, the League of Nations entrusted Great Britain with the Mandate for Palestine. Recognizing "the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine," Great Britain was charged with supporting the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in the Land of Israel. Shortly thereafter, the British severed four-fifths of Mandatory Palestine from the Jewish people in order to create a new Arab entity, Transjordan. The Arabs now had one state in eastern Palestine, and the remaining fifth on the west bank of the Jordan would be divided among Arabs and Jews. If the goal of the Arabs had been to have a state, four-fifths of Palestine would have sufficed.

Following WWII, seeking a solution for the refugees of Hitler's Final Solution, the UN established a Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP). The Commission recommended the division of Palestine, with the Jewish majority areas becoming part of a Jewish state, while Arab majority areas would be part of an Arab state. On November 29, 1947, the UN adopted this partition plan, giving Jews a tiny, disconnected piece of land, severed from the holy city of Jerusalem. Despite being unsatisfied with the dimensions of this new state, Jews worldwide rejoiced in the knowledge that for the first time in 2000 years, there would be an independent Jewish state in the Land of Israel. The Arabs, on the other hand, rejected any notion of compromise. The chairman of the Arab Higher Committee said the Arabs would "fight for every inch of their country." Two days later, the holy men of Al-Azhar University in Cairo called on the Muslim world to proclaim a jihad (holy war) against the Jews. Jamal Husseini, the Arab Higher Committee's spokesman, had told the UN prior to the partition vote the Arabs would drench "the soil of our beloved country with the last drop of our blood . . . ." Following the UN vote, the Arabs called a general strike and rioting followed. Immediately after the declaration of the State of Israel, one million Arab soldiers from 5 Arab armies invaded, their intentions quite clear. Azzam Pasha, Secretary-General of the Arab League, made clear that this was not a conflict about the territory or land: "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades." If the Arabs had wanted a "Palestinian" state in 1948, they would have accepted Partition. Instead, they went to war and were defeated.

From 1948 to 1967, Judea, Samaria and Gaza were under illegal Jordanian and Egyptian control. This would have been a perfect time for the "Palestinians" to fight for their independence, yet not such thing happened, especially since there wasn't even a concept of a "Palestinian" people before the 1960s! Right before the Six Days War, the Arab rhetoric against Israel reached a fever pitch, and again, the aim of the Arab armies was not the creation of a "Palestinian" state. As Nasser told the United Arab Republic National Assembly March 26, 1964: "Israel and the imperialism around us, which confront us, are two separate things. There have been attempts to separate them, in order to break up the problems and present them in an imaginary light as if the problem of Israel is the problem of the refugees, by the solution of which the problem of Palestine will also be solved and no residue of the problem will remain. The danger of Israel lies in the very existence of Israel as it is in the present and in what she represents."

In 2000, at the Camp David Accords, Ehud Barak made the most generous offer any Israeli prime minister ever made to Yasser Arafat. He offered to withdraw from 90 percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip. In addition, he agreed to dismantle 63 isolated settlements. In exchange for the 5 percent annexation of the West Bank, Israel would increase the size of the Gaza territory by roughly a third. Israel would also agree to the division of Jerusalem, with east Jerusalem becoming the capital of Palestine, and allow the Palestinians sovereignty over the Temple Mount and Muslim holy sites. At the time, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, the ambassador of Saudi Arabia, who was present when this offer was made said: “If Arafat does not accept what is available now, it won’t be a tragedy, it will be a crime.” Arafat rejected this most generous offer, presented no counter proposal and instead went home to stir up the Oslo War, popularly known as the Second Intifada. As always, the Arabs presented their goal quite explicitly. "We plan to eliminate the state of Israel and establish a purely Palestinian state. We will make life unbearable for Jews by psychological warfare and population explosion. . . . We Palestinians will take over everything, including all of Jerusalem,” Arafat explained. What about peace? “Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war which will last for generations.”

In 2005, Israel decided to completely evacuate its soldiers and citizens from the Gaza Strip. This would give the Palestinians a chance to build a viable society there, on the road to a Palestinian state. Israel presented the Palestinians with the state-of-the-art greenhouses that had made Gush Katif such a successful agricultural enterprise. The Palestinians, instead, destroyed them, as well as desecrated synagogues left behind by the Jewish residents. Rather than work for peace, Hamas, a terrorist organization which aims to destroy Israel, was elected. They used the former Jewish towns as rocket launch sites, using them as bases to attack southern Israeli towns like Sderot and Ashkelon. If the Palestinians had truly wanted a state, they had a golden opportunity to demonstrate this after 2005, when "Israeli occupation" could no longer serve as an excuse in Gaza.

After ending his term as prime minister, Ehud Olmert offered details of his secret "final deal" proposal to Abbas. Olmert claimed to have offered "to make concessions more painful than those offered by Ehud Barak at Camp David.” Olmert offered the eviction of thousands of Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria, as well as the redivision of Jerusalem. "There was one point when I put things on the table and offered Abbas something that had never been offered and dealt with the crux of the problem, with the most sensitive issues that touch the most exposed nerves and historical obstacles," Olmert said during conference in Herzliya. "I told him – 'let's sign.' It was half a year ago and I'm still waiting," he said. Of course, no deal was reached.

Much has been written about the supposed Saudi peace proposal of 2002. This plan is "quid, but no quo", to quote Thomas. Israel must surrender Judea and Samaria, expel half a million Jewish residents, and return to its indefensible pre-67 "Auschwitz borders". Israel must redivide Jerusalem, removing hundreds of thousands of Jewish residents from their homes. Israel must also surrender the Golan Heights, liberated from illegal Syrian occupation in a defensive war. Israel must also allow itself to be flooded with millions of Arab refugees who fled during the War of Independence and the Six Day War, making Jews a minority in their own country and effectively marking the end of Israel as a Jewish state. All of these painful compromises all for the Arabs recognizing the simple fact that the State of Israel has existed for 61 years. Of course, there is no reason for most of these Arab states not to be at peace with Israel now, since Israel does not hold the territory of any of them, nor does it pose any threat to them.

The goal of the Arabs has never been "a Palestinian" state. As Arafat explained, it is a Trojan-horse plan to make Israel withdraw to indefensible borders and weaken it, as a first stage to its elimination. This is the main difference between the "extremist" Hamas and the "moderate" Fatah: Fatah still believes in a two-state solution as a means to destroy Israel. Article 12 of the Fatah Charter makes it abundantly clear that they have no interest in compromise with Israel: "Complete liberation of Palestine, and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence." The Hamas Charter also negates compromise: "The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine has been an Islamic Waqf throughout the generations and until the Day of Resurrection, no one can renounce it or part of it, or abandon it or part of it... The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! "

Again and again, the Arabs have announced their intentions. A Palestinian state would not change the generations of Arabs raised on a steady diet of hate, the demonization of Jews and anti-semitism displayed in the Islamic media. It would not change the insatiable Arab desire to destroy the State of Israel, but only encourage it, interpreting compromise as weakness. Israel has made the mistake of believing the Arab lies before- let us hope that we learn from history.

Kol Dodi Dofek

2009-09-09T15:53:00.000-07:00

Kol Dodi Dofek-
The Voice of My Beloved knocks
He knocks and He says:
Return to Me, wayward children!
Return to Me, please.
Do not abandon Me,
Look to My Torah
And remember my goodness.

He pleads and He begs, saying:
If you but open for Me a little
I will open for you a lot.
Will I not pour out my storehouses of blessing for you
If you but return?

I remember the kindness of your youth, He says,
How you followed Me into the wilderness, into a land unsown.
It is a time for comfort, a time for salvation.
Please, My silly, foolish people
Please come back.

My Beloved knocks, and He calls, and He screams,
He tries to awaken me with trials and tribulations,
He tries to arouse me with signs and wonders.
The Glorious Redemption is near!
It is in your hands!
You need only open for Me.

I have not abandoned You,
Though you may have abandoned Me.
I have not replaced My covenant,
Nor broken My promise.
The grass may wither and the flowers may fade
But My word stands forever.

My children, open your eyes and see
All I have done, have I not done for your sake?
I was with you in fire and water,
Through dark and despair.
I held your hand as the tormentors led you.

Do not fear My stubborn sons!
For there is still a hope after you,
And sons shall return to their borders,
If you but open for Me,
If you but let Me in.

Wake up, He desperately cries out,
Take up a signpost and return to your towns.
Put on your vestment of righteousness,
And your crown of glory.
My people, I hide Myself from you in a moment of anger,
And in eternal mercy I will take you back.

My Beloved knocks,
And yells
And howls bitterly,
Yet I close my eyes,
Stop my eyes,
I refuse to hear.

***
May 5770 be the year when we finally hear the Voice of our Beloved knocking.

How to Answer the Haters

2009-09-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

One of the most important claims for Israel's defenders, both American Jews and Israelis, is Israel's willingness to compromise for peace. "Israel's greatest desire is peace, and is willing to sacrifice for it", they proudly proclaim, in contrast to the 6 decades of Arab rejectionism. Another essential point cited by supporters of Israel is that Israel is "the only democracy in the Middle-East", after which they go on to list the number of ways in which Israel is similar to the United States.

Israel is certainly the only country in the Middle-East with free elections, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Despite any problems with Israeli democracy, it is infinitely better than Saudi or Iranian theocracy, Egyptian or Syrian dictatorship or the host of other thuggish regimes that rule the Middle-East. However, if this is the cardinal argument in favor of Israel, then Israel advocates are faced with a terrible dilemma: Israel's Jewish and Zionist character are inherently opposed to true, liberal Western-style democracy. Israel is, by definition, a Jewish state, which means that Jews must be the majority of the population. Israel's people, culture, religion, language, holidays and character are thoroughly Jewish. Even if an Arab has equality before the law and the right to vote, he is automatically culturally alienated from a state which belongs to another people. No Arab can sing Hatikvah with pride, beaming as he recites the words "the soul of a Jew yearns". Neither can he identify with a flag which is designed to resemble the Jewish prayer shawl and that features the Star of David, symbol of the Jewish people. He cannot celebrate Yom HaAztmaut, Israel's Independence Day, as this is the day of his defeat at the hands of the Jews. All lovers of Israel must realize that Israel, as long as it is a Jewish state, can never be a perfect democracy in the sense of Canada or the United States. This is not meant to criticize or deligitimize Israel- it is simply the stating of a fact.

Similarly, Israel can never have a complete separation of Synagogue and State, as is in the United States. Whatever role religion should play in the public sphere, most Israelis agree that it is important for Judaism to play a role in the Jewish State. For the concept of a Jewish state to have any significance, Israel must have some sort of Jewish character.

Here we see the fundamental flaws of liberal Israel advocacy. Israel will never be a perfect democracy, nor will it ever be thoroughly American or Western, if it is to be Jewish. In the same vein, Israelis and American Jews present peace as the most important of Israeli goals, as if Israel without peace is useless. Israel's obsessive compulsion to pursue a reckless policy of appeasement and surrender in the name of "peace" is tauted as proof of Israel's supreme righteousness. From Jewish children in Hebrew schools and summer camps, brainwashed by "peace", to liberal American Jews and Leftist Israelis still enamored by Rabin and Oslo, we are constantly reminded that "Israel is all about peace".

Since the earliest beginnings of Jewish re-settlement in Israel, there has been constant conflict with the Arabs. In the 90 years since the Arab pogroms in the 1920s, the bloodshed has been without respite. Despite the initiatives of various US presidencies, the two sides seem too distant and irreconcilable for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. The Jews and Arabs have far too many differences in terms of culture, collective past and their respective views for the future for any peace agreement in the near future. This being said, is Israel then to be considered a complete failure?

Peace is an important goal for Israel, but it is not the most important goal. The quest for peace does not give Israel its right to exist, nor does its democratic government or Western leanings make it the morally superior party. After all, one could easily establish a democratic, Western regime on the stolen lands of another nation, as was the case in Canada, the United or India, for example. After appropriating native land, it is only natural for this country to seek peace with the conquered.

What gives Israel the moral upper-hand in the conflict is the fact that the Land of Israel belongs indisputably to the Jewish people. It was in the Land of Israel that the Jewish people arose, built two Commonwealths, and fought courageously before being carried away by first the Babylonians and then the Romans. It was the Land of Israel in which Abraham, Isaac and Jacob sojourned, in which David fought and Solomon built, in which Isaiah and Jeremiah prophesied and called the wayward Jews to repent. It was the Land that, upon remembering its glory, the exiled Jews sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept. It is the Land upon whose agricultural cycle the Jewish calendar and holidays revolve. It is the Land which our Sages taught that the entire Torah rests. Jewish settlement and presence in Israel predates that of the British in Britain, the French in France, or the Romans in Rome. When the Greeks were only beginning to ponder the great philosophical questions, the Jews had already left Egypt, conquered the Land, established Jerusalem as their capital, built the Temple there, split into two kingdoms, been exiled by the Babylonians for 50 years, and returned to rebuild under Ezra and Nehemia.

Even after the vast majorities of Jews were carried into captivity by the Romans, the Land was never bereft of a Jewish presence. The center of Jewish life spread to the Galilee and then to the Golan, and during the ages, pious Jews settled in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias. For the great masses who could not ascend and return home, Israel remained the focal point of their intense longing and desire. Every single year, at the end of every Passover Seder and Yom Kippur fast, every Jew would declare: Next Year in Jerusalem! At every Jewish wedding, a cup is broken and a vow is made: If I forget thee, O Jerusalem... Three times a day, every day, observant Jews turn towards the East and beseech G-d, "may our eyes behold Your return to Zion in mercy". A Jew cannot even eat a cookie without thanking G-d "for the good and spacious land which You gave our ancestors as an inheritance".

To all those who charge Israel with the most vile of crimes, with "occupation, "ethnic cleansing", "theft of land", our answer most not be of saying that Israel wants peace, or that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle-East. The fact that Israel is the United State's greatest ally is irrelevant to this accusation. Our answer must be that of Simon the Maccabee, which he wrote to the Seleucid king Antiochus: "We have neither taken foreign land nor seized foreign property, but only the inheritance of our fathers, which at one time had been unjustly taken by our enemies. Now that we have the opportunity, we are firmly holding the inheritance of our fathers." There is no "Palestinian people", nor was there ever, nor will there ever be. Any student of history is aware of this fact. The relationship of the Jews and their Land is one of love, longing, tearful separation and joyous return. With this we shall answer the haters of Zion.

Finally Home, and Never Leaving Again

2009-08-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

1012, Jews expelled from Mainz. 1290, Jews expelled from England. 1306, Jews expelled from France. 1483, Jews expelled from Warsaw, Sicily, Lithuania and Portugal. 1492, all Jews expelled from Spain. 1510, Jews expelled from Brandenburg, Germany. 1569, Pope orders all Jews out of the Papal States. 1593, Jews expelled from Italy and Bavaria. 1941, Jewish refugees expelled from the German Reich to Poland. 1956, Jews expelled from Egypt.

Both Church doctrine and Islamic teachings adopted the theology of the Wandering Jew, that the continuous expulsions of Jews was proof of their debased status and rejection by G-d. Jews were regularly forced out of their homes in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East at the whims of kings, clergymen and rulers. The partial list of expulsions above shows the regularity with which Jews were uprooted and were forced to seek new host countries. This 2000 year period of exile forever came to a close on one historic night in May 1948 when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the re-establishment of the State of Israel and the promise of immediate citizenship to any Jew who desired.

Never again were Jews to be left without a refuge or a place of safety. As Hitler's dark forces grew, the world began to close its doors to Jewish immigration, leaving the Jews of Europe doomed to the Nazi inferno. "None was too many" was the infamous response of a Canadian official when asked how many Jewish refugees his country would let in. Then suddenly, this homelessness came to an end with the earth-shattering words: "we... hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, to be known as the State of Israel". Finally, the exile had ended. When the Jews of the Arab world were forced out of their homes, they found a country waiting for them with open arms. The Jews of Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, etc. were not condemned to wander or to languish in camps but became full citizens in their own country, the Jewish state.

Incredibly, the very same countries that threw Jews out of their homes, prompting many to make their way to Israel and fight for their right to their own state there, are now leading the way in preparing for the expulsion of Jews from there. Leaving the lands of Europe behind, Jews came to Israel and now the European countries are demanding that Jews leave their rightful homes in Judea and Samaria. 70 years after the cry was 'Jews to Palestine!', the grandchildren of those who screamed this now yell 'Jews out of Palestine!'.

To be able to accomplish this, a clever propaganda campaign was unleashed against the Jews of Judea and Samaria. They were not residents returning home after a long absence, but rather colonists usurping a foreign land. They were not residents but "settlers". In a perversion of history, the lands of the Bible, the historical Jewish homeland, were re-branded as Arab land and to be permanently judenrein. Jew living in Monsey, Toronto or London lived in communities but Jews in Bet El, Ariel or Maale Adumin were in "settlements". Jews building homes on the site of the tents of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, on the battlegrounds of King David, or the towns visiting by Isaiah and Jeremiah were "illegal", "outposts". Land that was inhabited by Jews as recently as 1948 and from which they were driven by advancing Arab armies was deemed to be part of the fictional country that never existed, "Palestine".

History has shown that there is no place for Jews anywhere besides the land of their forefathers. The anti-semitic nations of the world, descendants of their wicked ancestors who chased Jews from England, Spain and Eastern Europe, now conspire to uproot Jews from Gush Etzion, Modiin Illit and Hebron. The Islamic world, which stretches from Indonesia to Morocco, must find room for the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and certainly not the tiny State of Israel. It is high time for the world to understand that the Jews of Israel are not leaving, not now, nor ever.

Proclaiming Zionism

2009-08-16T12:24:00.001-07:00

Perusing my local bookstore, I found the shelves replete with anti-Israel books. Besides trashing Israel and its supporters, the basic idea of these books was that the concept of a Jewish state is illegitimate and that Zionism has no place in the modern world. Some even had the chutzpah to suggest that a Jewish state is against Jewish values!

Sadly, it is becoming increasingly commonplace among pseudo-intellectuals and supposedly liberal thinkers to question to right of the State of Israel to exist. Consider the recent conference at Toronto's York University, "Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace", which, packed with anti-Israel speakers, based itself on the premise that Israel must be dismantled as a Jewish state and reconstituted as a bi-national one. In university campuses across the United States, Israel's Jewish character is constantly debated, condemned and defamed, returning us to the infamous 'Zionism = Racism' UN resolution.

Israel is the only country that 61 years after its founding, has its rights right to exist questioned. Similarly, Jews are the only people whose right to statehood and sovereignty is a matter for debate. The incredible irony is that of all the countries in the Western world, Israel is the only one that has the same people living in the same territory, speaking the same language, practicing the same faith, as it did 3000 years ago. No other country can boast anything similar. Long before Spain was Spanish and while Rome was still a collection of villages along the Tiber, Israel was Jewish and Jerusalem its capital and spiritual center. Jewish statehood and self-rule in the Land of Israel is completely natural, something that cannot be said about the other countries in the region. The modern map of the Middle-East was carved up by British and French imperialists after WWI, creating artificial countries such as Jordan (originally 'Transjordan'), Saudi Arabia, or Iraq. No Jordanian people appears in the annals of human history, having been invented when the British first carved up the Land of Israel in 1921. Iraq is simply the result of the British combining three distinct Ottoman provinces and forcing three separate ethnic and religious groups into an unwanted union.

Rather than combatting this dangerous historical revisionism, the Israeli government pursues policies that encourage, validate and exacerbate these beliefs. By dismantling outposts and evicting Jewish families from their hilltop homes in Judea and Samaria, the Israeli government sends the message that Jews are merely interlopers, with no real reason to be in Israel. As a result of Arab and Iranian propaganda, reinforced by President Obama's naivete, millions of Arabs and Muslims believe Israel to simply be the result of European guilt over the Holocaust and that it was simply luck that had the Jews set up a state in Israel rather than Uganda of Upstate New York. The Israeli government is unfortunately too blind to see that the key to peace is more, not less, Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, and a recommitment to a Jewish presence there. This would force the Arab rejection of Jewish historical rights and peoplehood, which is the heart of the conflict, to end.

Our right to Maoz Esther and Alon Shvut is the exact same as our right to Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem. It is time for Israel's leaders to realize that in the eyes of even the "moderate" Arabs, both are illegitimate and that the only proper place for Israel in the Middle-East is in the sea. To combat the anti-Zionist zeitgeist sweeping the United States and Europe, Israel must unequivocally assert that the Land of Israel belongs exclusively to the Jewish people, by right of history, politics, conquest and divine bequeathal. Israel has no need to be ashamed of its Jewish characters. In a world of 22 Arab states, 57 Islamic states and several that define themselves as "Islamic republics", it is the height of hypocrisy to claim that a Jewish state is somehow racist. The charges of racism and apartheid have no grounding in fact but are a tool of Leftist and Islamic propaganda to defame and demonize Israel.

Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people. There is no reason for its existence except as the homeland of the Jewish people. Zionism is the natural expression of two thousand years of Jewish longing to return home, to rebuild their country from which they were forcibly removed by Roman centurions and legionnaires. Israel has no need to apologize for this but must stand firm and proud at its incredible accomplishments. The point of Zionism was never really to end anti-Semitism but to be able to tell anti-Semites to bugger off. Israel must tune out the voices of hate and condemnation that echo from the farce that is the UN, from the despots and tyrants of the Islamic and Third-Worlds, from the Loony Left and Extreme Right. The Jewish people have come home, and nothing will change that.

Renewing the Dream

2009-07-22T09:11:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time, an edifice stood in Jerusalem connecting heaven and Earth. The Temple was the symbol of G-d's presence on Earth, a place where the divine was tangible.

Our Sages relate that 10 miracles happened daily in the Temple, an obvious manifestation of G-d's dwelling among His people. 3 times a year, the entire nation would make pilgrimage to the Temple, to clearly see and feel the G-d of Israel, to learn His Torah and to better live by His laws.

Today is Rosh Chodesh Av, the beginning of an intense 9 days of mourning, marking the end of the 3 weeks since the 17th of Tammuz, culminating in Tisha B'Av, when we grieve the loss of our Temple. On the 9th of Av, G-d moved out of His house, and in a certain sense, left His people. While we are told that G-d's Shechina accompanied Israel into exile, we are now subject to hester panim, divine concealment, the result being millenia of persecution and oppression, pogroms and Holocausts. The pain and torture in exile all stem from this hester panim. All of the subsequent travails that have befallen Israel all have their root in the destruction of the Temple. Today's sufferings, the rioting and discord in Jerusalem, the international coalition to uproot and expel Jews from their homes, are all because G-d is hiding His face.

The dream of a rebuilt Temple gave Israel the strength to survive and persevere despite the most horrendous of circumstances, the most difficult of exile. It was this vision that allowed the Jew to withstand the crushing humiliation of the ghettos, juderias and mellah, the awful poverty and deprivation, the lowliness of exile, the various decrees and restrictions imposed on him, his home, his family, his livelihood and the numerous physical attacks. It was this dream that allowed the Jew to return to his land, to rebuild his desolate cities and to make the desert bloom. The dream of a rebuilt Temple gave him the strength the reestablish his homeland, to fight enemies far more numerous and powerful than him. It is the dream that still propels him to settle and build, to fight and survive. The majestic dream of G-d's House on Earth, of His dwelling-place among the multitudes of Israel, fights for the Jew in battle, goes along with him to every hill and valley that he rebuilds, to every school, hospital, synagogue and home that he establishes.

Today, the world bands against the nation plucked from the fires of Europe and conspires to evict him from his rightful home. In the midst of this, there are many among the nation of Israel who have forgotten the dream. There are those for whom the Temple is just that, only a dream that belongs to the past. Their hearts have grown cold to the searing pain of being separated from our Father in Heaven, have become numbed to the yearning and longing to see the Temple standing once again in Jerusalem, the heart of Israel and the world. It is time to wake up from our slumber and realize that no matter how many communities we build, how big and grand Jerusalem is, how powerful our state is, everything is incomplete without the Temple. Every single problem facing Israel today has its origin in the fact that G-d is not clearly among us, that man cannot see the diving plan or presence.

May we awaken in our hearts a true longing for G-d's Throne to be reestablished on Earth. We must demand of HaShem "enough! Enough concealment, enough pain, enough exile and hardship! Show yourself!. May Tisha B'Av be transformed from a day of sadness and mourning to one of joy, comfort and salvation. May it be HaShem's will that the Beit HaMikdash be rebuilt speedily in our days, and may we have a portion in His Torah, and may the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem be pleasing to HaShem as in days of old, as in former years.

2009-07-21T21:50:00.001-07:00

On a brief hiatus... will post irregularly.

One Land for One People

2009-06-17T13:19:00.001-07:00

At Bar-Ilan, Binyamin Netanyahu laid the foundations for a Palestinian state. Along with that, he unwittingly nullified the Jewish State. Netanyahu outlined his vision for the Middle East: "In my vision of peace, there are two free peoples living side by side in this small land, with good neighborly relations and mutual respect, each with its flag, anthem and government, with neither one threatening its neighbor's security and existence."

Netanyahu's speech detailed the deep Jewish connection to the Land of Israel and attempted to correct many of the fallacies and inaccuracies contained in Obama's Cairo address. To thunderous applause, Netanyahu proclaimed that "the connection of the Jewish People to the Land has been in existence for more than 3,500 years. Judea and Samaria, the places where our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob walked, our forefathers David, Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah, this is not a foreign land, this is the Land of our Forefathers... The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People." Yet for all the powerful and refreshing Zionist rhetoric, Netanyahu undermined all of this with his call for a Palestinian state east of the Jordan.

The very existence of a "Palestinian" people negates the basis of Zionism. The age-old Jewish dream of being a free people in its own land stands in stark contradiction to the claims of the "Palestinians". Either Israel belongs to the Jewish people or Palestine belongs to the Arabs. If the land is the historical birthplace of the Jewish people, promised to us by G-d and redeemed and rebuilt in recent generations through Jewish blood, sweat and tears, then no other people has a claim of ownership. On the other hand, if "Palestine" exists, then the Jews are invaders and usurpers, colonizing a foreign land which they have no right to. There can be no two sides in this conflict: either there is an Israel, or there is a "Palestine:".

From its very inception, Zionist leaders understood this. Only 30 years ago, Golda Meir argued that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian!" One of the early Zionist slogans was that Israel was "a land without people for a people without a land". Of course during the long two-thousand year exile when the majority of the Jewish people were prevented from returning home did foreigners come and settled in the land- but only as individuals, and never as a people. At no point before 1967 did the Arabs living in Israel consider themselves part of any people other than the greater Arab nation, and certainly not as a distinct "Palestinian" entity. Never was there an independent "Palestinian" state, nor was there ever a struggle or a demand for one, until Israel liberated Judea and Samaria. When Egypt and Jordan occupied Gaza, Judea and Samaria illegally for 19 years, there was no movement by the Arabs in these areas for a "Palestinian" state. In short, the concept of a "Palestinian" people is crock, a fallacy and a fraud, product of historical revisionism designed to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. By accepting, at least partially, the validity of "Palestinians", Netanyahu has unknowingly rocked the foundations of Israel.

Despite the majority of the Jews being carried off by the Romans, never did we relinquish our right or title to the Land of Israel. Jews maintained a constant presence in Israel since biblical times and in each subsequent generation, they sought to re-establish themselves there. No other people ever took roots or built a state in the land, and no other nation ever called out longingly and with intense yearning for two millenia, for her, saying "Next year in Jerusalem!".

The borders outlined for a "two-state solution" are purely artificial borders, created arbitrarily. Judea and Samaria have no special significance to the Arabs, yet it is the land where Abraham, Isaac and Jacob roamed, where David fought and conquered, and where Isaiah and Jeremiah prophesied. An Israel cut off from its biblical roots has absolutely no justification to exist. Without these lands, Israel will be a body, but devoid of a heart or a soul. The Arabs have been blessed with 22 states and vast wealth- let them create a 23 state for the "Palestinians" there. Jordan was originally part of the "Mandate for Palestine", and has a majority of "Palestinians". Therefore, it is fitting for "Palestine" to be created in Jordan, yet there is no justification for the Jewish people to surrender their homeland to create a country for a foreign nation of squatters.

"No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish People in Israel. No Jew has the authority to do so. No Jewish body has the authority to do so. Not even the entire Jewish People alive today has the right to yield any part of Israel.

It is the right of the Jewish people over generations, a right that under no conditions, can be cancelled. Even if Jews during a specific period proclaim they are relinquishing that right, they have neither the power nor the authority to deny it to future generations. No concession of this type is binding or obligates the Jewish People. Our right to the country - the entire country - exists as an eternal right and we shall not yield this historic right until its full and complete Redemption is realized."

It was Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, who said this, because he understood that every single concession and territorial withdrawal meant that another nation had a claim on the Land of Israel. A "Palestinian" people negates and contradicts the Zionist dream, because it implies that some other nation established itself in the land of Israel. Only by virtue of our historical ties and divine promise can Israel exist, and if this is the case, there is no room for a foreign national movement in the Land of Israel. Either the Land is the eternal inheritance of the Nation of Israel, or it belongs to the Arabs, and specifically to the "Palestinians". Event as late as 2002, Netanyahu, speaking before the Likud Central Committee, recognized this. "Ultimately, the historical accounts are clear: Yes to a Palestinian state means no to a Jewish one. And yes to a Jewish state means no to a Palestinian one." Indeed, Mr. Netanyahu, indeed.

Our Claim to Our Land

2009-06-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

In a few short lines, Barack Hussein Obama did more to delegitimize Israel than all previous US previous in 62 years. In his speech, he effectively accepted the Arab Islamic narrative of Middle-Eastern history and painted Israel's existence as a Holocaust consolation prize.

He said: "America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and antisemitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust... Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful." With these few sentences, Obama said that Israel's right to exist is based on anti-semitism and the Holocaust.

According to the anti-Zionist narrative, Israel is a colonialist state that has no place in the Middle-East. Following WWII, European powers, ridden with guilt over the Holocaust, allowed the Jewish people to set up a state in Israel, a land that the Europeans never had the right to give away. Based on this belief, we can see why Holocaust denial is an essential feature of Islamic anti-Israel discourse. If the Holocaust never happened in the first place, then surely Israel has absolutely no right to exist. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad expresses this point well: "The West claims that more than six million Jews were killed in World War II and to compensate for that they established and support Israel. If it is true that the Jews were killed in Europe, why should Israel be established in the East, in Palestine?" "Moderate" Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, wrote his Ph.D. thesis denying the Holocaust.

Only an ignoramus could claim that Jews are interlopers and settlers in Israel. Archaeology proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Jews are the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, maintaining a presence in the land from biblical times until today. The first Jewish commonwealth existed from 1200 BCE until the 6th century BCE, this period of Jewish independence lasting longer than the United States, Canada or any modern country has been in existence. After a brief hiatus of 70 years in Babylonian exile, Jews returned in large numbers to the land and following the Maccabee revolt in the 4th century, the Jews in Israel enjoyed another 100 year period of unbroken sovereignty. During all of these centuries, Jerusalem lay at the heart of the Jewish nation and served as its political, religious, spiritual and cultural center. Long before France was French or Britain was British, when Rome was still a collection of villages on the Tiber and the Greek barely began philosophizing, Israel was already firmly Jewish and Jerusalem its capital.

Although forcible exiled in 70 CE by the Romans, the Jews never forfeited their claims to the land. Although the Romans renamed the land "Palestinae" by the name of another invading tribe, the Philistines, in an attempt to sever the Jewish connection to the land, the Jew never stopped longing and praying for Zion. In his heart, he knew that the land was Israel, and that "Palestinae" was a fraud, never existed. Three times a day for 2000 years, from the four corners of the Earth, Jews turned towards Jerusalem and prayed, "May our eyes behold Your return to Zion in mercy" and "Return to Jerusalem Your city, as You have promised, and build it speedily in our days." After every single meal, Jews in Morocco and Poland, Persia and Russia, Spain and India concluded by thanking G-d " that You have bestowed on our forefathers the inheritance of the precious, good, and spacious land" and asking Him to "rebuild Jerusalem, the Holy City, speedily in our days." At every Jewish wedding, the groom would break a glass in remembrance of the destruction of the Temple and vow "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its cunning." At the conclusion of every single seder all over the world, Jews declare with firm hope and faith "Next year in Jerusalem!" The Jew never forgot the dream of Zion, the beacon calling him home to his land.

In each successive generation, Jews strove to re-establish themselves in their ancient homeland. Writing in the 11th century, rabbi Yehuda Halevi wrote: "My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West; How can I taste what I eat and how could it be pleasing to me? How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet Zion lies beneath the fetter of Edom, and I am in the chains of Arabia? It would be easy for me to leave all the bounty of Spain --As it is precious for me to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary." The famed commentator, the Ramban, Nachmanides, re-established the Jerusalem Jewish community and the great sages, the Vilna Gaon and the Baal Shem Tov, sent their disciples to settle the land. In the 18th century, thousands of Eastern European Jews began to settle the land and the active return to Zion began.

To suggest that Israel is some sort of Holocaust consolation is not only obscene but anachronistic because the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations in the 1920s recognized the Jewish claim to the Land of Israel and declared that Jewish settlements "are there as of right, and not sufferance". The State of Israel draws its legitimacy not from the ashes of dead Jews but rather from the Torah, from the deep and ancient Jewish connection to Israel. The modern State of Israel is but a continuation of the previous Jewish commonwealths, with a mere two thousand year gap in between. No other nation or people has any claim on the land of Israel, nor was there ever any other sovereign state, beside the Jewish ones, in the land. Israel exists by historic connection, by divine right, by the blood and sweat of Jews who built and toiled, defended and fought for this land.

A new president arose over the United States who did not know Joseph. The President said, "Who is G-d that I should listen to His voice and leave Israel alone? I do not know of G-d, nor will I leave Israel alone!" However, G-d has a different plan in mind. "Behold days are coming, says the Lord, that the plowman shall meet the reaper and the treader of the grapes the one who carries the seed, and the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will return the captivity of My people Israel, and they shall rebuild desolate cities and inhabit [them], and they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their produce. And I will plant them on their land, and they shall no longer be uprooted from upon their land, that I have given them, said the Lord your God." (Amos 9:13-15)

The Cairo Obamination

2009-06-04T08:08:00.000-07:00

Before the eyes of billions of people worldwide, the leader of the free world munched happily on Mohammedan tuches. In what is without a doubt the largest example of appeasement before terror and fascism since Chamberlain, Obama brought his message of love, peace and reconciliation to the Islamic world, in Cairo. Crying "peace, peace in our time", he repeated ad nauseum myths and revisionist history about "civilization's debt to Islam", his hope for peace between "all the children of Abraham", and apologized for America upsetting the Islamic world. This speech is extremely significant in light of the declaration of jihad against the United States and the Western world, since the victim of aggression cannot even recognize that he is at war. Here are parts of Hussein Obama's speech, with my comments interspersed.

I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement.

Such higher learning is manifested in Al-Azhar's Grand Sheikh's approval of suicide bombings on Islamic grounds.

Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.

We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world - tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the west includes centuries of co-existence and co-operation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the west as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

Of course, the United States is to blame for the conflict. No mention of Islamic supremacist doctrine, of the teachings of violent jihad. There is no mention of the Qur'an injunction to "fight them until idolatry is no more, and religion is for Allah" (Q 2:193), or of Muhammad's deathbed last words that he "was commanded to fight until all men testify that there is no god but Allah". According to Obama, the West is guilty of antagonizing Islam, despite the fact that since its founding in the 7th century, Islam has never stopped aggressively expanding and conquering non-Muslim land. He ignores the traditional Islamic division of the world between Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, and Dar al-Harb, the House of War.

Violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims. The attacks of September 11 2001 and the continued efforts of these extremists to engage in violence against civilians has led some in my country to view Islam as inevitably hostile not only to America and western countries, but also to human rights. This has bred more fear and mistrust.

Again, Obama repeats the myth that the vast majority of Muslims reject terror, even though there is no basis for this claim. A 2007 CBC poll found that 12% of Canadian Muslims approved of suicide bombings and a foiled plot to behead the Canadian PM. 13% of American Muslims support suicide bombings and 40% do not believe that 9/11 was carried out by Muslims. 5% if U.S. Muslims support Al Qaeda specifically, although fully 25% refused to answer the question. 10% of British Muslims pro-actively support terror, while 20% sympathize while stopping short of actually blowing themselves up. 57% of Jordianians and 40% of Moroccans ("moderate" countries) condone or support suicide bombings. In addition to this, no mainstream major American, Canadian or European Muslim organization has unequivocally condemned or rejected the Islamic doctrine of jihad and repudiated the objective of replacing the secular constitution of Western states with Islamic sharia law.

So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the co-operation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.

I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles - principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Does this include a rejection of the laws of dhimmitude, under which non-Muslims are second-class citizens, discriminated against and forced to conform to humiliating laws? Or that women are subservient and inferior to men (Q 4:34)? That "non-believers are the vilest of all creatures" (Q 8:51)? More likely, the "new beginning" that Obama would like to inaugurate will be one of American appeasement and apology, concession and retreat.

I do so recognizing that change cannot happen overnight. No single speech can eradicate years of mistrust, nor can I answer in the time that I have all the complex questions that brought us to this point. But I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground. As the Holy Koran tells us: "Be conscious of God and speak always the truth." That is what I will try to do - to speak the truth as best I can, humbled by the task before us, and firm in my belief that the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.

Part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan [the Muslim call to prayer] at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam - at places like al-Azhar University - that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality.

The idea that Islamic culture was once a beacon of learning and enlightenment is a commonly held myth. In fact, much of this has been exaggerated, often for quite transparent apologetic motives. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims at all, but by Christians such as the fifth century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq (809-873), translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. The Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate -- not by a Muslim, but a Nestorian Christian. A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia — by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations. But when the Muslim overlords had taken what they could from their subject peoples, and the Jewish and Christian communities had been stripped of their material and intellectual wealth and thoroughly subdued, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered. (From Jihad Watch)

Islam's history of racism is shocking. Today, the Arab trade of black slaves continues in Niger, Sudan and Mauritania. But, perhaps the most conspicuous example of overt racism in Islam is the genocide in present-day Sudan by the Arab-Islamic government and the refusal of Muslim organizations around the world to condemn it. Over two million black Africans have died from Arab aggression in the Christian south. And 200,000 more were killed by Arab militias over the last four years in Darfur. The Arabs are known for rampaging through villages and hacking black Africans to death in the name of Jihad while screaming things like, "Kill the slaves!"

I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President John Adams wrote: "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, served in government, stood for civil rights, started businesses, taught at our universities, excelled in our sports arenas, won Nobel prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic torch. And when the first Muslim-American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our founding fathers - Thomas Jefferson - kept in his personal library.

So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn't. And I consider it part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.

Which wars have Muslims fought in (on the side of the United States)? "Won Nobel prizes" --- he should say "won A Nobel prize" (Ahmed Zewail is the only U.S.-based Muslim to have won a Nobel prize). Islam's largest contribution to American history is the smoking crater at Ground Zero in New York City.

Why is it the POTUS's responsibility to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam? What about negative stereotypes of Jews, or Christians, or Buddhists, or Hindus, or Shintos, or Californians, or vegetarians, or blue-eyed people, or redheads, etc.?

[...]

So let there be no doubt: Islam is a part of America. And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations - to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity.

Unfortunately, Americans tend to project their values on others. In the words of Mr Inyadullah, one of Pakistan's largest Islamic fundamentalist groups, "Americans love Pepsi, we love death". Or to quote Osama bin Laden: “We love death. The US loves life. That is the difference between us two.” Islamic culture simply does not place the same value on life as Western culture does. One need simply think of Palestinian mothers sending their children out to suicide missions and then dancing, rejoicing and giving out candy when they hear that they have successfully blown up and murdered Jews in a Tel-Aviv cafe. This is a culture that wallows in death and hatred.

Of course, recognizing our common humanity is only the beginning of our task. Words alone cannot meet the needs of our people. These needs will be met only if we act boldly in the years ahead; and if we understand that the challenges we face are shared, and our failure to meet them will hurt us all.

For we have learned from recent experience that when a financial system weakens in one country, prosperity is hurt everywhere. When a new flu infects one human being, all are at risk. When one nation pursues a nuclear weapon, the risk of nuclear attack rises for all nations. When violent extremists operate in one stretch of mountains, people are endangered across an ocean. And when innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience. That is what it means to share this world in the 21st century. That is the responsibility we have to one another as human beings.

Yet no peep is heard about the genocide of hundreds of thousands in Darfur. If one fraction of the indignation and condemnation that was heaped on Israel when it had the gaul of defending itself from rocket attacks had been directed towards Khartoum, so many hundreds of thousands would not be dead.

[...]

The first issue that we have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms.

Like Episcopalian extremism? Those nutty Quakers? Fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventists? Maybe he's talking about those Voodoist fascists? Radical Hindus? Or maybe Islam, the only religion that has carried out over 13 000 violent attacks since 9/11?

In Ankara, I made clear that America is not - and never will be - at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security. Because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is my first duty as president to protect the American people.

Islam condemns the killing of innocent civilians. Yet out definition and the Islamic definition of innocent may be quite different.

[...]

The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world.

America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Wrong! The aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in the hundreds of years of Jewish sovereignty in Israel and in the thousands of years of an unbroken Jewish presence there. Israel does not derive its legitimacy from the ashes of murdered Jews, but rather from the Bible, from the historical fact that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, a fact which was recognized by the League of Nations in the 1920s, and then again by the United Nations, and is enshrined under international law.

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and antisemitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

Obama apparently loves dead Jews much more than live ones. He has no qualms with forcing Israel back to the indefensible pre-67 "Auschwitz borders" and bringing every single major Israeli city within "Palestinian" rocket range.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

The incredible chutzpah of implicitly drawing a comparison between Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and "Palestinian" self-inflicted suffering. The "Palestinians" are architects of their own demise. ("Palestinians" have not suffered for 60 years- since there haven't even been a "Palestinian people" for 60 years! The term "Palestinian" only began being used to refer to the Arabs of Israel after Israel liberated Judea, Samaria and Gaza in 1967.) If millions of Arabs would not have fled Israel at the behest of invading Arab armies in 1948, there would be no refugees. Before the founding of the State of Israel, close to a million Jews lived in Arab lands. They were expelled, losing billions of dollars of property, leaving behind homes in which they had lived for centuries or millenia. Israel did not allow them to languish in camps but took them in and integrated them. Somehow, the Islamic world, which stretches from Indonesia to Morocco and is rolling in petro-dollars, could not find place to settle a couple hundred thousand Arab refugees. Rather, they kept them in camps to be used as pawns against Israel, to flood the Jewish state and to destroy it demographically. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A 60 YEAR OLD REFUGEE!!

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers - for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.

Arab rejectionism goes too deep. Both the "moderate" Fatah and Hamas have the elimination of Israel as its goals, as enshrined in their respective charters. The Arab goal has never been a "Palestinian" state but rather the destruction of the Jewish one. If that was the case, why didn't the "Palestinians" declare independence when Judea, Samaria and Gaza were under Jordanian and Egyptian control before 1967? Why did the Arabs reject the UN partition plan in 1947? Why did Yasser Arafat walk away from Ehud Barak's offer of a PA state in close to 99% of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem? Why didn't Abbas accept control of half of Jerusalem, when Ehud Olmert claimed to have offered him "even more than Barak ever did"?

That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest, and the world's interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the road map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them - and all of us - to live up to our responsibilities.

It is hardly in Israel's interests to set up a terror state a few miles away from Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, to expel hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes and to uproot Jewish communities. It is not in US interests to allow Iranian proxies a puppet-state which will be a base of terror and will destabilize the region. It is not in US interests to destroy the region's only democracy to set up a backwards Arab thug state. It is not in US interests to reward terror with independence and to give a state on a silver platter to the same people who danced when they heard the news that the US had been attacked on 9/11. As for "Palestine's" bests interests- they are as fictional as the best interests of Atlantis, El Dorado or Valhala.

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

The comparison between the "Palestinians" and American blacks is absurd and ridiculous. Israel is forced to implement these measures to protect its own civilians from being blown up in cafes, restaurants and buses. Clearly, an Arab's right not to be inconvenienced outweighs and Jew's right not to be blown to smithereens on a Jerusalem bus. As always, the poor Arabs are the victims, never responsible for their own choices, their rejection of Israel, their support of violence and hatred, their choice to go to war against Israel 7 times and to have lost each time.

Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people.

People have been calling upon them to do that for years. They have never heeded the call. Mortimer Zuckerman and others spent $14 million to give them Israeli greenhouses during the Gaza turnover, so they would have a way to make a living. They turned those greenhouses into weapons smuggling tunnels.

Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.

Don't hold your breathe for Khaled Meshal to sing and dance kumbaya with Jews on the White House lawn.

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

Insane moral equivalence. Israel liberated Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem in a war which the Arabs initiated and lost. In the word of Yehuda Z. Blum, former Israeli ambassador to the UN, speaking in 1979: "Anyone who asserts that it is illegal for a Jew to live in Judea and Samaria JUST BECAUSE HE IS A JEW, is in fact advocating a concept that is disturbingly reminiscent of the 'JUDENREIN' POLICIES of Nazi Germany banning Jews from certain spheres of life for no other reason than that they were Jews. The Jewish villages in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district are there as of right and are there to stay." There is no difference between saying that Jews cannot live in Hebron or Maaleh Adumim in Judea and Samaria, or saying that a Jew cannot walk on a certain sidewalk or sit on a specific bench in Germany or Poland.

It takes a certain amount of gaul for someone living on stolen Iroquois land to turn around and tell Jews that they cannot live in their biblical homeland.

Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.

Which humanitarian crisis?

[...]

Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.

Only under Israel has freedom of religion in Jerusalem been guaranteed. During the 19 year illegal Jordanian occupation, from 1948 to 1967, every single Jew of the Old City was expelled, synagogues were desecrated and turned into warehouses, Jewish cemeteries paved over and used as latrines and Jewish prayer banned from the Western Wall. Jerusalem is Israel's undivided capital. When London was still forest and Rome still a collection of villages on the Tiber, Jerusalem had already been King David's capital for hundreds of years, seat of the Jewish kingdom, and site of the Holy Temple. It will never again be divided. I highly doubt that Obama would divide up Washington and offer it to al-Qaeda, no matter how strong his desire for "reconciliation".

[...]

Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition.

More historical myth. Even Maria Rosa Menocal, in her extended whitewash of Muslim Spain called The Ornament of the World, admits that the laws of dhimmitude were very much in force in the great Al-Andalus. She says: "The dhimmi, as these covenanted peoples were called, were granted religious freedom, not forced to convert to Islam. They could continue to be Jews and Christians, and, as it turned out, they could share in much of Muslim social and economic life. In return for this freedom of religious conscience the Peoples of the Book (pagans had no such privilege) were required to pay a special tax — no Muslims paid taxes — and to observe a number of restrictive regulations: Christians and Jews were prohibited from attempting to proselytize Muslims, from building new places of worship, from displaying crosses or ringing bells. In sum, they were forbidden most public displays of their religious rituals."

So much for that "proud tradition of tolerance." Also, historian Kenneth Baxter Wolf observes that “much of this new legislation aimed at limiting those aspects of the Christian cult which seemed to compromise the dominant position of Islam.” After enumerating a list of laws much like Menocal’s, he adds: “Aside from such cultic restrictions most of the laws were simply designed to underscore the position of the dimmîs as second-class citizens.”

If Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived together peaceably and productively only with Christians and Jews relegated by law to second-class citizen status, then al-Andalus has absolutely no reason to be lionized in our age. Obama should know that the laws of dhimmitude give his claim of a "proud tradition of tolerance" the same hollow ring as the stories of prominent American blacks from the slavery and Jim Crow eras: yes, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were great men, but their accomplishments not only do not erase or contradict the records of the oppression of their people, but render them all the more poignant and haunting. Whatever the Christians and Jews of al-Andalus accomplished, they were still dhimmis. They enjoyed whatever rights and privileges they had not out of any sense of the dignity of all people before God, or the equality of all before the law, but at the sufferance of their Muslim overlords. (From Jihad Watch)

[...]

It is easier to start wars than to end them. It is easier to blame others than to look inward; to see what is different about someone than to find the things we share. But we should choose the right path, not just the easy path. There is also one rule that lies at the heart of every religion - that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. This truth transcends nations and peoples - a belief that isn't new; that isn't black or white or brown; that isn't Christian, or Muslim or Jew. It's a belief that pulsed in the cradle of civilization, and that still beats in the heart of billions. It's a faith in other people, and it's what brought me here today.

Suppress gag reflex...

We have the power to make the world we seek, but only if we have the courage to make a new beginning, keeping in mind what has been written.

The Holy Koran tells u: "O mankind! We have created you male and a female; and we have made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another."

The Qur'an says a lot of things. Like "slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them" (Q 9:5). Or that non-Muslims must be humiliated and made second-class: "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued." (Q 9:29)

The Talmud tells us: "The whole of the Torah is for the purpose of promoting peace."

Obama could very well be a Reform rabbi, choosing which parts suit him and lopping off the rest. Remember the part where G-d promised the Land of Israel to the Jews?

The Holy Bible tells us: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God."

Jesus the Palestinian said that?

The people of the world can live together in peace. We know that is God's vision. Now, that must be our work here on Earth. Thank you. And may God's peace be upon you.

Barf...

Take the Quiz

2009-05-24T07:26:00.001-07:00

The Hope Lives

2009-05-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

World leaders goose-step zealously around the "two-state solution", hovering like vultures ready to carve up and divide Israel. Bibi just returned from Washington where he met with the chief supporter of this plot, President Obama. There, he was told in no uncertain terms that Jewish couples in Judea and Samaria cannot be allowed to have children or build homes, and that the US intends to negotiate with Iran, and not deal with the nuclear ayatollahs militarily. To his credit, Bibi did not fold under the intense pressure. One this is clear: the United States is preparing to sacrifice Israel as a scapegoat for "peace" and "reconciliation" with the Arab world.

The two-state solution is a Final Solution to the Zionist Problem. 80% of Israel's population is concentrated on the coastal plain. If Israel's frontiers would be reduced to the "Auschwitz lines" (as Abban Eban famously dubbed them), every single major Israeli city would be under the threat of rocket fire. The situation that was produced in Sderot following the 2005 Disengagement would repeat itself all over Israel as any new "Palestinian" state would quickly become a launching pad for Islamic terror. Dr. Yuval Steinitz, former Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman, said that the idea of a two-state solution should be dead. “A Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria ,” he said, “would bring about Israel ’s demise. … Such a Palestinian state would immediately become an outpost for Iran ” (Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2008).

Besides the obvious strategic and military threat that a terror-state in the heart of Israel would pose, there is an even greater ideological danger inherent in a two-state solution. In essence, a two-state solution would mean the death of Zionism and the abandonment of the Jewish dream.

The Nation of Israel arose in the Land of Israel. The Bible provides the clearest proof that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people and to no other nation. For hundreds of years, the Jews lived in the land, established a monarchy under King David and Solomon, and built the First Temple in the capital city of Jerusalem. When the first Jewish kingdom was destroyed by the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE, they razed Jerusalem, burnt the Temple and carried away the Jewish defenders into exile, in Babylon. The Bible records how the Jews bitterly mourned the loss of their independence and homeland, and resolved to return. "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, we also wept when we remembered Zion... If I forget you, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget [its skill]. May my tongue cling to my palate, if I do not remember you, if I do not bring up Jerusalem at the beginning of my joy." (Tehillim 137). 70 years later, when the Persian emperor Cyrus allowed the Jews to return home, tens of thousands set out under the guidance of Ezrah the Scribe and Nehemiah. They rebuilt the desolate cities of Judea and reconstructed the Temple in Jerusalem. For centuries, the Jews lived semi-autonomously under Persian and Greek rule, until the Maccabbees revolted against Greek religious persecution. For another 100 years, the Jews enjoyed sovereignty under the Hasmonean dynasty. This independence was brought to an end with the Roman conquest and following several revolts, the Second Temple was burnt and the Jewish population carried into slavery and exile.

During the three millenia since Joshua first conquered the Holy Land until today, there was never another people that established a state in Israel. Never was there a sovereign nation by the name of "Palestine". The Arabs living in the Land of Israel never considered themselves to be part of a distinct "Palestinian" people. The only entity to ever have its independence in Israel was and remains the Jewish people.

Way back on March 31, 1977, the Dutch newspaper Trouw published an interview with Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee member Zahir Muhsein. Here's what he said:

"The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct "Palestinian people" to oppose Zionism.

For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan."

"Palestine is a term the Zionists invented.... Our country for centuries was part of Syria," remarked Arab leader Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi to the British Peel Commission in 1937. Certainly, Mr. Abdul-Hadi had the honesty to admit the fraud that is "the Palestinian people". Before the State of Israel was founded, Jews and Palestine were synonymous. Jews founded the Palestine Post, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, the Palestine Electric Company. The Arabs were referred to as Arabs and not Palestinians. Only in 1964 was this bogus term invented when Gamal Abdl-Nasser created the phony nationalism of the Palestinians.

The differentiation between Israel pre-67 and beyond "the Green Line" is entirely arbitrary and simply reflects the armistice line at the end of Israel's War of Independence (a war initiated by 6 Arab countries with the intention of "throwing the Jews into the sea". There is absolutely no difference between the right of Jews to live in Tel-Aviv, Herzliah or Haifa and Hebron, Shechem and Beit El. In fact, Hebron was the first capital of the Jewish people under King David, while Tel-Aviv was only founded 100 years ago. Judea and Samaria are the heart of the Biblical homeland, where our Patriarchs walked, our Kings fought and conquered, our Prophets warned and proclaimed. A judenrein Judea and Samaria would be the greatest travesty of history and would undermine the entire basis of the dream of the return to Zion.

Palestinian Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki articulated quite clearly how a two-state solution would spell the end of Israel. He was speaking to the Arab media:

"With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made - just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward."

For two thousand years, Jews dreamed of going home, of returning to the land of their forefathers and having their own country. Three times a day, observant Jews turn towards the East and beseech G-d: "May our eyes behold Your return to Zion in mercy". Jews declare at the end of every Passover seder and Yom Kippur fast: "Next year in Jerusalem!" The ties that the Jewish people have to Israel are deeper than those of any other people to its land, long preceding the creation of "Palestinians" in the 1960s, or even the birth of Muhammad and the spread of Israel. Before France was French and before Spain was Spanish, Israel was Jewish. When London was still forest and Rome was just a collection of villages on the Tiber, Jerusalem was already the capital and spiritual center of the Jewish people. Jews in the various exiles, Morocco and Poland, Iraq and Russia, Yemen and Greece, did not long for the Holy Land simply for it to be turned over to another people.

Friday marks 42 years since Judea, Samaria and Gaza were liberated and Jerusalem reunified under Jewish control. 800 Jewish soldiers gave their lives in defense of Israel against the Arab invaders during the Six Day War, and bravely liberated our biblical homeland. For 19 long years, the Jordanians illegally occupied Jerusalem, drove the Jews out of the Old City, desecrated synagogues and Jewish cemeteries and closed the Kotel to Jewish prayer. Hundreds of courageous Jews paid for Jerusalem with their blood and in June 1967, for the first time since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, Jerusalem was reunited in Jewish hands. The sheer euphoria as it was proclaimed on the radio "the Temple Mount is in our hands!" was indescribable. Even the most secular soldier broke down in tears in front of the Western Wall, when he realized the momentousness of the battle.

Today, the battle for Jerusalem and for the Land of Israel continues. We must remember the bravery of Joshua, of David, of the Maccabees, of Bar Kochba and those who fought the Romans, and our modern day heroes of the IDF. We must have the courage to proclaim that the entire Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people and that we do not recognize the legitimacy of the claims of any foreign entity on our land. The State of Israel only exists today because it is sitting on the shoulders of the generations of good Jews who, in all of their lands of dispersion, never forgot the dream, the two-thousand year old hope "to be a free people in our own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem". A hope that overcame the Romans, the Crusades and Inquisitions, pogroms and persecution, Auschwitz and Treblinka, will certainly overcome the most nefarious plots of our enemies.

A Soldier and an Old Woman

2009-05-17T13:22:00.001-07:00

From Aish by Ruchama King Feuerman

The Six Day War had ended. The generals assembled the commanders and foot soldiers for a customary review and analysis of the battle. After the military questions had been asked, and the investigative committee was about to disperse, a commanding officer pointed to one of the soldiers. "Wait a minute. I have a question for you. Yes, you, the soldier who put up the flag on the Temple Mount."

The soldier nodded.

"Where did you get an Israeli flag, and why did you put it up?"

The soldier spread out his hands and smiled, a gesture that indicated that here was more than just a one sentence response. He told the following story:

The night before the Old City was liberated, a contingent of soldiers fighting near the Old City took cover in a shelter in a Jerusalem neighborhood. Hordes of children, mothers, old men and women packed inside the bunker alongside the soldiers. People looked frightened and bereft. The government had imposed a news black-out so that the Arab countries wouldn't be able to figure out their positions. And the news -- originating from Jordan, Egypt and Syria -- was enough to induce hysteria: calls from Saudi King Faisal for the total elimination of Israel, calls from every Arab country to push the fledgling country into the sea.

Things looked so bad, Israelis famously converted public parks into mass graves, in preparation for the expected casualties. (Israel's Chief of Staff, Yitzchak Rabin, had even suffered a nervous breakdown.)

As the soldier sat there in the bunker, hopeless and uncertain, he saw an old woman slowly make her way over to him. "Excuse me," she said, standing at his side. She held a satchel in her arms.

He lifted his eyes. "Yes, Doda. Tell me, what is it?"

"Tomorrow you'll go to the Old City and you'll go to the Kotel."

He shook his head at the absurdity. He said, "No, we won't." There were no army plans to liberate the Old City. First, they were fighting just to hold their positions. Also, overtaking the Old City would entail hand-to-hand combat which was greatly feared: Many people would die. Moreover, any bombardment of the Old City might demolish even more of the holy sites than had already been destroyed by the Jordanians. He tried to explain all of this.

The old woman looked at him, steady-eyed. "No, you will go," she said, not as if she were trying to convince him, but as if relaying simple facts.

He shrugged. An old woman's delusions. He wasn't going to argue with her.

Before he turned away, she said, "I have a favor to ask you." She reached into her satchel and took out an Israeli flag. From the way she touched it, it was clear the flag had some personal meaning for her. Had she made it? Perhaps it had been draped over a loved one's grave? But what was she now saying? "When you go, please take this flag, and when you get to the Temple Mount, I want you to hang it up there." She held out the flag.

The soldier repeated, "We're not going into the Old City."

"You're going," she said. Again, she held out her arm.

A thought struck him. "I can't take it," he told her. "It's against army regulations."

"It'll be all right. Just take it."

"I'll get in trouble. You're only allowed to carry a few specified items."

Please," she said hoarsely. "Do me this favor."

He shrugged again. Why was he arguing with this old woman? Let him take the flag, let him make an old woman feel good. He could always get rid of it later.

The next day, the Israeli army, contrary to everyone's expectations, took the Old City. Sure enough, the soldier's unit ended up at the Temple Mount. As he and the other soldiers came close to the Western Wall, he suddenly remembered the flag and the old woman's words. Yes, he would do it, he would! He enlisted two buddies, and together they draped the flag over the grating on the upper left most side of the Kotel, and there they hoisted and hung the Israel flag.

The commanding officer conducting the investigation said to the soldier, "And what were you thinking when you put up that flag?"

The soldier said, "I was thinking that this was the answer to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering."

And so ends the story of the soldier, our hero.

But there's an unsung hero, too. What about the old woman who supplied the flag? One wishes the investigating officers had tracked her down. What did she have in mind as she entered a shelter with an Israeli flag in her satchel? And who was she, anyway? The only identifying feature is that she was old and carried a bag. But her advanced age already tells us plenty: that she knew something about Jewish history, probably having personally lived through it...World War I, Arab attacks, the Holocaust, the War of Independence, 1956. What hadn't she seen?

There, in Israel's darkest moment, outnumbered and surrounded by enemies, terrified that the next morning there will be no Israel, the old woman sees what no one else can see, what no one else is capable of conceiving. She insists on her vision, she practically browbeats the soldier into carrying out her plan. We'll never know how she knew, only that, like many Jewish women before her -- the Matriarchs, the midwives in Egypt, the righteous women in the desert -- she just knew. There are two kinds of prophecy. One that predicts the future, and one that makes the future.

Papal Bull

2009-05-13T18:27:00.000-07:00

While the Pope's speech at Yad Vashem left much to be desired, he had no such restraint when speaking at a "Palestinian" refugee camp. Speaking before Israeli officials, government representatives and Holocaust survivors at the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem, the Pope could not bring himself to mention the words "Nazis", "murdered" or "six million", nor did he apologize for the silence of the Vatican during the war, and its apathy to the plight of the Jews. The chairman of the Yad Vashem Council, Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, who is a Holocaust survivor, expressed disappointment at the pope's speech, saying that "there certainly was no apology expressed here. Something was missing. There was no mention of the Germans or the Nazis who participated in the butchery, nor a word of regret," Lau said. "If not an apology, then an expression of remorse."

Despite this, the Pope did not hold back in his call for an Arab terror state in the heart of the land of Israel and the return of the Jewish people to exile. Speaking before Fatah arch-terrorist Mahmoud Abbas, the Pope declared his support for "a sovereign Palestinian homeland in the land of... [their] forefathers". He used the opportunity to criticize Israel over erecting a security fence designed to prevent Islamic suicide bombers from blowing up Jewish men, women and children in cafes, restaurants and discotheques, a security fence only made necessary by relentless Islamic terror. Abbas, who is constantly referred to as a "moderate" in the West, used the opportunity to lament "the Nakba [catastrophe] 61 years ago" ie. the founding of the State of Israel. Straight from Yad Vashem, the Pope allowed himself to be used as propaganda for those who seek to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish State. PA spokesmen used the Pope's visit to reiterate the Arab "right of return", the flooding of Israel by Arab refugees with the intention of demographically destroying the state.

The Pope's pilgrimage is a case study in hypocrisy, falsehoods and lies. The Pope may have cried crocodile tears at Yad Vashem but he is far from expressing remorse over the Holocaust. His Church has been consistent in whitewashing its wartime record, reinstating Holocaust-denying bishops, promoting ludicrous and obscene comparisons between the Nazis and the IDF, as well as supporting the Durban II conference, in which a Holocaust-denying and genocide-enabling leader was the keynote speaker. The Pope has launched a campaign to exonerate Pope Pius XII, the Pope who closed his eyes as the Jews of Rome were round up from beneath his window, without hurting Jewish sensitivities. The Pope caused a huge scandal when he lifted the excommunication against a bishop who stated that there is no proof that gas chambers ever existed, and only relented after international outcry. Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Vatican Council for Justice and Peace and a former Holy See envoy to the United Nations, provoked an uproar when he repeated the revisionist libel that Gaza today resembles a Nazi concentration camp. In addition to this damning record of Holocaust-denial, obfuscation and unwillingness to confront the past, he met with Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, whose doctoral dissertation questions the veracity of the Holocaust and argues that Zionist leaders collaborated with the Nazis in the extermination of European Jewry. He writes in his thesis: "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions—fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand."" This "moderate" Holocaust denier was also involved in the 1972 murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and countless other terrorist attacks.

The Vatican has consistently promoted the internationalization of Jerusalem and taken a pro-"Palestinian" stance. It was only in 1993 that the Vatican recognized Israel. The reason for this hostility is that the State of Israel and Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem poses a tremendous theological problem for Catholicism. Church doctrine taught for millenia that Jews were "the witness", cursed to wander without a home as proof of their rejection of Jesus, and that they would never return to Israel. In 1948, and then again in 1967, an enormous issue was raised for theologians. By expressing support for a "Palestinian" state in the "land of their forefathers", the Pope is continuing this same deadly replacement theology. One would think that the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church would at least have a cursory knowledge of Scriptures, which says quite clearly that the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. He must certainly be aware that there has never in history been a sovereign "Palestinian" state, nor was there ever a distinct "Palestinian" people, culture or entity. In fact, the "Palestinian people" were invented only in 1967 when it became apparent to the Arabs that a new strategy had to be devised to throw the Jews into the sea. Certainly the world's oldest people, with ties going back to the Bible, over 3500 years ago, should not be expected to give up its homeland to make room for the world's newest people, an artificial entity created 42 years ago. The people today referred to as "Palestinians" are squatters and invaders, having arrived in the 1900s from Jordan, Egypt, the Maghreb and Syria, attracted by the increased living standards caused by renewed Jewish settlement in Israel.

The Vatican has a lot of chutzpah. The original Jewish olim from Eastern Europe left for Israel because Church-taught hatred had made life so miserable for the Jewish people. During our entire sojourn in Catholic lands, we never had a moment of rest as we were persecuted and oppressed. The Church taught that Jews were wicked, sons of satan, and forced them to wear distinctive clothing and live in ghettos. Thousands of Jews perished at the hands of crusading swords or on the racks of the Inquisition. Entire communities in France and Germany were wiped out during the Crusades as mobs burst into Jewish homes and demanded: "Kiss the cross or kiss the sword!" The Holocaust, the most horrendous crime humanity ever committed, was only possible because of the two-thousand years of Christian anti-semitism. After watching the Oberammergau Passion Play in 1934, Hitler said out loud: "Perhaps I am rendering to Christianity the best service ever!" Having left, for the most part, Catholic lands for our own soils, the Pope has now followed us, demanding that we give up our land. Jews left Christendom yet Christendom has chased after us, pointing us back to the exile, to subjugation and lowliness.

I would like to point the pontiff to the Book of Joel. He would be wise to read and digest the fourth chapter, which speaks of the fate of those who divide up G-d's land. "For behold, in those days and in that time when I return the captivity of Judah and Jerusalem, I will gather all the nations and I will take them down to the Valley of Jehoshaphat, and I will contend with them there concerning My people and My heritage, Israel, which they scattered among the nations, and My land they divided... And Egypt shall become desolate, and Edom shall be a desert waste, because of the violence done to the children of Judah, because they shed innocent blood in their land. But Judah shall remain forever, and Jerusalem throughout all generations. Now should I cleanse, their blood I will not cleanse, when the Lord dwells in Zion." 61 years after the return of Jewish independence, and 62 after the liberation of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, the world still disputes our rights to our home. We must not fear since even when Edom ie. the Church and the West will be a "desert waste", "Judah will remain forever!" Pope may come and go, but the Jewish people are firmly planted in their homeland.

Clarity over Gaza

2009-05-10T09:42:00.000-07:00

Note: I was asked to asked to justify Israel's operation in Gaza in January. My opinion on the operation can be found throughout my posts and articles. Rather than right an entire article, I thought that I would refute point by point the lies and misinformation disseminated by fellow blogger Young Activist. His article can be found in italics, with my commentary.

An Israeli intelligence officer acknowledged the IDF was targeting "both aspects of Hamas -- its resistance or military wing and its dawa, or social wing," Bombing schools, hospitals, universities, the water system, police stations, and other civilian infrastructure was entirely justified because, as NYT correspondent Stephen Erlanger makes clear, "in a war, [Hamas's] instruments of political and social control were as legitimate a target as its rocket caches." Of course, when Hamas acts on a smaller scale, but in a similar fashion, it must be denounced as terrorism.

My fellow blogger is making a false distinction between Hamas's military and "social" wings. They are both parts of the same entity, Hamas using its "social" wing to build schools that indoctrinate Arab children in hatred. Just as the Allies during WWII made no distinction between the Nazi Wehrmacht and the social centers built by the Nazi regime, so too this is completely irrelevant. The media has succeeded in portraying the Arabs of Gaza as poor victims of Israeli aggression. Such a characterization is demeaning and in fact bigoted, because it implies that the Arabs cannot be held accountable for their own actions, essentially infantilizing them. Israel withdrew its 7000 Jewish citizens from Gaza in 2005, in a bid to give the Arabs a chance at self-government and a better future. Israel poured aid into the Gaza and even left behind the greenhouses and agricultural infrastructure that had made the Jewish communities so successful. [1] While Israel extended the olive branch, they got terror in return. In the 2006 Palestinian elections, Hamas was elected with a clear majority of 74 of the 132 available seats. Hamas is recognized as a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union. It was founded with an explicit dedication to the destruction of the State of Israel and has carried out hundreds of murderous suicide and other terrorist attacks against Jewish targets. Hamas' charter is based on rejections and says that "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." Lest anybody claim that Hamas makes a distinction between Jews and Israel, its charter declares its genocidal intent. "The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Muslim)." Concerning this intended genocide, the charter promises that " the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take." To claim that the Arabs who voted for Hamas as their legitimate representatives were not aware of their goals and aspirations is simply dishonest. The Arabs of Gaza must take collective responsibility for freely choosing Hamas as their government. During the past 3 years, there was not a single protest against Hamas using homes, schools, hospitals and mosques to fire rockets against Israeli civilians. The Arabs cannot allow Hamas to use their homes as rocket launch pads while at the same time claim innocence.

NYT correspondent Stephen Erlanger's statement reveals a dangerous lack of moral clarity and hypocrisy. There is no comparison between a terrorist organization attacking civilians and a sovereign state trying to protect its civilians. This is the same twisted mentality that would denounce both a robber and the law enforcement officer who tries to neutralize him.

If Israel's apologists are to be believed these actions, namely the firing of rockets, necessitated the bombing and subsequent invasion of Gaza. The attack was launched to save lives, Israeli lives that is, Palestinian blood is worthless. But even if we accept the premise that Palestinian deaths are of no consequence this justification quickly falls apart.

This last statement is mere rhetoric, intending to portray Israel as a racist state. The obligation and responsibility of the Israeli government is to protect Israeli citizens, just as it is Russia's duty to protect Russian citizens.

Six months before the offensive began in earnest Hamas and Israel signed a cease fire: both sides would halt their attacks and Israel would open the borders. Rocket attack essentially stopped, although a trickle of fire from dissident groups continued with no fatalities, but Israel refused to open the borders. Nonetheless Hamas was interested in a renewal of the cease fire before it expired, Israel repudiated this offer with violence. This was not the long term settlement endorsed by Hamas and the entire world save Israel and the U.S where Israel and Palestine would recognize each other on the June 1967 borders and all hostilities would cease, this was a short term agreement to end immediate attacks. Israel not only refused to renew the cease fire, it violated it with a Nov. 4 raid that killed several Palestinian fighters.

Hamas never abided by the truce for even a moment. Almost immediately after the truce was signed in June 2008, Hamas fired rockets into Israel. Despite such a flagrant violation of this truce, Israel promised "restraint" [2]. In fact, during the entire 6 month truce period, Hamas fired a total of 329 rockets at Israel [3].

Immediately, and predictably, Hamas responded with a barrage of rockets in what the MFA acknowledged was "retaliation" for Israel's violation of the cease fire agreement. If the sole objective of Israel's leaders was to save Israeli lives they would have pursued an extension of the cease fire. The attack, as predicted, resulted in more Israeli deaths. As it launched its offensive the IDF was preparing for scores of Israeli casualties, in the end only eleven Israeli soldiers were killed, several by friendly fire, but this was still many more than had been killed in the preceding six years by rocket fire.

Dozens of Israelis have been killed by Hamas rocket attacks. The small number of casualties has been nothing short of miraculous yet it is twisted thinking to argue that Israel should have waiting until a higher number of Jews had been killed before responding.

The air attacks began shortly before noon on the Sabbath, Dec. 27 just as children were returning from school and midday crowds were out on the streets. Within moments over two hundred people were dead. Israel's deterrent capabilities, terrorism is lay man's terms, were quickly reestablished to the applause of over 90% of the non-Arab population. One Israeli political analyst predicted that the parties of then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's governing coalition would capture one additional seat in the upcoming Parliamentary elections for every forty Palestinians killed, a prediction that ultimately proved false but still reflected well on the mood of the country.

Israel's PR arm has claimed civilians were warned to leave by the world's most moral army before the fighting began, they couldn't leave the conflict zone through the sealed border crossing, but Israel nonetheless quickly absolved itself of all blame for deaths inflicted by its forces. Unfortunately civilians were not given an opportunity to flee, the result was nearly a thousand dead Palestinian non-combatants. Writing in the nation's leading newspaper Israeli intelligence analyst Reuven Pedatzur noted "[t]he IDF, which planned to attack buildings and sites populated by hundreds of people, did not warn them in advance to leave, but intended to kill a great many of them, and succeeded." Indeed, on one occasion Israeli soldiers ordered a family to evacuate the fighting to a shelter which they promptly bombed, killing scores of people.

Israel's army went to great lengths to prevent unnecessary civilian casualties, unfortunately often putting Israeli soldiers in harm's way. Following international allegations that Israeli soldiers acted immorally in Gaza, Israel's military launched an investigation into the matter. The military probe revealed that there was little truth behind the accusations. [4] Maj. Yehoshua Gurtler, a military lawyer, said that "these allegations were based on hearsay. They were not based on firsthand evidence. They were rumors. They did not reflect the operational circumstances which had actually taken place on the ground." We are still waiting for the NY Times and other news agencies to publicize the findings with the same zealousness with which they smeared the reputation of the Israeli army.

The IDF made little effort to distinguish between civilian and military targets, often it deliberately attacked civilian targets. It bombed a U.N school housing refugees killing scores of innocents claiming it was sheltering Hamas fighters, a claim the IDF was later forced to retract, it destroyed the warehouse of UNRWA on whom most Palestinians depend for sustenance, it used banned chemical weapons against civilians, it destroyed the al-Quds hospital where hundreds of terrified residents had taken shelter, it refused to allow emergency aid in, ramming and nearly sinking a relief vessel in international waters, and shooting at ambulances attempting to evacuate the injured during Israel's "three hour daily humanitarian cease fire". These reports come from Palestinians, the U.N, and those westerners in Gaza when the attack began, the IDF refused to allow foreign doctors or journalists into Gaza. Who did they want to die from lack of medical attention? What were they hiding? Perhaps the scale of the violence was too great even for Israel's well oiled propaganda machine to talk away. IDF soldiers, some of whom proudly dawned T-Shirts bearing images of a pregnant Palestinian women in a sniper's crosshairs with the words "1 shot 2 kills", killed even the animals at the Gaza zoo during their rampage through the coastal enclave.

Just as in the case of the case of the 2002 Jenin massacre that wasn't, Israel was falsely accused of crimes against humanity. rael faced a similar rush to judgment after reports of an Israeli attack on January 6, 2009 on a UN-run school in Jabalya. The building was not being used as a school at the time but was sheltering Palestinian noncombatants. Initial reports said at least 30 (the figure was later revised to 43) Palestinians were killed and UN officials claimed they had given Israeli forces coordinates of this building and others that they said were not associated with Hamas. The incident was immediately portrayed as a deliberate Israeli attack on innocent people.

Israel maintained that the building was being used as a shelter and that Israeli forces fired in the direction of the building because they were attacked by Hamas terrorists launching mortars from the area. Israel later identified two of the casualties at the site as Imad and Hassan Abu Asker, who served as heads of the Hamas mortar units in Gaza. A witness from Jabalya said that he had seen Abu Asker in the area of the school right before the attack when he answered a call for volunteers to pile sand around the camp “to help protect the resistance fighters.” [5a] In addition, two residents of the area near the school told the Associated Press they had seen a small group of terrorists firing mortar rounds from a street close to the school. [5b]

Journalists who investigated the incident and spoke to eyewitnesses, including a teacher who was in the schoolyard at the time of the shelling, concluded that no one in the school compound was killed. “The 43 people who died in the incident were all outside, on the street, where all three mortar shells landed.”[5c] As the Globe and Mail noted, this is very different than the UN’s allegation that the IDF had fired into a schoolyard crowded with refuge-seekers.

Nearly a month after the incident, following the publication of accounts discrediting UNRWA’s story, Maxwell Gaylord, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Jerusalem, was forced to admit that Israel’s account was true after all, that the IDF mortar shells fell in the street near the compound, and not on the compound itself. Gaylord said that the UN “would like to clarify that the shelling and all of the fatalities took place outside and not inside the school.” [6]

One explanation for the inflated civilian casualty figures is that Hamas routinely hides among civilians, since more Arab dead is better for their propaganda purposes. Hamas has stored weapons in schools, mosques and hospitals, and used them as bases for rocket attacks. United Nations Humanitarian Affairs Chief John Holmes told the UN Security Council, “The reckless and cynical use of civilian installations by Hamas and indiscriminate firing of rockets against civilian populations are clear violations of international humanitarian law.” [6a]

Norwegian Mads Gilbert, one of only two western doctors on hand for much of the conflict, estimated half of the casualties were woman and children and almost all casualties in Israel's "[a]ll out war against the civilian population of Gaza," were civilian. But perhaps the onslaught was justified, because as the Jersusalem Post noted one Sephardic Rabbi wrote to the Prime Minister that there is "absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings," Perhaps the only fault in killing over 1,300 people, mainly civilians, was that it did not go far enough in reestablishing Israel's deterrent and it failed in returning Kadima to power. Perhaps a 100:1 kill ratio was just not good enough. Perhaps what Israeli commentators frequently refer to as the "Palestinian peace offensive" was not sufficiently thwarted. As for the official pretense, the attack was, as predicted by Israeli officials, counterproductive to its declared aims. When the fighting subsided thirteen Israelis were dead and Hamas remained in power in Gaza, more popular than ever.

Pure anti-Israel rhetoric. Official Israeli statistics put 300 of the 1200 casualties as civilians [7]. This amounts to one-third, not the two-thirds Arab propagandists claimed. This is a much lower rate of civilian casualties than the United States in Iraq or Afghanistan, Russia in Chechnya or NATO in the Balkans. It is despicable to argue that Israel's operation was not justified because a fair or equal amount of Jews hadn't been killed. Close to 100 000 civilian have been killed by violence in Iraq [8]. When Operation Enduring Freedom began in 2001 in Afghanistan, the US launched an indiscriminate bombing campaign. Two US jets accidentally killed 100 people and wiped out an entire village in Eastern Afghanistan. [9] The high number of civilian deaths have led Afghan President Hamid Karzai to complain to the US. [10] To combat Chechnyan terror, the Russian army essentially decided to level Grozny, killing over 200 000 people since 1994 [11]. Of course, only Israel, the one country that went to pains not to harm civilians (and had a relatively low percentage of civilian deaths) is singled out for abuse, condemnation and vilification.

Hamas also bears direct responsibility for civilian casualties in Gaza because it is a violation of international law to launch attacks from civilian infrastructure. According to the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war, civilians are to be protected and distinguished from combatants. This protection extends to civilian areas to minimize harm to innocents. Hamas provoked return fire on civilian areas by launching attacks from densely populated areas and, specifically, from inside and the vicinity of private homes, schools, mosques, and hospitals. In a report to the Israeli cabinet, Israeli intelligence chief, Yuval Diskin, indicated that the Gaza-based leadership of Hamas was hiding in an underground bunker beneath Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip. [11a] Hamas also endangered civilians by ordering its forces to discard uniforms and dress in regular clothes that made them indistinguishable from the civilian population.

The rage over the T-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers highlights the selective anger of the world. While many brimmed with righteous indignation about these T-shirts, nary a word has been said about Hamas' explicit genocidal statements and the constant and deadly anti-semitic and murderous incitement in Arab culture. Some might argue that Hamas does not have the capacity to carry out these threats. However, when these threats are coupled with the proclamation of "wiping Israel off the map" by Hamas's Iranian puppet-masters, the situation becomes frightening. Former Canadian Justice minister, member of the Canadian Parliament and expert on international law, has said that Hamas is a "case study per excellence in war crimes" [12].

Finally, Hamas is in violation of the prohibition against using child soliders. Hamas regularly indoctrinates children in anti-semitic, anti-Israel hatred and the glorification of "martyrdom". [13]

We are told if there were no rockets than Israel would not have been compelled to massacre Gaza, but in the West Bank there are no rockets, but there are land seizures, there are checkpoints, there are regular IDF kidnappings, there are daily incursion into Palestinian communities, there are Jewish only roads, there are illegal settlements, there are attacks on peaceful demonstrations, and there is still the occupation. If peace is what Israel wants than it will engage the Arab world with words and not weapons.

In typical anti-Israel fashion, history began yesterday. The Arab assault on Jews in Israel has continued unimpeded for over a hundred years. In 1920-21, 1929 and the 1930s, Arabs rioted and massacred hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron, Safed, etc. This was before there was a state, let alone an "occupation" or checkpoints. When Israel declared its independence in 1948, its was attacked by a million Arab soldiers from 7 different countries. Again in 1967, Israel was threatened and attacked, before any "settlements". Israel has offered the Arabs peace numerous times. Former Israeli PM Ehud Olmert recently announced that he offered the PA more than even Ehud Barak did [8]. Barak offered Yasser Arafat practically 95% of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, with a capital in East Jerusalem and control over the Temple Mount. In typical Arab fashion, Arafat wanted everything and walked away. "At one point, I put everything on the table and offered Abu Mazen [PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas – ed.] an offer that had never been made before, that touched on the core of the conflict and the most heavily emotionally charged issues, the rawest nerves, the historical baggage,” Olmert said, recalling his negotiations with Abbas. “I told him, 'Come on, sign.' That was half a year ago, and I'm still waiting,” he added. I wouldn't hold my breath.

The Loyalty Fallacy

2009-05-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

In the recent Israeli elections, Avigdor Lieberman's party, Yisrael Beiteinu, won 15 seats in the Israeli Knesset. The party slogan of "no citizenship without loyalty" resounded with Israelis after they saw Israel's Arab citizens cheering on Hamas during the latest conflict in Gaza. Lieberman capitalized on the treasonous words and actions of "Israeli"-Arab MKs and on the general perception of Israel's Arab population as a fifth column. Speaking about Arab MKs, among them one who fled to Syria trying to escape charges of treason, Hamas and Fatah supporters and sympathizers, and several who have repeatedly met with Israel's enemies, while receiving salaries from the state, he said:"At the end of the Second World War, not only criminals were executed in the Nuremberg trials, but also those who collaborated with them. I hope that will be the fate of the collaborators in this house."

Every year, as Jewish Israelis take to the streets to celebrate their Independence, Israel's Arab commemorate "Nakba" (Disaster) Day. On this day, they mourn, condemn and resolve to eliminate the state in which they are living and which gives them full democratic rights. Jewish Israelis are angered when they see people who are given more rights and privileges than any other Arabs in other Arab countries opposing the state. While there is certainly no reason to allow "Nakba" commemorations on Israel's Independence Day, it is quite hypocritical for Jewish Israelis to expect Arabs to dance and celebrate on Yom HaAtzmaut. It was recently reported in the newspaper that an Arab minister refused to sing Israel anthem, "HaTikvah". Understandably, Jews were furious that a minister in the government would refuse to sing the national anthem yet it seems unreasonable to expect an Arab to sing of the continuation of the 2000 year old hope, beating in "the Jewish soul", "to be a free nation in his land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem".

No state is under any obligation to support and allow a fifth-column in its borders and I have no sympathies for the Arab citizens of Israel who took to the street to proclaim their admiration for Hamas. After a several terrorist attacks in Jerusalem, such as a massacre of yeshiva students and several bulldozer and vehicle attacks, by Arab residents of east Jerusalem, which were greeted by jubilation and rejoicing by the Arab citizens of Israel, few would argue that the Arabs are loyal citizens. In the words of "Israeli"-Arab protesters at Hebrew University: "we are all Palestinians now". There are no questions as to the identity of Israel's Arabs. Nonetheless, I feel that Lieberman's slogan misses the point. An even greater threat, in may ways, to Israel's continuity as a Jewish state, than the Arabs are the hundreds of thousands of Russian goyim brought from the former Soviet Union. Many of them are proud citizens, serve in the army, pay their taxes and support the state. Yet, despite all of this, they are not Jewish. Many of Lieberman's constituents are Russian immigrants who are not Jewish according to Jewish law. To appease them, some of his policies advocate a quickie conversion process, civil marriages, increased public transportation on Shabbat and allowing the sale of pork, all things that would hurt the Jewish character of the state. The loyalty of these Russian goyim cannot be questioned (excluding the neo-Nazis, I suppose) but they still cannot be considered full citizens since they are not Jewish. Liberman's proposal implies that Russian goyim, Arabs, Bedouins or Druze, if they sign a declaration of loyalty to the state, will be no different than other Israel. That is, in effect, a recipe for assimilation.

Israel was founded to be a Jewish state, to provide a homeland for the Jewish people. While Israel is a democratic country, to qualify as a Jewish state, it must have some sort of Jewish character. This includes the public celebration of Jewish holidays, stores and transportation closing on Shabbat, restrictions on the sale of pork, and the Rabbinate's control over the Jewish life cycle, such as wedding, births, funerals and burials. Around the world, Jewish communities are withering up and dying, with the exception of religiously-committed Jews, due to a frighteningly high intermarriage rate. Israel is (with the exception of Canada and Germany) the only Jewish community that is growing because of a normal and healthy birthrate. Judaism is blossoming and undergoing a revival in Israel, its birthplace. Lieberman's suggestions that being Israel simply depends on allegiance to the state are very, very dangerous for Israel's Jewish nature. He will import the Diaspora assimilation catastrophe to the Holy Land.

An Arab cannot feel loyalty to the state that officially calls itself "the Jewish state", whose flag has a Jewish star at its center, whose anthem speaks of "the Jewish soul yearning". He cannot celebrate on the day which he was defeated, on which he feels (wrongly) that his land was taken away from him. To demand for him to give up his national pride and aspirations and sign a declaration of allegiance is simply condescending. The plans and attempts to turn Israel into a Western Hellenistic country and to divorce it from its Jewish heritage must be rejected. No matter how loyal a Druze or a Russian goy is, they are not Jewish and cannot marry a Jew. If the condition for "Israeli-ness" is mere loyalty, it will break down all boundaries between Jews and non-Jews, the boundaries that prevent intermarriage and guarantee Jewish survival. I do not argue with the truth that the Arabs must go, that Israel cannot allow a growing and hostile minority to attack Jews, aid Islamic terrorists and plot our destruction from within. The essential is to return to our Jewish roots, to realize that by running away from Judaism, we run away from Zionism. There is only one justification for building a Jewish state in the heart of the Arab world, in the middle of a billion Muslims. Why suffer and fight for this little piece of land if all we want is a good quiet life, to go to the beach, to shop, club and enjoy? There are close to a million Israelis living in NY, LA, Florida or in other warm places. The only reason for the state is Judaism: to build a Jewish country in its ancient homeland. Israel is both Jewish and democratic, but both of these are not of equal importance. The world has many liberal, multicultural, secular democracies. Creating another one is not sufficient cause to antagonize half of the world's population. Israel's basis is firmly rooted in Judaism. Judaism demands separation from the nations, not to allow ourselves to assimilate and disappear. Lieberman's plans remove any concept of Torah or mitzvot from being a Jew, or being an Israeli. They are in fact suicide for Israel. A far better slogan would be: "The Nation of Israel, in the Land of Israel, according to the Torah of Israel."

Yom HaAtzmaut -- Israel is 61!

2009-04-28T16:32:00.001-07:00

On the 5th of Iyar, 5708 (1948), G-d's Name was sanctified. For the first time in two thousand year, the Jewish people had a state in their homeland. Two millenium after the Roman emperor Hadrian burnt our Temple, razed Jerusalem, sold the Jews into slavery and arrogantly declared 'Judea capta! (Judea is captured), the Third Jewish Commonwealth was established. After centuries of oppression and persecution, Crusades and pogroms, Inquisitions and Holocausts, the Jewish people had finally returned home to the land of their forefathers.

When the Romans crushed the Jewish rebellion in 70 CE and destroyed the Temple, they carried out the majority of the Jews into exile. They built a huge victory arch in Rome showing the Temple utensils being taken as spoil. The Romans minted coins depicting a conquered a mourning Jewess, along with the words 'Judea capta'. In their minds, the Jewish people had been crushed. The Roman Catholic Church, which became the official religion of Rome, taught as doctrine that the Jews had been replaced and rejected by G-d, never to return to Israel. The Church, along with the scholars of Islam, mocked the Jews and taunted them over their abasement, claiming that their continued exile was proof of their replacement in G-d's eyes. Incredibly, while the Roman empire today is nothing but dust, Jews are once again living in the Jerusalem, the city of King David, in Judea and Samaria, where the Patriarchs lived and in the Galilee, where Bar Kochba and his brave Zionist rebels fought for liberty.

"A song of ascents. When the Lord returned the captivity of Zion, we were like dreamers. Then our mouths were with laughter and our tongues with songs of praise; then they will say among the nations, "The Lord has done great things with these."" (Tehillim 126) Truly, we were like dreamers. Is there any clearer proof of G-d's sovereignty and majesty, of His guiding hand in history, than in the survival of the Jewish people in graveyards of the exile and in our return to the Land of Israel? Has there ever been such a thing in the entire annals of mankind, for a nation to have survived the sword and the stake, the racks of the Inquisition and the Crusading lance, the Cross and the Crescent, the killing fields and the gas chambers, to be returned home? Only by the might and mercy of G-d, through the brave pioneers and committed Zionist leaders, were we able to revive our ancient language, Hebrew, to re-settle the desolate cities, drain the swamps and make the deserts bloom. "For the Lord shall console Zion, He shall console all its ruins, and He shall make its desert like a paradise and its wasteland like the garden of the Lord; joy and happiness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and a voice of song." (Yishayahu 51:3) The land, empty and desolate, bereft of her children, which called out longingly for them for over two thousand years, now blossoms and is settled. For too long did Zion cry out for her sons and daughters in captivity, trampled on by a foreign oppressor.

From the four corners of the Earth, the Jews have begun to return home. "Fear not for I am with you; from the east I will bring your seed, and from the west I will gather you. I will say to the north, "Give," and to the south, "Do not refrain"; bring My sons from afar and My daughters from the end of the earth."" (Yishayahu 43:5-6) Out of the mellahs of Morocco and Tunisia and the shtetls of Russia and Poland, Jews came home. The same Jews who declared year after year their fervent hope and desire of 'Next Year in Jerusalem!' were privileged to see their dream become a reality. From the farthest and most remote reaches, the Land of Israel beckoned Jews home. Jews from Yemen and Ethiopia walked thousands of miles, trekked through dangerous deserts and hazardous terrain, braved intense dangers because they senses the impeding Redemption. When the Iron Curtain fell, the cry of 'Let my people go!' saw fruition as millions of Russian Jews fled the prison that was the Soviet Union and came to Israel to live lives of dignity and freedom. The Ingathering of the Exiles has begun as Jews from Iran and Turkey, Greece and Lithuania, Ukraine and Hungary, India and Afghanistan now live, mix and mingle, in peace together in the State of Israel.

In fire and blood Judea fell and in fire and blood Judea arose. In 1948, and again in six spectacular days in 1967, the myth of the passive Jew whose life was cheap and blood was the gentile's for the taking, was forever crushed. The nation that for so long had been associated with sheep to the slaughter, with massacres and weakness, had arisen like a lion and fought for its life. In 1948, one million crack Arab soldiers, dedicated to driving the Jews into the sea and destroying the fledgling state, were attacked the 600 000 inhabitants of the Jewish yishuv. Just as in the days of David and Goliath, the defenders drove the enemy out. The defenders were outnumbered, farmers and citymen, Holocaust survivors given a rifle as they got off the boat. Some come with horses and some come with chariots but we invoke the name of HaShem our G-d! As the ovens and furnaces of Europe were still giving off their horrible stench, as the smoke was still emerging from the chimneys of Auschwitz, the Jewish state had arise with strength and power. The dry bones that had been murdered and annihilated in Europe had been reborn in the Land of Israel. ""Son of man, these bones are all the house of Israel. Behold they say, 'Our bones have become dried up, our hope is lost, we are clean cut off to ourselves.' Therefore, prophesy and say to them, So says the Lord God: Lo! I open your graves and cause you to come up out of your graves as My people, and bring you home to the land of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and lead you up out of your graves as My people. And I will put My spirit into you, and you shall live, and I will set you on your land, and you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it and have performed it," says the Lord." (Yechezkel 37:11-14)

61 years after the awesome day in Tel-Aviv, we can sit back and feel pride over our many accomplishments. The Jewish language, Hebrew was revived, a feat never before accomplished. Cities and settlements were created. A vibrant and modern democratic state was built. Israel has one of the best and most powerful armies in the world. Close to half of the world's Jewish population now lives in the Jewish state. Israel is a world leader in science and technology and contributed a disproportionate amount to high-tech, medicine and science worldwide. Despite all of Israel's many problems, it has accomplished more in its mere 61 years of existence than most other countries around the world. The State of Israel is far from the fulfillment of the Prophets and there is a long journey to the Ultimate Redemption. Yet, in the words of Herzl: "If you will it, it is no dream." Just as it seemed impossible for there to be a sovereign Jewish state, as it seemed impossible for Jerusalem to be reunited as the capital of the Jewish people, so too will we reach all of our goals. A nation that waited two thousand years to return home is not afraid of a long and difficult struggle.

"Behold days are coming, says the Lord, that the plowman shall meet the reaper and the treader of the grapes the one who carries the seed, and the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will return the captivity of My people Israel, and they shall rebuild desolate cities and inhabit [them], and they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their produce. And I will plant them on their land, and they shall no longer be uprooted from upon their land, that I have given them, said the Lord your God." (Amos 9:13-15) May we see the complete fulfillment of the Jewish Dream, of the Prophets of Israel, of a world where "out of Zion will go forth Torah, and the word of HaShem from Jerusalem", very soon. May we merit the day when "nations will not lift up swords against each other, neither shall they learn war anymore". May the Complete and Final Redemption come speedily in our days, in mercy and love, amen!

Am Yisrael remembers its heroes

2009-04-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

On this day, we pause to remember the 22, 570 Jewish soldiers who have fallen in the defense of the State of Israel and the Jewish people since 1860, the year the first Jews built neighbourhoods outside of the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem. Only in the merit of the sacrifice of these brave soldiers can we have a state. Their courage and self-sacrifice is testimony to the strength of the Jewish people. We bought this land with blood and fire.

When HaShem promised our Father Avraham the Land of Israel, he asked G-d: Ba'meh eda ki erashena - How will I know that I will inherit it?. HaShem answered: bazeh, with this- sacrifices. Thousands of soldiers gave their lives to liberate this land and protect their people. 61 years after the re-establishment of the State of Israel, we continue to fight and struggle. The Eternal Nation is not afraid of a long journey.
***

The Silver Salver
"A State is not handed to a people on a silver salver"
Chaim Weizmann, first President of Israel The Earth grows still.

The lurid sky slowly pales
Over smoking borders.
Heartsick, but still lving, a people stand by
To greet the uniqueness
of the miracle.

Readied, they wait beneath the moon,
Wrapped in awesome joy, before the light.
-- Then, soon,
A girl and boy step forward,
And slowly walk before the waiting nation;

In work garb and heavy-shod
They climb
In stillness.
Wearing yet the dress of battle, the grime
Of aching day and fire-filled night

Unwashed, weary unto death, not knowing rest,
But wearing youth like dewdrops in their hair,
-- Silently the two approach
And stand.
Are they of the quick or of the dead?

Through wondering tears, the people stare.
"Who are you, the silent two?"
And they reply: "We are the silver salver
Upon which the Jewish State was served to you."

And speaking, fall in shadow at the nation's feet.
Let the rest in Israel's chronicles be told.

O G-d, full of mercy, Who dwells on high,
grant proper rest on the wings of the Divine Presence -
in the lofty levels of the holy and the pure ones,
who shine like the glow of the firmament -
for the souls of the martyrs of the Israel Defense Force,
who gave up their lives
for the Sanctification of the Name
and the Conquest of the Land,
because, the entire Nation of Israel mourns for them.
May their resting place be in the Garden of Eden -
therefore may the Master of Mercy
shelter them in the shelter of His wings for Eternity;
and may He bind their souls in the Bond of Life.
Hashem is their heritage,
and may they repose in peace on their resting place.

Now let us respond: Amen.

We cannot fathom the magnitude of the loss. I would like to remember one soldier in particular, Dvir Emanuelof, the first IDF casualty to fall in Gaza. Fighting there as a staff sergeant in his infantry unit, the elite Golani brigade, he was felled by Hamas mortar fire. Though Israel has a conscript army, Dvir did not have to be in Gaza, as he had received high marks as instructor of a squad leader course, was asked to go to officer school, and would still have been in training had he accepted; he deferred, however, saying he would not be fit to command until he had first fought alongside his comrades. In fact, Dvir did not have to be in any front-line position: His father Netanel had died of cancer at age 46, shortly before Dvir's service began; as an only son in a single-parent family, Dvir was exempt under IDF rules from combat duty. Before accepting him to Golani, his commanding officer visited Dalia and asked if she acquiesced in her son's opting for a dangerous path he was not obligated to choose. Her answer: "If this is how Dvir wants to serve his country, then this is what he will do." Two days before entering Gaza, Dvir had called home and said: "Mom, I have to fight. I have to be there." He fell defending the Jewish Nation in Gaza.

May his memory, and those of all of the fallen heroes of Israel, be a blessing.

The Real Meaning of Never Again

2009-04-22T13:44:00.001-07:00

"We, pilots of the Israeli Air Force, flying in the skies over the extermination camps, arose from the ashes of the millions of victims, carrying their silent cries, saluting their bravery, and vowing to be a shield to the Jewish Nation, and to its Land, Israel."

An oft-repeated cliche repeated by both Jewish leaders and the international community is that of "never again". Presidents and Prime Ministers visit Yad VaShem, pay tribute at Holocaust Memorials and shed crocodile tears over the Jews murdered in the Holocaust, while proceeding to condemn and attack Israel. The same leaders that stood silently in commemoration of the Holocaust denounced Israel with the most hateful vitriol during its moment of greatest need, as it was fighting to defend itself and its citizens. Never again, they pledged. Never again? Is that really so?

The Holocaust teaches many universal messages. It teaches mankind to be ever vigilant against the forces of hatred and intolerance, whenever they arise against any people or group. It warns us never to allow bigoted speech and ideas fester and grow. It shows the ease with which an entire nation can descend to the depths of depravity and immorality. Yet, for the Jewish people, the Holocaust has one sharp and poignant message: Never again to be weak.

Since the destruction of the Second Temple, for two millenia, Jews lived as strangers in foreign lands, minorities under the rule of others. In Christendom and in Islamic lands, Jews were forced to lived in ghettos, mellahs or juderias, to wear distinctive and humiliating clothing, had restrictions on their professions and employment and endured severe discrimination. Jews were at the mercies of the lords of the land and had to comply with their wishes, whether it be being forced to hear a conversionist sermon delivered by a priest in a synagogue on Shabbat, or to pay a jyziah tax in a debasing ceremony to their Muslim overlords. Jews were spat upon and cursed, beaten and abused at will. The two thousand years of Jewish life in Europe and the Middle-East, with the exception of occasional periods of prosperity and tranquility, was marked with constant fear and insecurity. Ravaged by pogroms and Crusades, Inquisitions and forced conversions, massacres and jihads, Jews lived with their lives always hanging in a narrow balance. A new king or pope, ruler or clergyman, could put the Jews in peril.

In this climate of ingrained loathing and despising of the Jews, Hitler came along. He used the traditional anti-semitic motives of the Catholic church as well as new anti-semitic racial theories to stir up the people's hate. The policies of the Nazi Regime, even before the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem was implemented, were designed to crush and dehumanize the Jews. The Jew looked in trepidation at the Nazi brownshirts, Gestapo and SS, unable to defend or stand up for himself. Like animals, Jews were crammed into cattle cars, suffocated in gas chambers and burnt in ovens. The Nazi beasts could not have accomplished their genocide without the help of their Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, etc. collaborators and executioners. Nor could they have managed without the world's silent approval. The Pope looked away when the Jews of Rome were rounded up from under his very window. Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill all knew about the death camps, about the killing fields and mass graves in the Ukraine, about the gas chambers and crematorium in Poland, yet closed their doors to Jewish refugees. Allied bombers flew over Auschwitz but the military didn't see the use of bombing the train lines. As Jews needed a place to flee to, the British, at the urging of the Arabs and the Nazi-collaborator Haj Amin al-Husseini, may his name be accursed, prevented Jewish aliyah to the Land of Israel, and even sent refugees back into the hands of the Nazis.

Just yesterday, on Holocaust Memorial Day, a group of partisans who fought the Nazis in the forests of Europe, visited an IDF air force base. One woman asked an officer in our air force if our pilots could reach Iran. "They can reach anywhere," he answered. This answer, powerful and moving for its simplicity, conveys the true meaning of never again. Never again will we wait in vain for Allied planes to bomb the gas chambers. Never again will we wait for world aid which did not come. Never again will we allow ourselves to be weak, to be victimized, to be powerless. Never again will we accept any conditions on where we can live, what we can wear, on our professions or possessions. Never again will we be at the mercies of the gentiles, begging for our lives. This pilot was saying that we may have been 60 years too late for the Jews of Europe, but we were not too late for the Jews of Yemen or Ethiopia. Never again will we be too late! We may not have been able to save the Jews of Warsaw, but our planes reached Iraq and Entebbe. Our planes can fly to Lebanon or Gaza, and they may yet fly to Iran, destroying the enemies of the Jewish people. We will not stand idly by our brothers blood, whether they are being rounded up and deported to annihilation, living under constant bombardment and rocket attacks or in the shadow of a nuclear attack. We know that the world abandoned the Jews to their fate, that deals were not made and safe havens closed off. Today, we can reach anywhere.

Another survivor made her own request of the air force of Israel, "What I ask of you is to make sure that there will not be another Holocaust." As long as brave Jewish men and women don the uniform of the Israeli Defense Force and protect the Jewish people from on land, sea and air, there can never be another Holocaust. We have learnt the terrible price of being weak. Being defenseless and without a homeland came at the horrendous cost of a third of our nation. The hatred of the world for the Jews has not diminished one iota since the trains came to a halt and the crematoriums stopped giving off their accursed smoke. Across Europe and North America, in public forums and university campuses, the Jewish State is being delegitimized and marked as a pariah. We must not heed the words of these haters for we know too well how dearly we pay without a state of our own. The only thing that stands between us and Auschwitz-Birkenau are the soldiers of the IDF. Those who condemned the army going in to Gaza must know that they only went in there to protect and defend the Jewish people. They are what keeps us from the narrow brink, from the mound of ashes at Majdanek, from the halls of shoes and piles of hair. To the Jews of Europe, massacred because of the world's apathy and our own weakness, scattered in the forests of Teblinka, the fields of Birkenau or the mass graves of the Ukraine, we promise never again to be weak, to allow ourselves to be bullied and beaten. For this is the true meaning of "Never Again".

Cross-posted to Stop Raping Israel

1939 Again

2009-04-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

Monday night, the 27th of Nissan, is Yom HaShoah v'Hagevurah, Holocaust and Heroism Memorial Day. On this day, we bear witness to the worst crime in human history, to the unfathomable murder of 6 million Jews of Europe, 1.5 million of them children.

The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers or crematorium. The road to Auschwitz-Birkenau was a gradual process, one that began with the delegitimization and isolation of Jews from general society. The Final Solution, which almost completely wiped out European Jewry, began with words of hatred and intolerance. It began with the demonization of Jews as disloyal to their countries, foreign parasites destroying the culture, race and homeland from the inside. Children were taught in schools that Jews were the enemies of the Aryan race, and in the papers, on the radios and in speeches, Jews were denounced. Before official government policies could separate and ostracize Jews, Nazi propaganda made them persona non grata, completely loathsome and rejected by German society.

Singled out for persecution, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars on the clothes. Restrictions were imposed on where Jews could go, what they could own and where they could work. They were completely separated from society at large. Jewish businesses were boycotted and German who patronized them were humiliated. This process of state-sponsored hate exploded into a full-fledged government-initiated pogrom on November 9th, 1938, Kristallnacht. On this Night of Broken Glass, SS thugs murdered 91 Jews, vandalized tens of thousands of Jewish businesses, destroyed 200 synagogues across the Reich and sent 25 000- 30 000 Jews to concentration camps. This marked the beginning of the end of the Jews of Europe, and beginning of the Final Solution. It was no longer sufficient to burn Jewish books, businesses and synagogues, but to burn Jews themselves.

The Holocaust was not a German crime against the Jewish people- the Eastern European nations, the Litvaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats, etc. happily became Hitler's willing executioners. The Holocaust was a conspiracy of silence against the Jews, as half of the world actively murdered Jews while the other half shut its eyes and ears to their cries. Just as the Jews of Germany were searching for safe havens to flee to, the world closed its doors. The United States imposed strict quotas on immigration. Canada's response to the numbers of Jews to be allowed in was "none is too many". The British, succumbing to Arab pressure, led by the Mufti of Jerusalem and Hitler-admirer, Haj Amin al-Husseini, may his name be accursed, shut firm the gates to the Land of Israel. Jews who had escaped on ships such as the St. Louis were turned back to, sent to Hitler's infernos. Seeing that the world was simply not interested in helping Jews, Hitler realized that he would have no opposition in implementing the Final Solution.

The entire German state apparatus devoted itself to systematically and bureaucratically rounding up, rooting out and exterminating every single Jew in Europe, and eventually around the world. The German PhD's used their expertise to further the goal of making Europe judenrein, German engineers built factories of death and German doctors and scientists devised ways of turning Jewish skin into lampshades and Jewish bones into soap and fertilizer. From as far south as Greece and as far north as Norway, Jews were transported to their annihilation in the death camps of Poland. Entire Jewish communities were snuffed out in these factories of death, their names living on in infamy: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belsec and Chelmo.

In these gas chambers and killing fields, a culture was murdered. Some of these communities were ancient, millennia old. Old and well-established communities, such as the Sephardic Jews of Saloniki, Bulgarian Jews, Polish and Italian Jews, were completely decimated. Two thousand years of Jewish life in Europe was erased. Fortresses of Torah Judaism, good pious Jews were destroyed. Nothing we have today even compares to the depth and vibrancy of Jewish life in pre-War Europe. Today, beautiful and majestic synagogues sit abandoned and derelict as their congregants are ashes in the fields and forests of Poland.

Incredibly, barely 60 years since the world closed its eyes to the plight of the Jews caught in the fires of Nazi Final Solution, Jews are once again targets of hatred and anti-semitism. This year, due to the economic crisis and conflicts in the Middle-East, has seen the worst outbreak of anti-semitism since before Kristallnacht. The ferocity of this renewed hatred manifested itself in the self-righteousness and hypocritical protests around the world in support of Hamas and against Israel. While Israel was bombarded with 10 000 rockets, the world kept silent. Not a peep was heard over the Russian bombings of Chechnya, the US in Iraq or Afghanistan or the genocide in Darfur. Yet, when Israel finally decided to launch an offensive to end constant rocket fire, hateful and violent rallies were held worldwide. Crowds in Europe, North America and the Islamic world equated today's Jews with their 20th century executioners, all while screaming things like: "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" and "Death to the Jews!". Jewish institutions around the world, synagogues, businesses and schools were vandalized and attacked. In January, while Israel was fighting against a terrorist organization in Gaza, over 250 anti-semitic incidents were reported worldwide. In Toulouse, France, assailants rammed a burning car into the gates of a synagogue, causing damage but no injuries. That same day in southern Sweden, a Jewish congregation was attacked when someone broke a window and threw a burning object inside. In the United States, vandals used shaving cream to paint swastikas on a Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue, and shattered one of its windows in mid-January. On one sabbath, 4 synagogues in Chicago were defaced. France saw an explosion of anti-Jewish attacks. The incidents included a stabbing of a a young Jewish man by two masked car thieves outside Paris, and two firebombing attacks against synagogues in Saint Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, and in Strasburg.

Israel has become the proverbial Jews among the nations. "Zionism" has replaced the defense of the Aryan race as the rallying cry of that so offends anti-semites. Alone of all the national liberation movements around the world, Zionism is singled out and defamed as "racist". Israel, the state that arose like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Holocaust, has never been subjected to such vile hatred. This very hatred made a Jewish state necessary, after the world stood idly by as the Jews were rounded up and murdered, powerless, during the Holocaust. On college campuses across the United States and Canada, there was a week-long hate-fest of "Israeli Apartheid Week". In York University in Ontario, crowds surrounded the Hillel House (Jewish student organization), besieging and trapping the Jews inside, while screaming: "Die Jews!". The legitimacy of the Jewish state is constantly challenged, 61 years after its founding, by denying the Jews the right to self-determination, or that they even constitute a nation. Beginning April 20th (ironically, Hitler's birthday), the UN will convene in Geneva to have a follow up to the 2001 Durban Conference in Support of Racism and Anti-Semitism. At this conference, the Jewish delegates were abused and attacked. Protesters compared Israel to apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany, while selling copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf, and bemoaning that Hitler didn't finish the job.

Israel has become a pariah in the international community. Hatred for Israel has allowed anti-semites to justify and explain away every single Arab excess and act of terror, every single brutal murder of a Jew. Teenagers gunned down in a yeshiva studying Torah or axed to death, Israelis blown to smithereens by Hamas rockets, all of these are legitimate targets. "Occupation", "racism" or the failure of the "peace process" are valid reasons for an Arab to crush mothers and babies with a bulldozer on the streets of Jerusalem. Settlers, after all, deserved it.

The world, and unfortunately Jews as well, have not learned from history. Just as Nazism began with the Jews but threatened the entire world, so does radical Islam today. Israel is the canary in the coal mine. It always begins with the Jews but never ends with the Jews. It seems that, for the Jewish people, its is 1939 again as we find ourselves unwelcome in a growing number of countries. In Venezuela, armed thugs broke into a synagogue, scrawled "Death to the Jews" on the walls, defiled the Holy Ark and stole information regarding the synagogue membership, right after the President of the country denounced and accused the Jewish community. The only difference today is that we have a state and an army and we will not allow ourselves to become victims again. Never again will we wait in vain for bombs on gas chambers that never came, or for the world to rescue us. History demonstrates that the world is blind and apathetic at best to the suffering of Jews. As the witnesses to Hitler's crime are slowly dying out, we must stand us and say: Never again! Never again will our blood be cheap, will we be persecuted and killed wantonly.

Never again!

Jewish Naqba النكبة (Catastrophe)

2009-04-17T14:49:00.000-07:00

In the 1940s, close to a million Jews from Arab countries were expelled from lands in which they had lived for 3000 years. They lost billions of dollars in property and came penniless to Israel. While we hear so much about the "Palestinian" refugees, the plight of the Mizrahi Jews has all but been forgotten.

Assimilated Jews and the Plague of Darkness

2009-04-12T14:38:00.000-07:00

In Egypt, 80% of the Jews did not leave but perished in the Plague of Darkness. These Jews simply could not separate themselves from the the gentile culture of Egypt and were not ready for the Redemption. It seems like a similar number of the assimilated Jews of the United States feel the same way.

Douglas Bloomfield, from YNetNews, warns of how Israel's new Foreign Minister, Avigdor Liberman, may alienate American Jews.

Lieberman, who was Netanyahu's chief of staff during the latter's first term as prime minister, said concessions to the Arabs "just invite pressure, and more and more wars. If you want peace, prepare for war." With declarations like that and his reputation as a racist who wants to drive out Israel's Arab citizens, Lieberman may be the best thing that has happened to pro-Arab lobbying in Washington since Yasser Arafat died.

But for the Jews he's bad news.

A recent survey for J Street, the Jewish "pro-peace, pro-Israel" lobby, conducted by Jim Gerstein, a Democratic strategist, showed Obama is "considerably more popular" among American Jews than Netanyahu by a 73-58 margin, and Lieberman's views are "resoundingly rejected by American Jews." The cornerstone of pro-Israel lobbying for more than 60 years has been Israel's yearning for peace in the face of Arab threats to destroy it. Israel, we've been taught and have taught others, is willing to take great risks, endure major sacrifices and accept painful compromises while the other side has insisted on its unrealistic and uncompromising demands.

Israel has ridden that image, despite occasional ups and downs, to a position of great strength in America and especially on Capitol Hill.

After Lieberman's declarations and Netanyahu's so-far lack of a convincing commitment to peace, Israel risks being branded an obstacle to peace.

There is a hard-core element in the Jewish community that will support Israel do or die, but the J Street data shows that fewer and fewer under 30 will, said Gerstein.

Their grandparents forged their ties with Israel during the vulnerable years of its birth and struggle for survival; their parents are of the post-1967 generation that grew up knowing the muscular Israel anxious to make peace. The 21st-century Jews see a different Israel, said a prominent pro-Israel lobbyist. "They see oppression, excess use of force and arrogance," he said. For many of them it is no longer the center of their Jewish identity.

Basically, liberal Jews are more comfortable with Israel carving itself up, uprooting Jewish communities, expelling hundreds of thousands of Jews and of millions of Israelis cowering in bomb shelters, all for the sake of "peace", rather than a strong Israel.

Following the recent war in Gaza, amidst false reports of Israeli "war crimes" and IDF atrocities, many liberal Jews felt torn between support of Israel and pictures of poor crying Arab women. These liberal supporters of Israel felt the need to somehow justify Israel's right to defend herself and of its citizens not to be blown to smithereens by Hamas Kassam rockets. And now that Israel has elected a new government that at least seems less interested in misguided "peace" processes, these Jews are squirming in their seats.

It is shocking that 60 years after Israel's re-establishment, liberal Jewry can be so fickle as to shift their support based on the policies of Israel's government. Most American Jews detested Bush yet few condemned America's right to exist or opposed the US war on terror. American Jews need not question Israel's legitimacy or be embarrassed by Israel. Whether the government is left or right, patriotism and nationalism is something that must run deeper.

Lieberman is absolutely correct in rejecting naive notions of "land for peace". Such an idea is absurd. If the Arabs want peace, then they can put down their arms and get peace. Israel has offered far too much land at too high a cost, for nothing. "Peace" is not worth the demise of the Jewish state. Carving up Jerusalem and making Judea, Samaria and the Golan Heights judenrein, effecting marching back into exile, is not a price we are willing to pay to receive world approval. Of course, it is ludicrous that the victor of a defensive war should give land to an enemy which attacked it, and it defeated, 6 or 7 times in various wars. If anything, the Arabs should be offering Israel land!

A few years ago, a study showed that for many American Jews, the Holocaust, and not the State of Israel, played the central role in their Jewish identity. It is a sad testimony to the contemporary state of American Jewry when they feel most connected to the brutal and horrendous victimization and destruction of European Jewry as opposed to the living and vibrant reborn Jewish state. It shows a tendency to prefer to be the victims than to stand up for oneself, to be passive rather than assertive and to be the one being killed as opposed to doing the killing. In short, many liberal Jews identify more with Tevye the milkman from Czarist Russia, or Anne Frank, than with the Entebbe Mission or the triumphs of the Six Day War. Only among Jews can this pathological self-deprecation be found.

It is not wonder than American Jewry is in a speedy decline, sliding into obscurity with an over 50% assimilation and intermarriage rate. Within a generation or so, Jews in the United States will not even be an identifiable group, as intermarriage will have caused non-committed Jews to become extinct. With such an abysmal ignorance of Judaism and a lack of Jewish pride, these sad trends should not surprise anyone. I say to American Jews to please hitch yourself to the nearest synagogue or study hall and to learn Judaism, real Judaism, and to grow a little Jewish pride. Stop apologizing for Israel protecting itself and its citizens. We don't want another Yad VaShem or an international Holocaust Memorial Day. Israel doesn't have to grovel before the Arabs and endanger itself for "peace" to win your love or anybody else's. The Jewish future will be in Israel while those who are unable to see this may end up, G-d forbid, with the same fate as the 80% of Jews who did not leave Egypt.

Chag Sameach!

Chag Pesach Sameach!

2009-04-08T14:02:00.001-07:00

To all of Am Yisrael, have a chag Pesach kasher v'sameach! May we witness miracles in our times just as we did in the days when we left Egypt. May we see the Final Redemption speedily in our days!

"And it was this that stood for us and our forefather. It was not one alone that stood up against us to annihilate us, but in every generation there arise those who wish to wipe us out. And the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves us from their hands."

Pesach- Our Blood is not Cheap!

2009-04-05T12:34:00.001-07:00

The world's silence is deafening. When Israel finally took measures to protect itself against the thousands of rockets launched against it by Hamas, protests and denunciations broke out worldwide. Thousands of people marched in the streets condemning Israel's offensive and supposed Israeli "war crimes". The media showed a constant stream of crying Arab women, injured or dead children, homes in rubble, accompanied by some Arab ranting about the evil Zionists. Despite a lack of evidence, we were treated to horrendous stories of human rights abuses, of Israeli attacks on ambulances and hospitals, of a "massacre" at a UN school. Based on hearsay and rumours, the New York Times, among many supposedly respectable newspapers, ran front page stories of testimonies of Israeli soldiers intentionally shooting innocent Arabs.

Yet when it comes to the brutal murder of a young Jewish boy by an axe-wielding Arab terrorist, not a peep is heard. Two days ago, an Arab terrorist entered the Jewish community of Bat Ayin and killed 13 year-old Shlomo Nativ, and injured another young boy. It is hard to fathom the level of depravity of someone who can look at teenager, barely bar mitzvah, in the eyes and swing an axe at his head. This is precisely what the wicked terrorist, may his name be accursed, did, nurtured and bred on the hatred and anti-semitism that permeates Arab society. This attack was barely reported in the American or European media. I saw one article hidden in the back pages of the newspaper describing the killing of "settlers", as if somehow a Jew living in Judea and Samaria legitimizes hacking him apart with an axe. The article described the community as very radical. Imagine the twisted logic- an Arab tears a Jewish child apart with an axe and the Jews are called extremists!

Israel has been so demonized and maligned by the media that it is legitimate according to many to kill Jews. A boy being slaughtered by an axe-wielding terrorist is an "act of resistance". The motivation of the terrorist, excuse me, "militant", is sheer desperation over "the occupation" and at the lack of success of the peace process. Totally overlooked is the extreme level of incitement in the Islamic world, total dehumanization of Jews and a religious imperative to slaughter them for a heavenly reward of 72 virgins.

Once again, Jewish blood is cheap. There will be no military reaction to this cruel and brutal murder. Shlomo Nativ's blood cries out from the ground, unavenged. Our "peace partners" understand this loud and clear and know that the world will not bother to lift a finger or even utter its objection to killing Jewish children. The world never changes. And Israel's lemming leaders will look beseechingly to Washington before doing anything.

On Wednesday night, Jews around the world will celebrate the holiday of Pesach which commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. As they have done for thousands of years since we left Egypt, they will sit down with friends and family and retell the story of our going forth from Egypt. For 210 years, the Israelites were oppressed in Egypt, subject to the most harsh of torments, victims of Pharaoh's Final Solution. The Israelites were so utterly degraded and humiliated by the back-breaking hardships of Egypt. If an Israelite slave could not fulfill his mandated quota of bricks, the Egyptian taskmasters would stuff his babies in the walls. Pharaoh would bathe in the blood of Jewish babies as his astrologers told him that this would cure his leprosy.

Finally, after 210 years of abject torture, the message came to Moses: "I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of their slave drivers, for I know their pains. I have descended to rescue them from the hand[s] of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land, to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivvites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to Me, and I have also seen the oppression that the Egyptians are oppressing them. So now come, and I will send you to Pharaoh, and take My people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt." (Ex. 3:7-9) No longer could G-d remain silent and keep His peace. No longer could He bear the sight of Jewish children wantonly killed, or ignore the cries of His tortured people. G-d sent a 10 plagues against Egypt, to humble them and to demonstrate His might.

The final plague that G-d sent against Egypt was the Plague of the Firstborn. G-d sent this plague against every firstborn in Egypt, from Pharaoh's firstborn to the firstborn of foreign slaves and handmaidens. Even the Egyptian slaves were included in this plague because they took pleasure at the torment of the Jews, and rejoiced as the Jews suffered. Because of this, they deserved to be punished. This is what I reply to any Jew who sheds a tear over the "innocent" Arab killed in Gaza, the same "innocent" Arab who danced when Jews were murdered in the streets of Jerusalem, in Merkaz HaRav, in Bat Ayin, in Sderot, and so forth. These Arabs who celebrate and give out candies when Jewish children are killed, on these people we can have no pity.

Our rabbis tell us (Midrash Avchir): "And Israel saw the great hand of G-d' - When the Almighty wished to drown the Egyptians, the Archangel of Egypt (Uza) said: Sovereign of the Universe! You are called just and righteous...why do you wish to drown the Egyptians? At that moment Gabriel rose and took a brick and said: Sovereign of the Universe! These who enslaved Your children such a terrible slavery as this, shall you have mercy on them? Immediately, the Almighty drowned them." Shall we have mercy on those who wish to drive us out from our land, who murder us with suicide bombings, shootings, rockets or axes? Thousands of Israelis will sit around their seder tables and look at the empty chairs of family members, absent because they were killed by Arab terrorists. The Nativ family will mark its seder without their beloved son Shlomo, because he was taken away from them by an Arab.

Every year at our seders, we pause to open the door for Eliyahu HaNavi, Elijah the Prophet, and we raise a cup and declare in full view of the nations, without shame: "Pour out Thy wrath upon the nations that know Thee not and upon the kingdoms that call not upon Thy name; for they have consumed Jacob and laid waste his dwelling. Pour out Thy fury upon them, and may the kindling of Thine anger overtake them. Pursue them with anger and destroy them from under God's skies." We pray that G-d not allow evil to continue unopposed and that the wicked gloat.

Many Jews are uncomfortable with this seemingly primitive call for revenge. We must, however, remember the words of the Passover Hagaddah, "be'chol dor va'dor - And there were those who stood up against us and our forefather, and not one alone who stood against us to annihilate us, but in every single generation, there are those who arise against us to annihilate us. And the Holy One, Blessed be He, saves us from their hands." This is not just a remembrance of a historical event. We are living this passage! Think of the 8 beautiful students killed in Merkaz HaRav, March of last year, or of Shlomo Nativ, killed only because they were Jews. How can anyone not be moved to demand that G-d repay His enemies? How can any Jew not demand that G-d bring the Redemption and usher in an era of morality, where the wicked are humbled and the righteous rewarded?

May this Pesach be a true layl shmurim, a night of protection, for the entire nation of Israel, and may we witness as great miracles as we did when we left Egypt. May we celebrate this Pesach with Moshiach Tzidekeynu, Eliyahu HaNavi and offer the korban haPesach in the rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. May we see the Final Redemption soon, speedily in our days.

Jewish Guilt and the Gaza Blood Libel

2009-03-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

In medieval Europe, Jews were often targeted with the claim that before the Passover season, they would murder a Christian child to use his blood in their matzot and wine. This dangerous libel spread across Europe, attacking Jews in England, Germany, Spain, Russia, and even reaching Damascus, Iran and the Islamic world. The myth of the blood libel led to the pogroms and persecutions of Jews. Cults supported by the Catholic Church flourished around the "martyrs" of the blood libel, such as Simon of Trent and Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln. These blood libel accusations began to wane as the Church lost influence in Europe, yet they occasionally did pop up in Russia, Eastern Europe and Syria.

Today, this classic anti-semitic motif has been re-incarnated in a new anti-Zionist form. The common claim is that Israel has been intentionally targeting and murdering Arab children as part of some genocidal program by the Zionist entity. During the recent war in Gaza, the Islamofascist-apologist media portrayed Israel as a blood-thirsty aggressor intent on terrorizing and massacring innocent Arabs in Gaza. The Israeli operation was a delayed under-reaction to 8 years of constant rocket fire on Israel's south. The Israeli army attacked Hamas terrorist weapons caches, smuggling tunnels and training camps. According to official Israeli statistics, 709 Hamas terrorists were killed, out of a total of 1,166 casualties. Hamas and the anti-Israel media deliberately inflated the number of civilians killed in order to make Israel seem guilty of "war crimes". Ignoring the fact that Hamas intentionally chose to hide among civilians and store weapons in mosques, hospitals and schools, the number of civilians killed is relatively low and is testament to the accuracy of Israel' air force.

While the fighting raged, protesters all over the world called for Israel to "stop the killings in Gaza" (never mind the fact that they had no problems with killings as long as they were directed at Jews). It was forgotten (or conveniently ignored) who the aggressors and who the victims were. Hamas, amidst bravado of how Gaza would "be a graveyard" for the "Zionist soldiers", spoke paradoxically of the slaughter of Arabs by the Israeli army. Hamas, the terrorist organization responsible for the murder of hundreds of Israelis, whose genocidal commitments are enshrined in its constitution, quickly became the innocent victims and the mean old Zionists, the bad guys. Cynical and obscene comparisons between the Nazi murderers responsible for the annihilation of a third of world Jewry and Israel's defensive operation abounded. The Holocaust became a tool to attack the Jewish state fighting for its survival. No context was provided to the conflict as it became accepted discourse that Israel was bombing Gaza simply out of a sick and perverse desire to kill Arab children. World reaction surpassed that of the 2002 Jenin massacre that wasn't, when allegations of hundreds of Arabs slaughtered in the Jenin refugee camp spread. After a UN investigation, it was revealed that about 50 Arabs had been killed during this phase of Operation Defensive Shield, half of them armed terrorists. Of course, this did not prevent condemnation and denunciation of Israel.

Unfortunately, some Jews joined in the chorus of Israel-bashers. Consumed by guilt over everything, these Jews marched side by side with Arabs, acting as useful idiots for those who used anger over Israel's actions as a smokescreen to attack Jews. These self-haters, such as Roseanne Barr and Gerald Kaufman, repeated the tired fallacy that the Israel army and the Nazis are interchangeable, lending credence to the anti-semites' claims. Incredible that while the Jewish state was fighting for its life, these kapos would choose to condemn it. This phenomenon of self-hatred is limited to Jews. Never will one find an Italian obsessed with hating and condemning Italy, or an "Arab against Palestine". Tragically, 2000 years of exile have poisoned the minds and hearts of far too many Jews, people who do not identify as Jews unless to lend support to their bigoted views.

Even supporters of Israel fell for this libel, apologizing over and over again for "killing innocent civilians". The pro-Zionist argument went like this: "Its a shame about the civilians deaths in Gaza, but..." The destruction of one's enemy is not supposed to be something painful or shameful. War is cruel and civilians die. The people of Gaza were not innocent by any stretch of the imagination. In 2006, the majority of the people in Gaza voted democratically to have the Hamas terrorist organization represent them. They permitted their homes and towns to be used as rocket launch pads against Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod and the Negev. They danced in the streets and gave out candy when 8 teenagers were shot in cold blood by an Arab gunman last March in a Jerusalem yeshiva. They have held Gilad Shalit captive for 1000 days without Red Cross humanitarian access They have built a perverse society built on hatred, anti-semitism and love of martyrdom and death. In short, their suffering, as all Arab suffering, is self-imposed, a result of their rejectionist policies. They chose the rocket over the olive branch and war over peace and they are now paying the price.

In WWII, the Allies went on a bombardment campaign of German cities. The people they killed were not Wermacht generals, Gestapo police or members of the German army. The Allies did not limit their attacks to Hitler and his Nazi regime but to the German people who voted in and supported the Nazi beast. No tears were wasted on those killed in the bombardment and similarly, Jews should spare no tears on those killed in Gaza. The "innocent civilians of Gaza" were the same ones who helped Hamas, who are totally committed to the destruction of Israel and who rejoice when Jews are murdered. These "innocents" are the same ones who kidnapped Gilad Shalit and have kept him in a cell for 3 years. With such a surplus of Israel-bashers, we need not join in.

Rosh Chodesh Nissan - Renewal

2009-03-25T19:45:00.001-07:00

Today is Rosh Chodesh Nissan, the beginning of the month of Nissan. The Hebrew calendar is determined by the moon, which is a symbol for the nation of Israel. Just as the moon waxes and wanes, yet always regains its strength, so too does the people of Israel. Rosh Chodesh, the New Moon, represents renewal and regrowth. Though today the situation may seem bleak and the Jewish people appear defeated, we will arise like a phoenix from the ashes. Despite the numerous challenges and difficulties we face, both from the inside and out, we will triumph. The Jewish nation lives forever!

Our Sages teaches that just as we were redeemed in Nissan, the month of the Exodus from Egypt, so too are we destined to be redeemed again in Nissan. A hopeless and pathetic rabble of slaves, a broken and lifeless collection of individuals and tribes, were transformed by G-d's mighty hand into a powerful nation. A people that appeared dead were energized and filled with life by the Almighty. Just like the growing crescent of the moon, the nation of Israel was redeemed and renewed. By giving us the power to determine the timing of the New Moon (since a New Moon could only be declared if the court in Jerusalem ruled it so), G-d gave us mastery over time. While other greater and more powerful nations have come and gone, leaving behind only dust and traces, the Jewish people remains. Time has no effect on us as time only exists in this world, while we belong to a different world.

'Will these dry bones live again?', asks the poor Jew. G-d answers him that He has chosen this nation from all others, and that its success is in His hands alone. Today, we are surrounded by a sea of bloodthirsty foes whose hatred knows no bounds. We may seem lethargic or apathetic as assimilation and intermarriage reeks its horrible toll, creating a spiritual genocide. Nonetheless, know that like the moon, we will be renewed. Once we are re-energized, there will be no limit to the accomplishments of Am Yisrael. The nations will stand in amazement as the people that they took for dead, that they did their best to murder and destroy, rape and pillage, convert and assimilate, stands proudly once again and asserts its rights. Our redemption is now. It is a time for comfort.

"Turn Thou us unto Thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old."

The Guardian of Israel does not Sleep

2009-03-21T18:35:00.000-07:00

A major terrorist attack was thwarted Saturday night, motzaei shabbat. Security found explosives in a parked car outside of a crowded Haifa mall, when one of the explosives malfunctioned.

If the bombs would have gone off, many Jews would have been injured or killed, G-d forbid. It is a miracle that one of the devices malfunctioned and that authorities found and disabled the bombs. This is testimony to HaShem's amazing love and mercy for His people. HaShem is constantly protecting and guarding over His nation. During the recent war in Gaza, we were privileged to see so many tremendous miracles, of rockets falling on empty schools, empty homes and kindergartens, of rockets hitting synagogues moments after the congregants had exited. During 8 years of bombardment and 10 000 rockets, there have been only a handful of casualties. Why? Is it because of Hamas' poor aim or the superiority of Israel's defense system? No! It is all thank to our Father in Heaven.

Every Jew must say: THANK YOU HASHEM! Thank You for Your many miracles and kindnesses that You perform every single day to Your people Israel, the numerous ones that we are aware of, and the thousands of miracles that we are unaware of.

"Behold, the Guardian of Israel neither sleeps nor slumbers." (Psalm 121:4) There is no clearer proof of G-d's existence and sovereignty than the continual preservation and survival of the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Israel is surrounded by a sea of blood-thirsty anti-semites longing for is destruction, cruel enemies who want nothing more than the death of the Jewish people. In 6 separate wars, they have attacked Israel and been defeated, by HaShem's loving grace. They have launched numerous assaults, attacks, bombardments and strikes against Israel, all to no avail.

"Plan a conspiracy and it will be annulled, speak your peace and it will not stand, for HaShem is with us." (Isaiah 8:10) To the enemies of Israel, you will never succeed in destroying the people of Israel. The Jewish return to Zion is a miracle, a divine decree and cannot be prevented. G-d promised in His Torah that those who bless us will be blessed and those who curse us will be cursed. The choice is up to you: whether to aid and support the return to Zion or to oppose HaShem and His will. Either way, our existence and prosperity is assured. Neither the Arabs, nor the US, EU or UN will ever succeed in uprooting us from our land. They are powerless before the G-d of Israel.

The Passover Hagaddah says that "there are those who rose up against our fathers and against us. It was not one alone that stood up against us to wipe us out, but in every generation they arise to annihilate us. But the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hands." The fate of Hamas and Fatah, Hizbullah and Ahmadinejad, will be the fate of Pharaoh and Haman, Hitler and Stalin. And Am Yisrael will live for ever and ever!

THANK YOU HASHEM!!

Vilified: Telling Lies about Israel

2009-03-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

Israel is victim of the most vile libel. Anti-semites and Israel-haters have made the most obscene comparisons between Israel and the Nazis (l'havdil elef alafei alafim havdalot). Jews and all good people have to respond forcefully to these lies.

The Vanishing Diaspora Jew

2009-03-11T17:41:00.000-07:00

Since the destruction of the Second Temple until very recently, the masses of the Jewish people did not dwell in the Land of Israel. For 2000 years. the majority of Jews dwelled in the Diaspora, among non-Jews. Jews were dispersed in far flung places such as Poland, Morocco, Iran, Ethiopia and even China. They spoke different languages, like Yiddish, Ladino or the local tongue, and differed very much in customs, cuisine and clothing from other Jews in other exiles. Yet, despite intense persecution, massacres, pogroms, suffering and poverty, the Jewish nation survived intact, the many generation since Sinai until the today. Through the force of their dedication and commitment to Judaism, they were able to withstand the most brutal and horrible of circumstances.

Generally, the second or third generation of immigrants assimilates quite fully into the host culture. The only reminder of their origins may be the occasional family cultural celebration, a grandparent with a heavy accent or maybe a trip back to their home country. It is incredible that Jews, dispersed and separated for 2000 years, did not assimilate but always maintained their own identity. Away from their land, with no country to go back to, Jews were able to survive.

Within the span of several generations, a new and frightening trend has emerged. All Jews, until a hundred or so years ago, were religiously observant, fully and wholly committed to Judaism. Because of this, Jews were able to survive the harsh Diaspora. However, today assimilation is taking a frightening toll on Jewish communities in the United States, Canada, Russia and Western Europe.

Consider the following statistics*:

Jewish identity is declining sharply.

Of 5.6 million Jews, 2 million American Jews live in households identified as non-Jewish

60% of Jews below 40 years of age live in households identified as non-Jewish

20% of Jews over 60 years of age live in households identified as non-Jewish

Intermarriage rates are increasing dramatically.

Before 1965, 10% of Jews who married, did so outside the faith.

Since 1985, 52% of Jews who married have done so outside the faith.

Children are being raised as non-Jews.

1 million, or 54% of all American Jewish children under the age of 18 are being raised as non-Jews or with no religion.

Fertility Rates are not high enough to replenish the religion.

The average fertility rate of American Jewish women is 1.4 children per household. The replacement level is 2.1 children.

Less emphasis is being placed on a Jewish education.

In 1962, 540,000 Jewish children were attending afternoon weekend schools, and 60,000 were enrolled in day schools. By 1990, fewer than 240,000 Jewish children attended afternoon /weekend schools and 140,000 attended day schools.

NET LOSS -- 220,000 Jewish children.

Traditional Shabbat observance is extremely low.

Only 36% of Jewish households light the Shabbat Candles.

Of the population that consists of people who were born Jewish and are Jewish by choice, only 11% attend synagogue weekly.

* All Statistics taken from Council of Jewish Federations' 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. This is the most comprehensive source of American Jewish data available

The Jewish population worldwide is sharply decreasing, ravaged by the scourges of intermarriage and assimilation. A census taken before Rosh HaShana 5769 found that the Jewish population worldwide increased by 70 000, only due to natural increase in Israel. A very shocking study found that within 3 generations, 97% of non-Orthodox Jewry in the United States will be extinct.

This is a tragedy of epic proportions. The nation that stood at Sinai and received G-d's Torah barely knows about Purim and Shavuot. The Chosen People eat cheeseburgers, not even knowing that they might be unkosher! Taught by the Jewish Establishment Organizers that "thou shalt melt", Jewish parents sent their kids to public schools, creating a generation of Jewish illiterates who know little more that Fiddler on the Roof, gefilte fish and a Yiddish expression or two. This is the most pressing threat facing the Jewish people today. The apathy of young Jews and their total disconnect and alienation from Judaism should frighten and worry every single Jews who is committed to the future of his people.

During Israel's recent operation in Gaza, Jewish leaders were extremely concerned over the alarming increase in anti-Israel around the world. Not to deny the seriousness of these anti-semitic attacks, the biggest danger threatening the Jewish today comes not from anti-semitism but from assimilation and intermarriage. There is a silent Holocaust going on in the Diaspora as young Jews marry outside of the faith, their Jewishness completely irrelevant to them, a mere accident of birth. Yet, the Jewish leaders are completely silent, doing nothing to try and reach out to our brothers and sisters who are slowly drowning in goyishkeit. If these current rates continue, the future does not bode well for Jewish continuity.

Raised in completely secular environments devoid of spirituality, young Jews look for meaning in other paths and belief systems. They travel to India and live in ashrams, or become Buddhists or Zen followers. These alienated Jews make easy prey for missionary groups like Jews for Jesus who thrive on Jewish illiteracy and ignorance. Most have only the faintest inklings of Jewish rituals, a quick show at "temple" on the high holidays, boring and irrelevant classes at Hebrew School, or a family seder. They have never been exposed to the incredible spirituality in Judaism and are often amazed when they discover that Judaism has a deep spiritual legacy. Intermarriage is only the last step in complete assimilation, finalizing the irrevocable break with the tradition and lineage that extends to Sinai and before, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. For generations of Jews, the question of "why be Jewish?" is unimportant. They were sent to public schools, encouraged to interfaith and integrate with non-Jews and now their own Jewish identities are nil.

To any Jew who is reading this article, I beg them please to seriously consider their own Judaism. Their ancestors gave their lives in order that they should live as Jews. Imagine their great-great grandfathers in the shtetls of Ukraine or the juderias of Spain, and how much it would pain them to know that they overcame pogroms and Inquisitions, Crusades and Auschwitz, only for their children to willingly give up their Judaism. Please, I beg you to return home, to your roots and to your people.

May HaShem merit that all of His children should come home very soon.

We Remember

2009-02-22T17:51:00.000-08:00

Today is the first yarzheit of the 8 bochurim who were murdered in the attack on Merkaz HaRav last year. On Rosh Chodesh Adar of last year, an East Jerusalem Arab gunman entered the library of the yeshiva and gunned down 8 students in cold-blood. These holy boys were killed while studying Torah, their sole crime to have been born Jews. Aged 15-21, they were committed and completely involved in Torah. As their families were plunged into the depths of mourning and sorrow, dancing and jubilation broke out in East Jerusalem, in Arab-controlled Judea and Samaria, and in Gaza. There was dancing in the streets and sweets were distributed, in celebration of the vile deed. As the Jewish nation felt the pain of this cruel attack, our enemies rejoiced in the massacre of teenagers.

The attack took place on Rosh Chodesh Adar, the first day of the month of Adar, associated with the festival of Purim. Purim commemorates the downfall of the Haman, the Persian vizier, and the foiling of his Final Solution against the Jewish people. Haman was a descendant of Amalek, the implacable enemy of the Jews. One week before Purim, on Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembrance, we read the Torah's command to remember the evil of Amalek. The Torah commands us: "Remember what Amalek did to you on the road, on your way out of Egypt. That he encountered you on the way and cut off those lagging to your rear, when you were tired and exhausted; he did not fear G-d. And it shall come to pass, when the L-rd your G-d has given you rest from all your enemies round about, in the land which the L-rd your G-d is giving you for an inheritance to possess it, that you shall obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget." (Deut. 25:17-19). It is an obligation to recall daily Amalek's cowardly attack on Israel.

Throughout history, thousands of nations have oppressed and persecuted Israel yet only Amalek is singled out for eternal remembrance and ultimate destruction. Why is Amalek alone to be remembered forever? Amalek was a nomadic tribe that lived in the desert. Its land was not a part of the Land of Israel and they were not threatened by Israel's advancement to Canaan. Despite this, they attacked Israel simply out of hatred and malice. They did not confront Israel head on but ambushed the rearguard, attacking the weakest and most vulnerable in the camp of Israel. This same spirit of Amalek has manifested itself time and time again in various nations throughout history, in their implacable desire to destroy Israel. The murderer, may his name be accursed, was from the seed of Amalek. His attack was so barbaric, so cruel and evil as to defy belief. To walk into a library in a house of study, a place of worship, on a holy day, and to systematically murder teenagers is an act motivated by the purest of hatred. It was not just an attack on a yeshiva, but on every synagogue and house of study, on every Jew and on the values of life and holiness which the books in that library represent.

It is a positive commandment to completely obliterate Amalek. Such a commandment seems jarring to the modern mind. Wipe out an entire people? We fail to understand that Amalek is not a physical entity but rather a concept, a national spirit. Amalek represents evil, denial of G-d and hatred of the Jewish people. Its warlike culture makes it antithetical to the message of the Torah and necessitates its destruction. The spirit of Amalek manifests itself so clearly in the gunman, the suicide bombers, the worship and glorification of death in Islamic society. To dance, give out candies and celebrate when teenagers are shot can only happen in a society completely steeped in hatred and violence. Such a savage society cannot co-exist with the Jewish people, the nation that loves and desires life and seeks peace.

Amalek shares the same numerical value as safek, meaning doubt. Amalek seeks to cause us to doubt G-d's Omnipotence, to doubt ourselves. our rights and claims to our land. When the emergency response teams entered the library, they found blood covering the pages of the Talmud. This demonstrates Amalek's utter contempt for G-d, for His commandment of life and its sanctity. The only way to overcome Amalek is by strengthening our connection to G-d and to His Torah. We must combat the doubt that Amalek seeks to sow by adding light. In the words of the Rav Kook, the founder of the yeshiva:

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.
They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.
They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom. "

The gunman stifled the voices of 8 young men. He tried to silence their Torah study and their good deeds. They have left behind a void of mitzvot that we need to fill, in order to defeat the darkness spread by Amalek. Let us all commit to performing an extra mitzvah such as laying tefillin, studying more Torah or giving tzedakah le'ilui nishmatam.

Remember what Amalek did to us! Evil cannot be compromised with or tolerated. It can only be wiped out. Let us remember:

Doron Mehereta, 26, of Ashdod
Ro'i Rote, 18, of Elkanah in Samaria (Shomron)
Yonadav Haim Hirschfeld, 19, of Kokhav HaShachar (Shomron)
Yochai Lipshitz, 18, of the Old City of Jerusalem
Yonatan Yitzchak Eldar, 16, of Shilo (Shomron)
Neriah Cohen, 15, of Jerusalem
Segev Pniel Avichayil, 15, of N'vei Daniel in Gush Etzion
Avraham David Moses, 16, of Efrat, Gush Etzion

May their memories be a blessing and may HaShem avenge their holy blood speedily in our days.

Yehi Zichram Baruch.

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard

No Peace Without Justice

2009-02-16T18:46:00.000-08:00

Speaking at a convention for American Jewish leaders, Tzippi Livni said that "we need to give up half of the Land of Israel". She claims that in the interest of peace, Israel must surrender Judea and Samaria to the Arabs. For the sake of a peace, it is necessary to create a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel.

The Left is fond of saying that there is no peace without justice. There is no greater truth to that statement that in this case. An unjust peace is no peace at all. Peace is valuable yet it cannot come at an unreasonable price. Uprooting Jews from their land is too high a price to pay for peace.

To make Judea and Samaria jundenrein is the greatest perversion of history. These lands form the homeland of the Jewish people, where our ancestors, Patriarchs, prophets and kings dwelled. To uproot hundreds of thousands of Jews from their rightful homes and destroy flourishing communities is a betrayal of history and of the generations of Jews who yearned for the dream of Zion. Although we were forcibly removed from our land, we never vacated it in our hearts and souls. We continued to look longingly to the day when "our eyes will behold Your return to Zion in mercy", despite the oppression and degradation of exile. The Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people by every conceivable historical, religious and political right. The Jewish people are the only nation to have roots in that land. Abraham is buried in Hebron, Jacob lived in Beit El and Joseph tended his sheep in Shechem (Nablus). When a certain prophet had his first revelation in Arabia, the Jewish people already had thousands of years of roots in the Land of Israel.

The Land of Israel is the inheritance of every single Jew around the world, and only the Jews. Every nation has its own land and no one would demand that it carve itself up to appease those who covet it. It would be unreasonable to expect the United States to offer Texas or Massachusetts to al-Qaeda in the hopes of peace. The United Kingdoms would never surrender London and France would never give away Paris. Similarly, Israel can never give away parts of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was, is and always will be a uniquely Jewish city. Catholicism is centered in Rome, Islam in Mecca and Judaism in Jerusalem. Jerusalem forms the basis of our national psyche. 3 times a day, looking eastward, a Jew pleads for the rebuilding of Jerusalem, as well as after he has had a meal and says Grace. We have ended our Passover seders and Yom Kippur fasts for 2000 years with the fervent prayer of "Next Year in Jerusalem!" At every Jewish wedding, the groom breaks a cup to remember the destruction of Jerusalem and pledges "if I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning."

The early Zionist pioneers had a slogan: "With fire Judea fell, and with fire Judea will arise." The dream of Zion could only be realized through the sweat and toil of the pioneers and settlers. The Jewish state only exists by virtue of the over 20 000 Jews who made the ultimate sacrifice in defense of their people. Thousands of good Jews fell defending and liberating Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Only 40 years ago, tears streamed down the cheeks of even the most alienated and assimilated Jews as we were reunited with our Holy Temple Mount, with the Western Wall and with the Old City of Jerusalem. A nation that held faith for two millenia does not forget so quickly the pain that we felt when we were denied access to our most holy sites. We have not forgotten how the Jordanians forbade us access to the Western Wall, desecrated synagogues and study halls and used ancient Jewish cemeteries as latrines. Only a lunatic would advocate a return to this terrible and dark time.

The basis of peace is self-respect. A Jew with a modicum of Jewish pride would never part with his homeland for anything in the world. Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Gaza, the Golan, Galilee, Negev and coastal plain all are an integral part of the Jewish homeland. A condition for peace cannot be the amputation of half of the Land of Israel and denial of the right of the Jewish to settle freely in their country. What is being challenged is the basic Jewish right to their own land as the world tries to herd the Jews of Israel into the Greater Tel-Aviv ghetto. What we fail to understand is that our right to Tel-Aviv, to Herzliah, to Be'er Shevah, is our right to Jerusalem, to Hebron, to Shechem, to every inch of the Land of Israel.

The Arabs have more than enough land for themselves. They occupy 99.5% of the Middle-East, and no one is challenging their claim to it. Yet Jews must stand up and assert our right to less than a percent of the land in the Middle-East. This is not a conflict over land as much as ideology. The Islamic supremacist ideology which demands that Jews be second-class citizens opposes Zionism, the most basic desire for a Jew to control his own destiny in his own sovereign state. If Tzippi or the Left were able to carry out their nefarious plans, G-d forbid, to expel the Jews of Judea and Samaria, it would mean the virtual end of the Zionist enterprise, of the building and settling, of the Ingathering of the Exiles, of the return of the Jewish people to its home and the hope for the Ultimate Redemption, may it be speedily in our days. I could think of no greater tragedy than for the Jews to come home after such a long exile and re-establish themselves only to be uprooted by corrupt leaders at the behest of anti-semitic governments.

This is a struggle of an indigenous people against the forces of a cruel occupation. Islamic imperialism cannot succeed in driving the Jews from our soil. The Jewish nation has survived far more powerful empires and powers. A nation with such deep roots cannot surrender before a non-entity, a pseudo-nation bent on its destruction. Peace will come one day in the Middle-East, but only when Arabs and Jews respect each other and each other's boundaries and borders. There are 22 Arabs countries and one Jewish country. That Jewish country exists and survives only by resting on the shoulders of our grandparents, good Jews who, in the ghettos and shtetls of Eastern Europe, in the mellahs of Morocco, exiled in Arab countries or under Christian rule, never forget that one day they would return to their home. To betray them would be a travesty, the height of injustice and cruelty. Every people is entitled to its own country, not least of which are the Jewish people, who have felt the pain and burn of being guests in a foreign land. There can be no negotiations, no compromise, no surrender on this most elementary point, our national aspirations and dreams. Such injustice cannot be tolerated. I hope for peace, but not for the fake "peace" promised by the Left, bathed in the blood of Jews. Peace will only come when the Jewish people are firmly planted in their land, as a Light unto the Nations. May that day come speedily in our days, amen.

The Silver Salver

2009-02-02T16:46:00.001-08:00

Chaim Weizman once famously said that no state is given to a people on a silver salver. He was of course referring to the toil and effort of the early Zionist pioneers and to the thousands of Jewish soldiers who gave their lives in defense of their country. Many people erroneously believe that Israel was magnanimously handed to the Jewish people by the UN. They fail to recognize the hundred years prior in which Jews came from all over the world to establish themselves in Israel. Jews worked to raise money to purchase land through the Jewish National Fund. The Zionist leaders established schools and hospitals, and built the political infrastructure that would later become the Israeli Knesset.

The zeitgeist of the time, and the newest method of destroying Israel, is "the two-state solution". The UN has declared negotiations "irrevocable", and the US and the Mid-East Quartet have committed themselves fully to advancing this policy. It is an accepted dogma that the solution to the current problem is a sovereign state for "the Palestinian people". Billions of dollars have been poured into this project, as well as countless summits, meetings, UN resolutions and diplomatic tours. Anyone who is a "moderate" accepts the necessity of such a solution.

Especially due to the fact that the "Palestinian" narrative is largely a product of historical revisionism, there is little reason why the "Palestinians" are deserving of a state. In the 60 years since the so-called "Nakba", the Arabs of Gaza, Judea and Samaria have produced or contributed little to the world at large, besides terror and hatred. The Arabs have languished in camps, hotbeds of fundamentalism and extremism, and have never sought to improve their situations. Rather, they use their own desperation, actual and imagined, as a weapon against Israel. They justify their repeated murderous attacks on Jewish civilians and refusal to come to a peace agreement as a result of Israeli aggression, occupation or supposed war-crimes. Somehow, the world has come to accept that "Palestinians" are entitled to depraved behaviour as a result of what they believe to be historical crimes against them. Incredibly, the Jews who founded Israel never resorted to this. Israel arose out of the ashes of Auschwitz. The evil the Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis far outweighs any indignities the Arabs have ever suffered. The survivors of the Nazi death camps did not turn to suicide bombings and murder, but rather re-built their lives in Israel. Having lost their entire families, with barely any possessions, they became doctors, professors, artists, writers and contributed to society. Similarly, the close to a million Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Arab countries were not permitted to languish in camps. They are now an integral part of Israeli society.

Various UN organizations, as well as the US and EU, have spent billions of dollars on the "Palestinians". None of this has been used to build schools or hospitals. Children in Gaza barely know how to read and write, yet their are all experts at explosives and handling weapons. They may not be familiar with literature, math or history, but they will all proudly proclaim their deepest desire to grow up to be a shaheed, to kill Jews, the highest honour. When Israel left Gaza in 2005, it transfered to the Arabs billions to built their society. Instead, they used this money to buy rockets and missiles. The Jews of Gush Katif left behind greenhouses for the Arabs to use. Rather than creating a flourishing economy, they destroyed the greenhouses in a fanatical frenzy. This is a civilization that does not create, but destroys. It is a perverse culture which dances in the streets and gives out candy as Jews are murdered, as they did on 9/11.

It has been said that the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Despite the efforts of the international community, the "Palestinians" have never shown themselves deserving of a state. There is little central government in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. When given the choice to vote for a government to represent them, they voted overwhelmingly for a terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jews. This says a lot about the type of society in which they live. Would it be the wisest move to give such a people a country? Has there ever been a moment in "Palestinian" history when they have rejected terrorism and violence? Given the Islamic regime in Hamastan, it would be hard to argue that the world needs another Taliban-style Islamic country. If one looks at Gaza, Judea and Samaria, they will see the self-inflicted squalor of the Arabs. They will see a pseudo-state whose streets are overflowing with sewage because the pipes have been used for rockets.

The Zionist pioneers found a deserted wasteland, uninhabited for thousands of years. They proclaimed it a land without people for a people without a land. These self-sacrificing chaluztim made the deserts bloom, built cities in desolate land, and created life where there was none. The Arabs, on the other hand, have done nothing. They are not the sons of the desert, but rather its fathers. The corrupt leaders of the "Palestinians" pocketed international aid at the expense of their people. They raised generations of children on a steady diet of death and anti-semitism, instead of giving them basic skills necessary to running a country. They prefer to whine about what they endured 60 years ago instead of planning for their future. Looking at the tragic failure of the "Palestinians" in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, there is not reason to believe that they can sustain a state. Such a state will undoubtably be used as a launching pad for terror attacks against Israel and a bastion of repression and fundamentalism. They are a culture that worships death and is addicted to martyrdom. Generations of Arabs have been taught how to die for their faith, but they have not been taught how to live for it.

No state is given to a people of a silver salver. The "Palestinians" have certainly not earned the right to a state. They blame Israel for their current situation instead of taking responsibility for the poor choices they have made as a society: multiple wars against Israel, endless terror attacks, creating a culture of fanaticism and hatred. In the recent conflict in Gaza, they could not accept that the Israeli onslaught was because of 8 years of rocket bombardment from Gaza. This juvenile mindset cannot maintain a country. It would be one of the greatest human tragedies to uproot 100 000 Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria, only to hand their land over to terrorists and their sympathizers. The Arabs simply do not deserve another state, especially one handed to them on the silver salver of UN humanitarian aid. "Palestine" has no industry, no infrastructure and is an assured failure. Israel will be forced to clean up the mess that the international community created in its backyard. Israel's leaders must have the courage to say no to what will assuredly be a Final Solution.

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard

I Am A Zionist

2009-01-30T10:00:00.001-08:00

At a time where Zionism is defamed and slandered, this article sets out the truth. Shabbat Shalom.

From YNet, by Yair Lapid:

I am a Zionist.

I believe that the Jewish people established itself in the Land of Israel, albeit somewhat late. Had it listened to the alarm clock, there would have been no Holocaust, and my dead grandfather – the one I was named after – would have been able to dance a last waltz with grandma on the shores of the Yarkon River.

I am a Zionist.

Hebrew is the language I use to thank the Creator, and also to swear on the road. The Bible does not only contain my history, but also my geography. King Saul went to look for mules on what is today Highway 443, Jonah the Prophet boarded his ship not too far from what is today a Jaffa restaurant, and the balcony where David peeped on Bathsheba must have been bought by some oligarch by now.

I am a Zionist.

The first time I saw my son wearing an IDF uniform I burst into tears, I haven't missed the Independence Day torch-lighting ceremony for 20 years now, and my television was made in Korea, but I taught it to cheer for our national soccer team.

I am a Zionist.

I believe in our right for this land. The people who were persecuted for no reason throughout history have a right to a state of their own plus a free F-16 from the manufacturer. Every display of anti-Semitism from London to Mumbai hurts me, yet deep inside I'm thinking that Jews who choose to live abroad fail to understand something very basic about this world. The State of Israel was not established so that the anti-Semites will disappear, but rather, so we can tell them to get lost.

I am a Zionist.

I was fired at in Lebanon, a Katyusha rockets missed me by a few feet in Kiryat Shmona, missiles landed near my home during the first Gulf War, I was in Sderot when the Color Red anti-rocket alert system was activated, terrorists blew themselves up not too far from my parents' house, and my children stayed in a bomb shelter before they even knew how to pronounce their own name, clinging to a grandmother who arrived here from Poland to escape death. Yet nonetheless, I always felt fortunate to be living here, and I don't really feel good anywhere else.

I am a Zionist.

I think that anyone who lives here should serve in the army, pay taxes, vote in the elections, and be familiar with the lyrics of at least one Shalom Hanoch song. I think that the State of Israel is not only a place, it is also an idea, and I wholeheartedly believe in the three extra commandments engraved on the wall of the Holocaust museum in Washington: "Thou shalt not be a victim, thou shalt not be a perpetrator, but above all, thou shalt not be a bystander."

I am a Zionist.

I already laid down on my back to admire the Sistine Chapel, I bought a postcard at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and I was deeply impressed by the emerald Buddha at the king's palace in Bangkok. Yet I still believe that Tel Aviv is more entertaining, the Red Sea is greener, and the Western Wall Tunnels provide for a much more powerful spiritual experience. It is true that I'm not objective, but I'm also not objective in respect to my wife and children.

I am a Zionist.

I am a man of tomorrow but I also live my past. My dynasty includes Moses, Jesus, Maimonides, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Woody Allen, Bobby Fischer, Bob Dylan, Franz Kafka, Herzl, and Ben-Gurion. I am part of a tiny persecuted minority that influenced the world more than any other nation. While others invested their energies in war, we had the sense to invest in our minds.

I am a Zionist.

I sometimes look around me and become filled with pride, because I live better than a billion Indians, 1.3 billion Chinese, the entire African continent, more than 250 million Indonesians, and also better than the Thais, the Filipinos, the Russians, the Ukrainians, and the entire Muslim world, with the exception of the Sultan of Brunei. I live in a country under siege that has no natural resources, yet nonetheless the traffic lights always work and we have high-speed connection to the Internet.

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I am a Zionist.

My Zionism is natural, just like it is natural for me to be a father, a husband, and a son. People who claim that they, and only they, represent the "real Zionism" are ridiculous in my view. My Zionism is not measured by the size of my kippa, by the neighborhood where I live, or by the party I will be voting for. It was born a long time before me, on a snowy street in the ghetto in Budapest where my father stood and attempted, in vain, to understand why the entire world is trying to kill him.

I am a Zionist.

Every time an innocent victim dies, I bow my head because once upon a time I was an innocent victim. I have no desire or intention to adopt the moral standards of my enemies. I do not want to be like them. I do not live on my sword; I merely keep it under my pillow.

I am a Zionist.

I do not only hold on to the rights of our forefathers, but also to the duty of the sons. The people who established this state lived and worked under much worse conditions than I have to face, yet nonetheless they did not make do with mere survival. They also attempted to establish a better, wiser, more humane, and more moral state here. They were willing to die for this cause, and I try to live for its sake.

Hands off of Israel

2009-01-25T12:50:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama, only several days into his presidency, has already announced that it will be one of his commitments to "actively and aggressively" advance negotiations and talks between Israel and the Arabs. Obama's new Middle East envoy will arrive in Israel next week to begin to push the process. In his first call to a foreign head of state, Obama called Mahmoud Abbas, arch-terrorist leader of Fatah, to symbolize his dedication to "a two-state solution". In his words, he doesn't want a future "in which these is no hope for the Palestinians".

It is mind-boggling that, in light of the monumental challenges facing the United States and its new president, he should be meddling so much in the affairs of a sovereign country. Given the full-blown recession, approaching the levels of a depression, in the US, along with a host of other serious problems facing the decaying American super-power, Obama has chosen to concentrate his energy on the conflict in the Middle-East. Despite the almost-deified status that the media has given him, it is quite hubristic for him to believe that he will solve a close-to 100 year-old conflict within a few months of his reign.

Israel's relationship with the United States has often been a double-edged sword. George Mitchell, the new envoy to the Mid-East, will not even wait until after the Israeli elections to begin his work. This represents a great amount of arrogance and disrespect on the part of Obama. He clearly disregards the choice of the Israeli people in the coming elections. The political winds are changing in Israel and a new administration may not be as likely as Olmert to continue along the same path of concessions and surrender. Evidently, what Israelis choose for their future is irrelevant to Barack Obama.

Israel is a sovereign nation- not an American colony or a 51st state. The close relationship between the two countries is based on shared values and strategic interests. Yet, in the end, Israel must do what is best for itself. Obama has no right to force concession or make demands on Israel. It is not the place of the United States to meddle in the business or politics of another country. The new administration has many extreme challenges facing it, and it would do well to concentrate on solving those before committing itself to carving up Israel.

Regardless of whichever side in the conflict is right, this is just one case of a disagreement between two religious/ethnic groups among thousands. All around the world, various tribes, peoples, ethnic groups and nations are fighting over different land claims. The US has its own problems and should not interfere on these tribal squabbles. Unless there is a case of genocide or severe human rights abuses, the US should mind its own business. In Darfur, close to a million blacks have been murdered by Arab janjaweed militia. The humanitarian situation is dire and could use international intervention. Why doesn't Obama send his ambassador there? Why doesn't he exert the same pressure on the leader of Sudan responsible for this genocide as he plans to exert on Israel to commit suicide? Besides cases such as this, it is the height of arrogance for the American president to interfere with the politics of another country. Israel's leaders much decide what to do for the security and welfare of Israel.

Only a few days in power, Obama has shown himself to be incredible naive in terms of foreign policy. He is committed to advancing the same deadly and ultimately fruitless road as Bush and Clinton. Despite all of the various agreements and summits between Israel and the Arabs at American behest, Israel and the Arabs are no closer to peace today that they were in 1948. No amount of documents signed negates the generations of Arabs raised on anti-semitic and anti-Israel hatred. The Arab world today remains virulently opposed to Israel existence and any concession on Israel's part only encourages and increases terror. Israel cannot afford another disastrous Oslo, or a Road Map to oblivion, G-d forbid. Obama would do wise to butt out of Israel's politics and concentrate on the problems on the home front. Hopefully, in the coming elections, Israelis will elect leaders with the courage to tell Obama respectfully but firmly: "Hands off of Israel".

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard and Stop Raping Israel

Chutzpadik Haters

2009-01-22T17:20:00.000-08:00

During the recent conflict in Gaza, anti-Israel rallies were held worldwide. They were noted for their sheer ferocity and aggressiveness. During these rallies, slogans such as "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas" and "Burn Jews as fossil fuel" were chanted. Another feature of these rallies were signs comparing Israel to the Nazis. A favourite tactic of Israel-bashers is to make comparisons between the IDF and the Nazis, thereby delegitimizing the State of Israel. Israel is demonized as apartheid and racist, guilty of the original sin of being in existence. By claiming such a state is the epitome of racist evil, Israel's foes legitimize her destruction.

Close to 70 years ago, one third of world Jewry were brutally murdered in the greatest crime ever committed in human history. The Jews of Europe were dehumanized, forced into ghettos, chocked and gassed, and then burnt in ovens and crematorium, while the world stood by silently. Once the war came to an end, the world realized the depths of depravity and evil to which it had sunk and resolved never to repeat the horrors of the Shoah. Today, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the wicked Nazis who wantonly spilled Jewish blood are leading the campaign against the Jewish state. Instead of regretting their crimes, they have been denying and minimizing the Holocaust. Racked with guilt over their grandparents complicity to murder, they have decided to downplay and belittle the Final Solution with cynical and obscene comparisons between Israel and the Nazis. As witnesses to the Holocaust are dying out and becoming ever more rare, such historical revisionism cannot go unchallenged, especially as anti-semitism continues to rise in Europe and America. For the Jewish people, it seems to be 1939 all over again.

The German National Democratic neo-Nazi party announced that it will be holding a solemn vigil in downtown Berlin for the victims of 'the Gaza holocaust'. The NPD has seats in the national parliament, and has gained significant support both at the local and federal levels. "Joint hatred of everything Jewish is unifying neo-Nazis and Islamists... German-Palestinians protestors unashamedly admitted that they would vote for the NPD during the next election," Charlotte Knobloch, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, warned in her speech at a pro-Israel rally earlier this month in Munich. In a similar vein, the Spanish government has cancelled its Holocaust memorial ceremony in protest of the supposed 'genocide' in Gaza. Marking the Jewish Holocaust while a Palestinian Holocaust is taking place is not right," a local City official told Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper. Other European countries have taken to Holocaust references. A Norwegian diplomat stationed in Saudi Arabia sent a mass-distributed email stating that "the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are doing the same thing to the Palestinians, as the Nazis did to their grandparents," using her official Norwegian Foreign Ministry address.

This abuse of history is so sick and twisted. Whatever one's opinion on the Gaza conflict, there is no comparison between the systematic campaign and extermination and annihilation waged by the Nazis against the Jews and a military struggle between a sovereign nation and terrorists. It is an insult to the victims of the Holocaust to equate them with civilians killed unintentionally in the cross-fires of battle. Apparently, anti-semitism and Holocaust denial allows history and events to be perverted. The same countries that happily delivered up their Jews for destruction are denying the grossness of their crimes, and allowing such a travesty to occur again.

Since the beginning of the Israeli operation in Gaza a few weeks ago, anti-semitism has flared up worldwide. Jews in Europe and North America have suffered the worst wave of anti-semitism since the Second World War. In Britain, there have been over 220 anti-semitic incidents, including bombings and vandalization of synagogues, Jewish institutions and kosher restaurants. Jews have been beaten up on the streets. In France, dozens of synagogues have been bombed as well as Jews threatened. Over Shabbat in Chicago, 5 synagogues were defaced. A homemade bomb was found outside of a Chabad House in Florence. In Rome, a trade union has proposed and put forth legislation to identify and boycott Jewish-owned businesses. Protesters have marched violently through Jewish areas in Antwerp and Paris and Italian police had to prevent protesters from entering Venice's historical ghetto area.

The hateful and ridiculous comparisons between Israel and the Nazis have made Jews targets once again. While any person has the prerogative to disagree with the specific policies of the State of Israel, accusing Israel of 'genocide' in Gaza is akin to blood libel. Those who besmirch Israel attempt to demonstrate the state as so evil that the only solution to the conflict is a Final one. According to their logic, such an apartheid racist state must be dismantled and destroyed. All decent and moral people must renounce their moral inversion and recognize that this is a conflict between terrorists and a democratic state. There are no similarities between those who shoved Jewish children into gas chambers, and Israeli soldiers trying to prevent jihadi rockets from falling on civilian targets. Those who are condemning Israel for defending itself are of the same stock as those who sat by while the Jews of Europe were being murdered. It appears that the world never learns.

Israel, Do Not Fear!

2009-01-22T17:18:00.001-08:00

"Israel, do not fear, for your are a lion's cub. When a lion roars, who will not fear?"

Parshat Shemot: The Eternal Nation

2009-01-15T11:54:00.000-08:00

This week's parsha of Shemot details the descent of the Jewish people into slavery and the beginning of their redemption. Pharaoh, alarmed over Jewish growth and prosperity, sets out his Final Solution to the Jewish problem. He afflicts the Jews with horrendous suffering and labour and decrees the death of all male babies. The future saviour of the Jewish people is hidden in a basket in the Nile and eventually found by Pharaoh's daughter, who nurses and mothers the baby.

The Torah recounts, in one of the most beautiful episodes in the Tanach, how G-d reveals Himself to Moses from a burning bush. The Torah tells us that "behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed" (Ex. 3:2). This powerful metaphor is symbolic of the Jewish people. Suffering under harsh taskmasters controlled by a tyrant who would bathe himself in Jewish babies' blood, the Jewish people seemed to be on the brink of extinction. The mighty Egyptian empire would surely outlast the Jews, the dregs of existence. Pharaoh's wicked enforces would cement Jewish babies into the walls of his monuments if the required amount of bricks were not met by the Hebrew slaves. Despite all this, G-d promised that His nation would endure. Out of this tremendous affliction came the Divine response: "I have surely seen the affliction of My people who are in Egypt, and I have heard their cry because of their slave drivers, for I know their pains. I have descended to rescue them from the hand[s] of the Egyptians and to bring them up from that land, to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivvites, and the Jebusites. And now, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to Me, and I have also seen the oppression that the Egyptians are oppressing them." (Ex. 3:7-9) G-d had not forsaken His people. He would redeem them from Egyptian bondage.

Throughout history, the Jewish people has been tested under fire. We went through the "holy" fires of the Inquisition, which burned our holy books and our bodies at the stakes, tried for being true to our faith. The Nation of Israel was subjected to the ovens and crematorium of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibor, Bergen-Belsen and the other mass graveyards of Europe. Even today, the State of Israel remains under constant bombardment from jihadist rockets. Our enemies continue to proclaim the eventual destruction of the Jewish people. Like the Pharaoh of old, Hamas, Hizbullah, al-Qaeda, Iran and the like continue to plot out demise and annihilation.

As much as the Egyptian oppressed Israel, so the Jews prospered and multiplied. "But as much as they would afflict them, so did they multiply and so did they gain strength" (Ex. 1:12). They sought to break our backs and our spirit but our resolve only strengthened. This is Jewish history in a nutshell. Only two generations ago, we went from Auschwitz and built Jerusalem. We emerged from the ashes, from the graveyards and sites of death and established ourselves anew in our land. "Son of man, can these bones live?'... these bones are the whole house of Israel; behold, they say: Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are clean cut off. Therefore prophesy, and say unto them: Thus saith the Lord GOD: Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, O My people; and I will bring you into the land of Israel." (Ezek. 37:3,11-12) The dry bones, left for dead, scorched by the raging fires of anti-semitism and hatred, arose and had live breathed into them again. Today, our resolve is tested by rockets, bombs, condemnations and threats. We will not be broken! Just as the Egyptian failed to break us, so will we not be broken by Hamas or any other murderous terrorists. From their attacks we will grown and be strengthened.

Our trials and tribulations are increasing right before the advent of the Messianic Era. G-d said to Moses: "Go and assemble the elders of Israel, and say to them, 'The Lord God of your forefathers has appeared to me, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, "I have surely remembered you and what is being done to you in Egypt." ' And I said, 'I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt, to the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivvites, and the Jebusites, to a land flowing with milk and honey.'" (Ex. 3:16) The same thing will happen again in our days, when G-d will remember our affliction and bring us out of our current captivity. We are the eternal nation, the bush caught in the flames but is not consumed.

Am Yisrael Chai! The Jewish Nation lives!

Cross-posted to Stop Raping Israel

My Letter to Canadian PM Stephen Harper

2009-01-14T09:22:00.000-08:00

Canada was the only country in the UN to oppose the unfair and unbalanced anti-Israel resolution. Stephen Harper has shown himself to be a great friend of Israel. He can be contact at pm@pm.gc.ca. Here is the e-mail that I sent him:

Dear Prime Minister Harper,

Once again, you have shown yourself to be a man of incredible courage and moral strength by standing up for the right of Israel to defend herself. While most of the world has been very forceful of in their condemnation of Israel, Canada was the only country at the UN to oppose the unbalanced and unfair resolution targeted at Israel. Canada and Israel face the same enemies, the forces of Islamic fascism, whether they are in Afghanistan or in Gaza. Under a constant barrage of over 4000 missiles on southern Israel since 2005, Israel cannot allow such attacks to go unanswered. No other country would have waited for so long to defend its sovereignty and citizens. Mr Harper, your support for Israel makes me incredible proud to be a Canadian.

On June 25, 2006, an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. He has been held, in unknown conditions, in Gaza for over 3 years, denied Red Cross access and the most basic human rights. Hamas's refusal to allow access to Shalit is a war crime and a violation of international law. As a friend and supporter of Israel and the Jewish people, please do not allow Gilad Shalit to be forgotten. Please do everything in your diplomatic power to ensure that Gilad Shalit comes home. I hope that Canada will raise this issue before the United Nations.

The attacks on Sderot and southern Israel come as a direct result of the Israeli Disengagement from Gaza in 2005, in which 10 000 Jews were expelled from their homes. Learning from this tragic mistake, it is time to bury the so-called "two-state solution". If an Arab terror state was created in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), every major Israeli city would come under rocket range. One single attack at Israel's international airport would effectively end Israeli tourism, trade and immigration. No friend of Israel can allow such a plan to come about. Judea and Samaria are the ancestral Jewish homeland and belong to the Jewish people by every conceivable religious, historic and political right. Israel cannot survive a terror state carved into its belly. The war in Gaza hopefully will put this terrible plan to rest.

Mr. Harper, you have shown the moral clarity to differentiate between a democratic state and a terror group. Israel is dedicated to peace and freedom while Hamas and the Islamic society which spawned it worships deaths and hatred. This hatred has manifested itself time and time again in NY, the London Tube, in Kabul or in Mumbai. Anti-Israel protesters in Canadian cities such as Montreal and Toronto have screamed such obscenities as "Jews to the ovens" and "Hitler didn't finish the job". This sort of anti-semitic behaviour cannot be tolerated in as civilized a country as Canada. Israel is the canary in the coal mine. It always begins with the Jews but it never ends with the Jews.

Sincerely,

xxx BK

Not a Tear!

2009-01-11T12:39:00.000-08:00

Faced with a barrage of new footage of dead children, Israel's PR is negligible. Hamas has proven that it has no shame in abusing the dead, but gleefully shows pictures of maimed or killed children. The terrorists in Gaza use death pornography to further their nefarious plans of defaming Israel. The crowds worldwide scream "stop the holocaust in Gaza!" while employing the most cynical and obscene comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany. Suddenly, the world pretends to be interested in human rights and uses them as a weapon against the Jewish state. Politicians and celebrities denounce the supposed massacres in Gaza and even Jewish leaders preface their support of Israel with apologies over civilian deaths.

Save me the pieties over Gaza. The very same people marching in the streets against Israel had nary a word to say when over 4000 rockets fell on Southern Israel during the past 3 years. When Jews were murdered by Hamas missiles, schools and hospitals bombarded and lives torn apart, the world was silent. The streets of Europe were empty as long as Arabs did the killing and Jews the dying. That is "peace" according to the "humanitarians". There were no pictures in the media of grieving Jewish mothers and fathers, or of children who lost limbs to jihadist bombs. Where were the marches and protests when a gunman murdered 8 teenagers studying in a yeshiva, or a berserk Arab bulldozer driver crushed a mother and her young daughter?

The same day that the operations in Gaza began, a Sunni suicide bomber blew himself up in a Shiite mosque in Iraq, murdering 40 people. This barely made news. When Jews kill Muslims, it is a massacre. When Muslims kill each other, it's like the weather. Nobody pays attention. In the past few years, close to a million black Africans have been murdered by Arab janjaweed militia in Darfur. Thats is a real humanitarian crisis. If the same protesters opposing Israel's right to self-defense would have used even a fraction of that energy to protest the situation in Darfur, there would be no genocide. The protests have little to do with human rights but are just another excuse to demonize and vilify the only democracy in the Middle-East. Over 60 years after the Holocaust, many are still uncomfortable with the idea of Jews fighting back. A "ceasefire" is when rockets fall on Jews and they do not retaliate.

The mainstream media feeds us constant images of dead Arabs. They inform us that women and children were among the dead in Israel's attacks. Somehow they neglect to mention that the blame for the dead lies squarely on Hamas, which hides among civilians when firing rockets at Israel. Hamas brazenly uses schools, mosques and hospitals to store weapons and attack Israel, then cries about Israeli retaliation. It has used women and children to carry out its murderous attacks against Israeli targets. The same group that self-righteously complains of Israeli attacks on children fires missiles on kindergartens and schools in Sderot, Ashklelon and Ashdod. They raise their children on a diet of hate, death and anti-semitism.

I have not a tear to spare for any Arab killed in Gaza. The international community treats Gazans as pawns, not letting them take responsibility for their own actions. Last year, the people of Gaza democratically voted Hamas, a terrorist organization, into power. They chose, of their own free-will, to have Hamas represent them as their government. As such, they should suffer the consequences of their choices. After the attacks on Merkaz HaRav in March, thousands of Gazans danced in the streets, giving out candies and celebrating the cold-blooded killing of Jewish teenagers. My tears are spent on the victims of Hamas, not their enablers. I wish that Israel would attack Gaza with a true proportionate response, letting the people of Gaza know the pain of the citizens of Sderot who have not had a complete night's sleep in a decade, or of the Jewish mothers and fathers who lost children to Hamas jihadist attacks.

The world does not deserve our apologies. They forfeited their rights to moral superiority after 2000 years of deportations, expulsions, forced conversions, persecutions and pogroms. A world that did not treat Jews as human beings for two millenia has no right to lecture us on how we may defend ourselves. At anti-Israel rallies worldwide, crowds chanted "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!", hoping that the wicked smoke of the ovens should blow over to the Holy Land. A world that still dreams of Auschwitz does not deserve any explanations or justifications.

Am Yisrael Chai!

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard

The Real Issue: Gaza is Jewish

2009-01-07T16:22:00.001-08:00

Israel has the world's 4th strongest army, superior weapons, arms and technology. Hamas, while armed with deadly weapons smuggled in from Egypt and supplied by Iran, is nothing compared to Israeli firepower. If Israel wanted, the Hamastan stronghold in Gaza could be wiped out in an aerial assault in a number of hours. Yet Hamas possesses something which the current Israeli leadership does not possess: confidence in the justness of its cause.

Watching the news, Israel's claim in defense of its actions has been that Israel the right to defend itself. Faced with a genocidal group of terrorists committed to murdering and maiming as many Jews as possible, all Israel has to say is that it has the right to defend itself. Lost amidst all of the rhetoric and slogans is the fact that Hamas has repeatedly and consistently violated Israel's sovereignty and contests its right to exist as a nation. Sadly, the war being fought in Gaza is not a war to conquer Gaza, but rather a war to get rid of Gaza. In summer of 2005, Israel unilaterally disengaged from Gaza, expelling close to 10 000 Jewish residents and dismantling their towns and villages, in an attempt to allow Gazans to build their own state. The discussion over the Disengagement consisted of mainly security, whether or not it would lead to peace or to rockets. Those who argued the latter were vindicated. Absent from the debate was Israel's entitlement to Gaza.

Israel's military failed miserably during the Second Lebanon War because its leadership lacked defined goals and objectives. While, thank G-d, Israel has been succeeding militarily in Gaza, it still lacks the same basic purpose. Israel's leaders have repeatedly emphasized that they do not intend to re-occupy Gaza and that should Hamas be destroyed, Gaza will be given over to Fatah. The powers that be see the current war as simply another means to further the two state (final) solution, the so-called "Road Map to Peace". In the minds of many Israelis, Gaza is simply not our land. The war is being fought to make the Disengagement final, to stop the rockets and finally be done with Gaza. Instead of realizing the errors of the Gaza Disengagement, Israel's leaders are determined to repeat the same mistakes in Judea and Samaria. Anyone with a limited amount of intelligence can see that the Hamas rockets in Sderot, Ashkelon and Ashdod are the fruits of the Disengagement.

Israel is in a stalemate with Hamas. It has surrounded Gaza City but hesitates to go in. The political leadership want to leave Gaza as soon as possible, and preferably hand it over to the more "moderate" Fatah murderers. The same mentality remains that Gaza is foreign turf. Because of this basic assumption, Israel cannot succeed in vanquishing Hamas. It must be repeated and repeated again, incessantly, to counter the Big Lie of Arab propaganda: The Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. Never in the annals of history has there been a sovereign Palestinian country, or a distinct Palestinian people, culture or language. The only three independent nations in the Land of Israel have been Jewish: the Davidic kingdom, the Hasmonean dynasty and the modern state of Israel. The term 'Palestine' was invented by the Roman emperor Hadrian after he crushed the Jewish revolt in 70 CE. Destroying the Temple in Jerusalem and scattering the Jews to across the world, he renamed Judea 'Palestinae', in the name of an ancient extinct people, the Philistines, in an attempt to erase the Jewish connection to Israel. Many successive empire conquered the Land of Israel yet none ever bothered to build their own nation. When Islam spread through the Middle-East in the 7th century, the Arabs moved into and occupied the geographical entity known as Palestine, yet never once did they consider themselves Palestinian. British document from the Mandatory period consistently refer to "the Jews and Arabs of Palestine", not the Jews and Palestinians. Only in 1967, once the Arabs had lost 6 wars against Israel did they decide on a new tactic and spun the tale of the "Palestine", stolen and occupied by the Jews.

This is not a conflict about territory, or about rockets and settlements. It is about moral rights, whether or not the Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people or to the Arabs. In a betrayal of history, Israel's leaders do not have the strength and moral convictions to assert Jewish rights from river to sea. Precisely for this reason does Israel find itself incapable of dispatching a ragtag band of murderers and terrorists. The Arabs speak about "dying for Palestine", martyrdom, and will not compromise on an inch of what they consider holy soil. Israel speaks about self-defense, tactical victories, cease-fires, truces and the "peace process". It is no surprise that Hamas shows not signs of surrender despite an intense 11-day barrage while Israel's leadership (but not people) are demonstrating war weariness. The corrupt Kadima government is determine to surrender as much Jewish land as possible. A post-Zionist government does not have the capacity to implement the necessary solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Gaza is firmly Jewish. It was a part of the tribal inheritance of Judah, was the site of Samson's campaigns against the Philistines and where David slew Goliath. During Greek times, it fell to Alexander the Great and was eventually recaptured by the Hasmoneans. It was home to a thriving and flourishing Jewish community. In 1967, A. Ovadiah excavated the area and discovered a synagogue from the sixth century C.E. Archaeology evidence supports the biblical premise of a continuous Jewish presence from the Late bronze period until the Byzantine period (ca. 1500 B.C.E. through 632 C.E.) It must be recalled that most of the Arabs living in Israel only came in the middle to late 1920’s to escape economic hardship and political persecution by their own people for better opportunity. Gaza, as well as Judea and Samaria, remain under illegal Arab occupation and must be returned to their rightful owners. International law, enshrined in the League of Nations mandate for Palestine and recognized by the UN, gives the Jewish people sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel, and both sides of the Jordan. Various British policies further limited and reduced the area to be given towards a Jewish homeland. However, the world body has never repealed the Jewish right to the Land of Israel under the International law.

A true and lasting peace will only come to the region once Gush Katif, Neve Dekalim and all of the destroyed Jewish towns are re-built on the ruins of Hamas. The Jews of Gaza were unjustly expelled from their rightful homes. The entire leadership responsible for the Expulsion must be tried for crimes against the Jewish people. Only once Israel has the strength to firmly declare that the entire Land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, will the conflict be resolved. Until then, rockets and suicide bombings will continually maim and kill Jews. Israel's leaders crave world attention and acceptance and therefore are hesitant to assert Jewish rights over the Land. The offensive in Gaza has been limited due to international pressure. What Israel's weak leaders don't realize is that the world body hates the Jewish people. Never will the UN and EU be satisfied until Israel is wiped off the map, G-d forbid. As a wise man once said: "It is better to have an Israel that the entire world hates than an Auschwitz that world loves". Jewish morality demands that Israel defend its citizens and re-conquer its land. Our enemies must be either completely destroyed or transfered from the Land.

History will judge harshly those who seek to separate the Jewish people from their inheritance. The nation that begged, three times a day that "our eyes should behold Your return to Zion in mercy", cannot be defeated. "And I will turn the captivity of My people Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof; they shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them, saith the LORD thy God." (Amos 9:14-15). May we see the day when the prophecy of Amos is fulfilled. Amen!

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard

Not Afraid to be Unique

2008-12-22T14:35:00.000-08:00

Peled said that Israelis want to celebrate Christmas because they do not want to feel culturally isolated from the rest of the world.

"Celebrating only Hanukka set us apart, makes us different. People don't want to feel that way. They want to be part of world," she said.

With these words, Tamir Peled, has signed the death warrant of the Jewish people. Explaining the increasing visibility of Christmas decorations in certain places in Israel, Peled says that many Israelis don't want to be different. They feel that Chanukkah sets them apart, something that they are uncomfortable with. This desire to fit in, to be alike the nations, is the slow end of the Jews.

The Greeks were one of the most tolerant and universal-minded peoples in the ancient world. It is doubtful that they oppressed or persecuted any other people besides the Jews. How did a people known for its openness and love of philosophy come to commit so many atrocities against the Jews? It is hard to understand how the people that gave the world democracy, Plato and Aristotle, were the same ones as those who murdered Chana's 7 sons before her eyes for not bowing to an idol, or martyred the saintly Rabbi Eliezer for refusing to eat pork.

Alexander the Great and his Hellenistic successors wanted to unite the world under Greek culture and philosophy. The ancient pagans were the ultimate in relativism as they syncretized gods and beliefs with great ease. The Greeks adopted the gods of the nations that they conquered and in return gave them their Pantheon. The only people who refused to do this were the Jews. The Jews insisted on circumcising themselves, alone of all the ancients, did not eat the same food as non-Jews and did not share in any of their customs. The Greeks were outraged when they discovered that the Jewish Temple contained no idol or statue. They forbade the circumcision, the mark of the covenant between the Jews and G-d. They decreed that anyone caught studying Torah, the divine laws, observing the Shabbat, the holy day, or keeping kosher was to be put to death. They outlawed the Sanhedrin's proclamation of the New Month, the obligation which gave the Jewish people mastery over time.

The Greeks did not wish to eradicate the Jews physically, nor did they wish to destroy them. Rather, the Greeks wanted to put an end to the Torah, G-d's laws which set the Jewish people apart. They desecrated the Temple, and erected a statue of Zeus in the Holy of Holies. They built giant sports arenas and theaters in Jerusalem and the countryside to try and entice the Jews into the Greek culture. In fact, many of the rich and elite became known as Hellenizers because of their affinity for the Greek culture. The Greeks polluted all of the oil in the Temple, reserved for kindling the Golden Menorah, symbolic of their desire to stamp out the Torah and its light.

Oil characterized the Jewish people because just as oil does not mix with other liquids, so too do the Jews not mix with other nations. Just as oil always rises to the top, Jews always rise above the mundaneness and triviality of the world, and above the attempts of those who wish to wipe them out. The prophet Bilaam called the Jews "a people that shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations." (Numbers 23:9) The essence of the Jewish people is to be separate, to be distinct and to be holy. The Uniqueness of the Divine is paralleled by the uniqueness of the Jewish people, G-d's chosen vessel through which to reveal His Oneness and Majesty. G-d chose the nation of Israel to bring consciousness of G-d to the entire world, and to spread the light of Torah.

Many Jews unfortunately do not want to be alone. They hate their Jewishness, their choseness and distinct-ness with a passion. Deep down, they are afraid of being unique. These Jews want desperately to be accepted. Little do they realize that it is their Jewish destiny to be different. Our Father Avraham was called the 'Ivri' because he stood on one ever, side, while the entire world stood on the other. In a society that worshipped the forces of nature and paid homage to tyrants, Avraham had the courage to stand apart.

Our Sages tell us that Israel was redeemed from Egypt by virtue of the fact that they retained their identity. The Jews did not change their Hebrew names, adapt their dress to meet Egyptian fashion and spoke only their Hebrew tongue. Throughout the ages, the Jews resisted assimilation and were therefore able to outlast any other nation.

When Jews wish to become like the other nations, it is the beginning of the end. As G-d says: "If you sever yourselves from the other peoples, then you belong to me; but if not, then you belong to Nebuchadnezzar and his fellows." (Midrash, Sifra 93d) In the United States, Judaism is disappearing rapidly in a Silent Holocaust of assimilation, with a 50% assimilation rate. According to research, non-Orthodox Jewry will be largely extinct within the span of 3 generations if the current trend prevails. In Israel, the absurd political situation is a symptom of people of little faith desiring to be accepted by the world. The Israeli government and a large segment of the population are willing to sacrifice land, retreat, withdraw and compromise, all to be accepted by a world that stood silently as European Jewry chocked and burnt in the gas chambers and ovens. Such a government of lemmings is leading the nation of Israel back into the ghettos of exile.

The Jewish nation did not survive 2000 years of exile in order to simply be a cultural club. We are told that G-d created the world for the sake of Israel. In order for G-d's Truth to be revealed to the world, He needs a chosen people dwelling in a holy land living by divine laws. Our ancestors rose up against the Greeks so that they should be able to keep the Torah freely, and not be overwhelmed by Greek cultural influence. "Ye are My witnesses, saith the LORD, and My servant whom I have chosen; that ye may know and believe Me, and understand that I am He; before Me there was no God formed, neither shall any be after Me." (Isaiah 43:10) That is our mission, our calling. Tamir Peled's words, which echo those of the Hellenizers before him, are a death sentence to the Jewish nation.

This Chanukkah, let us discover what makes us unique and may we spread the light of Torah around the world. May G-d illuminate the darkness that clouds of lives, speedily in our days.

Cross-posted to the Truth about Moshiach

No to a Two-State (Final) Solution

2008-12-22T13:48:00.001-08:00

Check out the 18.

Don't Let the Light Go Out

2008-12-17T18:52:00.000-08:00

Don't let the light go out. This light has seen mighty empires comes and go. It saw the Greece rise up and conquer world, only to fade away. This light saw the Roman empire grown and collapse. It saw mighty rulers, fearless generals and mighty warriors disappear, without a trace. Yet the light remains.

Don't let the light go out. This light overcame the forces of Hellenism and hedonism. It shone through the darkness of immorality and vanity. It gave guidance and meaning to thousands of generations of Jews who resisted assimilation, who refused to forsake their Torah and their G-d. This light illuminated the secularism that blinded many and sought to lead the Jewish people astray. Philosophies, ideologies and 'isms' are relegated to the dustbin of history, yet the light remains.

Don't let the light go out. It was tended and nurtured lovingly by Jews throughout the ages, often at the risk of their lives. It was protected and treasured despite pain, despite poverty, despite hardship and persecution. Downtrodden, humiliated and weak, the light gave us strength. When there was no hope, the light promised us a better future.

Don't let the light go out. It shone brightly in Morocco and Poland, in Baghdad and Paris. It illuminated the streets of Minsk and Pinsk, Istanbul and Fez, Shanghai and Rome. Our enemies could not extinguish it. Withstanding the cross and the crescent, crusaders and mujahadeen, the light still burns. Under the windows of popes and kings, emperors and sultans, shas and dukes, the light proclaimed that we were still here.

Don't let the light go out. It was lit hidden in cellars, for fear of the Inquisitors racks. It was lit in ghettos and camps, in the shadow of the gas chambers and crematorium. It was lit in the freezing gulag's, the punishment for wishing to return home. It burnt long after Crusaders and Almohads, revolutionaries and fascists, Nazis and Communists, disappeared from the earth and will burn long after the suicide bomber, "holy warrior" and jihadist terrorist. For the miracles performed for us in those days, in this time.

Don't let the light go out. The light that was kindled at the rededication of the Second Temple, and will be kindled at the dedication of the Third Temple, may it be soon. The light that has returned home after two thousands years of exile, the light that blossoms in its holy land. The light that was shot out in Mumbai, massacred on the streets on Jerusalem, in pizzerias and cafes, synagogues and study halls. The light that is threatened by assimilation and ignorance. The light that has seen history, yet still shines. Don't let the light go out.

Chag Chanukkah Sameach!

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard and the Truth about Moshiach

"But some of my best friends are Jewish..."

2008-12-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

I get it. You are not anti-semitic. Certainly not. That is ridiculous. I'm only charging you with that to shut you up, to slander you, to ignore what you have to say. Far be it from you to hate Jews. You eat bagels and lox and once were invited to your co-worker's Passover seder. You've seen "Fiddler on the Roof" at least 4 times. You even dated a Jewish girl in college. What more proof do I need? You have nothing against Jews; we've already established that. You just hate Israel. Jews aren't a people; they're just a religious group. There's a big difference between being an anti-Zionist and an anti-semite. Of course.

Keep talking. Maybe if you say if enough, you'll succeed in convincing someone. Certainly, only a Zionist fascist would deduce that being committed to the destruction of the Jewish state would imply hatred of Jews. Seeing as the most probable way that the State of Israel would come to an end is either through a nuclear Holocaust or at the hands of genocidal invading armies, that suggestion doesn't seem so ridiculous. And the fact that the only country you want wiped off the face of the earth is Israel sets off some alarms. Anti-Zionist, if you're simply naive rather than genocidal, know that the end of the State of Israel would mean the mass murder of its over 6 million Jewish inhabitants. But you have a Jewish doctor...

Your ranting and raving over "poor Palestinians children" every time Israel defends itself is reasonable. Just like your opposition to Jews protecting their right to exist. Hey, you read Anne Frank's diary. Now that's a Jew that you can like! Why can't we all be more like her? Anti-Zionist, let's call a spade a spade. You understand the motives behind a suicide bomber blowing himself up in a cafe full of Jews, or why someone would gun down a library full of students. You explain that its because of "poverty", "racism" or "the occupation" that they lynch Jewish soldiers and dance on their corpses, displaying their bloody hands proudly to the world. And yet no sort of reaction on the part of the attacked is permissible, at least if the victim is Jewish. For a Jew to fight back would be a disproportionate response. It would be a war crime, and you would evoke every despicable sort of Nazi comparison possible.

Anti-Zionist, are you getting the picture? Do you see the error of your ways, or is your hatred much deeper engrained? You proclaim the right of self-determination for all peoples, especially the made-up entity known as the "Palestinians", except for Jews. While every little tribe and clan should be able to make its own decisions, only Jews must be condemned to constantly live as minorities, at the mercies of others. You have no problem with Jews, as long as they know their place and keep quiet. A weak Jew is your favourite. Israel is victim to your double-standards, delegitimization and demonization. You condemn as a racist apartheid state the only country in the Middle East with free elections, based on democratic principles. The most diverse country in the region is racist in your eyes. A Jew living in Judea and Samaria is a crime against humanity. A Jew praying at his most holy site, the Temple Mount, is forbidden lest the Arabs be offended. Jews have no right to a state unless they accept a Rwanda-style bi-national state, while no other people would except such a thing. Jews should just be happy with whatever they're given- they're lucky we let them live.

Still, you're not an anti-semite. Only a fool or a neocon warmongerer would accuse you of that. After all, the Jews aren't even a people. They're just a religious group. Too bad that Jews have always defined themselves as a nation, held together by common bonds of religion, faith, culture, heritage and ancestry. You are chief rabbi now, and you have decided that we are not a people. And the only Jews whose opinions count are Neturai Karta and the loony self-loathing Left. It doesn't matter that living in Israel is equivalent to keeping the entire Torah, according to Jewish law. It is immaterial that the vast majority of the world's Jews choose to express their identity through nationalism and peoplehood. You make the rules, great rebbe and pasken. And you've decided that we don't deserve a country. In fact, such a thing is racist. Never mind that the French, Chinese, Iraqi and Zulu are entitled to one. Jews can only exist as guests in somebody else's country. Their own is racist and colonialist.

Anti-Zionist, let's not pretend here. You use the same classic anti-semitic canards in a new anti-Israel wrapping. The collective guilt of the Jews over their crimes of deicide has been replaced with Israel's original sin of land-grabbing and theft, the "Nakba", or disaster. The Zionists are responsible for the world's current ills and led the US into its disastrous war in Iraq. The Mossad was behind 9/11 and just about every other man-made and natural disaster since and before then. AIPAC and the Israel lobby are pulling the strings behind the US government. Jews no longer kidnap Christian babies to use their blood for matzot; they murder Arab babies with impunity. Jews don't poison the wells but rather Israel intentionally spreads disease among the Arabs.

Save it. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably hates Jews. You hate the Jewish state vehemently. You are obsessed with Israel/Jewish/Zionist conspiracies and see the Mossad's/Jew's hands behind everything. Check on double standards. Check on disproportionate condemnations. Check on historical revisionism and denial of Jewish basic rights. You, my friend, have all the basic characteristic of the classic anti-semite. Anti-semitism has proved itself extremely resilient throughout the ages, making itself suitable for every particular time and ideology. Anti-Zionism is simply its latest reincarnation. You're not fooling anyone. Give up the act.

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard and Stop Raping Israel

Let it Shine

2008-11-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

Today is Rosh Chodesh Kislev, the beginning of the month of Kislev, synonymous with Chanukkah, light, joy and celebration. In the month of Kislev, the Maccabees rededicated the Temple in Jerusalem which had been defiled by the Greeks. This month represents the triumph of the light of Torah, goodness and holiness over the forces of profanity, evil and hatred. During the 8 days of Chanukkah, we merit the return of the Or HaGanuz, the hidden primordial light that G-d created for the benefit of the righteous. The name of the month, Kislev, literally means 'kes'- hidden, 'lev'- 36. 36, equal to the lights of Chanukkah, stands for the 36 hours in which the divine light was on the Earth, until G-d hid it away for future. On the Rosh Chodesh of the month of lights, 5 lights of Torah have been brutally extinguished.

The Torah is a book deeply devoted to life. We are told that we should live by G-d's laws, and not die by them. We refer to G-d as the G-d of Life, the G-d who desires that the wicked not die but that they repent and live. As Jews, we cherish and appreciate life deeply. That is why the gratuitous violence going on in India pains us to our core. When the Greeks ruled Eretz Yisrael, they tried to distance Israel from the Torah and to hide the divine light. That is why we celebrate our renewed independence with candle lighting. We light the Chanukkah candles in our windows, in order to publicize the miracle. We want the light of Torah to overflow all around the world. Not surprisingly, there are Jews willing and committed to spreading such light to the most nether reaches of the globe.

The Chabad-Lubavitch movement has thousands of shlichim who give spiritual comfort and strengthen Jewish communities worldwide. Gavriel and Rivkah Holtzberg were two of those shlichim who moved away from their families in NY and Israel and went to live in India, an extremely remote country with a very small Jewish community, in order to provide food and hospitality to Israeli tourists there. They had little financial incentive to move so far away and to put themselves in danger, yet they chose to do so in order to bring Jews closer to Torah. These two holy people, of blessed memory, were shining examples of the light of altruism, of human kindness and decency. The Chabad center in Mumbai, India, was open to anyone who needed a place to sleep, eat, spend Shabbat or study Torah.

"Gabi and Rivky Holtzberg made the ultimate sacrifice," said Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, vice chairman of Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch, the educational arm of Chabad-Lubavitch. "As emissaries to Mumbai, Gabi and Rivky gave up the comforts of the West in order to spread Jewish pride in a corner of the world that was a frequent stop for throngs of Israeli tourists. Their Chabad House was popular among the local community, as well as with visiting businesspeople.

"For five years, they ran a synagogue and Torah classes, and helped people dealing with drug addiction and poverty," continued the statement. "Their selfless love will live on with all the people they touched. We will continue the work they started."

These two holy lights were brutally put out, along with hundreds of innocent people, by evil and cowardly murderers, committed to a religion of hatred and violence. In a senseless act commanded by a demonic deity, Islamic terrorists snuffed out the lives of hundreds of innocent people. A religion that desires only death and destruction, which creates nothing but only maims and murders, has spawned tens of thousands of deadly attacks such as this. Whether in New York, Jerusalem, London, Bali or Mumbai, these terrorists brazenly kill innocent civilians. Such an ideology is the complete antithesis of that of the light of Chanukkah, one which cannot coexist with the peace of the Torah. This cruel Islamic belief of war and hatred must be combatted and eradicated.

The sign of Kislev is that of Sagittarius, the archer, keshet. In Judaism, the keshet represents the forces of prayer. As Yaakov said to Yosef on his death bed, "which I took out of the hand of the Amorite with my sword and with my bow" (Genesis 48:22), meaning with prayer. The power and strength of the Jewish people is our prayer, our keshet. The keshet of prayer is opposite to Yishmael, who is called a roveh kashet, an archer. Only when the Jewish people unite and use our bow and arrow, our collective prayer, can we defeat the wicked archer of Yishmael. Yishmael, as the Torah tells us, is a wild ass of a man, his hand in everything, and everyone's hand against his. He is cruel and violent, a terrorist who murders at will. Without remorse, Yishmael wipes out the lights of the Torah and kills those who uphold and cherish life. He has no guilt, no conscious, but lives only to destroy. Yishmael flies planes into skyscrapers, dances as teenagers are shot to death while learning Torah, beheads captives and dances on the bodies of his victims. He is truly a wild ass of a man, out of control and bent on world domination. Now more than ever must Am Yisrael destroy the archer by using our power of archery, to cry out to HaShem to save us.

Just as the Greeks fell away against the holiness of the Torah, so too will Yishmael not be able to succeed in snuffing out the light so callously. The Chanukkiah is displaying in public so that the light should spread and illuminate the darkness. In these trying times, may we speedily to see a new light shine upon Zion, and the darkness that plagues the world be lifted. May Hashem comfort the families of all those killed by the evil archer in Mumbai among the mourner of Zion and Jerusalem and may we this month be inaugurated upon us for goodness and for blessing, for salvation and comfort.

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard and Jewish Vengeance

Force of History

2008-11-25T18:34:00.000-08:00

Enlightenment-age Jews felt that with the gradual erosion of the Church's power, traditional anti-semitism would soon disappear. In anticipation of becoming full citizens of their respective countries, they declared themselves "Frenchmen (or Germans, or Americans) of the Mosaic Faith". They were Jews in their homes and men in the street. A new age of equal rights was dawning upon them.

This hopeful dream was shattered in the aftermath of the Dreyfus affair, when anti-semitism in France attacked full force, ater 100 years of Jewish emancipation. Cries of "death to the Jews" woke the Jews up from their slumber. Many realized that anti-semitism made it virtually impossible for Jews to live peacefully in foreign countries. Assimilation could never be complete as the anti-semite would always remind the Jew of his origins. These Jews decided that the only solution to anti-semitism was for Jews to forsake the lands of the exiles and build a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. However, the ultimate idea of assimilation was not lost: instead of being good socialists in their home countries, they would build a good socialist state in Israel. The socialist Zionists hoped that in Israel they would create a new Jew, cut off from the ties of the past, a build a secular, socialist society. This new Jewish state would be accepted among the brotherhood of nations as an equal member.

In a great irony of history, after having returned from 2000 years in exile, cut off from our Land, the leaders of Israel today are busy carving the Land up. They are planning to expel 100 000 Jews from their homes, G-d forbid, and to give Judea and Samaria, the Biblical homeland of the Jewish people, up to its enemies. They have fought against traditional Jewish education and raised an ignorant and rootless generation, unattached to Jewish customs, history and practice. The Israeli Left is displaying suicidal tendencies in an irrational drive to surrender and retreat. They put their own people at risk in a desire to withdraw from land and transfer it to the Arabs. What is this insane desire? Israel, an extremely tiny state, could not survive a hostile terror state carved out of its belly. Another Arab state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza would put every singly major Israeli city within rocket range. Ben-Gurion international airport would be under constant threat and if one plane were to be shot down, aliyah, trade and tourism would be effectively over. It seems that despite any logical reasons to the contrary, the Left wants nothing more than to give up as much territory as possible. The spineless and corrupt leaders constantly bow before international pressure in order to appease the rabid anti-semites in the UN and the EU. What is the reason for these self-destructive impulses?

Just like the assimilated Jews of Europe when confronted with brutal hatred, the leftist establishment in Israel is reminded of its Jewish identity by the two-fold force of Jewish history and international rejection. The Israeli Left, inheritors of the secular, socialist vision of the new Jew, want nothing more than to escape Jewish history. All of their policies represent an attempt to flee from their own identity. After the 6 Days' War, Israel found itself in possession of an extremely large amount of territory, central to Jewish history. Instead of liberating Jewish holy places and settling the newly conquered land, the government attempted to return control to the Arabs. What nation would return land conquered in a defensive war, especially land so precious to the Jewish nation? The answer is simple: Judea and Samaria, with its holy sites and biblical locations, reminds the Israeli Left of their Judaism. All of the stories of the Tanach took place in Judea and Samaria. Avraham and David did not walk down Shenkin street, neither did they cruise down the trendy Tel-Aviv hotspots. They did, however, live and die in Judea and Samaria, in places that still exist today. The Israeli government has decided to evacuate settlers from Hebron. Hebron is the foundation of Judaism, where our Patriarchs and Matriarchs are buried. If they are able to free themselves of Hebron, so they believe, they will not be reminded of Judaism.

One could hardly think that the Jewish nation survived oppression and persecution, pogroms and Holocaust, and was returned to its own land simply to bar-hop or go to the beach. The Jewish nation has a destiny to keep the Torah and to become a light unto the nations. Judea and Samaria remind the Left of this. When they see Jews sacrificing themselves to live in these lands, Jews pouring out their souls at the Kotel, Mearat HaMachpela, Kever Rachel and all of the tombs of our forebearers, they cannot forget their mission. They know deep down in their souls how there is more to the Land of Israel than sunshine and hummus. And they cannot abide this. However disturbs their good life must be expelled.

In the past, the Jews had no choice in their identity as anti-semites were quick to point them out. When overt anti-semitism began to fade, assimilation and intermarriage became rampant. Similarly, the hatred of the United Nations and the international body towards the State of Israel lets the Left know that the are still Jews. Israel is the Jew among the Nations. That is behind the intense desire to for peace. Peace, peace, peace. Peace at any cost, any price, any sacrifice. For, according to the Left, if peace is achieved, Israel will be accepted by the world and nobody will dare remind them that they are Jews. If 100 000 Jews need to be thrown out of their homes, so be it. The end result will be acceptance by the world. The condemnations and denounciations of the United Nations has taken the place of the discriminatory restrictions against Jews. Even if they choose not to practice Judaism, the hostility towards them is enough to let the Left know that they have not fully assimilated.

The Jewish nation has a destiny. It was chosen by HaShem, the G-d of the Universe, to bring His Torah to the entire world and to make this world a dwelling place for Him. Such a perfected world necessitates a chosen people living in a special land according to a holy law. Those who oppose such a plan try to divorce Israel from its biblical heritage and mandate by force. However, Israel's identity catches up with it always. When the Jews try to flee from who they really are, the angry nations of the world are quick to remind them. We must remember our divine calling as the Navi says (Isaiah 42:6) "I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and have taken hold of thy hand, and kept thee, and set thee for a covenant of the people, for a light of the nations; To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison-house." Let us embrace our destiny rather than having it forced upon us unwillingly.

Reading the Instruction Manual

2008-11-16T16:08:00.000-08:00

"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that change darkness into light, and light into darkness; that change bitter into sweet, and sweet into bitter!"

Like any good product creator, G-d provided His world with a blueprint for successful and happy lives. G-d gave us His holy Torah so that we should live lives with more meaning and more blessing. The Torah is the path to reaching G-d and safely maneuvering through life's obstacles. As the Sages teach, "delve into it and continue to delve into it, because everything is in it". The secret to overcoming every problem and mishap is contained in G-d's Torah. In even the most seemingly trivial verse, there is eternal and divine wisdom for all ages. Whether we are dealing with ancient halachic problems or modern controversies, the answer lies in the Torah.

If a person buys a new gadget but neglects to read the instruction manual, he will quickly find that he has trouble working the device. A person may only watch basic cable because he never took the time to learn how to install satellite TV. When we ignore what the instructions tell us, we barely use a minimum of our potential, simply because we never knew that more existed. G-d says of His Torah: “The Torah I give you, is a good acquisition; don’t abandon it.” (Proverbs 4:2) What is a good acquisition? The Torah is the path to reaching G-dliness, to rising above the emptiness and materialism of the world and elevating the mundane into the holy. Torah enable us to find holy everywhere, to invite G-d into our lives and to become worthy of His Presence. When we follow the Torah, we can see clearly with divine intuition. It enables us l'havdil, to differentiate, between right and wrong. It is the key to a moral society, which is why all people and nations have adopted at least aspect of the Torah. Only a society based on the Torah-notion of ethical monotheism, of a G-d who demands morality and justice, can flourish and prosper.

Unfortunately, when we abandon the Torah, we abandon our moral compass. In the portion of Haazinu, Moses calls the nation of Israel a "foolish people and unwise" (Deut. 32:6). In his rebuke of Israel, he warns them that if the disobey G-d, they will be stricken with "the blindness of Egypt". What was Egypt's great blindness? In their stubbornness, their resistance to listen to G-d and their persistence in their wicked ways, they brought down their great civilization. When we have no Torah to guide us, we are empty and cannot effectively label right and wrong.

Today, we are in precisely this situation. Due to our rejection of the Torah and our insistence of following the foibles of our own heart, we have subjected ourselves to a catastrophe of our own doing. The greatest tragedies of the modern era, Nazism, Communism and the rise of Islamic fascism, all go to demonstrate what happens when man forgets the moral G-d of Abraham. The former show the dangers of a man-made morality which will eventually lead to moral relativism and wholesale slaughter, while the latter represents the evil of religion without "thou shalt not murder". It is in this sick and twisted world that murderers who shoot teenagers studying in yeshiva or rain rockets down on schools are called 'militants' while denouncing as 'disproportionate' those who seek to defend themselves.

When man does not use the Torah to guide him, he is prone to moral relativism. It is this relativism that creates a culture of permissiveness, where 'intolerance' and 'being judgemental' are the greatest slurs. It is a society in which two men are allowed to marry, where the sanctity of life is constantly under attack, whether for infants, the elderly or the disabled. It is a society that will allow anything at any time and that refuses to call people to task for their actions. In this dangerous moral void, people cringe at the word 'evil', or laugh derisively at at, considering it archaic and unenlightened. People prefer to hide their heads in the sand rather than confront terror and hate. Honour killings and female genital mutilation are tolerated in the name of "cultural diversity". Tyrants and despots are lauded as freedom fighters and human rights activists. A leader who calls for the destruction of another state and its people is cheered before the assembled nations of the world. Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil, that cannot draw any lines, who allow evil to fester and spread.

G-d gave mankind free will and in doing this, He abdicated Himself from responsibility. That is one of the most frightening and empowering concepts in the entire Torah. "See, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil. I have commanded you today to love Hashem your G-d, to walk in his paths, and to keep His Commandments, Decrees, and Laws. You will then live and flourish, and Hashem your G-d will bless you... But if your heart turns astray, and you do not listen... I am warning you today that you will be exterminated... I call heaven and earth as witnesses. Before you I have placed life and death, the blessing and the curse. You must choose life, so that you and your descendants will live." (Deut. 30:15-19) G-d commands us to choose life, to embrace His Torah and to perfect His world. The choice is stark: either Torah and moral clarity, or be condemned to emptiness and vanity, blindness and triviality. G-d laments: "If they would have abandoned Me but kept My Torah, its inherent light would have brought them back to Me." The power is in our hands. We need to read the instruction manual.

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard and Jewish Vengeance

Kristallnacht: See No Evil

2008-11-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

Tonight is the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the most severe pogrom of the century and the beginning of the end of European Jewry. On November 9-10, 1938, SS officers and German mobs destroyed Jewish property throughout the Reich. Over 90 Jews were murdered, 26,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, close to 200 synagogues were burnt or razed, and almost 7,500 Jewish businesses were destroyed.

While Hitler claimed that the pogrom was a spontaneous outburst following the assassination of German official Vom Rath by Jewish boy, Hershel Greenspan, the attacks were methodically planned. Kristallnacht marked the transition from discriminatory and racist measures to physical violence and terror against Germany's Jews. Despite the violence against Germany's Jews, no country was willing to open their doors to them. As Germany's Jews sought refuge from Nazi hatred and persecution, the world was closing the ways of escape. Paltry protests notwithstanding, the world was largely silent in the face of the orgy of hate that was Kristallnacht. By not heeding the warning signs, 6 million Jews were murdered as the world stood idly by. As half of the world collaborated with the Nazis to exterminate the Jews, the other half closed their eyes and ears to the evil.

If the Holocaust is commemorate once a year on Yom HaShoah, why do we mark Kristallnacht? On Yom HaShoah we mourn the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis. We contemplate the barbarity of the Final Solution, the death camps, the killing fields, the gas chambers and ovens. Kristallnacht, however, marks the beginning of the end. Yom HaShoah marks the end product while Kristallnacht is all about the process. Holocausts do not begin with deportations or gas chambers. They begin with words, with demonizations and delegitimization, accompanied by silence.

It is incredible to think that 70 years after Kristallnacht, the world has scarcely learned this lesson. A month and a half ago, the President of Iran spoke before the United Nations, an international organization founded in the wake of the genocide of Europe's Jews, and repeated all of the classic anti-Jewish canards and myths to the applause of world leaders. He told the assembled representers of the world's nations that the current financial crisis is the fault of the Jews. This man put his anti-semitism in vivid display as he repeated the lies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He denies the Holocaust while planning a second one. His hatred for the Jewish people goes ignored by the world leaders, who chose to honour him with a dinner at the Hyatt Hotel. He has called the State of Israel "a stinking corpse", "a rotten tree" and many other vile things. He pledges to finish Hitler's mission and wipe the Jewish state "off the face of the Earth". He funds terror groups around the world and incites his people to genocide. And the world is silent.

This satanic silence during the Holocaust has no better symbol than that of Pope Pius XII. Currently on the road to sainthood, the wartime Pope said and did little to protect Europe's Jews. A man whose word commanded millions of Catholics worldwide and carried moral authority, was not able to clearly condemn the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. When the Jews of Rome were rounded up from right under his window, literally, and send train-bound to Auschwitz, the Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church held his tongue and allowed the damned to suffocate in the gas chambers. Today, the Vatican seeks to exonerate him from his complicity in mass murder and raise him to the level of a saint. Instead of dealing with its tragic and cowardly history, the Church prefers to whitewash the events of the past.

As the witnesses to this most dark era in human history die out, it is our duty to remember those who died at the altar of hate because the world looked away. Today, the fires of anti-semitism in the Islamic world, Europe and North America burn brightly. The most insidious hate hides behind humanitarian pretenses and seeks to delegitimize the Jewish State. The UN is getting ready for the Second Durban hate-fest. A neo-Nazi leader in Austria was given a state funeral and full miliatry honours, his death having been blamed on the Mossad. On this eve of Kristallnacht, the first nail in the coffin of European Jewry, it is the duty of every moral and decent Jew and non-Jew to protest anti-semitism and hatred in all of its various forms. Otherwise, we do a disservice to the memory of the 6 million, and invite disaster upon ourselves once again.

***

God full of mercy who dwells on high
Protector of widows and father for the fatherless
Please be not silent and show no restraint
on behalf of the Jewish blood that has been spilled like water.
But grant perfect rest on the wings of Your Divine Presence
In the lofty abode of the holy, pure and valiant
who shine as the brightness of the heavens
to the souls of our brothers and sisters
Six million Jewish
men, women and children
Who were put to death, slaughtered, burned,
starved, buried alive
Or who suffered other forms of unnatural death
at the hands of the accursed Nazis
and their associates - may their name be wiped out!
In Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maydanek, Malthausen
and in other death camps in Europe
And who gave up their lives in order to Sanctify God's name.
Because we are at one with their memory
and we pray for the elevation of their souls
Their resting place shall be in the Garden of Eden.
Therefore, shall the Master of mercy care for them
under the protection of His wings for all time
And bind their souls in the bond of everlasting life.
O Earth! Do not conceal their blood
and let there not be a resting place for their cry
In their merit shall the remnant of Israel
return to its rightful place
And as for the holy ones, their righteousness
shall be in front of the Lord as an everlasting memory
They will come in peace and will rest in peace
They will meet their rightful destiny at the end of days
and let us say Amen.

Cross-posted to Goat's Barnyard, Jewish Vengeance and Stop Raping Israel

Halloween: Treif or Treat?

2008-10-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again. The Jack-o-lanterns, pumpkins, goblins and ghouls gave it away. My least favourite goyish holiday is here again. Halloween is celebrated in Anglo-Saxon countries worldwide and is considered a national holiday. Many Jews unfortunately participate in the Halloween festivities: trick-or-treating, decorating the house and dressing up. So is Halloween kosher?

While many Jews today prefer to focus on the universal aspect of Judaism, tikkun olam, morality, ethics, etc., Judaism demands that Jews remain a separate people. God tells Moses to teach the people:

"I am the Lord, your God. Do not follow the ways of Egypt where you once lived, nor of Canaan to where I am bringing you. Do not follow their customs (be-hukotehem lo teileichu)" (Leviticus 18:1-3, cf. also, 20:23).

Deuteronomy suggests that this prohibition is intended to prevent idolatry:

"Take heed to yourself lest you be trapped by following them, after they are destroyed from before you; and lest you inquire about their gods, saying, 'How did these nations serve their gods?' that I may also do likewise" (Deuteronomy 12:30).

While many halakhic authorities understand these injunctions to be limited to the customs of the Canaanites and Egyptians, the Rambam understands it to be a prohibition of following any non-Jewish rite or ritual. The Torah is warning us against adopting chukat hagoy, gentile customs which will lead us to assimilate. He writes:

"We do not walk after the ways of the idolaters. We do not assimilate ourselves to them; not in our clothing and not in other things like this, as it says, 'do not walk after the ways of the gentiles' (Leviticus 20:23)…Rather, a Jew should be distinct from them and recognizable through one's clothing and one's other actions, just as one is distinct from them in one's thoughts and characteristics" (Laws concerning Idolatry, 11:1).

Halloween, although today it is mostly devoid of religious significance, has pagan and Christian roots. The philosophy behind the festival is idolatrous and antithetical to the Jewish worldview. According to Wikipedia:

"Halloween has its origins in the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain (Irish pronunciation: [ˈsˠaunʲ]; from the Old Irish samain). The festival of Samhain is a celebration of the end of the harvest season in Gaelic culture, and is sometimes regarded as the "Celtic New Year". Traditionally, the festival was a time used by the ancient pagans to take stock of supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the alive and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them."

The Catholic Church celebrates Halloween as All Saint's Day and special services are held in churches worldwide. Why would any Jew celebrate a holiday even remotely connected to the Roman Catholic Church? Historically, many pogroms occurred on Halloween. Jews would be kidnapped, murdered or brutalized as part of the celebration, since Jews were associated with evil, the devil and witches.

The pagan worldview in which Halloween took root is completely contrary to Judaism's teachings. There are no ghosts and goblins, heavenly families, satanic adversaries or demons. There is only Him, the One and Only. Halloween, or Samhain, was a worship of nature and the spirits which rules it. Judaism, however, is insistent that all of nature is subservient to Him.

In short, there is nothing kosher about Halloween. It originates in pagan adoration of nature and was eventually appropriated by the Church as a day to celebrate all of their saints, many of whom were virulent anti-semites. In Eastern Europe, Halloween was a time when pogroms usually broke out. Jews weren't able to celebrate the holiday because they were hiding in cellars for their lives. Tainted with paganism, christianity and a bloody history of anti-semitism, Halloween is treif, treif, treif. This year, Halloween falls on erev shabbos, which makes it all the more unkosher. Instead of dressing up to commemorate pagan worship of nature, Jews should celebrate the day which is testimony to G-d's Creation. Ditch the ghosts and pumpkins and switch them for shabbos candles and kiddush.

I certainly won't be answering my door. But if you want to wish me a good shabbos, I'll be ready for your knock.

Cross-posted to the Truth about Moshiach

Emunah and Bitachon on Sukkot

2008-10-19T09:23:00.000-07:00

Today is the second to last day of Sukkot. For 6 days, we have sat in our Sukkah, amidst the cold and chill, shaken by wind and rain, and yet we stand. We have eaten our meals out here. During the week-long chag, we have ventured forth from our warm, comfortable homes to make the sukkah, this little temporary hut, our dwelling place.

The sukkah, its bare walls and schach roof, teaches us that life is temporary. Despite our best intentions to secure ourselves, life is just as shaky and rough as a sukkah. There was once a man traveling through Europe in the 1800’s. He came to the town where the Chofetz Chaim had lived. The traveler stopped in to meet the great Talmid Chuchum. When he arrived at the house, he saw that the Chofetz Chaim lived in a tiny home. He knocked on the door and when he looked inside he saw a nearly empty one-bedroom apartment. The traveler asked the Chofetz Chaim, “aren’t you the great Chofetz Chaim? How can you live like this? Where are all of your possessions?” The Chofetz Chaim turned to the traveler and posed the same question. “Where are all of your possessions? All you have with you is a suitcase.” The traveler answered, “Well, I am just passing through,” to which the Chofetz Chaim responded, “I too am just passing through.”

Out here, away from our big secure brick walls, we have none other to rely on that HaShem. In the sukkah, we are literally in His presence. It makes us realize how all of the events of our lives, all of the pain, the suffering, the blessings and the harshness, how all of it comes from HaShem. We are required to look upwards and to call out unto Him. In the sukkah, there is no hiding from the Ultimate Reality: HaShem, the One and Only.

The Talmud quotes two opinions as to why we sit in the sukkah. Rabbi Akivah explains that it is because the Children of Israel sat in sukkot when they left Egypt. Rabbi Eliezer holds that it represents the clouds of glory that G-d encircled Israel in during their sojourn in the desert. The Shulcha Aruch, which never holds by the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer, surprisingly agrees with him. So what are the clouds of glory? Why do we commemorate them as opposed to all of the other miracles that G-d performed for us in the desert? The answer is simply. G-d provided the Nation of Israel with heavenly manna and a travelling well of water during our 40 years. And yet we don't commemorate those miracles because G-d had to provide us with food and water. He took us out of Egypt so He had the responsibility of feeding us. But the Clouds of Glory were simply for our own comfort. G-d led us by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. He flattened out the desert for us, raised valleys and lowered mountains. He did not let our foot falter. HaShem protected us from the elements, made sure that we didn't shvitz or get uncomfortable. The Clouds of Glory are HaShem going the extra mile to show us how much He loves us. So Sukkot is the celebrationg of G-d's love for Am Yisrael.

Yisrael, betach be'HaShem, ezram u'maginam hu. Israel, trust in HaShem, their Helper and Shield. Everything that happens to us comes directly from HaShem, the all Merciful Father. Despite the apparent harshness and injustice of a situation, it is all for the best. HaShem is kind to all and only wants us to grow. Harsh and sweet both come from HaShem as test for out own good.

Chag sameach!

Reflections on the Akko Riots

2008-10-15T18:30:00.001-07:00

Once again, the bubble of coexistence has burst before our eyes. It is plain to all those who are willing to see that tolerance and respect are not universal. In the city that some believed proved how Jews and Arabs can live in peace, violent riots have broken out.

The scene is reminiscent of medieval Europe- certainly not 21st century Israel. On the holiest day of the Jewish year, when even secular Jews respect the sanctity of Yom Kippur, an Arab driver came zooming into a Jewish area of Akko, music blaring, in a deliberate provocation. Fearing an attack similar to the ones in Jerusalem involved Arabs and vehicles, Jewish residents attempted to chase the provocateur off. Soon after, a rumour spread that the Jews had murdered this Arab driver. A call from the minaret went out to avenge this attack. Hundreds of Arab youth armed with axes converged on the Jewish areas screaming, 'death to the Jews!'. Many Jews hid in their homes until the duration of the holiday, until the police arrived.

What drove this sudden outburst of hatred? Were we not told time and time again that Jews and Arabs are cousins and that are differences are merely political? We are fed a constant stream of historical revisionism about the Jewish experience in the Arabian exile and are told to calm down. And yet, the provocation was clearly religious in nature. On a day when Jews, religious and secular alike, do not drive, fast and conduct themselves in complete solemnity and seriousness, an Arab drives into the area with his music on full blast, honking and blaring. There can be no excuse for such a blatant desecration. To further incite the crowd against the Jewish residents of Akko, the same tower from which Islam's prayers are broadcast was used to call for attack on Jews. Axe-wielding Arabs attacked Jews and vandalized their property in a pogrom in the heart of the Jewish state on Judaism's holiest of days.

The rationale behind the pogrom is one deeply rooted in the theology of Islam. Arab leaders, Hamas and Fatah, Palestinian and "Israeli" citizens, condemned the Israeli "occupation" of Akko. Akko, well within the so-called Green Line borders, was being referred to as occupied territory. It is the same mentality that calls Tel-Aviv and Haifa occupied. The Arabs feel that every inch of Israel, whether pre-67 borders or past, is occupied territory. According to their faith, Jews are to be tolerated as second-class dhimmis, with all the humiliations and degradations that accompany such a status. In their mind, there is no difference between Tel-Aviv or Ramallah- the Jews are not to rule over any Islamic land. These dhimmis must accept their condition willingly or be subjugated.

Plainly put, Israel's Arab population is not merely another group of Israelis of a different religion. It is a hostile fifth-column intent on destroying the Jewish state from within. For many years when the Arabs feared Israel's reaction, they sat quietly. Now, feeling Israel's growing lethargy and indecision, they are becoming ever-more assertive and vocal. They know that after this riot, Israel's politicians will wring their hands and scurry over to Akko to appease them, like good little ghetto Jews, cooperative dhimmis. Seeing Israel's extreme willingness to compromise over any issue, to surrender land, expel Jews or release terrorists, without guaranteed reciprocal compromises from the Arab side, the Arabs feel that Israel's days are numbered. Assaults on Jews in Judea and Samaria are growing more common as the police and authorities do nothing to prevent them. The Arabs are acting like they are masters of this house.

It is time for Israel to assert its right to Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel. A renewed Zionist commitment to the Land will shatter Arab hopes for Israel's impending demise. Unfortunately, in today's climate of post-Zionism and corruption, Israel's leaders seem more interested in currying favour with the international community instead of putting Jewish interests first. No doubt, violent attacks will increase until either Israel wakes up or finds itself thrown into the sea. This being the holiday of Sukkot, when Jews leave their secure homes and dwell in wooden huts for a week, I will not put my trust in the seemingly "secure" government and security authorities. As our flimsy Sukkot indicate, our only hope comes from Above. Israel's leaders should take a cue from the Lulav, one of the four species which we shake on Sukkot, which is invalidated is its spine is broken. A spineless Jew is not kosher. That is a lesson that Israel would be wise to heed.

Chag Sameach!

2008-10-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

Wishing all of Am Yisrael, and the entire world, a chag sameach and may our simchah be completed by the arrival of Eliyahu Hanavi and Moshiach Tzidekeneinu.