Hugo Gurdon, editor-in-chief of the Washington Examiner, recently said, “Hamas,
with the shameful complicity of the United Nations, indoctrinates Palestinians
into a moral deformity that cannot be neutralized by negotiation, by half
measures, or by taking the supposedly more civilized road to peace. It cannot
be cured. It can only be expunged by lethal force.”
Regrettably, it seems that too many
people who weren’t born evil have become the “useful idiots” who support and
stand with evil. Eventually, through their close association with evil, they
themselves succumb and become willing participants. Witness what is happening
on our top-tier university campuses and in our cities. An editorial in the
October 17th edition of the Washington
Examiner states:
Denial
of truth in academia is so bad that recent college graduates cannot recognize
reality in front of them. Asked if Hamas deliberately struck Israeli civilians,
the vast majority of adult Americans said yes, but just 32% of those aged 18 to
29 did. Universities need to be liberated from ‘renowned scholars’ who are
indoctrinating students with violent “decolonization” ideologies. Fortunately,
Ron DeSantis has been doing that. After the higher education cartel blocked
DeSantis’s choice to lead Florida State University, the governor passed a law
stripping the cartel of its power over Florida schools. When Joe Biden tried to
undermine the governor, DeSantis sued him in court. DeSantis also passed
legislation banning taxpayer dollars for ‘discriminatory’ initiatives on campus,
such as Diversity Equality and Inclusion programs. While liberal universities
across the country are forcing new hires to sign DEI “loyalty oaths” to
identity politics, DeSantis prohibited Florida universities from requiring such
statements.
While I am somewhat amazed at and
very grateful for Joe Biden’s support of Israel, I am at the same time confused
by his lifting sanctions on Iran so that they can make billions of dollars from
oil sales. Donald Trump had virtually strangled the Iranians with tough
sanctions, stopped money going to Hamas, and stopped funding the Palestinians’
pay-to-slay program. According to Senator Joe Lieberman and former Ambassador
Mark Wallace, since becoming president, Biden’s lifting of sanctions has
brought Iran approximately 35 billion dollars, thus far. In addition, Biden was
about to hand them an additional six billion which House Republicans are
holding onto. This windfall for Iran has financed Hamas and their numerous
terror proxies.
What is equally disturbing is the
lack of U.S. reaction to the Iranians openly stating their desire to destroy
Israel and defeat the United States. From the podium of the UN, Iran’s Foreign
Minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian, directly threatened us by stating that the
U.S. will not be “spared this fire,” referring to the Hamas Israel war. Since
October 17th there have been 50 attacks on U.S. interests and U.S.
bases in Syria and Iraq. There have been serious injuries to our troops. As the
attacks continue, the U.S. looks weak because we are behaving like a paper
tiger. The U.S. has two huge strike forces and missile-laden submarines in the
area. If, after the first or second strike against U.S. interests, there had
been a forceful retaliation against Iran, a strong message would have been sent.
Joe Biden wants to look strong by talking tough, all the while fecklessly doing
nothing but absorbing punches. Just as the Obama administration rewarded Iran
for bad behavior, so does our current administration. In a region which only
responds to overwhelming fire power, the U.S. is seen by the mullahs as weak.
Our reluctance to face our enemies will lead to more terror, some of which will
almost certainly be on our soil.
* * *
In Washington, leading Democrats in
critical positions are openly antisemitic. Who would have ever believed that
members of Congress could hate America and Israel and still be accepted, and
even supported, by their colleagues? Rashida Tlaib and her cheerleaders should
not be tolerated. The State Department is rife with Jew haters. Last week, 500
Biden administration (upper tier) employees (many appointed by Obama and Biden)
insisted that Biden demand that Israel immediately stop their assault on Hamas
(The Wall Street Journal, November
16). Robert Malley, Joe Biden’s special envoy to Iran is but one example of an
inside traitor. Ariadne Tabatabai, a Defense Department advisor who is a
supporter and advocate for Iran and another traitor, still has security
clearance at the Pentagon. When Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was
asked about the rise in anti-Semitism, she avoided answering the question by
discussing “Islamophobia.” As if Islamophobia and antisemitism are equivalent.
They are not! The leftist woke liberals inhabit a truth-less world of
distortion. Anything that they want to believe to be true is true for them – no
matter that it may be absolutely false. It is this environment that gives
credence to blood libels and Holocaust denial, while honoring some of the most
detestable creatures on earth posing as human beings. I pray that, by some
miracle, Joe Biden won’t succumb to the pressure from those around him, but his
record on strength, conviction, and consistency doesn’t inspire me.
* * *
Wai Wah
Chin, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, recently wrote the following
article, which appeared in the New York
Post, entitled “What’s Really at the Root of Anti-Jewish Hate on College
Campuses.”
Pro-Hamas
protests erupting on campuses across the country have shocked and dismayed
Americans. These protests are wrong for many reasons, but suffice to say it’s a
monstrous failure in moral judgment to draw equivalence between deliberately
targeting innocents for slaughter and the inevitable, often forewarned
collateral killing of innocents, especially when they’ve been planted as human
shields for terrorist installations in schools, mosques, and hospitals.
And the rationalization that Israel should
be wiped off the map because it is an apartheid state founded on settler
colonialism – that’s as fabricated a race hoax as the 1619 Project.
Many Americans, having magnanimously
acceded to the diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI) narrative for “oppressed
minorities,” feel betrayed. How can kids who linked arms with their Jewish
comrades on Oct. 6 to demand every “inclusive” accommodation in order that
every last LGBTQIA+ person “feel safe” leave their Jewish friends cowering in
fear on Oct. 8 while they, flaunting paraglider posters, lustily celebrate
terrorists who slaughtered kids and shouted “Kill all Jews”?
For this betrayal, many Americans blame
college administrators. Indeed, college administrations can’t disown the
students they enrolled after bragging that their “holistic admissions process”
evaluates not just scholastic promise – because that would “not be sufficiently
inclusive” – but rather the “whole student,” for which they summoned the dark
art of “personal scoring” to predict “integrity” and “courage.” Really?!
Nor are administrators credible when they suddenly proclaim
newfound love for “academic freedom” to coddle pro-Hamas campus militancy when
their campuses are effectively no-free-speech-zones.
First prize for academic-freedom hypocrisy goes to Harvard
President Claudine Gay, who notoriously led the witch hunt against heterodox
Professor Roland Fryer, though University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill
doesn’t lag far with her ongoing persecution of heterodox Professor Amy Wax.
Yet blaming college administrators is
fighting shadows of the real culprit because kids didn’t lose their brains and
morality when they stepped on campus. That happened in K-12.
Indoctrinate kids in K-12, telling them
that America is irredeemably odious because it is an apartheid state founded on
settler colonialism, and kids are primed to rally that Israel must be wiped off
the map because it, too, is an apartheid state founded on settler colonialism.
This fabrication, straight from the
oppressor-oppressed revolutionary ideology of critical-race theory (CRT), is
equally weaponizable against any meritocratically earned success story:
America, Israel, Jews, and my people, Asians.
But blaming the K-12 educracy is still fighting shadows. Who
made K-12 toxic?
While education schools come to mind, the
800-pound gorilla of CRT is the teachers unions.
But that’s still fighting shadows.
The teachers unions owe their outsized
power to their heady marriage with the Democratic Party: The unions deliver
manpower, donations, and future Democratic activists, while Democrats
reciprocate with friendly legislation, policies, and taxpayer dollars.
The Democratic Party is the ultimate purveyor of CRT; it is
its core ideology, with teachers unions playing eager partners. Whenever
Democrats spout all-too-familiar racial dog-whistles like “underrepresented,” “marginalized,”
“inequity,” “privilege,” “systemic,” and the latest, a real juggernaut, “reparations,”
we recognize the toxic marks of CRT. And in CRT’s racial cauldron, Jews and
Israel stand unequivocally in the wrong; the battle-cry “From Ferguson to
Jerusalem” is no accident.
Some “progressives,” pointing to President
Biden’s support for Israel and Rep. Ritchie Torres’ denunciation of Hamas, say
antisemitism occupies only the extreme-left Democratic Socialist of America
fringe, not the mainstream, of the Democratic Party. But that’s delusory
because with CRT as a core ideology Democratic support for a pro-West,
entrepreneurial, successful Israel that unapologetically rejects the
oppressor-oppressed binary is necessarily conflicted.
It’s no accident that Jimmy Carter,
already in 2006, called Israel an apartheid state, that Obama sent billions to
Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s paymaster Iran, that Biden would have sent $6 billion to
Iran but for Republican outcry, that Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s first
reaction to Hamas’ attack was to call for cease-fire, that mainstream Democrats
Dick Durbin and Chris Murphy call Israel’s campaign “unacceptable,” and that Biden
and Vice President Kamala Harris noisily announced an “anti-Islamophobia” initiative
last week.
As if further confirmation is needed,
Gallup polling shows that Democratic sympathy for Israel, perennially weaker
than Republican, finally swung deeply negative this year. Mainstream Democrats’
support for Israel lives on borrowed time. It is the DSA (Democratic Socialists
of America) that enjoys coherence between core ideology and Jew-hatred; it has
the upper-hand and is surely gaining.
To our Jewish Democratic-voting friends:
Are you ready for this future Democratic Party?
* * *
Further to Wai Wah Chin’s article,
former liberal Democrat Professor Alan Dershowitz, in an interview with Fox New’s
Maria Bartiromo, called out Obama’s “deep hatred of Israel.” Dershowitz began
the interview with “[Obama] should be ashamed.” Expressing outrage over former
President Barack Obama’s call for an end to Israeli “occupation,” Harvard Law
professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz expanded on why he’s never talking to the
former Democrat president again.
“I think he always had a deep hatred
of Israel in his heart. He hid it very well. He called me to the Oval Office,
and he said to me, ‘Alan, you’ve known me for a long time. You know I have
Israel’s back.’ I didn’t realize he meant to paint a target on it,” Dershowitz said
on “Mornings with Maria.”
“He’s never been supportive of
Israel. And finally, his true feelings have come out now that he’s no longer
president and doesn’t have to be elected,” the professor continued. “He has
contributed enormously to the problem because he is respected among young
people. And if he says the occupation is unbearable and that anything can be
done to stop it, he is encouraging people to engage in their antisemitic,
anti-Israel, and anti-American attitudes. He should be ashamed of himself. He
should apologize, but he won’t.”
Dershowitz’s commentary comes after
he claimed Thursday that any relationship with Obama is “over” following the 44th
president’s onstage statements about the Israel-Hamas war.
Obama spoke at the Obama Foundation’s
Democracy Forum, where he called for a two-state solution and an end to the “occupation,”
while not clarifying what occupation he meant. “All of this is taking place
against the backdrop of decades of failure to achieve a durable peace for both
Israelis and Palestinians,” the former president told the forum audience, “one
that is based on genuine security for Israel, a recognition of its right to
exist, and a peace that is based on an end of the occupation and the creation
of a viable state and self-determination for the Palestinian people.”
On Friday, Dershowitz accused Obama
of lying “through his teeth” about what the former president called an “unbearable”
occupation of Gaza. “To compare those disputed claims with the rapes,
beheadings, burnings, kidnappings – it’s just obscene and despicable. And what
it does is it lends support to those students basically, who are saying, ‘Well,
what Hamas really did was not so bad....It was in response to the occupation.’
“Although Obama said that the
attacks by Hamas are not justifiable,” Dershowitz added, “he made them
justifiable because if life really is unbearable, as it’s not, then you can do
anything you want.” Obama is further “pouring gas on the fire” of a serious
matter, the Harvard professor argued, which could fuel more antisemitic
sentiment nationwide.
“What he did was contribute to the
risks to not only Israelis but to Americans because it’s coming to a theater
near you,” Dershowitz told host Maria Bartiromo. “If Hamas is not stopped in
its tracks from doing the terrorist acts, they will bring them to the United
States.”
* *
*
With leftist liberal media support
for the terrorists, Hamas gleefully lies to the world through its media allies.
The New York Times, always wanting to
be ahead of the pack, hired a Palestinian who supports and praises Hitler to
cover the Israel-Hamas war.
Winston Churchill wrote While England Slept, which details the
ignorance and apathy that prevailed in England in the 1930s, which allowed
Germany to prepare for war. In 2006 Melanie Phillips wrote Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within. Her
book details the British establishment’s liberal attitudes to immigration,
which have caused it to now be captive to Islamist aggression and terrorism
inside of Britain. An American copy of her book, with minor adjustments, could
be called “New Yorkistan” or “Washingtonistan.”
The West has imported the
terrorists. No one should assume that Hamas and its proxies are not operating
here. We American Jews are waking up to the reality of the virulent
antisemitism that our ancestors faced and understood all too well. The
irrational blood libels have returned. Blanket permission to openly hate and
assault Jews is now acceptable. There is a war in Israel and a war being (less
successfully) fought in America and the Western democracies. This war may have
begun with the Jews, but it won’t end with the Jews.
* * *
Nevertheless, as we approach
Chanukah, there is hope. In the Chanukah davening we add, “…And for the
miracles and for the salvation; for your people Israel you engineered a great
victory.” Throughout the ages, the Jewish people has survived our implacable
enemies because “the G-d of Israel neither slumbers or sleeps.”
I had the privilege of attending the
rally for Israel on the Mall in D.C. The actual number of attendees is
estimated to be just under 300,000 people. It was the largest gathering of Jews
since Temple times. While the music was nice, and some of the speeches were
excellent – especially that of Pastor John Hagee, who spoke with passion and
conviction – my greatest inspiration came from the achdus, the unity of all kinds of Jews, from right to left, from
observant to (almost) assimilated, all standing katef el katef, shoulder to shoulder, in solidarity with Eretz Yisrael
and with each other.
As the many thousands of Jews were
leaving the peaceful gathering, most of us paused to thank the police officers
as we walked past. I reached out to shake the hand of a U.S. Park Police
lieutenant. He took my hand and said, “Normally, when there are demonstrations,
especially large ones, we expect violence, damage, and often looting and
destruction of property. I’m looking at this crowd, and all I can say is you
are the Chosen People! G-d bless Israel.”
Further along my lengthy walk, I
paused to thank a Metropolitan Police officer. He smiled and said, “I’ve been
doing this job for 19 years, I’ve been cursed and I’ve been assaulted, but I
don’t ever remember being thanked by so many people. He then pointed to a young
woman picking up trash in the street. He said, “After demonstrations here, the
clean up crews have a huge mess to deal with – look at that – your people are
picking up other people’s trash.”
I said, “Officer, may G-d bless you,”
to which he said, “Long live Israel.” For me, that kiddush Hashem was incredibly uplifting and inspiring. One day
later, a small group of only 150 pro-Hamas protesters demonstrated in front of
the Democratic National Committee headquarters. They violently assaulted police
and destroyed property, and six officers were taken to the hospital. Evidently,
those people clearly represent their people.
Yes, we Jews are a light unto the
nations. Often, when we are too close to something, we can’t view it in its
proper perspective. If you are standing under the Empire State Building you
cannot see its true height. You need to be miles away to see how it dominates
the midtown skyline. Something supernatural is now happening. Although it’s way
too close for us to have perspective – it’s not like any other occurrence in my
lifetime. Yet, despite this world of turmoil, this time of tremendous confusion,
we can be thankful that – unlike our ancestors, exiled for two millennia – we are
blessed with Eretz Yisrael.
May Hashem bless and keep our
courageous soldiers, and may the light of Chanukah penetrate the darkness which
surrounds us. Am Yisrael Chai!!
Chanukah
same’ach.
