One does not have to look far to understand why World Jewry completely failed to organize against the looming threat of Nazism in the 1930s. All it takes is a quick look over some of the posts on one the the blogs I think well-represents liberal activist Jewish circles in the US, Jewschool.
Not all of Jewschool–there are those that remain aware of the world around them. But the tone has become such that one cannot escape that this segment of American Jewry has veered down the path of auto-subjugation.
As the president of Iran prepares Iran for a “nuclear birth”, those same Jewschoolers who agitated previously for nuclear disarment remain silent and sometimes even openly state that such arming is justified, because of the Neocon conspiracy for their “fiscal self-interest.”
As the president of Syria gives impassioned speeches calling for war on Israel, and Hizbullah refuses to disarm, bourgeois Jewschoolers stage die-ins and seek to undercut American support for Israel while blaming the war on Israel.
As Saudi Arabia and Iran pour money into Islamic fundamentalist centers and programs around the world, Jewschoolers somehow have taken up the notion that Israel has driven Muslims into Islamist arms.
And while all of this is happening, the unbearable lightness of being a bourgeois Jewschooler living in Israel as others die for your protection leads self-proclaimed beautiful souls to throw fundraisers for all victims, and others to urge troops to risk their lives more, instead of raising money to help stock and prepare Israeli troops who arrived at the North only to find warehouses empty and out-of-stock.
It is only now that I can understand why European, Diaspora-minded Jewry failed to react to the looming threat in the 1930s. Instead of recognizing that the Islamists are human beings full of hate, some Jews insist on taking responsibility for being hated. Instead of realizing that the Islamists are human beings who are conscious of what they say and how they say it, and usually mean what they say just like any other human beings, these Jews condescend by claiming that these words are said only because we, the Jews, are not acting fairly towards them. Instead of realizing that these Islamists are imperialists, set on reconstituting a Caliphate and subjugating all peoples now living in that territory to their own law and morality, these Jews call us the imperialists even as we were going down the path of leaving all Palestinian-populated territories until this war was forced upon us.
With Jews like these, who say such things as “Sometimes I think the Jewish people get everything they deserve”, 1930s Europe makes sense–not because the Jews deserve it, but because Jews such as these Jewschoolers are so intent on being Jews-of-conscience that they forgot the other side is composed of human beings too who actually, truly, want us dead–and will gladly kill us if we do not do something about us first.
August 25th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
I enjoy this well designed blog.
sidenote:
Nice propaganda.
Where did you learn the techniques necessary to apply adhominems and statements designed to rabblerouse ethnic hatred is such a well written and fluid fashion?
August 25th, 2006 at 7:29 pm
oh, my site is
www.usanumberone.blogspot.com, I don’t ask such questions without giving the blogger a chance to act in kind at my place.
-cheers, gentlemen.
August 26th, 2006 at 1:39 pm
B”H Ariel, I think you put this relatively well, especially when you tackled the question of “deserving it” or not. You all but spelled out the word which I believe is the root of our struggle as a people: “assimilation.”
Regarding “Jews of consciences,” I think you’re letting them off to easy. I would imagine that even a logical “pluralist,” which I am not, would recognize that it is helpful to have a balance between “din” (justice) and “rahamim” (mercy).
In addition, Haza”l states that when one is compassionate with the evil, it causes one to be cruel to the righteous.
September 3rd, 2006 at 2:33 am
Ariel, you led me to Mobi’s post in your article and I thought you should see my reply to him:
I rarely visit this site and now I know why.
Why don’t you simply go buy and smoke some more hash, Mobi? That way, you can support both your fellow Jew and your friendly Lebanese when he decides to shoot rockets at a city you don’t live in. I’m sure that makes you one of the truly just Jews of the world, especially since you belatedly made “teshuva” about this matter. I’m sure that bit of teshuva will help save the Jewish people much more rapidly than, say, some schmuck going off to the Zionist Army to work his ass off and then risk his life against weapons you helped subsidize with your illegal actions in the Zionist state (which you disrespect anyway, so why obey their laws?) so that you can sit comfortably in Jerusalem and come up with your latest dj party or whatever the hell you do to be hip and cool.
The laughable part of this, which really proves the shallowness of your opinions on the topic, is your belief that everyone who supports Israel supports it uncritically or supports the neo-Cons and their position on the Mid-East. Your simplistic, childish view on this issue as about as, well, simplistic and childish as your view on attacking Israel about its struggle to survive in an incredibly hostile environment. You would not be able to live as you do without the “Zionist army,” the “Zionist state” or what they need to do to survive. Sure, you could live in New Jersey as a Jew but if that was what you wanted, presumably that’s where you’d be. Instead, you live off the sacrifice of others even as you criticize them.
You write:
publicly shaming your fellow Jew for not being a blind cheerleader in the Zionist army. And you can celebrate your depravity and curse those who genuinely seek to connect to and serve G-d all you like. Piss on my head and tell me its raining. Stand the definition of justice on its head and smile as you stuff a shit sandwich down my throat.
You don’t have the capacity to determine what is justice and what is injustice. You have no tools to judge what is deprived and what is not deprived. You have no idea what God wants although you have the hubris to tell others what he wants. You’re a spoiled anglo tourist in Israel who feels comfortable taking from the “Zionist state” has to offer while vilifying it in terms that service its enemies. Let’s call it shitting where you’re eating - usually a sign of poor manners although in your case it’s also called service to the enemy.
But as you inch this world ever closer towards apocalypse,
Wait, you’re talking to Zionists about this? Zionists?! Are you so blinded by your own rhetoric and “progressive” friends that you don’t understand the society in which you live to this degree? The people inching the world closer to the apocalypse are certainly not those living in the “Zionist entity.” How incredible that you would say this.
just know that I would rather be on the side of G-d and justice than a member of your club.
Um, you’ve spoken to God about this and he told you what he wanted? Funny thing cuz there a leader in Iran, another in Lebanon and another in Afghanistan who have also had this very same consultation with God. You’re on the same team: “the Zionist entity is a criminal enterprise that must be destroyed.” I guess you must really know what he wants.
If you want to make me out to be a pariah — if you want to put me in cherem because I actually believe G-d when He says redemption comes “Not through arms nor through strength, but through My spirit” — go right ahead.
Boo hoo, you’re such a victim. You only have seventeen thousand blogs, 30 or so contributors, contacts all over the Jewish community, and dozens of parties to run and attend. Life is tough. You’re such a deprived revolutionary.
Toss me out on my ass if you must. But know that you are throwing aside one of the most devout, committed, whole-hearted, loving Jewish people in the world today.
Committed to helping those who seek to destroy Israel achieve their goals, that you are. I know of another deeply committed Jew who is so devout he refused to call any rabbi who wasn’t Orthodox “rabbi.” He, too, is whole hearted and loving and…Jewish. You break the law, he breaks the law, you know how it works in corrupt Jewish circles.
And not because I’m not a good Jew. But because I don’t support the infinitely corrupt and halakhically illegitimate state that will be the undoing of our people.
Pay close attention.
Right now there are plenty of very fine Jews who disagree with you both about whether it is a halachically legitimate state, whether it is infinitely corrupt, whether it deserves to exist and in what form, and how it needs to fight for its survival. Some of them, tzaddikim far greater than you, even died in the past several weeks defending their beliefs and their state. It is their memory and upon their surviving family members - parents who have lost their sons; wives who have lost their husbands; children who have been orphaned; friends and family who will never recover - that you continually piss on with your hypocritical views, especially since you broadcast those views loudly and publicly.
September 3rd, 2006 at 11:48 pm
Damn TM, that’s strong stuff there. Did Dan respond?
September 4th, 2006 at 12:22 am
I presume that he has seen it by now. Since it’s not up on his site, I presume he hasn’t let it through his filter on to the site and the discussion. Ha ha.
September 4th, 2006 at 2:25 pm
That sucks, TM. I guess free expression is a limited right.
And, that said, I am embarresed to say that in my attempt to fix your comment I pressed “black list” on this damned complicated and unworkable Spectacle system designed by Matzat. I hope to fix it–but since Matzat is no longer our host, I fear it might take some time.
No worries, TM–you and all opinions that are not trying to convert or curse us out, will always have a place on BoZ.
September 6th, 2006 at 12:55 am
you two are made for each other
September 6th, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Ariel: Have you ever read the Transfer Agreement? Or Perfidy? There’s a reason that the Jews who were in Israel before the particular set of Tzionim that took over didn’t and don’t trust the state’s priorities, and why strength and solidarity at the expense of noticing the destruction that we’re causing.
On the other hand, there is a strong taiva to ignore how sinister and dogged the hate of those committed to the destruction of Israel is. And I can’t remeber Dan, or even Cole K. ever denying that, or asking for “surrender” to them, or claiming that they were not to be concerned about– Only that we stay aware of the terrible things we do to feel safe, and how not-safe they might be making us in the long term instead.
What did you think of Dan’s response, that the zionist movement was what held back world Jewry from fighting the holocaust? did you look up any of the proof sources, or is the Idea that David Ben Gurion doesn’t care about jewish lives too threatening to even imagine? Try reading those books, and for that matter, Daniel Boyarin’s Unheroic Conduct. They have some interesting insights, pretty well backed up according to my perception, but it’d be great to see any of these books torn apart and argued against, by you or anyone else who’d are enough to consider the possibility that Israel’s toughness is not about saving us from destruction, as much as maybe… something else.
The big fear being that The Tough Thing We Have To Do To Make Sure We’re Safe is the beginning and continuation of the eternal war, and that as much as it seems to save our lives in the short term, it doesn’t help for long, but just builds the divine and worldly accusation against us.
Because Israel as a state, as if such a thing exists at all, and it isn’t just individuals with different trips in occasional positions of power, has never had a problem doing terrible things to people, assinating it’s own pretty willingly for the sake of it’s own success and integrity, only a problem in managing those who work for it or are needed to support it who won’t.
The big fear is that, in surviving, we could become something that doesn’t deserve to survive, something that does g-d and humanity no benifit by surviving. IS that really such a bad thing to be afraid of?
September 6th, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Good to know that I’m bourgeois and will be responsible for the deaths of millions. And that my social justice work as PART of my expression of who I am as a Jew will also help contribute to the destruction of the Jewish people.
what’s with the hateraide?
September 7th, 2006 at 12:35 am
Your hypocrisy is a shining example to us all. Unless the comment comes from your mirror, it has no merit:
I presume he hasn’t let it through his filter on to the site and the discussion. Ha ha.
I guess free expression is a limited right.
You and all opinions that are not trying to convert us….will always have a place on BoZ
When was the last time you allowed yourself to consider YOU might be wrong? About anything?
October 14th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
B”H I was confused for a while, finding it increasingly difficult to put the various Jews in this discussion into boxes, not that I make a habit of trying to do that, quite the opposite.
I know how I identify. I am a Torah Zionist. I do not deify Ben-Gurion, rather I recognize his evil, as well as the opinion that he and other Torah-absent Jews will merit baOlam HaBa for having built up the Land. I refer you to _Em HaBanim Smecha_ which provides sources which predict that the Land will be under the rule of “trefa birds,” but that this will be temporary, and will end when their gaivah finally drops to a level when even they will cry out to HaShem.
The Kol HaTor goes a step further, teaching us the GR”A’s opinion that if do not fight against them (Erev Rav), we are supporting them.
I am NOT of the camp known as “mamlachtim,” who blindly bow down to the state, and pretend that contradictions between Torah law and Israeli secular law are simply nonexistent. Nor, have I been brainwashed into thinking that it is a misswah for me to serve in the IDF. It isn’t. It is a misswah to defend the borders of the Land of Israel. Joining and supporting the IDF is simply one option as to how one may fulfill this misswah (and I commend those of you who have), an option which is becoming less and less possible as they are led by an increasingly corrupt government.
Ariel, Yosef Leib, and TM make good points, and even in some bizarre way, Mobius accidentally makes a good point. But then I realized something:
Where’s the Torah? I’ll assume for now that it has been mentioned somewhere, and I just have yet to see it.
Who are you? Please introduce yourselves. (non-antagonistic)
You remember the Torah? The ONLY justification for Jewish control and residence in the Land of Israel,…among other things.
October 14th, 2006 at 7:19 pm
B”H
I was confused for a while, finding it increasingly difficult to put the various Jews in this discussion into boxes, not that I make a habit of trying to do that, quite the opposite.
I know how I identify. I am a Torah Zionist. I do not deify Ben-Gurion, rather I recognize his evil, as well as the opinion that he and other Torah-absent Jews will merit baOlam HaBa for having built up the Land. I refer you to _Em HaBanim Smecha_ which provides sources which predict that the Land will be under the rule of “trefa birds,” but that this will be temporary, and will end when their gaivah finally drops to a level when even they will cry out to HaShem.
The Kol HaTor goes a step further, teaching us the GR”A’s opinion that if do not fight against them (Erev Rav), we are supporting them.
I am NOT of the camp known as “mamlachtim,” who blindly bow down to the state, and pretend that contradictions between Torah law and Israeli secular law are simply nonexistent. Nor, have I been brainwashed into thinking that it is a misswah for me to serve in the IDF. It isn’t. It is a misswah to defend the borders of the Land of Israel Joining and supporting the IDF is simply one option as to how one may fulfill this misswah (and I commend those of you who have), an option which is becoming less and less possible as they are led by an increasingly corrupt government.
Ariel, Yosef Leib, and TM make good points, and even in some bizarre way, Mobius accidentally makes a good point. But then I realized something:
Where’s the Torah? I’ll assume for now that it has been mentioned somewhere, and I just have yet to see it.
Who are you? Please introduce yourselves. (non-antagonistic)
You remember the Torah? The ONLY justification for Jewish control and residence in the Land of Israel among other things.