Jews Archives - Bookworm Room

Jews excel at antisemitism, as they do at so many things

October 10, 2017 by Bookworm 14 Comments

A recent attack against Harvey Weinstein in a Jewish publication reminds us that, when it comes to antisemitism, America’s Jews are overachievers.

Almost three years ago, I wrote a post entitled Some of America’s ugliest antisemitism comes from young Hollywood Jews (language warning). I wrote after I had watched a comedy roast of James Franco and was appalled by the way in which the other guests slung about gross insults, all of which reeked of antisemitism. It’s no exaggeration to say that they tied into the worst kind of anti-Jewish propaganda, whether emanating from the Tsar or the Nazis.

As I noted in my post, the insults weren’t the pointed, but still loving, insults that so enrich the Yiddish language and Jewish jokes. Certainly Jews have never been under any illusions about certain cultural features that arose in ghetto and shtetl, but there is no self-loathing in these jokes or in the rich Yiddish words. Instead, they wittily acknowledge the human condition without dehumanizing the human. There is no antisemitism in this traditional Jewish self-analysis.

The same cannot be said for what came out of such well-known Hollywood Jews as Sarah Silverman, Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen, Andy Samberg, and James Franco. Their jokes were hideous, oozing self-referential antisemitism. Here are some examples of those jokes, along with my comments about what they reveal (language warning):

King of Hollywood: [about The Guilt Trip] Listen, if I wanted to watch two ugly Jews weaving through traffic, I’d watch Seinfeld’s web series.

***

Nick Kroll: Many of you might not know that Seth has a writing and directing partner named Evan Goldberg. What does this other guy look like that you’re the face of the operation? I assume he’s like a sweaty Orthodox Jew eating a pastrami sandwich, and he said [scrunching up his face and using a thick Yiddish accent] “I did nine dick jokes on page four, and I was thinking that the guys are friends, and then they’re not friends, and at the end of the movie, they’re friends again.”

***

Sarah Silverman: I can’t tell if this is the dais or the line to suck Judd Apatow’s balls. This dais is so Jewey. What is this, the Comedy Central audit of James Franco?

***

Sarah Silverman: Jonah is such a Jewy dick, you have to watch his movies through a hole in a sheet.

***

Nick Kroll: “James Franco is truly our generation’s James Dean. So handsome that you forget he’s only been in two good movies. Dean, of course, died at the tender age of 24 sparing himself the embarrassment of writing self-indulgent short stories and getting roasted by a bunch of jealous Jew monsters.

***

Nick Kroll: “Seth Rogen is so Jewish.”
Crowd: “How Jewish is he?”
Nick Kroll: “Seth Rogen is so f***ing Jewish… Anyway, it’s great to be here.”

These awful “jokes” are just the ones that internet publications deemed amongst the funniest things the assembled “comedians” said. There were more, and they were all in the same vein, saying horrible things about Jews. None of them gently laugh at the human condition. None offer insight into human foibles or human decency. All play into the most vile stereotypes about Jews: Jews are ugly, Jews sweat and stink, Jews are obsessed with sex, Jews are eaten by jealousy, and Jews are simply “f***ing.”

These jokes are a primer in self-loathing. They perfectly reflect the Stockholm Syndrome that has overtaken America’s Progressives Jews. These young Jews — who are amongst the most recognizable people in America, and have become power brokers in Hollywood — have internalized all of the worst stereotypes about Jews. They believe this of themselves.

Moreover, as is often the case with people who perceive themselves as defective, they’re trying desperately to be the first to insult themselves, relieving the “normal” person with nothing left to say. (Sarah Silverman’s stories of her horrific childhood bear out this theory about beating yourself first, before someone else does it.)

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A theory about Progressive Jews and how they got that way

October 9, 2017 by Bookworm 24 Comments

Did the Holocaust’s shadow give Progressive Jews such a fear of dying that they cling to a political ideology promising (but not delivering) peaceful death?

A theory that popped into my mind yesterday that may help explain the mystery of the Progressive Jew, a person who clings desperately to the Democrat party despite the party’s escalating hostility to Jews and Israel. I wonder if it’s all tied into the way in which the Holocaust weighs on Jews of my generation.

I got started on this line of thinking because an old, although not terribly close, friend of mine died yesterday. When I say “old,” I don’t mean chronologically old. He was my age — mid-50s — which I consider to be on the slightly younger side of middle-age. (Perhaps that’s wishful thinking.) His death was also not entirely unexpected, because it was a recurrence of a problem he’d had before and was fighting for years.

My friend is not the first of the increasingly frequent brushes with mortality that are intertwining with my life. The older generation — parents, relatives, colleagues, all in their 80s and 90s — are passing away with relentless frequency. That’s to be expected. What’s more disturbing for me is the number of people, such as my deceased friend, who are my age and succumbing to cancer, heart disease, the effects of substance abuse, and other ills that start chasing us as we age.

What I’ve noticed is that my religious friends face death differently than my non-religious friends. They’re not resigned, which indicates a lack of hope, but they’re philosophical and that philosophy melds with the hope, allowing them to focus on the treatment process without too much fear. They see themselves as part of a greater plan, with God as their partner. If this plan denies them recovery, Christians look to the promise of Heaven; Jews put their faith in the final resurrection.

In contrast, my atheist friends have nothing to hang on to. The Grim Reaper is threatening them without rhyme or reason and then, at the end, there’s nothing.

I think, though, that there’s an added twist for many contemporary secular Jews when they consider death. By the way, when I say “secular,” I’m including non-Orthodox Jews who follow the outward form of worship in reform and “lite” conservative synagogues. They belong to a Temple, they attend on the High Holy days, and they probably send their kids to Sunday school . . . but they don’t believe in God. For them, these are rituals that tie them to their childhood communities, that fulfill a long for tradition, and that are a strong part of their Jewish identity. [Read more…]

The Bookworm Beat 8/31/17 — another “Leftist insanity” edition

August 31, 2017 by Bookworm 24 Comments

There’s so much Leftist insanity that one Bookworm Beat wasn’t enough to contain it all. It takes two posts to grasp what’s really going on.

An un-retouched photo of Lynn Yaeger, the fashion writer who criticized Melania Trump’s shoes.

The craven FBI refuses to stop Leftist insanity. Although the mainstream media is silent, the conservative media is appropriately outraged that James Comey had already decided in April or May of 2016, in the very early stages of the investigation into Hillary’s national security violations, to clear her of wrongdoing. That is, his decision came about far in advance of the evidence — and nobody in the FBI called him on it.

I’m disgusted but not surprised that the FBI’s employees would do nothing about their head’s manifest violation of his duty to Americans. You see, I already predicted this outcome in early April 2016:

No matter how principled they’d like to think they are, most middle-class people will turn a blind eye to corruption in their midst rather than run the risk of being unable to pay their mortgage or fund all of the other payments necessary to support a middle-class lifestyle. They don’t think of themselves as dishonest or complicit in dishonesty. They think of themselves as cautious people who aren’t going to risk their children’s future for some grand-standing that, rather than resulting in applause, could leave them unemployed and desperate.

This episode from my past makes me doubt very strongly that Hillary Clinton will be indicted. I know that the rumor mill keeps saying that FBI agents, from Comey on down, will quit if Loretta Lynch lets Hillary walk. Some of the FBI agents whispering this to friendly reporters may even believe that they’ll quit.

Mostly, though, this is a bluff. Why? Because the people talking about quitting are middle-class people with mortgages, and school fees, and insurance, and all the other expenses that keep us in the middle-class living up to our own expectations. If Hillary really does walk, 99% of those “I’ll quit if she’s not indicted” agents will manage, very quickly and easily, to convince themselves to stay in their jobs, and get their salaries and pensions.

Was Jim Crow a cruel but necessary reality? David P. Goldman couldn’t writing something boring if he tried. His most recent post riffs off the fact that the North allowed the South the illusion of victory for almost 100 years after the Civil War. According to Goldman, this was an unpleasant necessity required to protect America against foreign threats and analogizes it to the West’s necessary decision to absorb former Nazis to protect against the Communist threat.

I’m not familiar enough with America’s foreign policy in the years between the Civil War and WWI to judge critically what Goldman wrote, but it’s an interesting argument. Certainly America needed its Southern fighters in WWI and WWII. Indeed, we still need them today.

Some Leftist Jews are catching on to the Left’s antisemitism. Lately, I’ve been totally obnoxious on Facebook. Every time my Facebook friends goes off about neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and antisemitism, I’ve stated in bold language that I don’t take them seriously because they’ve completely ignored the fact that, for well over a decade now, I’ve made them aware of the vile, pervasive, normalized antisemitism in the Democrat party and, especially, on American campuses.

Thankfully, a few Leftist Jews are figuring out that their Leftist cohorts are not feeling the love. At Forward, a Leftist Jewish publication, Benyamin Moalem says what I’ve said forever, which is that antisemitism (and racism) on the right consists of a few bottom feeders, while antisemitism on the Left is large, mainstream, and very dangerous. After discussing Roger Waters (who revels in antisemitic imagery the Nazis would have loved) and the aggressive antisemitism on campuses, Moalem has this to say: [Read more…]

An inspiring, uplifting, educational, and very fun long weekend

June 12, 2017 by Bookworm 6 Comments

The deeply moving 14th Annual Ariel Avrech Lecture was the anchor for an inspiring weekend that cemented old friendships and introduced me to new friends.

Some of you may remember that, about a week ago, I wrote a post saying that I’d be flying down to L.A. to attend the 14th Annual Ariel Avrech Lecture, which Robert Avrech, of Seraphic Secret, and his wife, Karen, sponsor annually in honor of their dear son Ariel, who died in 2003. That weekend (which I extended into Monday) has now finished and I am home again. It was a very wonderful weekend in so many ways.

To begin with, I got a chance to know my in-laws so much better than before and with greater knowledge comes greater appreciation for what great people they are. I know I’ve boasted for years that I have the best in-laws, but in the past I’ve always seen them in a pack, at mass get-togethers. This time, I stayed with my sister-in-law, her husband, and their son. They could not have been more gracious.

I felt genuinely cared for while I was in my in-laws’ house. As a mother, that’s a rare and wonderful feeling. After all, the normal state of the world is that the mother and homemaker cares for others — which is as it should be. That doesn’t mean, though, that I don’t appreciate a break in the routine.

The fact is that my in-laws are ferociously intelligent, informed people, and conversation with them is as stimulating as it gets. It wasn’t just politics. Both of them are luminaries in their respective fields, and that too made any conversation interesting.

I love their dogs too.

Having that kind of visit with relatives by marriage could have been enough for a wonderful weekend, but there was more.

On Sunday, as I mentioned at the top of this post, I attended the 14th Annual Ariel Avrech Memorial Lecture, at which Daniel Greenfield spoke. Before I get to his talk — which was, as one would expect, brilliant — I want to talk a bit about the entire event. [Read more…]

Answering the question: Why in the world do [insert name of group] support Democrats?

May 2, 2017 by Bookworm 17 Comments

If you want to know why identity groups support Democrats even when doing so is counter to their interests, there’s one reason, and one reason alone….

Practically since the day I started blogging, at which time I revealed myself to be a politically conservative Jew, I’ve regularly been asked the same question: “Why in the world do Jews support Democrats?” It’s an excellent question because the facts on the ground are that, for the last 20 years, while the Democrat party’s politicians have paid lip service to supporting Israel and their affinity for the Jewish people, the reality is that Democrats are hostile to the Jewish state and invariably throw their emotional weight behind those who hate Jews and Israel.

When Democrat convention-goers in 2012 loudly and vehemently objected to identifying Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, people asked me, “Why in the world do Jews support Democrats?”

When Obama referred to the deliberately targeted Jews shot in the kosher market in Paris as victims of a “random” act, people asked me, “Why in the world do Jews support Democrats?”

When the Democrats insisted on swelling the American Muslim population by bringing in hordes of people who, even if not actively violent, are actively antisemitic, Jews were in the front row saying “bring them in.” It was then that people asked me, “Why in the world do Jews support Democrats?”

When Obama used his 2009 Cairo speech to erase 3,000 years of Jewish history in Israel and, instead, tie the Jewish state’s creation solely to the Holocaust, people asked me, “Why in the world do Jews support Democrats?”

When the Democrats almost elected Keith Ellison, a former member of the violently antisemitic Nation of Islam to be their party chair, people asked me, “Why in the world do Jews support Democrats?”

When Obama, practically as his last act as president, told his UN ambassador to stand down when the UN voted to deny the Jews’ ancient ties to Israel, people asked me, “Why in the world do Jews support Democrats?”

But it’s not just all things Jewish that elicit that question. [Read more…]

Leftist: civil disobedience is for protesting illegal immigration, not abortion

March 7, 2017 by Bookworm 5 Comments

A Progressive makes the illogical argument that civil disobedience is good in the cause of illegal immigration, but bad in the cause of abortion.

A good rule of thumb is that you should never trust a Leftist who makes an argument under the morality banner. That’s certainly the case with Jay Michaelson who claims to be a “rabbi . . . and Jew” — which, if you think about it, is an oddly redundant pairing, given that one would think that the former would presuppose the latter. I mention that peculiar pairing because it foreshadows Michaelson’s subsequent “moral” argument, which is either very devious or very stupid.

Michaelson’s contention is that the only moral position “a rabbi, journalist, and Jew” can take in today’s world is to defy federal law on immigration. As a predicate to appreciating how dreadful is argument is going to be, please recall that, despite owning Congress and the White House during the first two years of Obama’s presidency, Progressives never managed to take the obvious “moral” step of doing away with America’s southern border and just letting everyone in.

Of course, Michaelson has nothing to say about Progressive passivity six to eight years ago when the Left truly had the power to change America’s immigration dynamic. Instead, he offers this argument to justify what he would have us believe is a “principled” resistance to an “unjust” law:

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What Donald Trump has done (and is still doing) to fight antisemitism

February 17, 2017 by Bookworm 3 Comments

American Jewish groups (the majority of which ally with the Democrat Party) are once again claiming to be concerned about Donald Trump and antisemitism — that is, they’re implying that Trump is a KKK puppet. Of course they are wrong but, as is often the case with a slur that brings together a world of assumptions in a single false word or sentence, there are a lot of facts and ideas that need to be unpacked to explain precisely why it is a slur — that is, an unsupported insult. This post aims to do that unpacking.

First, a little background about the reason Jewish groups (which are almost invariably Leftist) are again trying to make the “Trump is worrisomely close to Hitler” argument, this time by claiming that he’s doing nothing to stop antisemitism and, worse, that when asked he goes insane. This latest attack started with questions from Israeli and Jewish reporters:

Jewish groups called “worrisome,” “puzzling” and “mind-boggling” President Trump’s answers in two days’ worth of press conferences about rising anti-Semitic incidents in the United States.

During Wednesday’s press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli reporter asked Trump how he planned to address the hike in anti-Semitic incidents, and what he’d say to people around the world “who believe and feel that your administration is playing with xenophobia and maybe racist tones.”

[snip]

At his marathon press conference in the East Room on Thursday, an event added to the president’s schedule at the last minute, Trump said he wanted to call on a “friendly” reporter and picked Jake Turx, a reporter for Ami, an orthodox Jewish magazine published in New York and Israel.

“I haven’t seen anyone in my community accuse you or anyone on your staff of being anti-Semitic. We understand that you have Jewish grandchildren, you are their zayde,” Turx said. “What we haven’t really heard being addressed is an uptick in anti-Semitism and how the government is planning to take care of it.”

[snip]

Another reporter followed up soon afterward, though, noting that it wasn’t a question about Trump’s personal beliefs but anti-Semitic incidents happening across the country, “some of it by supporters in your name.” The New York Police Department, for instance, reported last week that while the rate for several crimes such as murder have fallen this year, the number of hate crimes in the city had doubled in 2017 compared to the same period last year, with anti-Semitic incidents leading the increase.

Trump, who is narcissistic in the classic sense of the word (extremely self-centered) rather than in the psychiatric sense of the word (a low-grade sociopath), heard the questions as an attack against him. Looking back on the campaign, I have to say that, even if Trump were not a classic narcissist, it would be reasonable for him to respond as he did.

For the entirety of his campaign, despite his beloved Jewish family members and long-standing support for Israel (recently evidenced again in Netanyahu’s rapturous meeting with him), the Progressives and the media (but I repeat myself) attacked Trump non-stop for antisemitism because white nationalist groups fell in behind him. (As an aside, the same media and Progressive organizations were utterly and completely silent about the openly, violently, antisemitic Muslims, blacks, and Leftists who occupied a main car in the Obama train, rather than chasing after the caboose. I’ll explain more about that in this post.)

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The Bookworm Beat 10/23/16 — the #NeveryHillary edition and open thread

October 23, 2016 by Bookworm 3 Comments

The despicable media and Trump’s message. In an effort to keep people who identify themselves as #NeverTrump from turning their focus to Hillary, an action that instantly turns most people into #NeverHillary voters, the despicable media is currently ignoring entirely the substance of Trump’s important speech yesterday. As Roger Simon says, if Americans actually knew the promises Trump made and the policies he intends to pursue, they would vote for him by a huge majority:

That speech put forth some of the more intelligent and creative ideas to be before the American public in years. These proposals, contained in what Trump calls his “Contract with the American Voter,” deserve to be heard and seriously debated in these last weeks before the election.

Undoubtedly the Newswoisie will do their best to squelch them, panicked that some innocent citizen might deign to compare Trump’s “Contract” to the unremitting banality and moral vacuousness (“please see my website”) of the Hillary Clinton campaign. But it is our duty — all of us — to expose this “Contract” to as many people as possible and give the American public a chance to consider it, even if their so-called “thought leaders” do their best to obscure it.

For those who believed the media when it said “Nothing to see here” lie and therefore missed what Trump said, here’s a Trump-Pence poster summarizing the gist of his speech:

As Simon predicted, the drive-by media has squelched Trump’s message, burying it under a tangential and irrelevant point:

Today Trump went to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and delivered a major, substantive speech, outlining what he proposes to do in the first 100 days of his administration. This is the kind of thing that must be kept secret–marked with a “c” perhaps–lest voters be reminded that they actually agree with the reviled Republican nominee. Let’s not take any chances!

How did the liberal press suppress information about Trump’s proposals? They buried the lede. This is how the Associated Press reported on Trump’s effort to shift the focus to the issues:

Read more about the perfidious media here.

The media’s tactic is working with the usual suspects (i.e., the Progressive friend who make up my real-me world). Looking to me like idiots, but thinking themselves very clever, they’ve peppered their Facebook pages with posts about Trump’s women problem, but don’t have a single post addressing (even to attack) his substantive points. I actually asked a group of Lefties on Facebook gloating about Trump’s stupidity if they weren’t troubled by the fact that the media buried the substance in favor of something like that — and was greeted with silence (a silence, I’m sure, that was smug not shame-faced.)

As part of its perfidy, the media is giving time to every two-bit liar who comes along claiming that Trump did something sexually wrong to her. (It’s like the “sexism” version of the “racism” stories in 2008 and 2012 that were used to destroy Obama’s opponents.) Real investigation, of the type the media refuses to do, has revealed that, as is true for the others, the most recent accuser is a hard-core Democrat activist. One of the new media outlets revealing this fact added a useful point:

Just like every other supposed Trump “fake rape” accuser, Karena Virginia is not a Republican, Independent, or even everyday Democrat, but someone tied to the Democratic Party, Clinton Foundation, Democrat donors, or, in this case, Big Pro-Hillary Media.

What are the chances of that?

Oh, and she “came out” about her “assault” at a press conference organized by left-wing feminist lawyer, Democrat fundraiser, and “hired killer” for Republican campaigns Gloria Allred, who attempted this same campaign-killing stunt with a fake accuser just last week.

What a coincidence!

Oh, and one more thing: The polls are almost certainly gamed to discourage Trump voters. If you doubt me, just watch this video that CNN instantly regretted and buried.

This fight is nowhere near over. Vote like your life depends upon it — because it probably does.

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Learn about your world at WOW! Magazine

September 19, 2016 by Bookworm Leave a Comment

Here it is: Your daily reminder that the revamped website for the Watcher’s Council is a brilliant collaborative online effort called WOW! Magazine. Since I last posted an update, Council members and their friends have uploaded all of these spot-on articles:

I don’t believe I’m exaggerating when I say that, if you visit WOW! Magazine regularly, you will be as caught up on the headlines as a New York Times or Yahoo News reader except that, unlike the readers of those publications, you’ll have a solid grasp of facts and be thinking about serious and honest indepth analyses.

Europe’s dystopian present — and why, because I’m helpless to stop it, Schadenfreude overwhelms me

February 14, 2016 by Bookworm 53 Comments

Beginning on September 11, 2001, and with increasing speed since January 2009, I’ve had a very strong sense that the world — not just America, but the whole world — is unraveling. At home, venerable and often cherished institutions and ideas are falling into disrepair or being perverted beyond all recognition. Abroad, the Pax America that stabilized the world for so many years, with America acting not as a conqueror but as ballast, has broken down. I’m afraid of the world into which I’m launching my children. The dystopian future that become a stable of countless young adult novels seems to have become the dystopian present.

In many ways, the worst thing about watching the passing spectacle is that I’m helpless to do anything. Sure, I blog, but I recognize (and I don’t mean this with any disrespect, dear readers) that I’m mostly preaching to the choir. I’d be delighted if my words changed one mind, swaying one person from unthinking Progressivism to thoughtful conservatism, but I’m pretty sure that the best I can do is offer comfort and comradeship to people who share my values and my concerns. There’s nothing wrong with binding people together, but I don’t see what I’m doing as effecting any real change.

I’ve also tried to help my children understand that the Leftist political pieties forced upon them in their schools and through their media are false. Mostly, I’ve been successful — my children, when they’re willing to think at all about politics, seem to have absorbed my conservative world view, one that fears big government, believes in strong borders and self-defense, and is fanatic about a free market and the virtue for able-bodied people of self-reliance. I don’t know, though, if I’ve done them any favors. Their values clash with the world they’re entering and put them at odds with their generation. Maybe they could face their socialized, possibly Islamic, future with some equanimity if they didn’t believe in the alternative.

On my Facebook page, I politely tweak my Leftist friends by subtly inserting conservative ideas into their Feeds, but I’m not kidding myself. Even the most open-minded of them are open-minded only to the extent that they don’t “un-friend” me or get nasty. I can practically feel the pity radiating across the feed as they think “She was smart once. What the heck happened? Early dementia perhaps?” None think, “She has always been a really smart, well-informed person. Maybe she’s on to something.” Sigh.

Faced with a domestic scene that saddens me and an international scene that frightens me, I’ve come to a necessary conclusion if I’m to continue functioning — and I must continue functioning. After all, even as things come down around my ears, I still have meals to prepare, laundry to wash, bills to pay, and people (and dogs) dependent upon me for their care. I can’t allow existential anxiety to make me useless.

So here’s my philosophy: To the extent I can bring about change, I’ll fuss and try to come up with solutions that make a difference. However, when there’s nothing I do or say to make a damn bit of difference, I’m going to sit back and get whatever pleasure I can out of the show. I’ll only make myself crazy if I continuously bang my head against walls to no effect.

My lemonade-out-of-lemons philosophy applies strongly to Europe. If there were any way I could save it from its present existential collapse, I actually believe I would. However, because there is absolutely nothing I can do, I’m opting for the pleasures of Schadenfreude as I watch Europe’s passing parade.

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The Bookworm Beat 10-29-15 — the spindle overload edition and open thread

October 29, 2015 by Bookworm 11 Comments

So much to share with you (23 separate articles at last count) and so little time. I’ll therefore get right down to business and you might want to give yourself some time to review all these fascinating articles at your leisure:

Another pundit figures out Cruz might be the man

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I support Ted Cruz, and have done so since he took a stand on Obamacare. Ross Douthat (whose writing I respect) has suddenly realized that those of us who support Ted Cruz might be on to something.

Ted Cruz makes sense on taxes

Certainly Ted Cruz’s flat tax plan ought to help people realize that he’s offering genuine change for the better, not just platitudes and painful socialism. Heck, you’d think that all Americans would support a candidate who wants to deep six, or at least severely de-fang, the IRS and, in doing say, make our tax system fairer and make doing business in America more tempting for both American and foreign corporations.

Daniel Greenfield waxes eloquent on the heckler’s veto that is Islam’s stock in trade

After clearing his throat about the Obama administration’s despicable pandering to Palestinian terrorists, along with its sickening chastisement of Israel (this from an administration that would never dare blame the victim if a drunk woman walked naked through a biker’s bar), Daniel Greenfield gets to the real point, which is the fact that the West lets the mere threat of Islamic anger paralyze it.

The world’s one billion Muslims, whose delicate emotions are always infuriated by something, enforce an Islamic status quo in which no non-Muslim dares to violate the Muslim superiority complex.

[snip]

Some might say that the billion Muslims are just looking for things to get angry at… but that would just make a billion Muslims angry.

When buildings fall or buses blow up, when people are stabbed, shot or exploded by the unofficial representatives of the bilious billion, we go right past the crime to the anger that motivated it. “Why do they hate us?” becomes the question and Muslim anger becomes the pivot of national security policy.

Since Muslim anger causes violence, we stop terrorism by tiptoeing around anything that might make them angry. Minor things mostly like freedom of speech or freedom of religion. If you’re a Coptic Christian who makes a YouTube video about Mohammed, you can be sent to prison when some of the moderate Muslim Brotherhood/Al Qaeda locals murder four Americans while shouting, “Allahu Akbar.”

After weeks of brutal Muslim murders, Kerry has gotten Israel to reinforce a ban on Jews praying at the holiest site in Judaism because it offends Muslims. Next up, maybe Jews will be restricted to the seventh step of the Cave of the Patriarchs again. Because that was the “Status Quo” under the Muslim conquest.

As my lengthy quotation in this “quick hits” round-up reveals, Greenfield’s article falls into the must-read category.

[Read more…]

Understanding which people — the Jews or the Arabs — really have ties to the Holy Land

June 20, 2015 by Bookworm 2 Comments

Sunday night round-up and Open Thread

July 27, 2014 by Bookworm 7 Comments

Just a few things to round out the weekend.

** 1 **

Yesterday, I went to an exhibition soccer game — Real Madrid versus Inter Milan. The game, held in UC Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, was sold out. Despite that, it was a surprisingly lackluster game.

I think that flat feeling arose from a combination of factors. First, it wasn’t a real game, with real consequences. The players, mostly B-List players for both teams, looked more as if they were practicing than competing. Second, the mellow fans were generally enjoying the exhibition quality of the game, so they were cheering both sides equally. While this was very polite, it sucked the energy out of the stadium. In a real competitive game, you want some passion from the audience, as well as from the players.

And third, we were in the nosebleed section. I’m not complaining. It was lovely up there (albeit a little hot), especially since the field was spread out before us. I felt like an eagle. I also realized looking down on the field that soccer reminds me of WWI.

This is not as crazy an analogy as you might think. The players endlessly cycled back and forth over a few yards, constantly getting near each other’s goal and then being repulsed. Although each team played fluidly together, the nature of soccer meant there weren’t any set plays.

Watching it from up high, I thought that, in a way, this would have been what WWI’s trench warfare would have looked like to an alien being perched on a far-away planet, watching the war play out. The two sides faced off against each other and, up until the Americans came along, just endlessly pushed each other back and forth over the same 8 miles.

American football strikes me as being more like traditional American warfare. The battalion, or division, or unit, or whatever, comes up with a strategy and then charges ahead. Ideally, it gains ground and holds it. Less ideally, it gets pushed back and has to regroup. The discipline, though, requires unified forward motion, rather than an endlessly fluid back and forth.

When my kids played, I loved soccer because it made them run, which kids need, and I enjoyed watching my little darlings compete. Without one of my own kids on the field, I definitely like American football better than soccer.

** 2 **

In my earlier post, I said Hamas is worse than the Nazis were. One of the reasons I said that is that the Nazis valued their own (not their enemy’s, but their own) children. Hamas, however, has decided that its children’s greatest utility is to act the role of corpse — and the younger the Palestinian child, the more enthusiastically Hamas tries to turn it into a dead body.

It turns out that Hamas’s disdain for its children exists independent of an active war with Israel. By its own admission, Hamas used its children as slave labor to build the many tunnels under Israel. One-hundred-sixty of those children died.

** 3 **

Joshua Muravchik is a wonderful writer. One of my favorite of his books is Heaven On Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, which I highly recommend. He’s just published another book, which is definitely going on my reading list: Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel.

I know I’m going to like the book because it touches upon a subject I’ve long blogged about, which is the death of the Jew in American culture. Jews no longer exist in American culture. That marks a sea change from the situation in most of the 20th century. From the 1910s through the 1970s, Jews were omnipresent, acting, singing, writing, producing, directing…. They made us laugh, cry, and think. That’s all vanished now. The decline of American Jewry’s role in American life has mirrored Israel’s rise and fall in the eyes of the world.

** 4 **

Antisemitism is a completely irrational hatred. In Islam, antisemitism is predicated upon the words of a 7th century “prophet” who resented the fact that the Jews refused to abandon their faith in favor of his newly created one. For those thankfully few Christians who still hew to old-time antisemitism, their hatred for all Jews in the present day is because, 2,000 years ago, a very small group of Jews aided Christ to his destiny by turning him over to the Romans. For Leftists, hatred of Jews was born out of a 19th century hatred for those few Jews who were visibly capitalist, and now arises from the fact that, until Obama, Israel was seen as inextricably intertwined with America, the bastion of capitalism. None of the preceding justifications for hating Jews springs from a rational source.

Because antisemitism is irrational, it leads to truly stupid outcomes, revealing brains so steeped in hatred they are incapable of thought. Exhibit A is the BBC’s insane, inane tweet about Hamas’s unilateral breach of one of the cease-fires:

Palestinian militant group Hamas declares Gaza ceasefire after Israel ended earlier truce amid rocket fire from Gaza http://t.co/SszXAi4COt

— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) July 27, 2014

Will God punish the world’s Jews because American Jews worship a false idol?

December 13, 2013 by Bookworm 24 Comments

I had lunch today with two friends, both conservative, neither Jewish. Since we were talking politics, both asked me a question I hear repeatedly from non-Jewish conservatives — How can Jews support Obama?

It occurred to me — and this is a very depressing though — that Jews are repeating an old pattern. American Jews are Jews in name only, insofar as theirs is, at best, a superficial association with the religion. I’m a bit of an anomaly, in that I don’t practice the religion, but believe absolutely in its conservative strictures.

If I remember my Bible correctly (and with my memory, that’s a big “if”), the Bible is very clear: when Jews start worshiping false idols, they are punished and they are punished horrifically.

The most false of all false idols, of course, is the type of assimilation that sees Jews claiming to be Jewish while rejecting the Jewish God. This is a type of assimilation that sees them losing all the way around. They never fully integrate with their neighbors, even though that’s their primary goal, and they also break their covenant with God.

American Jews, by worshiping Obama as a false idol have set themselves up for another round of punishment. Even worse, the consequences of their actions will fall most heavily, not on them, but on Jews in Europe and the Middle East. While most Americans (outside of Ivy League colleges) are not antisemitic, the antisemites in the rest of the world are smart enough to know that Obama gave them a free pass. As has always been the case, from the Bible through to the Holocaust, a core of true-believers will survive, and the rest are in for a hell of a time.

As you can see, Obama’s actions, not to mention rising anti-semitism around the world, make me nervous.

Whew! I just depressed myself.

As a Jew, why am I not more exercised about the use of poison gas in Syria?

September 1, 2013 by Bookworm 37 Comments

As you’ve gathered, I do not support President Obama’s promised “show” strike against Syria to protest the Assad regime’s alleged use of toxic nerve gas against a community that presumably supported the al Qaeda rebels. To justify my position, I’ve pointed to the fact that there is no benefit to the U.S. in getting involved in Syria. That still leaves the question, though, of why I, a Jew, wouldn’t want to see every country of good will make its utmost efforts to protest the use of poison gas against civilians.

It’s not that I think a Syrian civilian’s life is less valuable than a Jewish civilian’s life (or an American’s life, for that matter). Based on the available news, I assume that those who died were just ordinary people, trying to live in a nation torn apart by an internecine tribal, Muslim battle. If that assumption is correct, those who died are innocent victims, no less than those who lost their lives in Nazi gas camps and mass graves throughout the Pale. So why don’t I want to help?

Well, there are several reasons. My first response relates to my family history. What’s happening in Syria is not genocide, a la Hitler, who wanted to remove an entire race from the earth. There was no military objective underlying Hitler’s decision to round up 6 million people and killing them. Indeed, it was militarily stupid, because it diverted resources that were desperately needed for a two-front war.

In this regard, I know my views about “ordinary war” versus genocide are informed by my Mother’s experiences. While she’ll go to the grave hating the Japanese guards who so brutally controlled the concentration camps in Indonesia where she spent almost four years of her life, she’s never been that hostile to the Japanese people. “They were fighting a war,” she says. “In this, they differed from the Germans, who were destroying a people.”

What’s happening in Syria is a civil war. In the hierarchy of wars, civil wars are always the most bloody and least humane, in much the same way that, in the area of law, the most vicious cases are divorces. Your opponent is close enough for you to hate wholeheartedly.

In Syria, we are witnessing a fight between two closely-related, rabid dogs. These war dogs can be put down entirely or they can be ignored. They cannot be trifled with in an inconsequential way, or they will turn the full fury of their wrath on the trifler, even as they escalate actions against each other. If America goes in, she must go in to destroy one side or the other. Doing less than that is futile and tremendously dangerous, especially because these are Arabs….

And that gets me to the main reason I’m opposed to intervening despite gas attack that Assad’s troops launched. Perhaps to your surprise, I’m not going to argue that “Let the Muslims kill each other there, because it’s good riddance to bad rubbish.” I certainly don’t mind Syria being so busy internally that she has no time to harass Israel. However, that pragmatic response is most definitely not the same as delighting in the destruction of her innocent civilian population.

Instead, my sense of futility in getting involved in Syria is that what we’re seeing is simply how Muslim Arabs fight. They don’t do polite warfare, with rules. They do balls-to-the-wall warfare, with women and children as primary targets. Their cultural preference when fighting war is rape, mutilation, torture, mass-murder, civilian massacres, and soaking-their-hands-in-their-victims’ blood.

When we oppose gas warfare, it’s because it is so wildly outside the rules by which Western warfare has so long abided: we fire things at the enemy, whether guns, or cannon, or missiles. Our culture accepts projectile warfare, but has been for at least a century extremely hostile to non-projectile warfare, whether it’s gas attacks, civilian slaughters, or concentration camps.

Within the context of the Muslim world, when it comes to warfare, anything goes. If we stop one type of atrocity, they’ll come up with another one, because they have no parameters.

Also, to the extent all Muslim/Arab wars are both tribal and religious, they have no concept of civilians. Whether you’re a newborn infant, a teenage girl, a mentally handicapped man, or a doddering old lady, if you belong to “the other” tribe or religion (and everyone does) then you are automatically an enemy and a target. Today’s baby becomes tomorrow’s adolescent rock throwers. That young teenage girl might give birth to another member of that tribe. The mentally handicapped man is proof that the other religion or tribe is corrupt. As for the doddering old lady, she almost certainly raised someone among your enemy.

I’m not saying anything surprising, here. It’s why the Palestinians so enthusiastically target Jewish schools.

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that we did not go to war against Germany at the end of 1941 because it was harassing and killing German Jews. We tend to leave countries alone, even when they slaughter their own people. We went after them because they were trying to take over Europe. To the extent the Roosevelt administration knew about the genocide, it kept it under wraps. There was no way Roosevelt was going to take America to war over a bunch of Jews. It was only after the war that everyone was shocked — shocked! — to learn about the scope of Nazi atrocities.

My daughter rather inadvertently pointed out how ridiculous this “mass slaughter of civilians” yardstick is. For one of her classes, she is required to read three newspaper stories a day. I suggested the report about Kim Jong-un’s order that his former lover and her entire band get machine-gunned to death. I also told her that the regime forced the family’s of those executed to watch their loved ones die, and then shipped all the families, lock, stock, and baby off to the concentration camp system. “They’ll be lucky if they die there quickly,” I added. “The camps are that bad.”

When she heard this, my daughter, bless her heart, came back with a question that gets to the heart of Obama’s flirtation with bombing Syria: “Then why aren’t we planning to attack North Korea, instead of Syria?”

Excellent question, my dear, especially considering North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. We have shown for decades our willingness to stand aside when tyrannical regimes kill their own people — provided that those murders do not implicate American interests. Even during the Cold War, our incursions into other countries were to protect non-communists from communists. Since we couldn’t attack the Soviet Union directly, we engaged in containment by proxy. In other words, our national interests were at stake, because the Cold War was a direct threat to American interests.

In Syria, however, both sides embrace Islam and hate America. There are no parties there that need to be protected to further America’s security interests. We should certainly decry the deaths of the civilians, but the average American on the street seems to understand better than the pettish, petulant Obama that this is one where we should stand aside. This is their culture and they will defeat it only when they want to, not because of half-hearted, ineffectual, silly efforts on our part.

Obama is sort of beginning to grasp this fact, and he’s trying to save face by approaching Congress. He assumes that the Senate will support his war cry, because Democrats are slavishly echoing him and there are a few Hawkish Republicans (like McCain) who support him. He fully expects, however, that the House will vote him down, thereby saying him from the consequences of his own threats and posturing. It’s quite obvious that he also expects that there will be a pitched battle on the House floor, exposing Republican callousness to a disgusted America.

Obama’s hope that Republicans display each other to their worst advantage in their own form of internecine warfare is misplaced. Considering that only 9% of the American people believe intervention in Syria is a good thing, if the Republicans display even minimal good sense in opposing a strike, they will get the full support of the American people.