EXCLUSIVE!! Photos of Vienna Mike

I recently received this letter and accompanying photos from an anonymous sender who insists that he has discovered the identity of “Mike from Vienna, Virginia.” I have edited out real names and places to avoid legal hassles.

Dear Mr. Fishman:

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you, except through your blog which I have now just discovered in the following way. Saturday night, I was having a drink in one of our local bars here in @@@@ when one of the fellas got a bit rowdy. He was throwing darts into a dartboard with deadly accuracy, and cursing with each throw, “I hate him! I hate him!” he kept repeating.

"I'll kill him!"

“Who do you hate?” I asked him.

“Fishy,” he said.

Finishing off a bottle of beer, he set it down next to another four empties on the table and hurled another dart straight into the bulls-eye.

“Who’s Fishy?” I asked.

“Fishface,” he replied.

Out of darts, he sat drunkenly down at the table. Suddenly, he burst out crying. “I hate his Israeli guts.” he said.  “He humiliates me with every blog he writes. He makes me sound like a jerk. Because of him, the whole world thinks I’m a coward.”

“What blog is that?” I inquired.

“Israel National News, you peon!” he answered, shouting for another beer. “I’m going to kill him. You’ll see. I don’t lack the means. I didn’t spend half my life in the army for nothing. If I could kill a couple dozen Taliban in Afghanistan, and two dozen A-rabs in Iraq, I can surely knock off one lemming of an Israeli Jew.”

“To hell with them all!” he continued, gulping down half of his new beer. “To hell with the world. They didn’t want to read my website, so to hell with them all. Let them all nuke each other off the friggin map. Old Vienna Mike will have the last laugh. He’ll outlive them all.”

“How are you going to do that?” I asked him.

“On Vienna’s Mike’s Survival Ark, that’s how. What do you think about that?”

“You must be a real genius,” I said to him, to get on his good side. “I’d sure like to see it, if it really exists.”

So we made an appointment to meet the next day. Here are the pictures. He’s got enough food to survive for a year in his galley, along with all kinds of gas masks, water purifiers, Geiger counters, chemical suits, oxygen tanks, helmets, radiation antigens, and weapons.

Vienna Mike and his Survival Ark

"I built it all by myself."

Ready for sailing.

Vienna Mike with crew

So, Mr. Fishman, if you are the Fishy that he was talking about, please beware.

Amalek Today

On Shabbat Zachor,  every man and women of Israel is required to hear the Torah portion, “Remember what Amalek did to you….”

Elsewhere, we have described how Amalek’s plan was to weaken and strike at the Jewish People by drawing them into sexual sin.

Amalek Today

The holy Sage and Kabbalist, Rabbi Tzaddok HaKohen of Lublin, explains that we read the portion of remembering Amalek before Purim in order to remind ourselves that our strength over our enemies depends on the holiness of our sexual lives. When this sanctity rises, then the impurity of Amalek falls, paving the way for its destruction on Purim ("Yisrael Kiddoshim," 8:27).          

Today, the spirit of Amalek in the world is still trying to uproot the holiness of Israel by exporting all of its immoral culture, homosexuality, and pornography to the Holy Land. Throughout the Diaspora, the spirit of Amalek is working overtime to lure the Jews into sexual transgression via assimilation. Like their ancestors before them, these modern day sons of and daughters of  Amalek are hoping that this spiritual pollution will sever our connection with the Almighty, leaving us vulnerable to their ever-evil designs of destroying our holy nation, may the Almighty foil their plans.

This is what we have to remember, and guard against, and fight with education and counseling, in order to repel this plague of spiritual pollution from our borders, from our streets, and from our homes, television screens, and computers.

We blot out the memory of Amalek by physically annihilating the likes of Hamas, Iran, Syria, Hizballah, Fatach, and the other sworn enemies of Israel, and by sanctifying our lives according to the dictates of the Torah.

In so doing, the L-rd G-d of Israel shall be One, and His Name shall be One over all of the earth.

The Peddlers of Deceit

One of my neighbors asked me to speak with his son, a young man of 35, who refuses to get married. He’s a nice fellow, but he walks around with a sneer on his nose, like he has some chip on his shoulder. Whenever I see him around our apartment building, I try to be friendly and exchange a few words. A few times, I spoke to him about guarding the Brit and invited him to come along on a Tikun, but he’s always dodged the issue.

One day, so he wouldn’t think his father put me up to it, I asked him if he could help me move a heavy dresser in our flat. We got to talking, and I asked him why he didn’t get married.  At first, he gave me a brush off story about not finding the right woman, but when I probed deeper, the skeletons started to rattle.

“Why should I get married?” he said. “To fight with my wife all the time and yell at my kids like my parents do?”

In truth, his parents didn’t have the most peaceful marriage in the world. A few times a month, we hear them screaming at each other from their apartment in the building adjacent to ours. Obviously, they had problems, but who doesn’t? What it came down to was that he had been traumatized as a kid by his parents’ aggressive behavior and unconsciously feared that it would happen all over again in his marriage. On the surface, he offered other reasons why his dates were always a flop, always finding fault with the woman. One was too religious, another wasn’t religious enough; one was too fat, another was too much of a talker. No one could live up to his demand for perfection.

Not wanting him to feel like I was putting him on the analyst’s couch, I spoke to him about the supreme importance of the mitzvah of getting married, and about the importance of having children to fulfill his destiny as a Jew. I spoke to him about the difference between egotistically living for oneself, as opposed to the more ideological goal of raising a family.

“Only the Almighty is perfect,” I told him. “Down here on Earth, everyone has problems. Every marriage has quarrels. All women are cuckoo in one way or another. Children get sick. There are difficulties at school. The plumbing leaks. Sometimes, it’s hard to pay the bills. But those aren’t reasons not to marry.”  

What is his situation analogous to? To the sweet talking “Jews For Galut” missionaries, who complain and grumble about life in Israel and refuse to perform the great mitzvah of living in the Land. If they were to shut up and keep their fetishes and fears to themselves, this wouldn’t be so bad, but when they vomit out their poison on the web, trying to discourage other Jews from coming to Israel, this is a heresy that must be condemned with all force, so that they don’t succeed in leading other Jews astray into worshipping life in foreign lands, trying to blend in with the goyim.

They are like people who refuse to come to the synagogue on Purim to hear the Megilla because the kids are too raucous and noisy. Or like the perfectly healthy people who refuse to eat matzah on Pesach because it gives them constipation. Or the reformers who don't want to give up their weekends for the restrictions of Shabbat. They are the “baale terutzim,” the masters of excuses, the peddlers of deceit.

You can talk to them until you are blue in the face, but they can’t understand a word you say. Because the ears which heard “Shema Yisrael” at Mount Sinai have been sealed, due to their revolt against G-d and His Torah.

Blue in the Face