A group of American Rabbis don’t like that charities help Jewish victims of terror attacks. In their contrariness to stop charity going to Jews, the rabbis make common cause with the so called “Squad” – confessed anti-Semites in the US Congress.
Jews of complex duality – animus for the Jewish state mixed with compassion for the shedders of Jewish blood – have a long and tacky pedigree.
Another of the kind is Jodi Rudoren, the ex New York Times Bureau Chief in Jerusalem. Her every dispatch confirmed that bias was in her brief; that her solemn duty was to tear down the Jews in the eyes of the world, to deprecate, denounce, condemn and revile Israel as the villain. The Jewess picked out Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for “dehumanizing” terrorists who abducted three Jewish teens, shot them point blank and celebrated. Netanyahu had called them “beasts”. Rudoren’s hackles rose. Beasts! What descriptors for laughing murderers would pass muster for her: Criminals? Militants? Law breakers?
It would be mistaken to think that venom so toxic as to turn Jew against Jew is a matter of some bad apples. In fact tens of thousands of Jewish ‘bad apples’ draw lifeblood from affiliations on the left – and hardly any are T-shirted hotheads. Loathers of Israel tend to be faculty Jews, Jews in politics and government, in the human rights business and the rabbinate. All are careers providing perfect platforms on which to wage political war to make Israel a pariah, to get passionate over human rights and social justice, and never mind this rape of language.
The rule seems to be that intelligentsia on the left are prone to do a Jewish flip and have compassion for the killers of Jews. The 1962 execution of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem was the ultimate of this bizarre instinct at work. Luminaries of the day such as Martin Buber, Hugo Bergmann, Isaiah Berlin and Professor Walter Kaufmann opposed putting the Nazi mastermind to death. Israel, they reckoned, should have allowed the exterminator to live on.
But what after all is so wrong with being merciful to the nth degree? Is it such a great sin to spare a cold-blooded monster? Is it not just taking compassion too far? Mercifulness in fact is one of the best Jewish traits: God commanded Israel to this effect!
Deuteronomy deals with letting compassion triumph over sober thought. God commands Israel to remember, for all time, how cruel Amalekites tried to exterminate it in the wilderness. God commanded Israel to exterminate that nation at every opportunity. Not even to let one animal live. But the very first king of Israel let compassion get the better of him, and thought God would approve that. King Saul allowed his army to spare the choicest animals but, worse, he took Agag the Amalekite King captive. In fury the Prophet Samuel by his own hand hacked Agag to pieces.
Compassion for deliberate murderers is not compassion but collaboration with the wicked. It comes down to indulging one’s own desires, instincts and whims. And by so doing the ‘merciful’ sinner bears the guilt for any victim murdered by the murderer he let live.
The lesson: compassion for deliberate murderers is not compassion but collaboration with the wicked. It comes down to indulging one’s own desires, instincts and whims. And by so doing the ‘merciful’ sinner bears the guilt for any victim murdered by the murderer he let live. Hitler was King Saul’s guilt; Hitler descended from the child that Agag conceived during the one night that Saul allowed him to live.
All well and good; but how do some Jews get their surfeit of compassion? It is no answer that the rabbis group, T’ruah or Ruderon’s hatred for Israel explains their feeling sorry for terrorists and cold about the Jewish teens they murdered. The hatred is what needs explaining.
How do so many Jews come to hate Israel with all their might and ire?
The explanations are none too pretty. Jews get broken moral compasses and hard hearts from pure expediency, from stupidity, but worse, they have psychotic episodes peculiar to Jews alone.
Unlovely and unflattering ignorance and greed come back to bite Israel. On the Left to a fault, many Jews believe what they want to believe from the mainstream and social media doctoring the news to confirm what audiences like to believe: Israel is the one and only villain of the peace.
I have dissected oftentimes how the media’s doctoring gets done. Chapter 4 of my book, “Hadrian’s Echo” demonstrates all the methods. The main thesis is that anti-Israel media do more than report news; they actively make it, and sometimes even participate in the news making.
The riots on the Temple Mount, the murder of nineteen Israelis, and the shooting of a journalist in Jenin are recent cases of making news and assisting to make it. In point of fact, the journalist who paid with her life is the ultimate example of the media participating in making news!
For the purpose of giving Israel a stinking name – worse even than terrorists – facts are juxtaposed to mean what they don’t. Here’s the Economist caught doing it. “Since March 19 Israelis and 30 Palestinians have been killed.”
The stats are true. The censored out facts about the cause and manner of the killings – context – renders the statement as false as can be. Reporting events in WWII, the Economist would have stuck to the formula of cutting out context: “Since March, 19 Allied forces and 30 SS guards have been killed.” The reader would tend to empathise with the SS which suffered a disproportionate number of deaths, while the Allied forces seem to have been cruelly heavy handed.
On greed as the driver for hating Israel, again I’ve written much, under the ‘economics of Israel bashing.’ Many of the arguments appeared on Arutz Sheva.
The fact is that human rights are just another industry. The firms in it operate by a particular business model. And the unlovely fact is that Jews make an above average living in academia, as columnists for Woke papers like the NYT, as owner//managers of monstrosity non-profits like Amnesty or B’Tselem or Breaking the Silence or J-Street, milking that never failing cash cow: Israeli crimes. Not too many can resist a $10 million handout from the Soros family, and its Open Society Foundation network, among the world’s biggest philanthropists.
The media severely focused on Israel has little in common with the Jews brainwashed by the media. True – both are unrelenting in their hatred; but their equipment is quite different. The knots and crankiness of Jews come from prolonged exposure to fake news, censorship and narrative. Jews have been conditioned to believe that Israel is criminal and shameful, and the Palestinian Arab camp is the moral one to be in.
To paraphrase Jean-Paul Sartre in his treatise “Anti-Semite and Jew,” Jews “allow their minds to be poisoned by the stereo-type of Israel.”
Still, they need to be psycho contortionists, to go a circuitous route by way of the desert which non-Jewish hate groups like BDS don’t take. Jewish haters have (again to paraphrase Sartre) “over-adjusted, to be distinguished radically from acts catalogued as Israeli.” For its part the media, through the ‘Games it plays,’ keeps the ‘anti’ on the boil.
This over-adjustment makes a Jew vengeful. It may take different forms. Some Jews qualify their identity; Ronnie Kasrils a former Cabinet Minister in the ANC government in South Africa, admits to being a Jew, adding carefully, ‘by descent only’. Distancing himself he proclaims, ‘Not in MY name!’ and collects signatories under the banner.
Or there was the media exec who lent his Jewish ID to get his media group off the hook after it had run a cartoon of a monster Jew devouring a baby. ‘Look at me,’ he said, “I’m a Jew, My media group cannot possibly be anti-Semitic if I as a Jew have no problem with the cartoon.”
And on the back benches of the House of Commons sits a Jew counted on by his party to address the Zionists. To speak of an innocent Zionist, he believes, is a contradiction in terms. Israel is a synonym for crime. And when Israel is apparently innocent of a crime it is only because you have to scratch deeper. He got angry with the UN after it failed to scratch deeply enough, when it was foolish to clear Israel of a massacre in a refugee camp. He would have none of it. Israel, the MP told Parliament, had covered up its deeds too well.
But undaunted and ever watchful, the contrary Jew neither slumbers nor sleeps. Another time, another day he shall have the crime. And in that day he shall go forth, he and the crime, and before the ugly truth the public shall bow. And in that day the Zionist and the Nazi shall be one.
It was Voltaire that said, “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
Steve Apfel is an economist and costing specialist, but most of all a prolific author of fiction and non-fiction. His blog, ‘Balaam’s curse,’ is followed in 15 countries on 5 continents