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Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a sixteenth-century star in the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance. He’s most often associated with paintings of peasants and other common people doing everyday things: hunting in the snow, ice-skating, dancing at a wedding, eating, sleeping, and playing children’s games. In one painting, a peasant is doing what peasants have been doing for over ten thousand years. He is plowing. The earth rises up in furrows. The horse trudges forward. The plowman keeps his gaze directed at the ground beneath his feet. On a terrace beneath the plowman, a blank-faced shepherd, surrounded by sheep, leans on his staff and directs his gaze toward the sky. Further down, a fisherman casts out his line. In the distance, the wind puffs the sails of a galleon. Only after learning the name of the painting does the viewer search the scene beyond these prominent features. And there the viewer finds them: two pale, naked legs are plunging into the water. This is “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Icarus was a character in Greek mythology. His father manufactured wings so his son could fly. The wings gave way and Icarus fell to earth. Many other artists have depicted Icarus’ fall. They usually place him in the center. Bruegel did not.
In 1938, almost four hundred years after “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” poet W.H. Auden visited Belgium’s Royal Museums of Fine Arts. He wrote a poem about the paintings he saw there. Auden observes that the Old Masters were never wrong in their artistic depictions of human suffering. In Nativity scenes, there are some children who don’t much care about the birth of the Messiah; they are off ice-skating. In scenes of martyrdom, “the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.”
And then there is that boy falling out of the sky.
the ploughman may
have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
but for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
The human ability to ignore shocking data and to carry on with the business of every day life is an important survival skill. Perhaps nothing is as shocking to an individual as losing a loved one to death, and yet we get up the next morning, make breakfast, clock in at work, and march dully forward into a future void where our departed loved one will never again play any part. The problem is, of course, that evil people count on this human ability to stroll past atrocity. The internet seemed, at first, to promise that that most precious of commodities, human attention, would be focused on wrongdoing. Evil people, thus exposed, would hesitate to commit crimes, or would stop committing crimes once those crimes were filmed and witnessed by others.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas jihadis attacked Israeli civilians. The jihadis carried out an orgy of atrocities against defenseless people who were at a music festival, or sleeping in their beds, or even just relieving themselves in a port-a-potty. Jihadis tied a father and child together with wire and then burned them both to death. Hamas jihadis paraded a dead woman’s stripped corpse so that other Muslims could spit on her remains. Hamas jihadis tied children together and then set them all alight and burned them alive. Hamas jihadis sexually violated copses. Hamas jihadis ate a family’s lunch as they tortured and mutilated parents and two young children. A Hamas jihadi used a garden hoe to attempt to decapitate an injured but still living agricultural worker from Thailand. And Hamas jihadis placed a Jewish baby in an oven and turned on the heat, murdering the infant. Hamas jihadis filmed their atrocities, and shared them with pride. Captured jihadis later described their atrocities in interrogations with Israeli officials. One admitted that Hamas jihadis kidnapped women and children in order to “dirty,” that is to rape them. Another said, “We became animals.” He and his fellow jihadis, he confessed, did “things that humans do not do.”
The atrocities Hamas jihadis committed are in accord with the standards established by Quran verses, hadiths, and examples from the biography of Muhammad. These canonical materials support endless war, torture, rape, including the rape of minors, genocide, and dismemberment of non-Muslims. Muhammad committed a genocide of a Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayzah. Muhammad ordered the torture with fire of a captured Jew, Kenana al-Rabi. Muhammad took as his sex slave this tortured and murdered Jew’s wife. Muhammad had also killed the father and brother of Safiyah bint Huyayy. Muhammad ordered his jihadis not just to rape women captives of war, but also to rape them in front of their husbands, and to impregnate them. Muhammad permitted the killing of women and children, saying, “They are of them,” that is, they are members of a group we want to wipe out, so killing them is permitted. Muhammad ordered the expulsion of Christians and Jews from the Arabian peninsula. The Quran orders Muslims to subject Christians and Jews to “humiliation.”
Hamas atrocities are related to atrocities committed by other jihadis elsewhere. ISIS committed filmed atrocities for years. Their victims included Shiite Muslims, Yazidis, and Christians. In 2015, jihadis attacked in Paris, murdering 137 and injuring over 400. In the US there has been a string of jihad atrocities, including the 9/11 attacks, the Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino attack, and many others. Jihadis attack their fellow Muslims, as well. See a partial list here and here.
The current estimate is that over 1,400 Israelis were killed. Given that Israel is much smaller than the US, by some estimates, a proportional loss of life in the US would have erased over 50,000 American lives. Here’s another metric. On October 7, more Jewish civilians were murdered on any day since the end of the Holocaust.
Many Muslims and their supporters around the world reacted with glee and approval to October 7. There were the de rigueur ululations and distribution of celebratory candy. Muslim journalist Latifa Abouchakra, a broad smile spreading across her face, said, “Nothing will ever be able to take back this moment, this moment of triumph … this moment of humiliation” of Jews. Professor Refaat Alareer, who had previously been praised by and published in the New York Times, joked about killing a Jewish baby in an oven. In Dagestan, Muslims mobbed an airport and climbed on planes, attempting to break windows, in response to a rumor that Jews might be on those planes. Other Muslims “besieged” a hotel in search of Jewish guests. In Sydney, Australia, near the iconic opera house, Muslims and their allies chanted “Gas the Jews.” At Cornell in New York State, Jewish students have been receiving messages like, “watch out pig jews. nowhere is safe. Your synagogues will become graveyards. your women will be raped and your children will be beheaded. glory to Allah” [sic].
Mika Tosca, a professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, and a man who identifies as a woman, called Israelis pigs, savages, very bad people, irredeemable excrement, and concluded, “May they all rot in hell.” Support for Hamas atrocities perhaps reached its absurdist nadir when British prostitutes joined in. Their statement of support is here. Or, as Armin Navabi points out, the cluelessness of Western leftists’ support for Hamas is best illustrated by “Queers for Palestine.” Of course gay and trans-identified people are regularly tortured and killed by Muslims in Gaza.
It doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Aware citizens recognized October 7 as a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, and as a day that called for decent people to take a stand. There are selfish reasons as well as humanitarian ones for concern. Israel is a tiny country, approximately the size of New Jersey. It has fewer than ten million citizens. But Israel is a nuclear power. Jews have become impatient with being targeted for genocide while the world stands idly by. Desperation might cause fingers on buttons to twitch. Israel’s nukes do not render it omnipotent. There are almost two billion Muslims in the world. Some of those allies have nukes. Israel is located in a petroleum hub, and the world runs on petroleum. The World Bank warned on October 30 that Hamas atrocities and subsequent Israeli response could trigger an oil price shock and an increase in already troublesome inflation.
Jihadis often justify their atrocities with reference to previous events. Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev attempted to justify his murder of an eight-year-old boy, Martin Richard. America had killed Muslims, Tsarnaev insisted, so it was righteous to plant a pressure cooker bomb full of nails next to Martin Richard’s tiny, innocent body. Tsarnaev wrote, “The US Government is killing our innocent civilians … I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished, we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all.” On October 7, thinking people knew: Israel will retaliate, and Muslims will, in turn, murder Americans, and attempt to justify that murder just as Tsarnaev attempted to justify the senseless murder of a little boy standing right next to him.
Finally, there is one more selfish reason for the whole world to shudder at October 7 and its aftermath. Anti-Semites may start with Jews, but they don’t finish with Jews. Every act that emboldens jihadis makes everyone – even other Muslims – less safe.
Moral people feel as if we are reliving the days of Nazism’s rise. When we learned about Nazism in school, we were encouraged to ask ourselves, what would we do if we witnessed anything similar? We were all sure that we’d be the heroes. The heroes intelligent enough to recognize the threat. The heroes courageous enough to speak up in spite of the mob. The heroes integral enough to take action. The heroes compassionate enough to see in victimized Jews a fellow human being.
I looked for that heroism on social media, even the minor heroism of adding a tiny Israeli flag to a Facebook photo. I well remember January, 2019, when Facebook was suddenly flooded with video of a teenage boy in front of the Lincoln Memorial face to face with an elderly man banging a drum. The video came through my feed multiple times from Judy, Terry, and other liberal, middle-aged white women. They spoke in the panicked tones of the last passenger aboard the sinking Titanic. The white boy was the embodiment of everything evil. We all had to live our lives as if we were plugged into an electric outlet pumping our beings with righteous, electrifying outrage until this white boy was, as one social media post illustrated, fed into a wood chipper and reduced to squirting blood and unrecognizable slices of viscera.
I also remember the summer of 2020, when, again, liberal, middle-aged white women were on fire, so much so that these nice ladies voted thumbs up when whites and blacks alike, including black police officer David Dorn, were murdered in the streets as part of a vast worldwide ritual of human sacrifice for the new deity, George Floyd.
Surely there would be a similar series of Facebook posts expressing outrage at the rape of corpses, the beheading of a Thai agriculture worker, the burning alive of children tied together.
Of course that never happened. Very few of my Facebook friends posted anything at all saying anything at all about October 7. One posted an article questioning the truth value of the atrocity reports. Maybe Jews were lying. Maybe these bad things never happened.
A few women posted images of doves with olive branches in their beaks accompanied by statements insisting, paraphrase, “Peace is better than war. We should have peace.” One Facebook friend posted a photo of a boy in a keffiyeh hugging a boy in a yarmulke. The photo is fake and was staged; see here. My friend didn’t care. She wants the world to be soft and sweet and closes her eyes when it is not. I am sad that she and so many others believe it is moral to close one’s eyes to others’ inconvenient pain and to pure evil. One male friend posted a “both sides” post. He also claimed that Israelis are really German.
After jihad attacks on France, many Facebook friends, including liberals, added a French flag to their profile photo. After October 7, just one friend, a Polish-American Catholic, added an Israeli flag to her photo.
I posted a photo of a horse. I snapped the photo in a local park. I admitted that I’m not a big horse fan or cat fan, but I thought the horse looked attractive against the bright blue autumn sky. Facebook friends who had been silent when I posted support for Israel suddenly had something to say. Horses are nice, they insisted. Cats are also nice. My Facebook friends who had nothing to say about the massacre of Jews were ready to go to the mat for horses and cats.
Jews everywhere should carry a kitten at all times. Then, if the Jew is attacked, the kitten will be imperiled also, and suddenly the world will care.
New Jersey is a diverse state. New Jersey has both comparatively high Muslim and also Jewish populations. On Monday, October 23, I had a doctor’s appointment. A woman I know to be Jewish was conversing with the receptionist. The receptionist asked, “For your next appointment, would you like a date just before or just after Christmas?”
The woman responded, “Makes no difference to me. I’m –”
She was about to say, “I’m Jewish.” But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “I don’t celebrate Christmas.”
I was chilled. In my state. In my country. A woman is afraid to say, in the civilized setting of a crowded doctor’s waiting room, the words, “I’m Jewish.” Her fear is not exaggerated. In December, 2019, anti-Semites carried out a terror attack in Jersey City, killing four.
A Facebook friend who lives in Bloomington, Indiana, reported that her husband attended a pro-Israel event. He felt it necessary to wear body armor. His concern is not exaggerated. When I lived in Bloomington as an IU graduate student, the local Hillel was repeatedly subjected to threats of violence, and on July 4, 1999, an IU student went on a shooting spree and shot Jews, Blacks, Christians, and Asians.
I posted the following on Facebook:
“After Russia invaded Ukraine, I safety-pinned a Ukrainian flag to my backpack. I wear the flag everyday, on the back of my backpack, as I walk. Ukrainians stop me and thank me. I tell them I am praying for a just peace in their homeland.
After October 7, I searched for Israeli flags. And then I realized that if I wore an Israeli flag on my backpack in the same way that I wear the Ukrainian flag, people would hurt me. If I wore an Israeli flag, I would risk being pushed, hit, spat on, having rocks thrown at me, and even killed.
Friends, imagine how many Jews feel now. In America. The land of the free and the home of the brave. They see that Jews are targets for deadly and sadistic hate. They see that too many stand by silently. Jews are less than one percent of the world’s population. Without allies, Jews are doomed. Looking the other way at a moment like this sends the wrong message. Do something, please. Post a picture of a menorah. Call the White House. Say, simply, ‘This is horrible.'”
This post got a few likes, mostly from Jewish friends. But no more than that.
No, I do not think that my friends who are remaining silent are anti-Semitic. But their silence makes me rethink the definition of “anti-Semitism.” Choosing to look the other way when a vulnerable minority is targeted isn’t the same as seething hatred, but it can contribute to the same final outcome, the same final solution.
I don’t know if the silent ones buy the narrative from National Public Radio and other powerful media. In this narrative, jihadi atrocities on October 7 were sad, of course, very sad. But, “both sides.” But, “proportional.” But, “1400 Jews” versus the death toll in Gaza, now put at 8,000 by the Gaza Health Ministry. The ladies who posted peace doves are very upset by that number.
Here’s what NPR refuses to say. If Muslims recognized Israel, war would cease. The only ones who rejoice at Muslim death tolls are Hamas and other anti-Semites. To Hamas and other anti-Semites, dead Muslim Arabs have only one purpose: to inflame more hatred against Jews. Israel would gladly fight Hamas by the rules of conventional war, but Hamas fights an unconventional war because unconventional war is to its advantage. NPR does not say that Hamas is a genocidal movement whose stated goal is, ultimately, to kill every Jew in the world. Hamas insists that this genocide is the duty of every Muslim, as outlined in sacred texts. See here. I’ve tried to speak these truths in comments to the New York Times. I am civil. I quote canonical texts. The New York Times, though it posts other comments by me, does not post these comments. As long as these basic truths are unsayable in mainstream media, Israel must be depicted as the bad guy.
NPR insists that Gaza is a terrible place to live. NPR blames Israel for Gaza’s poor living conditions. Here’s what NPR will not mention: Muslim countries in Africa, including Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, and Chad, and Muslim countries in the Middle East, like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and Muslim countries in Central Asia, like Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in South Asia, like Bangladesh – are terrible places to live. They all host terror cells. Countries with Muslim minorities, including the US, and in Europe, in the UK, France, Belgium and Holland, and the Philippines and Thailand in South-east Asia, all host Muslim terror cells. The one thing they all have in common is a shared belief system: Islam. There’s a reason there are Muslims protesting in Europe, America, and Australia. All those Muslims wanted to be someplace other than their Islamic homelands, so they are now in Europe, America, and Australia. The problem is not Israel. The solution is not two states or even the eradication of Israel that Hamas demands. The solution is telling people the truth about Islam and liberating Muslims from the ideology that ruins their lives.
Worldwide protesters don’t care about dead Muslims. We know because worldwide protesters remain silent about China’s extreme oppression of Uighurs. Over a million Uighurs have been detained in camps by China. There has been no significant street protest against China. The Muslim Rohingya have been violently persecuted in Myanmar (Burma) and are unwanted in countries to which they have fled, including Bangladesh and Thailand. Thais have towed Rohingya out to sea. There have been no significant street protests for the Rohingya, nor for Iranian women, or Syrian victims of government torture, or for stateless Kurds, or for the Circassian diaspora, forever exiled from their homeland by Russia.
The protesters hate Jews. They are animated by that hatred. They are not shouting or texting or writing signs about the great new Muslim homeland they will create. They are fantasizing about gassing and raping and beheading Jews. We need leadership that has the courage to articulate these truths.
Two of my non-Jewish Facebook friends have been speaking up. Robert Guyton is a devout Catholic and a man of integrity. He does not rejoice in his difference from the silent ones. He said that exhibiting integrity merely allows him the ability to look at himself in the mirror. He wrote,
“I have had to take a stand several times in my life, and say what others will not, about things I see that others ignore. I don’t like doing it. I don’t feel noble. I usually feel angry that I was put in a position to act while others stood about or hid. I don’t like it because I feel like I could go ‘OK Corral’ too easily, and may not know when to stop. My ‘example’ means nothing to others, as far as I can tell. Maybe they are amused, and are glad some other dumb sap got to put himself at risk. I don’t know anything really, except that it allows me to look at myself in the mirror.”
Otto Gross’ parents were Nazis. He understands the danger of zealots seduced by hate and ignored by silent bystanders. In Hamas’ strategy, Otto sees a parallel to Nazi strategy. In Gaza, he sees the Sudetenland – territory and people manipulated to invite what two different nihilistic ideologies demand – cataclysmic war that purges the earth, leaving it Judenrein. “Hamas used donations for other purposes than setting up a sustainable society or functional government. The ‘downtrodden Palestinians’ are analogous to ‘downtrodden Sudetenland Germans’: pawns to increase extremists’ power. Just create conflict, claim that others cause your misery, and misdirect rage at the Israelis. No one wants Gazans now, including Muslim countries, because they’ve been militarized. They had a land they could have built on. Egypt could have contributed. The only thing they created was a launch pad for terrorism. Same deal, different dogma. If they wanted peace they had a chance and blew it.”
Otto is not alone in analogizing Hamas to Nazism. Soliman Hijjy works at the New York Times. He’s on the record praising Hitler, as Bari Weiss points out, here. More Muslim Arab Hitler fans with New York Times bylines are exposed here.
My Jewish friends have not been silent. I want to, with their permission, share some of their words.
My Facebook friend Marc Brawer lives in Israel. He is a jolly fellow, usually posting songs and humorous material to uplift the spirit of anyone who passes by his page. His words were different after October 7. That day was a Jewish holiday. Simchat Torah marks the end, and also the beginning, of a cycle of Torah readings. Marc wrote,
“Following a holiday dinner on Friday evening, October 7, my son drove down to southern Israel, near the border with Gaza, together with two of his friends to attend the Nova music festival.
A barrage of rockets fell on the festival. Total chaos ensued. People ran every which way to try to escape the attack. My son entered a shelter together with about thirty other young people including five of his friends.
As soon as the rocket attack stopped, dozens of heavily armed terrorists entered the venue with the objective to kill as many people as possible, and take hostages.
They sprayed automatic rifle fire into the shelter that held thirty defenseless civilians, threw in hand grenades, and set it on fire. Anybody that tried to escape was shot.
My son took off his shoes and shirt as it got very hot, and it was very difficult to breathe. He ran out of the burning shelter, managing to avoid being shot.
Nearby he found a large thicket of bushes next to a corpse of a young woman who had been murdered. He hid himself in the bushes. He pretended he was dead. He laid there for about six hours. All that time he heard gunfire, explosions of hand grenades, shouting in Arabic, and screaming in Hebrew.
At one point he identified friendly vehicles of the Israeli security forces. He ran towards them. He was barefoot, and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. He wore only blood-soaked short pants. They picked him up and took him out of that hell.
He miraculously escaped with his life. Four of his five friends were slaughtered on that day. His hearing has been impaired and he is now undergoing treatment at a local hospital.”
Facebook friend Van Ze’ev Wallach wrote that, in his New York home, he began to hear of the October 7 attacks and decided to do something he’d never done before: attend a Simchat Torah service.
“I decided,” Van wrote, that “the time had come … on this terrible day, to sing and dance with my fellow Jews and the Torah … The observance took on an eerie feel when I arrived at the shul on a drizzly Saturday night. The interior looked dark, although cars were in the parking lot. Through the windows I could see flickering lights and shadowy outlines of some people. A security guard, barely visible in the gloom, told me the power had gone out that afternoon, during a day of pounding rain, and directed me to the side entrance. This was my introduction to Hakafot in darkness.”
“Hakafot” here means singing and dancing with Torah scrolls.
“The rabbi mesmerized us with a story about a celebration of Simchat Torah by yeshiva students in a concentration camp and the bittersweet nature of laughter and tears in this moment … I felt a connection to my fellow Jews at Chabad of Bedford, to the embattled Jews of Israel and the generations going back to Mt. Sinai. I’ll always remember October 7 as the night of the Hakafot in darkness, as if we had blackout curtains hung for safety. We met in the darkness of night, in the darkness of violence against Israel. Still, we defied the physical and spiritual gloom when we lit candles and said prayers and danced with the Torah.”
Facebook friend Alex Bensky predicted that Hamas would use images of Arab suffering to win the propaganda war. He saw, in this, a parallel to Nazi strategy. Alex’s local library has a collection of Signal, a Nazi magazine. Alex wrote, “I came across some articles about Allied bombing and of course there are pictures of German women and children injured or dead, sad little faces looking at the reader, stories about churches destroyed, schools hit by bombs, and so forth … The death of children is of course terrible … and each and every one of these carefully selected pictures shows someone who was the responsibility not of the Combined Bomber Offensive, but of Hitler and the Nazis … We will be seeing lots of similar tragic pictures of Gazans and when I see them I will bear in mind who is responsible for them.”
In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, ceding the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. He said that Nazi Germany’s territorial demands on Czechoslovakia were “a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.” Ultimately, of course, that “far away” “quarrel” would metastasize into a British death toll of 384,000 soldiers killed in combat, and 70,000 dead British civilians.
Are my Facebook friends silent because they regard Israel as a far away country about which they know nothing? If so, I would like to disabuse them of that belief. The same ideology, the same canonical quotes from the same Quran and hadith that Hamas cites in justification of its genocidal stance, that same package, took the lives of approximately three thousand Americans on September 11, 2001.
And there’s another reason that all of this is not far away.
My friend Liron posts laconic updates. Sample, “Heavy barrage. We are okay.” I asked for more details. She replied, “Hamas is firing rockets from Gaza, some short range and others long range. There’s no pattern to it, though they tend to fire them at the center of the country in the afternoons and evenings. Without the iron dome, we’d be f—ed.”
Alex elaborated. “Hamas is launching missiles from densely populated areas. Here, as elsewhere, Hamas deliberately makes civilians targets and the rest of the world, by and large, plays along.”
That’s what my Facebook friends who have been silent about Israel are scrolling past. One friend posts cat photos; another friend posts updates informing us that she has survived another missile barrage. All I ask is this. If you are going to “like” the cat photos, please also “like” the update from my friend surviving genocidal assaults.
I don’t understand how anyone can scroll past accounts like that from my friend, the author Karen A. Wyle. Karen’s mother, Bronislawa Zarkower, left Poland in 1938. The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, and built Auschwitz and other death camps there.
Karen reports, “My father Karl Weihrauch left Berlin a month before Kristallnacht. He and his brother Bert went back into Europe and then Germany with the U.S. military. He was in a rifle squad in the 42nd Division, in one of two units that were first into Dachau. He saw at least one guard alive who was dead in the photos taken that day. Some soldiers gave their weapons to prisoners, which may be how the guard ended up dead.”
My friends scrolling past reports of October 7 also scroll past Karen’s and Liron’s history.
Liron writes, “Yehuda Ber was my great grandfather. He spent the war years in the Lodz ghetto. His daughter, my grandmother, and his son escaped to the USSR. His other daughter, my grandmother’s little sister, died in the ghetto. He and his wife, my great grandmother, were deported to Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. She was gassed there, and he was placed on a train from Auschwitz to Dachau. He died on that train.
Teresa Rosendahl is my mother-in-law. She was born in the Sosnowiec Ghetto in 1943. Her parents managed to smuggle her out of the ghetto to a Polish family. That family, some days later, brought her to a local convent, and that’s where she stayed until the war ended. Teresa Janina Kierocinska was the name of the nun who took care of her. After the war ended, her mother, who survived Auschwitz, returned to Sosnowiec and retrieved her.”
Genocidal anti-Semites would have a further impact on Liron’s family. Liron mentioned her aunt. I searched the web and found an obituary for Liron’s aunt. I plugged it in to Google translate and polished up the translation.
“Miriam Guetta was born on April 14, 1947 in Alexandria, Egypt … The family of nine children immigrated to Israel in 1950.” Note: in the twentieth century, Muslim countries like Egypt expelled almost a million Jews. Many of those Middle Eastern Jews went to Israel.
“Miriam’s career choice, nurse, was natural for her. She loved people and desired to help. Miriam worked at the hospital in Afula, in the children’s department, where she was called ‘the angel in white.’ When her sister became seriously ill, Miriam did not leave her sister’s bed for months, and took care of her until her sister was out of danger and completely recovered. Miriam took care of wounded soldiers in the Six-Day War.
In 1972 she moved to Kiryat Shmona as a community nurse. On her first day, she met her future husband, Jacob Guetta, who worked as a guide for street gangs.
Miriam became pregnant shortly after her marriage, and her joy was boundless. The woman who had been the mother of her many nieces and nephews had names already prepared for her newborn.
On Thursday morning, April 11, 1974, during Passover, three terrorists infiltrated Israel from Lebanon. Early in the morning, the terrorists arrived at Kiryat Shmona. The squad members entered a school building, but when they saw that the building was empty, they left it and moved to nearby residential buildings on Yehuda Halevi Street.
At first they entered building number 13 and went up to the first floor, where they murdered family members who were seated at breakfast. The terrorists then moved to the next building, number 15. They went through the various apartments and shot people to death.
Miriam was in her apartment on the third floor. She was drinking coffee before she left for work. Miriam heard shouts from the Stern apartment on the first floor. Miriam and her husband could have gone down the three steps to leave the building and save their lives. But Miriam did not hesitate. She and her husband ran toward the shouts. Miriam entered the Stern apartment. The terrorists shot her with many bullets in her chest and a bullet in her head, and her death was immediate. Miriam’s husband, Jacob, ran after her. He was hit by a grenade and died for a long time before he died. Miriam was six months pregnant. She was 27.
The Stern family’s grandchildren testified that they were saved thanks to Miriam’s entry, as the terrorists chased her and allowed the children to jump out of the window and save their lives.
The terrorists murdered eighteen people, half of them children.”
As I corrected the Google translation of the original obituary, I did not “polish up” the wording that Jacob Guetta “died for a long time before he died.” This phrase captures for me what terrorism does not only to victims, but also to jihadis. Jihadis walk through the world soul dead, long before their actual death. Men like Professor Refaat Alareer, who joke about the torture murder of Jewish babies, are soul dead.
My Facebook friend Alex lives in the US. He doesn’t know Liron; he “met” her on my Facebook page. When Alex read Miriam’s obituary, he remarked, “I was in Kiryat Shmona the week before this happened … if I had decided to go to that area during Passover, as I almost did, that might have been me.”
Professor Refaat Alareer justifies hatred and genocide thus: “You can’t oppress us … and not expect people to react.” Refaat, my friends Liron, Karen, and Alex are just a few of millions of Jews who have ancestry in Poland. Some Polish Catholics, during the Holocaust and even after, committed atrocities against Jews. Liron, Karen, and Alex offer love to me, and I am a Polish Catholic. After the Holocaust, the Jews who survived and their descendants went to law school, or grad school, or medical school. They established schools, charities, media companies, and families. They won Nobel Prizes. Billy Wilder, Hollywood genius, lost family members, including his own mother, in concentration camps and ghettoes. Wilder “reacted” to oppression – to use your words, Refaat, by making deep, funny, and human films. Jonas Salk’s mother was from Minsk, where the large, ancient and vibrant Jewish community was wiped out. Salk “reacted” to oppression by developing the polio vaccine. Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Warsaw Jew who left before the rise of Nazism, “reacted” to oppression by writing Nobel-prize winning literature. These Jews’ belief system, even in the face of unspeakable atrocity, makes the world a better place. Your hate-and-violence based belief system, even in the Garden of Eden – see here – makes the world a worse place. Refaat, your people, too, could “make the desert bloom.” You don’t. You turn it into hell on earth. Stop blaming Jews. Start looking at your belief system.
It’s not just the indifference of my Facebook friends who haven’t commented on October 7 that disturbs me. Comments like this, from an Israeli, break my heart. “Dear Danusha, pardon this personal message on a public forum … Your support and expressions of concern are very kind and strengthening. This is a very difficult period to get through. Your posts are very comforting to read.”
It shouldn’t be that way. No one should have to “thank” me for a social media post rejecting atrocity and speaking up for decency. This should be obvious. It breaks my heart that it is not.
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
I feel like a flood has washed me against the rocks and then carried me out to sea. The sadness after reading this permeates my being, almost to the point where I think it may now be an intrinsic quality. I can’t help but to think back in my life when I was unkind, or worse to others. Dropping a girlfriend because my friends disapprove, stealing from my parents, lying to friends, family, running from pain instead of facing it, and the problems that caused the first half of my life. It reminds me of what is real. Unlike the hack fiction I write because of the cognitive dissonance I endure, which I try to mollify by working in a technical field. Engineering became a source of wellbeing, one that I eventually and reflexively kept returning to, mashing the ‘good engineer’ button to get that quick hit of accomplishment like a monkey in a Skinner box. That way I don’t have to look at what’s really bothering me. That fear and insecurity that eats at us all.
The friends you mention that spoke up, they are people I have noticed, and they have something to say. I compare that to some of my coworkers, who say much, but it’s always circular. No meaning except what loops back to them. I guess that’s their button. I am glad you wrote these words, and that I got to read them and reset my perception after a trying week. I am happy to see Auden’s poem. I became a fan of his late in life, some 27 years ago when I discovered a little blurb he wrote on behaviorism that included mention of the Athanasian Creed. Evil people count on all kinds of things. They exploit the slack in the system, which other people call good will, or even concupiscence.
“No, I do not think that my friends who are remaining silent are anti-Semitic. But their silence makes me rethink the definition of “anti-Semitism.” Choosing to look the other way when a vulnerable minority is targeted isn’t the same as seething hatred, but it can contribute to the same final outcome, the same final solution. “
This, this is something for all of us to remember. Danusha, thank you for this essay. I wish I could do it the justice it deserves, but for now I am just grateful you wrote it.
“There are selfish reasons as well as humanitarian ones for concern…. Finally, there is one more selfish reason for the whole world to shudder at October 7 and its aftermath.”
Wow, Danusha Goska, you actually used the word “selfish” twice with a non-derogatory, non-evil, meaning. Thank you.
Rational selfishness does not preclude nor prohibit humanitarian generosity, kindness, or charity. In fact, humanitarian actions, rational as opposed to irrational humanitarian actions, in order to be beneficial and not destructive require rational selfishness. Require rational thinking.
For example, Israel granted 21,000 work permits to the Palestinians. Work permits the Palestinians used to do reconnaissance on the Israelis they would slaughter on October 7. Why did Israel do that? The answer is suicidal “humanitarian” ALTRUISM. Need makes right, no matter who it is that is in need.
Altruism demands the sacrifice of rational moral principles and rational thinking. Altruism demands mercy, pity, and forgiveness for the undeserving.
You are really starting to resemble a clown that is getting nowhere with his obsession of altruism.
And she still won’t date you, because you are a hateful, spoiled, bitchy little clown that only cares about one thing…..himself.
Your Lutheran church is destroying America with its Christian self-sacrificial altruism. Your Lutheran church is happily and eagerly receiving millions upon millions of stolen tax-payer dollars from the Biden administration to aid and abet the destruction of America through illegal and unvetted immigration.
ALL of the major Christian churches in America, Catholic, Methodist, Baptists, etc., are doing the same thing, in the name of Christian altruism and sacrifice. Christian altruism is destroying America and always has been since the beginning.
Who made it possible for Ilhan Omar to invade America? The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. All in the name of Christian altruism and self-sacrifice, “the meek shall inherit the earth”, “love your Muslim enemy”. “love your Muslim neighbor as you love yourself”.
“After fleeing my home country of Somalia I lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for four years before seeking hope and opportunity in the United States, and it was thanks to the support of LIRS [Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service] that I and my family found a home in the United States,” the Democratic lawmaker said.
Omar is just one of the lawmakers, religious leaders and former refugees who stressed the importance of restoring the United States’ long-standing commitment to resettling refugees Thursday on a virtual panel hosted by LIRS, one of nine agencies contracted with the U.S. government to do resettlement work.”
Wow, your favorite way of attacking me by using Lutheranism to get to me. Didn’t you post this a couple of days ago? Didn’t work then….doesn’t work now. Are you running out of ideas? Guess what, there are more Lutherans in America than there will ever be Objectivists. Sorry.
Earlier this week American thinker had an article talking about the new Republican House speaker:
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/10/its_a_good_thing_mike_johnson_got_in_quietly.html.
In the article the author pointed out that the Leftist rag The Atlantic tried to smear Mike Johnson by pointing out something his great great grandfather did in 1867 because he was a Southerner.
The immature tactic of guilt by association is what you do when you fallaciously state the Nazi connection to Lutherans. This is your typical anti-Christian lame tactic of trying to associate me with the Nazis. You are about as stupid as one gets…..it wouldn’t hold up in a real court of law as “evidence”…..and it shows you to be nothing but a cheap shot little con artist wannabe fascist and a truly lazy thinker. And I am using the term thinker loosely because you are anything but a thinker.
But please keep using your little tactic as often as you can, little man. I also like the deliberate mis-quoting of Jesus. Perhaps you should refrain from misquoting scripture….you always get it wrong.
Yeh, keep calling Objectivism and Objectivists fascists, keep deflecting as to what your Lutheran church is doing right now to destroy America, and what all the Christian churches are up to.
All in the name of Christian altruism and sacrifice. “You are your Muslim brother’s keeper”.
Judaism prepared the ground for Christianity, and both prepared the ground for Islam and Marxism. That is a historical and philosophical FACT. Marxism is religion in disguise, it is Judeo-Christianity in disguise.
“Religious writers often claim that the cause of Nazism is the secularism or the scientific spirit of the modern world. This evades the fact that the Germans at the time, especially in Prussia, were one of the most religious peoples in Western Europe; that the Weimar Republic was a hotbed of mystic cults, of which Nazism was one; and that Germany’s largest and most devout religious group, the Lutherans, counted themselves among Hitler’s staunchest followers….
There was also Martin Luther, regarded by the Nazis as a major hero, who was the greatest single power in the development of German religion and, through this means, an influence on the philosophies of both Kant and Hegel. Luther is anti-reason (“Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason”), intensely pro-German, and crudely anti-semitic (“Fie on you wherever you be, you damned Jews, who dare to clasp this earnest, glorious, consoling Word of God to your maggoty, mortal, miserly belly, and are not ashamed to display your greed so openly”). He formally enlists God on the side of the state. Unconditional obedience to the government’s edicts, he holds, is a Christian virtue. “In like manner we must endure the authority of the prince. If he misuse or abuse his authority, we are not to entertain a grudge, seek revenge or punishment. Obedience is to be rendered for God’s sake, for the ruler is God’s representative. However they may tax or exact, we must obey and endure patiently.” – Leonard Peikoff, “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom In America”
I’m going to keep calling you a fascist, a girly man and a coward. I’m not deflecting at all on what “my” Lutheran church is doing re: refugees. I’m not commenting on it at all.
If you have a problem with what Lutheran Social Services is doing, be a man and call them….and every other religious social services organization. Including the Jewish ones.
God knows I’ve given you the phone number numerous times, tough guy.
But you won’t call anyone because you are barely a man and a coward. That is why you hide behind your keyboard passing judgement on the rest of us while dumping all of that Peekaboo and Rand drivel and video assignments on us that no one is reading or watching.
Got news for ya, loser boy….no one is coming on board your sinking SS Objectivist, now listing hard to port…..ever.
Typical liberal fascista….won’t do anything for himself and expects everyone else to do his dirty work. I guess all of the copying and pasting just wears you out by the end of the day.
You never learn……anything. you never provide proof to back up your whacked out ideas. You simply make statements as if they are they are fact. and then your big deal statement is to associate me with 1930s and 40s Germany. The only thing you are doing is making yourself feel superior to mask your true inferiority. If calling me a Nazi makes you feel better, I suppose there is nothing that I can say to change that. But it truly is pathetic on your part.
“Judaism prepared the ground for Christianity, and both prepared the ground for Islam and Marxism. That is a historical and philosophical FACT. Marxism is religion in disguise, it is Judeo-Christianity in disguise.”
If it’s a fact where is your documented proof, other than the work of crackpot historian and faux philosopher Lenny Peekaboo. Until you can provide legitimate proof from real historians and philosophers you will be what you always are….a grifter who proves nothing and simply confirms what a fraud he truly is.
It is not surprising that you have no credentials from any university, that you have never accomplished anything of note on your own. You are simply copy/paste moron, and a religious bigot who parrots back everything your favorite collection of Objectivist toadies have written
Objectivism is your religion and as it’s current low-rent high priest you show yourself to be the small petty, irrational P.O.S. you are. You are a fascist and you will always be a fascist.
Well, for one thing Danusha Goska is a woman. As to spoiled…you obviously know nothing about her or her background.
I direct people, by the way, to another Front Page Mag article today, the one about the New Yorker. I was wondering how leftist Jews would deal with the genocidal horror inflicted on other Jews just for being Jews and “I was wrong about the Palestinians” I didn’t figure was a likely response, leftists not being particularly good or interested in self-reflection. The article shows you how they’re doing it.
Was your post directed at me or THX, because my post was directed at THX. And I was referring to him as a hateful, spoiled, bitchy little clown. Not Goska.
“Should you be just? To the contrary, altruism insists that you treat people with mercy, rather than justice. If others are guilty of some wrongdoing, you should offer them absolution, not judgement. Treat them with pity in place of censure. Deal with people based not on what they deserve but on what they NEED.
Altruism’s attitude toward moral principles is sharply illustrated by the following. Some years ago, the campus of New York’s Stonybrook State University became the target of numerous fires, resulting in several million dollars of damage. It turned out that the fires were set by one of the university’s own fire marshals — who had previously been imprisoned for ARSON. While it is not clear whether anyone at the school knew of his criminal record at the time he was hired — he supposedly left blank the line on the application form that asked about criminal history — the university’s chief fire marshal said such knowledge would have made no difference in the hiring decision: “We couldn’t refuse him; that would be discrimination.” That is, it would have been UNALTRUISTIC for the university to be concerned about its own interests in keeping students and faculty safe from dangerous felons. It would have been unaltruistic to treat a criminal as a criminal, since the paramount consideration is supposed to be, not his character, but his acute need for the job.
An even more egregious example occurred at the Honeywell Corporation in Minnesota. There, an employee strangled to death a co-worker, his girlfriend, and was sent to prison for four-and-a-half years. Several weeks after his release the company took him back — only to have him murder another co-worker, who was spurning his romantic overtures. Explaining the decision to re-employ him, a Honeywell spokesman said: “The philosophy we have is that we don’t discriminate when it comes to hiring practices.”
It is true that employers may fear being sued for illegal discrimination if they reject such applicants. But the legal constraints themselves are simply the manifestation of altruism, of its mandate that we SACRIFICE everything, including our moral principles, for the sake of someone in need.” – “In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice is Unjust and Destructive” by Peter Schwartz
Yet another moronic lesson on altruism….the one that you posted just two days ago. Or was it three? I get so confused with your repetitive posts….they are all so beyond boring.
Altruism, altruism, altruism. Boring boring boring.
I wish you could talk about something you actually know how to do, like taking a crap in the morning. How altruistic that would be.
Wonderful essay. But my hatred and fury over these latest Muslim atrocities in Israel make me utterly indifferent to the fate of the Muslim noncombatants in Gaza, even the children, who will be poisoned by Jew hatred by the time they are six or seven. I want to see Gaza turned into an ash heap, and d–n the nonexistent “innocent civilians” who rejoice at the sight of murdered and mutilated Israeli women strapped to vehicles driven through the Gaza streets. Death to them all. Their continued existence is a cancer upon the world, as is Islam itself. Blow them all to hell.
Blow them all to hell.
Couldn’t agree more!
George W. Bush did the most evil thing when he called Islam a religion of peace. Evil requires the sanction of the victim to thrive and George W. Bush gave the evil of Islam the victim’s sanction in spades.
I consider George W. Bush more evil than Islam because his sanction and cowardice has made the evil of Islam thrive in America and the West. His sanction, his appeasement, his cowardice, his self sacrificial altruism, has made the evil of Islam thrive.
When Israel altruistically and self sacrificially granted the Palestinians 21,000 work permits Israel granted the evil of Islam the sanction of the victim.
“The “sanction of the victim” is the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the “sin” of creating values.” – Leonard Peikoff
“Then I saw what was wrong with the world, I saw what destroyed men and nations, and where the battle for life had to be fought. I saw that the enemy was an inverted morality—and that my sanction was its only power. I saw that evil was impotent—that evil was the irrational, the blind, the anti-real—and that the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to serve it. Just as the parasites around me were proclaiming their helpless dependence on my mind and were expecting me voluntarily to accept a slavery they had no power to enforce, just as they were counting on my self-immolation to provide them with the means of their plan—so throughout the world and throughout men’s history, in every version and form, from the extortions of loafing relatives to the atrocities of collectivized countries, it is the good, the able, the men of reason, who act as their own destroyers, who transfuse to evil the blood of their virtue and let evil transmit to them the poison of destruction, thus gaining for evil the power of survival, and for their own values—the impotence of death. I saw that there comes a point, in the defeat of any man of virtue, when his own consent is needed for evil to win—and that no manner of injury done to him by others can succeed if he chooses to withhold his consent. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was “No.” – Atlas Shrugged
I consider you to be more evil than Islam, because you lack constraint and you don’t know when to shut up.
re: the sanctimonious Atlas Shrugged quote, could there possibly have been a more verbose, clumsy writer, endlessly lecturing us with her Objectivist B.S.
I can see where you picked up all of her bad habits….the sneering, snotty tone that is endless in the second tier writers and pretend philosophers in your religion is what makes you guys the most boring people on the planet.
I can’t imagine hanging around your ilk for more than 5 minutes….everyone talking about nothing and trying to outdo each other with your own puffed up sense of importance.
Would it be right to say that Rand and the Objectivists all have the moral position of self-important, self-righteousness and self-exaltation, as the basic principle or their “morality”?
No, it would NOT.
The basic principle of Objectivist ethics is observe and take action according to the facts of reality, the contextual facts of a situation.
It is NOT your “self” (in other words it is NOT your mind or your ego or your emotions) that is the final arbiter of what is good or evil, but the FACTS OF REALITY.
To put it in Judeo-Christian-Muslim terms to be objective and therefore moral a man must obey, not the Bible, not the Koran, not Jesus, not Mohammed, not Moses, not God, not Allah, not another consciousness, not another ego, nor any whims or fantasies of his own, to be objective and moral a man must obey the facts of reality.
“The concept of objectivity contains the reason why the question “Who decides what is right or wrong?” is wrong. Nobody “decides.” Nature does not decide—it merely is; man does not decide, in issues of knowledge, he merely observes that which is. When it comes to applying his knowledge, man decides what he chooses to do, according to what he has learned, remembering that the basic principle of rational action in all aspects of human existence, is: “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.” This means that man does not create reality and can achieve his values only by making his decisions consonant with the facts of reality.” – Ayn Rand
I would say you are correct. The sad thing about them is how their philosophy resembles Communism, Nazism, progressivism as the moral position of self-important, self-righteousness and self-exaltation.
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
The liberal mainstream media is responsible for giving people these attitudes. They are, of course, personally responsible for keeping them. I see something different in conservative media. The majority of commenters fully support Israel and pray for an Israeli military victory, though all are war-weary. Take heart. Your Facebook circle is not representative of the population as a whole but of the liberal portion.
“Hamas fights an unconventional war”
Hamas fights a COWARDS war.
There’s more to it than an analogy between Hamas and Nazi’s. The Mufti of Jerusalem-war criminal Haj Amin Al Husseini spent a good chunk of WWII in Germany with Hitler and Himmler. Yad Vashem Israel’s Holocaust museum claims there was never a photo posted at the museum of Hitler and Al Husseini (except on their site) although credible witnesses saw it and accused the museum of removing it. Yad Vashem has claimed they didn’t want to bring Israel-“Palestinian” politics into it;…-which has everything to do with Nazi’s and assasinated PLO chief Zuheir Mohsen’s quote that there is no such people as ‘Palestinian’s’-It’s simply an identity with which to rub out Israel.
The poison that is destroying the West and America is coming from the universities.
“Every kind of ethnic group is enormously sensitive to any slight. If one made a derogatory remark about the Kurds of Iran, dozens of voices would leap to their defense. But no one speaks out for businessmen, when they are attacked and insulted by everyone as a matter of routine. What causes this overwhelming injustice? The businessmen’s own policies: their betrayal of their own values, their appeasement of enemies, their compromises—all of which add up to an air of moral cowardice. Add to it the fact that businessmen are creating and supporting their own destroyers.
The sources and centers of today’s philosophical corruption are the universities . . . It is the businessmen’s money that supports American universities—not merely in the form of taxes and government handouts, but much worse: in the form of voluntary, private contributions, donations, endowments, etc. In preparation for this lecture, I tried to do some research on the nature and amounts of such contributions. I had to give it up: it is too complex and too vast a field for the efforts of one person. To untangle it now would require a major research project and, probably, years of work. All I can say is only that millions and millions and millions of dollars are being donated to universities by big business enterprises every year, and that the donors have no idea of what their money is being spent on or whom it is supporting. What is certain is only the fact that some of the worst anti-business, anti-capitalism propaganda has been financed by businessmen in such projects.
Money is a great power—because, in a free or even a semi-free society, it is a frozen form of productive energy. And, therefore, the spending of money is a grave responsibility. Contrary to the altruists and the advocates of the so-called “academic freedom,” it is a moral crime to give money to support ideas with which you disagree; it means: ideas which you consider wrong, false, evil. It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers. Yet that is what businessmen are doing with such reckless irresponsibility.” – Ayn Rand. “The Sanction of the Victim”
Oh no, not her final public lecture. You mean to say that’s it? The last one?
She definitely didn’t age well as if she had anything much to start out with.
Is this all you ever do….watch her moronic videos and those of her sycophants? Maybe you should put out your own vids so we can see what you look like. But you probably won’t. After all who wants watch a video of you whining about Christians and altruism.
Nice life you have carved out for yourself.
Jesus of Nazareth didn’t age at all did he? He was sacrificed on a cross at the young age of 33 as a sacrificial animal for undeserving and evil sinners.
Just as America is being sacrificed to evil Muslims and Islam by the Christian churches today.
America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, the land of the personal pursuit of happiness here on earth, will not age at all because of self-sacrificing altruism.
Christianity is for those that wish to escape this life on earth for some fantasy utopian Kingdom in a supernatural dimension when they’re dead. It has NOTHING to do with the desire to live on earth and pursue personal happiness on earth.
“Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used.” – Ayn Rand
Oooo, sensitive aren’t we? Whatsa mattah? Don’t like it when your b**ch goddess the source of your mental illness, gets attacked for that “stunning physicality”? Gee too bad. Suck it up buttercup.
So what do you do in response? Make a yet another snide remark about your favorite Christian strawman.
All of your lunatic fears about America, Christianity and hatred of religion all rolled into one sophomoric post, with a quote from the dried up queen of nothing to boot.
Christ has 1.5 billion followers around the world. What do you have? A couple of bad movies and a few lame books very few people read anymore. Sounds like quite a bowel movement to me.
Since when is popularity the objective measure of truth or falsehood.
Islam has 2 billion followers, does that make Islam holier, more sacred, truer, than Christianity?
“Since when is popularity the objective measure of truth or falsehood.
Islam has 2 billion followers, does that make Islam holier, more sacred, truer, than Christianity?”
I wasn’t talking about Islam, but as usual you change the topic.
You do not have a lock on truth any more than your DOA girlfriend did. But I would say that, in general Christianity is way more closer to the truth than your religion will ever be. More believe in God than will ever believe in Rand. Remember what happened when Germans replaced God with Hitler? It did not end well.
By the way if you really want to know about the relationship between Nazism and Lutherans simply google it. You will find out just what those facts are.
Thank God it’s the weekend. No new articles for you to piss on
Dear THX 1138: Your incessant screeds are not only excruciatingly monotonous but rather psychotic. How is it that after all this time you can’t take the hint that no one is the slightest bit interested in your vacuous blather?
Well said sir.
He has a messiah complex….out to change America’s way of thinking. He once said he is the lone voice crying out in the wilderness. So he sees himself as John the Baptist.
He never takes the hint because he is in love with himself.
If you’re not interested in my comments don’t read them and don’t reply to them.
It is psychotic to claim that YOU are not in the slightest bit interested in my comments and yet here you are reading them and replying to them and saying that YOU are not in the slightest bit interested in them.
Hamas is greatly influenced by the elimationatiionist ideology of Nazism which the left ignored in the 1930s and which FDR did nothing to prevent the Holocaust from happening as president .Until recently, a visit to Yad Vashem would show a pictuire of Hitler and the Mufti may their names and memories be erased talking together about their plans for the Jewish question . The author deserves much credit for demonsrating the utter and complete evil of Hamas and is a great friend of the Jewish People and the State of Israel
Wonderful, moving article. I am not decent enough to be a Jew, and am not, so after the atrocities in October I wanted to see Gaza carpet bombed.. No ‘two-state solution’ can ever work with these monsters as neighbors. And I was horrified by the evil reactions at our universities., shocked that they have become so vile as to celebrate pure evil. If they cannot recognize evil now, they never will.
You’re not decent enough to be a Jew? Bernie Madoff was a Jew did that make him a decent man? Ask the Jews whose life savings and pensions he STOLE and DESTROYED.
Being a Jew does not make a man decent nor indecent, just as being a Christian does not make a man decent nor indecent, just as being an atheist does not make a man decent nor indecent.
Your individual character and individual actions make you decent or indecent.
There are two types of racism, hating a man because of his race and praising a man because of his race.
“Like every other form of collectivism, racism is a quest for the unearned. It is a quest for automatic knowledge—for an automatic evaluation of men’s characters that bypasses the responsibility of exercising rational or moral judgment—and, above all, a quest for an automatic self-esteem (or pseudo-self-esteem).” – Ayn Rand
I was speaking as to decency in general l
Of course individuals vary in any population.
But one would be hard put to find any other people who have contributed as much good to humanity with very little evil.
As to my not being decent enough to match those people I would never have give up control of Gaza as they did and after the horrors last month I would not have been upset with carpet bombing Gaza after the fashion of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo in WWII. Israel has been too decent and too kind for the type of evil it confronts.
In the 1980s the great Dr. Thomas Sowell received a phone call from the Reagan White House.
He was told that President Reagan was inviting him to the White House to speak to him and offer Him a position in his cabinet. The White House rep went on to tell Dr. Sowell that President Reagan considered him the greatest black economist in America.
At which point Dr. Sowell calmly asked if those had been President Reagan’s precise words. “Did President Reagan actually say those precise words, he considers me America’s greatest BLACK [emphasis added] economist?” The person on the phone answered, ” Yes indeed those were the President’s exact words, he considers you America’s greatest black economist”.
At which point Thomas Sowell hung up the phone and refused to ever again receive a phone call from Ronald Reagan. Even less to lower himself to work for the Reagan White House.
Think about that. Chew on it.
Too upset over a clumsy remark.
You’re not decent enough to be a Jew, or a Christian. To be one those people you would have to be decent human being, a status you will never achieve.
However, you are inhuman enough to be a Muslim and even more, an untermenschen Hamas terrorist. And that is probably all you will ever be. After all the Nazis believed themselves to be the master race, kind of like the Muslims do. You will have a problem achieving the status of master race since you are an objectivist.
Yeh, the decency of Christians who persecuted the Jews for 1,500 years. How many pogroms did you Christians enact against the Jews? How many Jews did you kill over 1,500 years?
How many ghettos did you decent Christians put them in?
And then 300 years of killing each other over interpretation of your so-called Holy Scripture. Catholic killing Protestant. Protestant killing Protestant.
But now Christianity is a religion of decency and peace, and love, what a bunch of REVISIONIST bullshit!
Guess what derp. Humans are human. They are flawed and fallen from grace. You are the perfect example. I know you think you are somehow above it all. That is your constant delusion.
I didn’t participate in any pogroms. I have never killed anyone. I haven’t put anyone into a ghetto.
But if you think you have a guilt by association case put your money where your mouth is and sue the Lutherans and the Catholics in court. I’ll be the first in line to get a seat, just to see what a fool looks like and how he behaves.
Christianity has always been a religion of decency, peace and love. Christians don’t pray to men who pervert the religion. We pray to the Triune God. That will never change and there’s not a thing you can do about it.
The reason Objectivism basically has no history, good or bad, is that there aren’t enough fools who believe in it. Like you, Objectivism has never accomplished a damn thing.
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Prov 18:2.
“Tis better to keep one’s mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
THX: “Yeh, the decency of Christians who persecuted the Jews for 1,500 years. How many pogroms did you Christians enact against the Jews? How many Jews did you kill over 1,500 years?”
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Intrepid has given a good response to your comment. This is something I have thought about for a long while. Certainly your thoughts on Christians are true and one can easily find examples of similar evils by the Jewish people in the Bible. But somehow both Jews and Christians have grown beyond those earlier times, perhaps from a deep, sometimes obscured, respect for life.
In the history of English law the Magna Carta set down some basic legal principles that were often ignored but served as a beacon, often faint, in darker times that guided the growth of the people and respect for the rule of law.
The Gospel of John has the expression, loosely remembered by me, “in Him life was and the life was the light of Mankind:”. I think that was basically a Jewish concept adapted to what was then another Jewish sect. Love of life is the beacon which both belief systems turn instinctively when confusion rules. Islam, by contrast, has openly embraced death and I believe them when they claim Death is their guiding beacon.
Reply to Young:
Dear Young,
both Judaism and Christianity are weaponized for intolerance and the brutality of theocracy. In that respect they are no different than Islam. Judaism is weaponized for anti Christianity, just as Christianity is weaponized for anti-Judaism.
There can be no truce or peace between Judaism and Christianity, not when those two religions are taken seriously.
You claim that Judaism and Christianity have within them a love of life which Islam does not. This is not true at all. Neither Judaism nor Christianity have a love of life here on Earth or a love of man as he is here on earth.
The doctrine of Original Sin thoroughly condemns man as an innately depraved and evil creature. The doctrine of the Fall of Man condemns life on earth as a punishment for Original Sin. Original Sin is hatred of man. The Fall of Man is hatred of life.
Today the vast majority of Jews and Christians are highly secularized without even being aware just how secularized they are. Today’s Jews and Christians basically pay lip service to religion, they go to church or synagogue, they may pray, they may follow religious rituals, but then they go and enjoy the pleasures of life on Earth. That’s not serious religion, that secularized religion.
If you want an example of serious Judaism and serious Christianity then you’ll have to look at the Amish and the Hasidim, those two sects practice Judaism and Christianity seriously.
The Aristotelian Renaissance (the rebirth of reason) and the Age of Enlightenment broke the stranglehold that religion had on the West.
Judaism and Christianity did not evolve into life-loving religions, what actually did happen is that serious belief in religion eroded in the West after the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment
THX,
I think it is true that Judaism and Christianity were softened by both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, but they appear to be evolutions of a Judeo-Christian society. Neither arose in other cultures. How it happened is for others to figure out.
You rightly look to older times for evidence and find harshness and intolerance. That is undeniable.
But one incident in the Christian Bible stands out for me. A mob surrounded a woman to stone her for committing adultery and Jesus intervened to stop the killing, let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
Legally the stoning could proceed but mercy stopped it. Jesus was a Jew as, undoubtedly, were those who were preparing to kill the woman and that mercy had to have come from a deeply Jewish character or the killing would not have stopped.
That Jewish sentiment became a part of Christianity and guides it. The further we, Jews or Christians, depart from it, and we do at times, the more we begin to feel wrong and feel the need to turn back.
By contrast, imagine Mohammed standing there in place of the Jew, Jesus. Would he stop the stoning? No. We know he would grab stones to hurl himself and exhort the mob to join him, joyfully, and brutally in killing the woman.
Despite our worst at times when Jews and Christians look for guidance we see the light of life, however expressed, to follow. Muslims see the prophet killing a woman with a big rock.
Sometimes fundamentals make a difference.
Mr. Goska; Your fear to be Jewish in America was brought on by Liberal Jews, who vote for the party that hates their guts for over 40 years. Conservatives from every color and creed, have been supporting Israel more then Liberal American Jews.
As with everything in life. As Dr. Scott Peterson says ” make your bed everyday.”
Start with changing the hearts and minds of American Jews and what their cultural leftism has wrought. Nothing will change in America, and make you feel safe, until you can do that!
Danusha mentions several times her ‘Facebook friend, her Facebook friends, her many Facebook friends’ (I paraphrase).
I’ve never had the pleasure of participating in Facebook discussions, but her Facebook acquaintances sound like a bunch of ignoramuses and / or losers.
No offence.
Facebook is a shithole full of “boomers” who have grown comfortable and unattached from real life in their retirement. They virtue signal with “black squares”, pride flags and any other cause du jour while in their real life they could care less. It’s easy to do because there will be a new “concern” along soon enough. Selfies at the Eiffel Tower or the Grand Canyon and photos of their cats, dogs, grandchildren or vegetable garden are all just “look at me” BS that helps them ignore the real world. Go outside of that venue and someone might post something unkind on your page or, worse yet, unfriend you.. OH, the horror! Is there anything worse than losing one of your 698 “friends” over something no one cares about anyway? I admit, I have a FB page I opened to see if I could find old friends from decades ago. I was also hoping to find discussions of interest or debates over the issues that influence our daily lives. That went over like a turd in a punchbowl so now the account lies dormant most of the time. The lack of interest in the Israel situation or the hordes of neo-nazis filling our streets is sickening. But hey, your granddaughter scored a goal in the soccer game and you grew the biggest tomato ever this year and the meme you posted got 53 “likes” so, life is good. We are not a serious people and we will pay the price for it.
as much as the recent events in israel are an object lesson in the belief that if you are nice to those that would murder you in a heartbeat everything will turn out fine , it is also an indication of how morally bankrupt america is given the cheers that went up from the left both in govt. in academia and the ingrate population of those from the middle east . australia is following closely with its own bankruptcy spurned on with our marxist govt. all wringing their hands and moaning about a measured response . to hell with a measured response !! level gaza and flush out all the vermin that inhabit the hilton tunnels . don’t stop until it is done . let all the arabs give them a piece of land , there are plenty of sand dunes available . what’s that !? the arabs don’t want them either ? who knew ! i wonder why that is ?
Here is a YouTube video that asks and answers why Arab and Muslim nations won’t take Arabs from Israel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7GAg8sWDpI
Some savages are more savage than others which means some Muslims are more Muslim than others.
And she still won’t date you.
“The protesters hate Jews. They are animated by that hatred. They are not shouting or texting or writing signs about the great new Muslim homeland they will create. They are fantasizing about gassing and raping and beheading Jews. We need leadership that has the courage to articulate these truths.”
You have to dig deeper, Danusha Goska, they hate Jews not because they’re Jews, but because the Jews are generally speaking so highly successful everywhere they go. At bottom Jew-hatred is hatred of the successful for being successful.
On a smaller scale you see this hatred of the good for being the good, hatred of intelligence, hatred of virtue, in the black ghetto where the intelligent and studious black child is attacked and sometimes even killed (Darrion Albert, 2009) for “acting white”, for being virtuous, for being good. For being SUCCESSFUL!
Thomas Sowell has argued that except the Overseas Chinese have suffered more pogroms and legal discrimination that even the Jews. Because everywhere the Overseas Chinese go they outperform the native population by leaps and bounds. Envy, jealousy, resentment, and hatred of their success follows. Dr. Sowell argues that the major reason behind the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that the white workers on the railroads grew to hate the Chinese workers because they could not compete with them. The Chinese worked harder, longer, cheaper, and more diligently than the white workers and so the white workers lobbied the government to keep the Chinese out.
If you’ll notice the hatred of Israel really exploded after 1967 when Israel went from being considered a “David” worthy of altruistic pity to becoming a “Goliath” worthy of admiration. Altruist egalitarianism, socialist egalitarianism, cannot tolerate the strong, the mighty, the highly successful. For the envious altruist, the socialist egalitarian, everyone must be equally shabby, equally weak, equally small, equal in failure and misery.
As if she needs an explanation on why the world hates Jews. She is smarter than than you and she is successful. Something you will never be.
Stop treating us as if we are children to be endlessly lectured. We generally don’t care what you have to say. You are a crashing pompous bore.
“This talk provides important historical context for the unfolding Hamas war on Israel and the reactions to it. …
the talk looks at the role of socialists and communists in backing enemies of Israel….
In analyzing this leftist role, Dr. Sotirakopoulos connects it to Ayn Rand’s unique philosophic concept of “envy,” or, the hatred of the good for being the good. Rand discusses this broader phenomenon in “The Age of Envy,” an essay reprinted in Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution. Also mentioned in the talk is Elan Journo’s book, What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which analyzes that conflict from an Objectivist moral framework.”
“The Left’s Long War on Israel” by Nikos Sotirakopoulos
“Today, we live in the Age of Envy.
“Envy” is not the emotion I have in mind, but it is the clearest manifestation of an emotion that has remained nameless; it is the only element of a complex emotional sum that men have permitted themselves to identify.
Envy is regarded by most people as a petty, superficial emotion and, therefore, it serves as a semihuman cover for so inhuman an emotion that those who feel it seldom dare admit it even to themselves. . . . That emotion is: hatred of the good for being the good.
This hatred is not resentment against some prescribed view of the good with which one does not agree. . . . Hatred of the good for being the good means hatred of that which one regards as good by one’s own (conscious or subconscious) judgment. It means hatred of a person for possessing a value or virtue one regards as desirable.
If a child wants to get good grades in school, but is unable or unwilling to achieve them and begins to hate the children who do, that is hatred of the good. If a man regards intelligence as a value, but is troubled by self-doubt and begins to hate the men he judges to be intelligent, that is hatred of the good.
The nature of the particular values a man chooses to hold is not the primary factor in this issue (although irrational values may contribute a great deal to the formation of that emotion). The primary factor and distinguishing characteristic is an emotional mechanism set in reverse: a response of hatred, not toward human vices, but toward human virtues.
To be exact, the emotional mechanism is not set in reverse, but is set one way: its exponents do not experience love for evil men; their emotional range is limited to hatred or indifference. It is impossible to experience love, which is a response to values, when one’s automatized response to values is hatred….
They do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence, and they keep running, each trying not to learn that the object of his hatred is himself . . . . They are the essence of evil, they, those anti-living objects who seek, by devouring the world, to fill the selfless zero of their soul. It is not your wealth that they’re after. Theirs is a conspiracy against the mind, which means: against life and man.” – Ayn Rand
Another endless lecture that I didn’t read. Not exactly how I like to spend my weekends, or any day of the week for that matter.
Understanding antisemetism. Why does this hatred continue? Visit Poland where the concentration camps operated by the Nazis during World War II exterminated the Jewish people, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. Walking by the barbed-wire fences, standing in the gas chambers, and seeing the crematoria that Adolph Hitler used to commit Jewish genocide in the 1940s made these horrific places real in a way no book or documentary ever could.
These camps serve as poignant memorials to the victims of the Holocaust and as macabre reminders of (man’s sinful heart. ) But even more, they demonstrate that there is something more to antisemetism than meets the eye. It is an evil that defies human logic. In Truth, it is a manifestation of Satan’s millennia-long struggle against God and His Chosen People. To understand antisemetism and its aggressive, deadly nature, we must understand the context of this war against the One True God.
Understand that antisemetism is a manifestation of Satan’s conflict with God. Satan knows his time is short; and he is doing all he can to keep God’s immutable plans from coming to pass, including the fulfillment of His covenant promises to Israel.
I’m a Catholic. I have been wearing a t-shirt with an Israeli flag on it lately. I get a lot of ‘looks’. It’s a crazy thing, but I definitely do not feel comfortable wearing it. I do anyway. I probably shouldn’t because it’ll most likely trigger a jew hating leftist at some point, but I don’t know, beyond my support for Israel, maybe that’s why I wear it>
Largely agree with everything written. However you’re still wearing your Jewish colored glasses. In America, Jews are now the new Christian white male, that’s all. Now. That we’re out of power, you’re next. See the entire situation is good vs evil. God vs Satan. The media, Hollywood, the educational system, the Intelligence Community, and the deep state government are all controlled by the globalist Marxists. So obviously white Christians had to be vanquished. Most American jews are secular, so you had to wait for your turn in the barrel. But your time has come! In the same way that everything in the media is cherry picked and stated from the point of view of the oppressed minority, so too will everything be parsed from the eyes of oppressed Muslims. Enjoy!
50 years ago I was debating with someone about the holocausts. He told me America is deferent. What happened in Europe will never happen here. I said don’t be so sure. Then he laugh at me. Sadly what happened in Europe is happenings here and very few people are noticing. The world once again in walking into an inferno.
Read “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America” by Leonard Peikoff, published all the way back in 1982. The book is astonishingly prescient.
He argued then (and still does now) that America was slowly becoming like the Weimar Republic and if no philosophical antidote to this Kantian-Hegelian irrationalism was introduced into American universities and culture the USA would eventually collapse into some form of collectivist-race based fascism like Nazi Germany.
No, not “The Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America” by Leonard Peekaboo” The Low priest of objectivism. Wanna bet he doesn’t read it. The only thing you try to spread is your own misery.
The funny thing is he wrote just as America was entering the Reagan era which produced 30 years of prosperity in spite of Bush I and Clinton, The only thing that could wreck it was the advent of the Muslim in the WH for 8 years.
Trump was getting us back on track but the dhimmicrat traitors couldn’t stand that so they cheated to put O’Bidenbama back in and now we have what we have. And you don’t do a damn thing to help us make things right.
You just sit around spouting your irrational nonsense and your religious bigotry, and waxing rhapsodic about your DOA girl friend. Oh yeah, you like calling me German Lutheran too. You could always pound your fist on the table if that makes you feel better.
Meanwhile is America any better because of you? What have you done besides copy/paste the same neurotic garbage day after day.
King of the Failed Big Lie and the epic downvote count — THX. Even Goebbles wouldn’t be proud because no one is reading your crap.
Need more Nazi evidence ? Those who defend Fauci’s crimes against humanity. Violations on par either Nuremberg !
Nazi. Short for National Socialists. The full form being National Socialists Workers Party of Germany. NSDAP in German. They hated capitalism. Leftists to the core, and they hated other Leftists such as the communists. And they have overtaken Western academia.
So tell me, Danushka, Why are American Jews overwhelmingly woke, liberal, and voting Democrat? They cry at the thought of babies being killed in the war, but rejoice at the thousands murdered at Planned Parenthood abortuaries.
They condemn sexual harassment and rape (Me, too) but support sexual mutilation of children, transgenderism’s drag queens’ story hour, the environmentalism do or die, climate change, and the hordes of foreign invaders at the open border?
I have no dog in this fight. I hate the terrorist, evil Islamists who kill at the drop of a hat and desire annihilation of people that are not like them. But Jewish-American wokeism kill other people’s spirits, too.
This ideological war on American soil is nothing but Democrats vs. Democrats. Until Jewish Americans stop voting for Democrats, I can’t show sympathy for their present heartaches. Neither do I care for Hamas supporters.
You might be interested in some excerpts culled from an article by Rabbi Dov Fischer below:
“You were reared by rich, comfortable, Long Island and Westchester liberals to be liberals and woke. They had abandoned the Judaism of their parents and grandparents, and now had nothing Judaic to offer you…All you know is that, by happenstance, you were born Jewish just as others, by happenstance, are born left-handed.
“At your parents’ behest, you ran from your roots, foolish liberal Jews, fleeing the anti-Semitism you feared would come from the right because anti-Semitism so often indeed comes from the extreme right.
“You thought, having abandoned your G-d and His Torah, that you would find succor among the left and the progressives and the Woke because they care about everyone. They care about the climate and the homeless, everyone. So you all became variations on George Soros and Bernie Sanders and Ben & Jerry — fleeing your heritage… ‘The Squad speaks for me. I am woke. I oppose climate change. I fit in here at Harvard / Yale / U. of Penn / Columbia.’”
“No, you don’t. You never did. You never will. You know that Greta Thunberg? Guess what, O liberal progressive woke Ivy League Jews? That little snot also supports Hamas-ISIS.
“As Woke leftists, you have been taught to whine, to seek safe spaces, to cringe at microaggressions. But whining will do no good. It never does…”
Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values
Israelites need to rally on home to be with their country in time of need, and those who consider themselves only jewish need to consider doing likewise. If there is a mass attack, many trigger fingers will be required to respond effectively and in timely fashion, and other duties and battlefield and civil defense and medical jobs will also need filled. There needs to also be a common unity of purpose, as ‘ a house divided against itself, cannot stand’, and with that lincoln quote, 2a: a well-regulated militia, being necessay to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’ Be afraid, very afraid, of the current globalist wokist socialist ‘liberal’ iteration of the US ‘democratic uniparty, somethin’ fishy goin’ on…god bless us, one and all, and keep your powder dry and safe from people like ‘pocohontas’ Elizabeth geriatric Warren.