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Commentary
by Dr. Gerhard Falk |
The Lessons of Jewish
History
“Adonai Li, v’lo iro.”
“The Lord is With Me, I Shall not Fear.” Those are the last words we
sing at the end of every Shabbat service and that is the first lesson of Jewish
history.
There
never was, there is not, and there never will be a time when Jews, all Jews have
not lived, do not live and will not live on the edge of destruction. From the
exodus from Egypt to the assault on the Children of Israel by the tribes of the
ancient Near East, from then to the coming of the Romans, throughout all of the
Middle Ages and into the age of Hitler, Jews have always been under attack. So
it is now. Again, the psychotic haters and the vicious killers and their
supporters are seeking the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people
everywhere. Arafat and his hoodlums murder Jews at random in restaurants,
supermarkets, discos, public transportation and on the street. All these
killings are not a crime according to the the supporters of the killers. The
so-called European Union, which is engaged in “trying” Slobodan Milosovich
for the crime of defending his country against the same haters who seek to
destroy Serbia, find no fault with Arafat and his campaign of murdering Jews.
When on
September 11, 2001 the Arafat friend Osama bin Laden launched his Saudi killers
against the World Trade Center and murdered three thousand Americans in four
attacks, everyone demanded revenge and protection against such horrors.
Yet, when
Israel finally enters Judea and Samaria to root out the killers there, then the
European Union, true to its heritage, turns against the Jews whose deaths at the
hands of the “homicide bombers” never raised an eyebrow in Germany, France,
England, Denmark, Norway, etc. etc. But then, why should it? Are not the
Europeans the heroes who slaughtered 6 million Jews in their gas ovens within
our memory? But then, as the Europeans are fond of saying: “Hitler did not do
enough. He should have killed all of them,” meaning you and me. So now, the
European Union finances the Arab killers within Israel so that they can buy
weapons with which to murder another 5 million Jews now.
To their
consternation and fury, it turns out the Jews of Israel have chosen to defend
themselves. They refuse to walk into the gas ovens a second time. The Arabs are
deprived of the opportunity to make lampshades from the skins of small Jewish
children and are even prevented from making soap from the bones of mass murdered
Jews. The European Union, true to its tradition of killing Jews, has too few
Jews to murder among them, so they now seek to kill Jews by proxy. They finance
the Arabs. France in the lead, of course. In France, synagogues are now being
burned down and the government, by way of heaping the most crass abuse and name
calling upon Israel, incites its citizens to attack the French Jews.
Yet, in
face of all of this we say and we know that we will survive, Israel will survive
and the haters and the enemies of God will lose again. In every epoch in Jewish
history it always seems that we are finished and our enemies too huge to
overcome. Yet, we always survive and we will survive this time again. Do not be
afraid. Keep your spirit up and right now send a letter to the White House
supporting Israel. Better yet, call.
The second
lesson of Jewish history is that we cannot shake the burden of Sinai. Look at
Shemoth XX, also known as Exodus XX. Here and in Devarim 5, also known as
Deuteronomy (Greek, for second law) all mankind is told not to murder, steal,
lie, commit adultery, hate and envy etc. etc. Now the secularists among us will
say that these words or commandments are human inventions and not divine. Even
if that is so, it is sure that these and the many other ethical admonitions in
the Torah represent the common experience of mankind. We all know that we cannot
live in a community of killers, liars and thieves. Therefore, those who hate all
these commandments and the restrictions that therefore devolve on all of us hate
Israel and the Jews. For like it or not, we Jews are viewed as the carriers of
the moral code the Torah teaches and those who hate that moral code hate us.
Even if a secularist wants to reject the reputed connection between the Children
of Israel and the Ten Commandments; even if one were to call it all a man-made
legend; even if “it” never happened and there was no Moses and there was no
Exodus and there was no Revelation at Mt. Sinai, it is still true that “that
which people believe is real is real in its consequences.” We teach
that to every social science student. Therefore, we Jews are the targets of
the haters and the killers because we carry the message of morality into the
world. This does not mean that we are more moral than other people. This does
mean, however, that we are the messengers whom the haters want to kill. “Kill
the Jews,” they scream in the streets of Nablus, Cairo, Damascus and all the
other 20 Arab countries. Translation; “Kill morality,” “kill decency,”
above all denounce the teachings of Torah “and you shall love your neighbor as
yourself.” ((Vayikro 19:18 also known as Leviticus). The Arabs teach their
children to hate their Jewish neighbor. We teach to love our Arab neighbor. This
seems so strange and mad to the haters and their allies that they see Jews as
outsiders, as not really human. How can you love your neighbor, say they.
All their school texts, sermons, media, political leaders and relatives teach
them to hate their Jewish neighbors.
Who will
win this argument between love and hate? We will. The common experience of
mankind teaches us that and it will happen again. Israel will survive and the
haters will lose even though we are only 13 million in all the world and the
Arabs are 260 million and the Moslems have 1.3 billion followers. Yet, we will
win. Remember that and do not fear. “Adonay li, v’lo iro.”
The third
lesson of Jewish history has to do with Adam Shapiro. He represents a constant
in our long history, as you know if you have read even one Jewish history book.
Adam
Shapiro is a Brooklyn born Jew who is engaged to a Palestinian woman, Huweida
Arraf, whom he expects to marry in New York later this year. Shapiro chose to
“rush to the side” of the Jew hater Arafat when Arafat was confined to two
rooms in his Ramallah headquarters by the army of Israel. There he had his
picture taken with the latter day Hitler, Arafat, whose mass murder of Jews is
evidently also the cause of Shapiro. In fact, Shapiro finds no fault with the
Passover Massacre, which killed 26 Jews at a Seder. He finds fault only with
other Jews. It is interesting that the parents of Shapiro, who raised him to
hate us all, asked for protection from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai
B’rith because they believed themselves threatened by some lunatic ‘phone
calls concerning their assault on the Jewish people. Why didn’t they ask the
“Palestinian” consulate for protection? Don’t they trust them?
One more
interesting item. Sheryl McCarthy, a columnist appearing in some newspapers,
calls Adam Shapiro a hero. McCarthy is a professional Jew baiter who would
easily rank with Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, as a promoter
of every hatred and every bigotry ever launched against us.
Now
Shapiro is not himself important. Indeed he achieved some publicity for his
bizarre bigotry, but his “fame” will not last long. For us Jews however,
Shapiro illustrates a fact of Jewish history. That fact is that whenever Jews
are under attack, whenever Jews are threatened with annihilation, there are some
“ex-Jews” who side with our worst enemies and incite them to kill us all.
Shapiro is not the last of these nor is he the first. In fact, the first of
these “ex-Jews” was Barnabas, who lived in Egypt in the second century of
the common era. A Jewish apostate (Greek apostanai =to rebel), he set in
motion all those endless lies about Jews which have been repeated by every hate
monger since then. In The Epistles of Barnabas, written in 100 C.E., the
author attacks Jewish law and then writes that G’d has abandoned the Jews;
that G’d does not hear the prayer of a Jew; that Judaism is empty legalism;
that Jews cannot do “good deeds”, etc. etc. etc.
Added to
this list of psychotic lies is the crazy accusation that Jews are “Christ
killers”, a canard which has cost millions of Jewish lives over 2,000 years.
In 1240,
an ex-Jew named Nicholas Donin used his knowledge of the Talmud to feed
Christian clergy excerpts he pretended insult the Christian religion. These
excerpts were then used to “defeat” the rabbis who were forced to
participate in the so-called disputations, which always led to Christian
“victories”.
Another
example of Jewish apostasy was the career of Johann Pfefferkorn, an ex-Jew who
told the Christian clergy in 1452 that the Talmud should be destroyed because it
contains “anti-Christian” material. The clergy was glad to oblige and burned
every copy of the Talmud they could find, but they also induced the German
population to attack Jews and murder them indiscriminately.
In our own
day we have “Jews for Jesus” and other anti-Jews. Even Israel has
Jewish journalists who denounce their own country and side with our murderers.
Yet, they
too shall be defeated as they always have been. For no matter how isolated we
may feel and how hard it may be at all times to be a Jew, we too have allies and
friends. There are many people, including many Christians, who take the Torah to
heart. There are journalists like Cal Thomas who “swim against the stream”
and tell the truth even as Newsweek and CNN and other media rant and rave
against “the Jews” and befoul the air with their vitriolic hatred of our
people.
No,
everyone is not Pat Buchanan, Jew hater number one. There are decent people
everywhere, even in France, where the government incited a mob to burn down the
synagogues ala Kristallnacht 1938.
Above all
there are the courageous people of Israel who have suffered more than appears
humanly possible but who stand fast despite all efforts to conduct yet another
Holocaust. We know they will survive. We know we will survive. We know the
“Light unto the Nations” will not go out but the People of Israel will live.
Am Yisroel Chai. Be strong and of good courage.
Shalom u’vracha.
Dr. Gerhard Falk is the author of numerous publications,
including Stigma: How We Treat Outsiders.
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