Friday, December 16, 2011
A LETTER FROM GOEBBELS
The Republican race is more muddled than ever as Gingrich's numbers fade a little without anyone to take his place. Either Gingrich recovers, Perry surges or it's Romney all the way. The establishment backing Romney had to damage Gingrich to limit the fallout from their backing of Romney. This way they chose between two evils, rather than choosing the man that they were always going to choose.
Congressional deadlocks continue as neither side can really move their agenda forward. But Obama can still abuse executive orders and he benefits from the appearance of a do-nothing congress. Meanwhile the NJDC has dumped a sputtering press release condemning Congressman West for his "shocking" Goebbels comment about the Democratic Party, complete with an ADL press release.
The comment may be a bit much, but is the party most associated with breaking Godwin's Law really pretending to be outraged by a Goebbels analogy? Let's just have a skip and a hop back to January when a Democratic congressman said that Republican criticism of ObamaCare was "a big lie just like (Nazi propagandist Joseph) Goebbels."
There's also a difference between a Nazi analogy and a Holocaust analogy. A Nazi analogy is about how totalitarian populism works. A Holocaust analogy is about the mass murder of millions. In some cases it is valid to make Nazi analogies, but not Holocaust analogies. Goebbels' Big Lie is an obvious example because it addresses the mechanics of propaganda, which is a valid point even when applied to people who are not mass murderers.
The Democratic Congressmen scurrying to condemn West for it is political opportunism at its most cynical, especially when the NJDC adds quotes from West's former opponent and future opponent. About the only sensible condemnation of the lot comes from Carl Levin, the rest of the condemnations misrepresent what West said and try to spin it for political gain.
This from Ted Deutsch isn't even a sentence: "By comparing the way Democrats defend our record to the way the Nazi Minister of Propaganda attempted to defend and even justify the murder of 6 million Jews is utterly outrageous"... and it also misrepresents what West actually said, not to mention that it misrepresents history.
This from Steve Israel is even dumber: "Congressman West needs to immediately apologize for insulting the memories of the millions who lost their lives during the Holocaust."
Nadler insanely accuses West of "latent anti-Semitism". West's future opponent is even more slipshod. "These remarks belittle the Holocaust, insult the Jewish community and the millions of American veterans who fought the Nazis in WWII." I have no idea how West's remarks insult millions of American veterans, I doubt Patrick Erin Murphy or whoever wrote this twaddle for him does either.
But to recap, West accuses the Democratic Party of being like Goebbels. Democratic Party responds by falsely accusing West of Anti-Semitism, insulting veterans and a whole raft of other lies that have nothing to do with what he actually said. If their goal was to suggest that West had a point, then mission accomplished.
If the Democratic Party really wants to rebuild some credibility with the Jewish community, they need to stop using Jewish members as "House Jews" for political gain and actually allow them to represent the interests of Jewish communities. The day that Jewish Democrats start coming out in support of school vouchers, ending US pressure on Israel and forming a committee to investigate Muslim Anti-Semitic violence is the day they can be taken seriously as representatives of the Jewish communities. Instead of as the Uncle Howards of the Democratic Party.
When Howard Gutman tried to set up two tiers of Anti-Semitism, one justified and one unjustified, then most of the same people sputtering over West's Goebbels comments had nothing to say. But Goebbels is dead, Muslim Anti-Semitism is alive and well.
I see nothing from Nadler on Gutman. I see nothing from Deutsch on Gutman. Which means they can shut the hell up about West. If they want to bark when Obama tells them to bark, then they're poodles and they have nothing to say worth listening to. If they won't stand up against the actual justification of present day violence about Jews, then no one wants to hear their mewling about a WW2 analogy.
In response to Gutman's victim blaming, The Forward published a piece in his defense. So did the Jewish Journal of LA. The Forward piece is the dying paper's usual sneering commentary. The JJ of LA piece by Michael Berenbaum is far more pernicious because it misrepresents Gutman's remarks and the responses to them.
Berenbaum is lying. The full speech appeared at the European Jewish Press and was used by myself and many other bloggers.
Actually Berenbaum is lying again. It's not more nuanced or different. Here is exactly what Gutman said.
This is Gutman's first tier of Anti-Semitism. A traditional form of bigotry practiced by European natives, but not by Muslims.
According to Gutman, this form of bigotry (not really bigotry but "tension") is more nuanced and will go away when Israel reaches a peace agreement with the terrorists.
Gutman denies that Muslim Anti-Semitism exists. He denies that Muslim violence against Jews is Anti-Semitism and places the blame for it on Israeli policy.
So let's get back to Goebbels and Michael Berenbaum and the NJDC, Goebbels is dead but Gutman lives and Berenbaum lives. And who is really more dangerous a dead Goebbels or his live Jewish cousins who find ways to excuse and justify violence against Jews in the present day?
I am not very concerned about Goebbels. He had his day. But today Der Sturmer exists at the JTA and at the Forward and at every liberal paper in America that whitewashes violence against Jews.
It is a matter of plain and simple fact that if Hitler were to come back as a Muslim, then he would be cheered by the left. We might even bomb a country or two to help him come to power. Is that hyperbole? Judge for yourself from this CNN piece whitewashing Egyptian Salafis.
Is it still hyperbole? Let me leave you then with the following from Egyptian Salafi Imam Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub.
Goebbels is alive and well. Today he goes by Gutman or Berenbaum and Hitler is also alive and well, he goes by Muhammad. Before there was Mein Kampf there was the Koran, and after Mein Kampf the Koran is still here.
In an old article at the Spectator, Melanie Philips has a long list of more of this same genocidal hate. Or what Gutman calls "tension" between Muslims and Jews. Earlier I distinguished between Nazi and Holocaust analogies, but when it comes to Gutman, Goldberg and Berenbaum it is not a Nazi analogy... it is a Holocaust analogy.
The people they are covering up for intend nothing less than another Holocaust. and the House Jews of the Democratic Party are sending out urgent emails about nothing.
THE LOWE'S JIHAD
For the first time in weeks All-American Muslim is back in the news, not for anything on the show, but over the commercials. A number of sponsors have stopped advertising on the show, including Lowe’s. Muslim groups and their supporters have taken this development in stride by trying to blackmail the home improvement chain into advertising on the failing TLC series.
Is blackmail the right word? California State Senator Ted Lieu threatened boycotts and more disturbingly “legislative remedies” if Lowe’s doesn’t submit. Lieu, who clearly doesn’t believe in the separation of mosque and state, is shamelessly pandering to his Muslim constituents but his thuggery is fundamentally un-American and dangerous. No advertiser should be compelled to sponsor any television show.
All-American Muslim started out strong with 1.7 million viewers and a 0.9 share of adults 18-49, the demographic most coveted by advertisers. Advertisers will pay money for low-rated shows so long as they have a high 18-49 share. But by the second episode it had lost 600,000 viewers and its 18-49 share was down to 0.5. The week after that it was the lowest rated cable show on the top 100 for the night. And last week’s episode was bad enough that it appears to have fallen out of the top 100 completely.
The question then is why would Lowe’s or any other company want to pay good money for that? And why should a political thug like Senator Lieu be able to abuse his office by threatening a company that if they don’t advertise on a particular show then he will target them with “legislative remedies,”
See the full piece at Front Page Magazine - All-American Muslims, Threats, Intimidation and Hate
MORE PAULING AROUND
At the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who's getting to be almost as bad as JJ Goldberg, called Ron Paul a Zionist, mixed in with the usual claim that the issue with Ron Paul is foreign aid. It's not.
That's an excerpt from my article, Ron Paul: Blame Israel First. And here's the video linked in the piece. Watching Ron Paul chat up the agents of the Iranian regime and bash Israel should end any further debate on the issue.
UNHITCHED
I have nothing particular to say about the death of Hitchens. I have always believed that we face a larger threat that requires us to make common cause with people we disagree with and even people who hate us. Speaking as a Jew, Hitchens certainly fell into that category. He was a lefty who made the somewhat unique decision not to follow his movement from supporting Arab Socialist terrorists to supporting Muslim terrorists. That he was one of the few not to do so is more damning of the left than it is a praise of him.
Hitchens hated Jews, he hated Christians and he hated Muslims. That made him an ally of sorts and an enemy of sorts, Benjamin Kerstein at the Jewish Daily sums up most of the relevant stuff. Like others on the Counterjihad atheist left, he didn't like Israel or Jews, but he recognized that Islam was the larger threat.
I see no real point in penning completely misleading headlines like Ron Kampeas' "Christopher Hitchens, contrarian who embraced and battled Judaism, dead at 62". It's about as far from the truth as imaginable, except his name, age and the contrarian part.
IT WOULDN'T BE CHANUKAH WITHOUT...
It wouldn't be Chanukah without idiotic essays on who the Maccabees were and even dumber comments from "professors" of something or other.
Fighting on the Shabbat was always standard. It was not a religious innovation. Anything that saves lives can be done on the Shabbat. Otherwise there wouldn't be Jewish doctors or Jewish soldiers.
Even more off. There were plenty of new holidays created, those holidays just didn't have the status of the biblical ones. Tu'BeAv was created almost as soon as the Jews made it out of the desert to Israel. It's not an adjustment of the law to create a holiday to commemorate an event.
Actually it's quite of the time and of previous times as well. But let's go to Josephus, whom I don't care for very much, but was close to enough to being current. Antiquities 12.7.3 302 for his version of Judah Maccabee's speech.
Totally anachronistic. Even assuming that Josephus made the speech up, it still dates back to 94 CE. Religious liberty wasn't invented five minutes ago. Sorry.
The "Unknown" reason would be the end of prophecy which also marked the last days of the canon in Judaism. Narratives of the beginning of the beginning of the Second Temple went in, but the canon wasn't opened against centuries later after the Great Assembly.
Is it really too much to ask that the closing to an article on the Maccabees shouldn't be full of this kind of postmodern barking idiocy?
It's bad enough that there's a sizable clergical contingent that feels this way about Moses, but in historical terms, the Maccabees did not live all that long ago. This isn't like pretending that King David was a mythical figure (something many historians have tried to do until his palace turned up) and we can learn things by pretending that he's just like Harry Potter and represents the Ophraistic truth that you can believe in anything that inspires you or is relevant to your life. This is like pretending that Antony and Cleopatra were imaginary figures from Shakespeare who probably never existed.
The ignorance level here is astounding and inexcusable. If there's better evidence that the left rots minds it would be hard to find. This is an entire article on who the Maccabees were that never once mentions any historical information about them, but relies on a collection of idiotic quotes from experts who don't seem to know anything about the subject. You can learn more about the Maccabees by asking a Jewish four year old than you can by reading this article or asking one of its experts.
And the conclusion is like reading a piece on George Washington's birthday where experts wonder if he ever really was a revolutionary or a president, and ends by suggesting that the important thing is not whether he existed, but that he inspire us to not cut down cherry trees and to always tell the truth.
Israel shouldn't have used those commercials about the diaspora, it should have just taken this article, translated it and passed it around.
THE ROUNDUP
STAR WARS. Iranian Mullahs now on a campaign to destroy any stars on suspicion that they might be stars of david.
AP Loses Ability To Do Simple Math, Cites New Post-Math World
Defeat National Review?
If you can't make it to the land of the Maccabees for Chanukah, MyEretz offers the ability to buy and sell Israeli products in an online marketplace. It's the Shuk experience without the shoving and smells.
Treason? NAACP appealing to UN to stop voter id
“Muslim brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?”
Belgium's monuments will not be spared either.
Occupy Pavement.
Bully for Appeasement
Zilla's Endorsement
Final good news. The EU has big secret plans for Israel.
From NY to Jerusalem,
Daniel Greenfield
Covers the Stories
Behind the News
A LETTER FROM GOEBBELS
The Republican race is more muddled than ever as Gingrich's numbers fade a little without anyone to take his place. Either Gingrich recovers, Perry surges or it's Romney all the way. The establishment backing Romney had to damage Gingrich to limit the fallout from their backing of Romney. This way they chose between two evils, rather than choosing the man that they were always going to choose.
Congressional deadlocks continue as neither side can really move their agenda forward. But Obama can still abuse executive orders and he benefits from the appearance of a do-nothing congress. Meanwhile the NJDC has dumped a sputtering press release condemning Congressman West for his "shocking" Goebbels comment about the Democratic Party, complete with an ADL press release.
The comment may be a bit much, but is the party most associated with breaking Godwin's Law really pretending to be outraged by a Goebbels analogy? Let's just have a skip and a hop back to January when a Democratic congressman said that Republican criticism of ObamaCare was "a big lie just like (Nazi propagandist Joseph) Goebbels."
There's also a difference between a Nazi analogy and a Holocaust analogy. A Nazi analogy is about how totalitarian populism works. A Holocaust analogy is about the mass murder of millions. In some cases it is valid to make Nazi analogies, but not Holocaust analogies. Goebbels' Big Lie is an obvious example because it addresses the mechanics of propaganda, which is a valid point even when applied to people who are not mass murderers.
The Democratic Congressmen scurrying to condemn West for it is political opportunism at its most cynical, especially when the NJDC adds quotes from West's former opponent and future opponent. About the only sensible condemnation of the lot comes from Carl Levin, the rest of the condemnations misrepresent what West said and try to spin it for political gain.
This from Ted Deutsch isn't even a sentence: "By comparing the way Democrats defend our record to the way the Nazi Minister of Propaganda attempted to defend and even justify the murder of 6 million Jews is utterly outrageous"... and it also misrepresents what West actually said, not to mention that it misrepresents history.
This from Steve Israel is even dumber: "Congressman West needs to immediately apologize for insulting the memories of the millions who lost their lives during the Holocaust."
Nadler insanely accuses West of "latent anti-Semitism". West's future opponent is even more slipshod. "These remarks belittle the Holocaust, insult the Jewish community and the millions of American veterans who fought the Nazis in WWII." I have no idea how West's remarks insult millions of American veterans, I doubt Patrick Erin Murphy or whoever wrote this twaddle for him does either.
But to recap, West accuses the Democratic Party of being like Goebbels. Democratic Party responds by falsely accusing West of Anti-Semitism, insulting veterans and a whole raft of other lies that have nothing to do with what he actually said. If their goal was to suggest that West had a point, then mission accomplished.
If the Democratic Party really wants to rebuild some credibility with the Jewish community, they need to stop using Jewish members as "House Jews" for political gain and actually allow them to represent the interests of Jewish communities. The day that Jewish Democrats start coming out in support of school vouchers, ending US pressure on Israel and forming a committee to investigate Muslim Anti-Semitic violence is the day they can be taken seriously as representatives of the Jewish communities. Instead of as the Uncle Howards of the Democratic Party.
When Howard Gutman tried to set up two tiers of Anti-Semitism, one justified and one unjustified, then most of the same people sputtering over West's Goebbels comments had nothing to say. But Goebbels is dead, Muslim Anti-Semitism is alive and well.
I see nothing from Nadler on Gutman. I see nothing from Deutsch on Gutman. Which means they can shut the hell up about West. If they want to bark when Obama tells them to bark, then they're poodles and they have nothing to say worth listening to. If they won't stand up against the actual justification of present day violence about Jews, then no one wants to hear their mewling about a WW2 analogy.
In response to Gutman's victim blaming, The Forward published a piece in his defense. So did the Jewish Journal of LA. The Forward piece is the dying paper's usual sneering commentary. The JJ of LA piece by Michael Berenbaum is far more pernicious because it misrepresents Gutman's remarks and the responses to them.
"A summary of Gutman’s remarks, not a direct quote, appeared in an Israeli newspaper. American bloggers took it as gospel, and Republican political candidates called for Gutman’s ouster."
Berenbaum is lying. The full speech appeared at the European Jewish Press and was used by myself and many other bloggers.
The Israeli newspaper quoted Gutman... “A distinction should be made between traditional anti-Semitism, which should be condemned, and Muslim hatred for Jews, which stems from the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.”
What he actually said is quite different and a bit more nuanced:
Actually Berenbaum is lying again. It's not more nuanced or different. Here is exactly what Gutman said.
This is Gutman's first tier of Anti-Semitism. A traditional form of bigotry practiced by European natives, but not by Muslims.
There is and has long been some amount of anti-Semitism, of hatred and violence against Jews, from a small sector of the population who hate others who may be different or perceived to be different, largely for the sake of hating. Those anti-Semites are people who hate not only Jews, but Muslims, gays, gypsies, and likely any who can be described as minorities or different...This is Gutman's second tier of Anti-Semitism, practiced by Muslims in response to Israel.
Throughout Europe, there is significant anger and resentment and, yes, perhaps sometimes hatred and indeed sometimes and all too growing intimidation and violence directed at Jews generally as a result of the continuing tensions between Israel and the Palestinian territories and other Arab neighbors in the Middle East.
According to Gutman, this form of bigotry (not really bigotry but "tension") is more nuanced and will go away when Israel reaches a peace agreement with the terrorists.
"The largest part of the solution for this second type of problem – too often lumped under a general banner of anti-Semitism – is in the hands of Israel, the Palestinians and Arab neighbors in the Middle East. It is fortunate because it means that, unlike traditional hatred of minorities, a path towards improving and resolving it does at least exist."
Gutman denies that Muslim Anti-Semitism exists. He denies that Muslim violence against Jews is Anti-Semitism and places the blame for it on Israeli policy.
So let's get back to Goebbels and Michael Berenbaum and the NJDC, Goebbels is dead but Gutman lives and Berenbaum lives. And who is really more dangerous a dead Goebbels or his live Jewish cousins who find ways to excuse and justify violence against Jews in the present day?
I am not very concerned about Goebbels. He had his day. But today Der Sturmer exists at the JTA and at the Forward and at every liberal paper in America that whitewashes violence against Jews.
It is a matter of plain and simple fact that if Hitler were to come back as a Muslim, then he would be cheered by the left. We might even bomb a country or two to help him come to power. Is that hyperbole? Judge for yourself from this CNN piece whitewashing Egyptian Salafis.
"Salafists are normal human beings. If you treat them as terrorists, what do you expect will be their reaction?"
Co-founder of the Salafyo Costa Facebook page Ehab El Kholy, a 33-year-old cartoonist and himself a Salafist, says: "We are trying to hammer home the message that Salafists are normal people.
"We eat the same food, drink the same beverages and frequent the same hangouts. So don't be surprised when you find Salafists sitting next to you at Costas, sipping lattes."
But it hasn't been an easy road, as many Egyptians are skeptical of the strict Muslim practices by Salafists. The founders of the Salafyo Costa page think the Salafi-phobia stems from ignorance.
Is it still hyperbole? Let me leave you then with the following from Egyptian Salafi Imam Muhammad Hussein Ya'qoub.
"Your belief regarding the Jews should be, first, that they are infidels, and second, that they are enemies. They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing... We must believe that our fighting with the Jews is eternal, and it will not end until the final battle - and this is the fourth point. You must believe that we will fight, defeat, and annihilate them, until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth."
Goebbels is alive and well. Today he goes by Gutman or Berenbaum and Hitler is also alive and well, he goes by Muhammad. Before there was Mein Kampf there was the Koran, and after Mein Kampf the Koran is still here.
In an old article at the Spectator, Melanie Philips has a long list of more of this same genocidal hate. Or what Gutman calls "tension" between Muslims and Jews. Earlier I distinguished between Nazi and Holocaust analogies, but when it comes to Gutman, Goldberg and Berenbaum it is not a Nazi analogy... it is a Holocaust analogy.
The people they are covering up for intend nothing less than another Holocaust. and the House Jews of the Democratic Party are sending out urgent emails about nothing.
THE LOWE'S JIHAD
For the first time in weeks All-American Muslim is back in the news, not for anything on the show, but over the commercials. A number of sponsors have stopped advertising on the show, including Lowe’s. Muslim groups and their supporters have taken this development in stride by trying to blackmail the home improvement chain into advertising on the failing TLC series.
Is blackmail the right word? California State Senator Ted Lieu threatened boycotts and more disturbingly “legislative remedies” if Lowe’s doesn’t submit. Lieu, who clearly doesn’t believe in the separation of mosque and state, is shamelessly pandering to his Muslim constituents but his thuggery is fundamentally un-American and dangerous. No advertiser should be compelled to sponsor any television show.
All-American Muslim started out strong with 1.7 million viewers and a 0.9 share of adults 18-49, the demographic most coveted by advertisers. Advertisers will pay money for low-rated shows so long as they have a high 18-49 share. But by the second episode it had lost 600,000 viewers and its 18-49 share was down to 0.5. The week after that it was the lowest rated cable show on the top 100 for the night. And last week’s episode was bad enough that it appears to have fallen out of the top 100 completely.
The question then is why would Lowe’s or any other company want to pay good money for that? And why should a political thug like Senator Lieu be able to abuse his office by threatening a company that if they don’t advertise on a particular show then he will target them with “legislative remedies,”
See the full piece at Front Page Magazine - All-American Muslims, Threats, Intimidation and Hate
MORE PAULING AROUND
At the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who's getting to be almost as bad as JJ Goldberg, called Ron Paul a Zionist, mixed in with the usual claim that the issue with Ron Paul is foreign aid. It's not.
Foreign aid is not the issue. The actual issue is that Ron Paul’s views on Israel and Jews (as well as American foreign policy) are indistinguishable from those of Pat Buchanan.
Ron Paul isn’t simply against foreign aid; he believes that the Israeli lobby controls Washington and involves American in foreign wars… and that this was among the causes of September 11. Paul has described the original World Trade Center bombing as a “retaliation” and during the Republican debates in 2007 and 2011 blamed American foreign policy for Al-Qaeda’s attacks.
That's an excerpt from my article, Ron Paul: Blame Israel First. And here's the video linked in the piece. Watching Ron Paul chat up the agents of the Iranian regime and bash Israel should end any further debate on the issue.
UNHITCHED
I have nothing particular to say about the death of Hitchens. I have always believed that we face a larger threat that requires us to make common cause with people we disagree with and even people who hate us. Speaking as a Jew, Hitchens certainly fell into that category. He was a lefty who made the somewhat unique decision not to follow his movement from supporting Arab Socialist terrorists to supporting Muslim terrorists. That he was one of the few not to do so is more damning of the left than it is a praise of him.
Hitchens hated Jews, he hated Christians and he hated Muslims. That made him an ally of sorts and an enemy of sorts, Benjamin Kerstein at the Jewish Daily sums up most of the relevant stuff. Like others on the Counterjihad atheist left, he didn't like Israel or Jews, but he recognized that Islam was the larger threat.
I see no real point in penning completely misleading headlines like Ron Kampeas' "Christopher Hitchens, contrarian who embraced and battled Judaism, dead at 62". It's about as far from the truth as imaginable, except his name, age and the contrarian part.
IT WOULDN'T BE CHANUKAH WITHOUT...
It wouldn't be Chanukah without idiotic essays on who the Maccabees were and even dumber comments from "professors" of something or other.
Jeffrey Tigay, emeritus professor of Hebrew and Semitic literature at the University of Pennsylvania, said the Maccabees were religious innovators, not fundamentalists.
Mattahias "rejected the refusal of some of his allies who refused to fight on Shabbat and as a consequence were slaughtered by the Greeks; Mattahias decided to fight back on Shabbat in order to survive," Tigay wrote in an email.
Fighting on the Shabbat was always standard. It was not a religious innovation. Anything that saves lives can be done on the Shabbat. Otherwise there wouldn't be Jewish doctors or Jewish soldiers.
And by creating a new holiday, Chanukah, that had no basis in the Bible, the Hasmoneans -- the dynasty that came to power after the Maccabees defeated the Seleucids -- showed "a willingness to adjust the law when necessary."
Even more off. There were plenty of new holidays created, those holidays just didn't have the status of the biblical ones. Tu'BeAv was created almost as soon as the Jews made it out of the desert to Israel. It's not an adjustment of the law to create a holiday to commemorate an event.
Although Judah Maccabee may not have been a religious zealot, neither was he the symbol of religious freedom that he is often portrayed as today, said Seth Schwartz, an expert on Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman periods at Columbia University in New York.
"Judah as fighter for an abstract principle of religious liberty is also totally anachronistic," Schwartz wrote in an email.
Actually it's quite of the time and of previous times as well. But let's go to Josephus, whom I don't care for very much, but was close to enough to being current. Antiquities 12.7.3 302 for his version of Judah Maccabee's speech.
"O my fellow soldiers, no other time remains more opportune than the present for courage and contempt of dangers; for if you now fight manfully, you may recover your liberty, which, as it is a thing of itself agreeable to all men, so it proves to be to us much more desirable, by its affording us the liberty of worshiping God. Since therefore you are in such circumstances at present, you must either recover that liberty, and so regain a happy and blessed way of living, which is that according to our laws, and the customs of our country, or to submit to the most opprobrious sufferings; nor will any seed of your nation remain if you be beat in this battle.
Fight therefore manfully; and suppose that you must die, though you do not fight; but believe, that besides such glorious rewards as those of the liberty of your country, of your laws, of your religion, you shall then obtain everlasting glory."
Totally anachronistic. Even assuming that Josephus made the speech up, it still dates back to 94 CE. Religious liberty wasn't invented five minutes ago. Sorry.
"For reasons that remain unknown, the Maccabee books were excluded from the Hebrew Bible"
The "Unknown" reason would be the end of prophecy which also marked the last days of the canon in Judaism. Narratives of the beginning of the beginning of the Second Temple went in, but the canon wasn't opened against centuries later after the Great Assembly.
For Chaim Galfand, rabbi at the Raymond and Ruth Perelman Jewish Day School, getting a clear view of Judah Maccabee is "like seeking out the clear view in Los Angeles -- it exists, but it depends on which direction you're looking."
Galfand said he teaches his students that there are different kinds of truth: The Harry Potter books may not be factually true, but they teach about integrity, friendship and perseverance. Ultimately, the truth that the Chanukah story offers today is an inspirational saga about the merits of Jewish tradition and the dangers of totally abandoning one's faith and tradition.
Is it really too much to ask that the closing to an article on the Maccabees shouldn't be full of this kind of postmodern barking idiocy?
It's bad enough that there's a sizable clergical contingent that feels this way about Moses, but in historical terms, the Maccabees did not live all that long ago. This isn't like pretending that King David was a mythical figure (something many historians have tried to do until his palace turned up) and we can learn things by pretending that he's just like Harry Potter and represents the Ophraistic truth that you can believe in anything that inspires you or is relevant to your life. This is like pretending that Antony and Cleopatra were imaginary figures from Shakespeare who probably never existed.
The ignorance level here is astounding and inexcusable. If there's better evidence that the left rots minds it would be hard to find. This is an entire article on who the Maccabees were that never once mentions any historical information about them, but relies on a collection of idiotic quotes from experts who don't seem to know anything about the subject. You can learn more about the Maccabees by asking a Jewish four year old than you can by reading this article or asking one of its experts.
And the conclusion is like reading a piece on George Washington's birthday where experts wonder if he ever really was a revolutionary or a president, and ends by suggesting that the important thing is not whether he existed, but that he inspire us to not cut down cherry trees and to always tell the truth.
Israel shouldn't have used those commercials about the diaspora, it should have just taken this article, translated it and passed it around.
THE ROUNDUP
STAR WARS. Iranian Mullahs now on a campaign to destroy any stars on suspicion that they might be stars of david.
AP Loses Ability To Do Simple Math, Cites New Post-Math World
Defeat National Review?
If you can't make it to the land of the Maccabees for Chanukah, MyEretz offers the ability to buy and sell Israeli products in an online marketplace. It's the Shuk experience without the shoving and smells.
Treason? NAACP appealing to UN to stop voter id
“Muslim brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?”
Belgium's monuments will not be spared either.
Occupy Pavement.
Bully for Appeasement
Zilla's Endorsement
Final good news. The EU has big secret plans for Israel.
The European Union should consider Israel's treatment of its Arab population a "core issue, not second tier to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," according to a classified working paper produced by European embassies in Israel, parts of which were obtained by Haaretz.
This is an unprecedented document in that it deals with internal Israeli issues. According to European diplomats and senior Foreign Ministry officials, it was written and sent to EU headquarters in Brussels behind the back of the Israeli government.
From NY to Jerusalem,
Daniel Greenfield
Covers the Stories
Behind the News
