Israel Haters and the Art Of Lying

Two days ago I made the mistake of responding to an anti-Israel tweet written by Glen Greenwald - a NYT's best selling author with about 63,000 Twitter followers.  I was surprised that he quickly responded - with another unreasonable tweet, but considerably more surprised by the hours long torrent of unhinged, antisemitic vitriol that landed in my Twitter notification box after that.  Here's a small sampling of what was said:

"Rabbi, one day will come we will come from Pakistan to kill your generation."

"you are a liar. Beaches and UN schools. Hospitals. Israel is targeting civilians. No weapons found."

"The reason u can justify this is because u r not a man of God, u have no soul. A disgrace to real Jews"

"U are ethnically cleansing Palestine!"

"Sorry to say this but You are no different than the Terrorists."

"No believes the thoroughly discredited shtick that "Israel kills innocent civilians by accident."


These individuals are lairs, or they have swallowed lies hook line and sinker and either lack the ability or willingness to see straight anymore.  They have had lies hammered into their heads for so long by the other side - one that is so brazen, so wholly audacious about the lies it tells - that it has managed to fully invert the truth so that good is now seen as evil and horrible, cruel and malicious depravity is seen as a reasonable response to the "crimes" of the Jews.

Hamas and their ilk are truly consummate, pathological deceivers.  If they were Pinocchio their collective schnoz would extend around the sun and back.  They would lie about the time of day.  They would happily lie to their grandmother's face if it helped "the cause."  They probably lie to themselves in order to justify their sick, repulsive and cruel barbarity.

So, sadly for anyone who values life, truth, justice or any value of the civilized world, they have managed to cause - among other things - people to believe that Israel (ie: the Jews) is guilty of:

Ethnic Cleansing

There is a cruel irony in this one in that the only people who the Jews actually did ethnically cleanse from Gaza were...Jews - uprooting each and every one of them (8,000) in 2005.  No credit of any sort is given for this intensely painful concession and strangely, despite Gaza being Judenrein for nine years, Jews are still saddled with the charge of:

Occupation

Despite the fact that Palestine was solely the name of a geographic region and one given by the Romans specifically in order to distance the Jews from the ancestral homeland and despite the fact that there has never existed a Palestinian government or leader that governed or even controlled that area, we are routinely led to believe that this people has been peacefully dwelling there for thousands of years - until the arrival of cynical, displaced Jews from Europe who stole and usurped that aboriginal people's rightful ownership.  This one sticks like Crazy Glue.  Despite the fact that there has always been a Jewish presence there, despite many cubic tons of archaeological evidence linking our presence there to three millennium ago, despite the fact that the land was largely uninhabited swamp land and sand until the Jews began reclaiming it in the 19th Century, despite our being "given" the land by the UN in 1948 and subsequently defended (and expanded) in various defensive wars we are told time and again that it is not ours and that our very presence there is a crime.

Genocide

Astounding.  The only people on this planet that have actually been the victims of a true genocide (a plan set in motion to eradicate an entire innocent nation) are now accused of perpetrating one.  Never-mind that the numbers don't come remotely close to other groups who commit "megadeath" - who kill huge numbers of people such as the Hutu's, or the Syrians or the Cambodians or the Turks, never-mind that it is abundantly obvious that the Israelis don't want to kill anyone and do everything in their power to prevent it and wring their hands over each and every death - amazingly, they are sold and the new Nazi's - a comparison so odious, so vile and so nauseating as to leave one recoiled and sputtering in shock.  And yet there it is - sold and bought by millions the world over.

It's a sad time for the Jews and for the world though I take some solace in knowing that it is our light and goodness that so incenses these people.  When pure evil points its hand and accuses others of wrong-doing, there is no better indication of the great meritoriousness of the accused.  Evil is coming for us - and no other.

"You know friends, sometimes it makes me sad, but sometimes it makes me happy; Israel has no friends in the world.  The Holy Land, the Holy People of Israel are all alone.  But you know what we have?  We have one Friend in Heaven - Yisrael B'tach BaHaShem!"

- Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach

The Spiritual Origins of Jew-Hatred

Without bothering to recount the thousands of years worth of oppression the Jewish People have endured and the endless stream of explanations (and justifications) for it, I wanted to briefly touch on what I believe to be the true root of the past and present “Jewish Problem.”

As is well known, the Jews perennially take it on the nose – often, despite our very best efforts. If we keep to ourselves we are accused of failing to pull our societal weight. If we get too involved in world affairs we are suddenly running all of the media and the banking system and various shadow governments. We stand accused of creating Communism… and Capitalism. It’s been claimed that we poisoned wells (and the air) and eat children’s blood with our unleavened bread (despite the fact that blood is forbidden by our religion). As far as I know, we are the only people that had stood accused of Deicide.

It’s currently en vogue to dislike us because we have supposedly taken another people’s land – though even a small bit of research will reveal that the land was never controlled by that people and in any event was won in a series of defensive wars from yet other peoples. After a while it really starts to seem as though we will be disliked no matter what – that the goalposts will always be moved and some reason found to dismiss our (very many) contributions to world civilization in favor of an inexplicable and wildly disproportionate approbation - one that comes even when innocent Jews are kidnapped and murdered.

Syria is in the process of killing its second 100,000 citizens. Russia has just taken over another country. Iran has lied and tricked and manipulated its way to the brink of nuclear capability – one with which some of its officials have openly said they would use against the Jews (of course). Yet there is no BDS (boycott, divest, sanctions) movement aimed at these or any other nation – except for the one Jewish nation. There are no “peace” flotillas launched to help the victims of any of these terror zones – only Israel contends with those. And in 2013 there were no less than 21 UN resolutions against tiny Israel while a whopping four were directed against the rest of the world. It seems to me that only one of two possible things is going on here. Either the Jews are truly the most despicable, demonic, and blood-thirsty people the world has ever seen (something that any half-sentient observer knows is complete bunk) or the majority of the world has been and is currently under the sway of a sub-conscious abhorrence of our goodness and more importantly the ultimate root of that good.

2,500 years ago the Jewish prophet Isaiah envisioned a time in which the nations of the world would come to recognize that they had it all wrong – that the Jews were the world’s “suffering servant” – the messengers of light and morality that God charged with steadfastly staying on message no matter the consequences. “He was despised and we had no regard for him. But in truth it was our ills that he bore, our pains that he carried… .” To me there is no greater confirmation of this prophecy than the utterly irrational, misplaced histrionics that characterizes modern Jew hatred. People who hate Jews ultimately hate God. People who hate morality (and want to live unshackled by it) hate the Jews and what we have to say.

Hitler himself said it best when he wrote that “Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear. The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention, it is a blemish like circumcision.” (Rauschning, Hitler Speaks, p. 220-222)

Far be it for me to suggest that the BDS movement has that distinctive Nazi like stench but forgive us for noticing that the “Final Solution” started off with a series of boycotts as well. Forgive me also for saying that once again you have it all backwards -what you believe to be ugly is in truth beautiful and perhaps worse, what you believe to be beautiful is actually evil.

I have news that you may not like to hear – we are not going anywhere and we are not going to just shut up and die. We’ve been at this for more than three millennium. Do you think that you’re stronger or more clever than Egyptians or the Romans or the Third Reich? No, we and our message are here to stay. In fact, we’ve been promised: “And I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you, throughout the generations, an eternal covenant to be your God, and the God of your descendants after you.” (Genesis 17:7)‎

Mark Twain also wondered about this dynamic and wrote:

“The Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Persian, rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dreamstuff and passed away. The Greek and the Roman followed, made a vast noise and they are gone. Other peoples have sprung up, held their torch high for a time, but it burned out and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the Jew. All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

Perhaps both the secret of the world’s disdain for us and our “immortality” lies with the originator of the message and not in the messenger.