By Rabbi Dov Fischer, INN 25.4.23
Imagine if Adolf Hitler’s full agenda, and the nearly universal quiet backing he enjoyed from German citizenry, had been known ten years earlier — before he assumed irreversible power. Initially, his people downplayed how far he would go. Foolish Jews hoped and dreamt he never would pass Nuremberg laws or mass-burn Jewish books or ignite a Kristallnacht — or death camps. They knew they were in for tough times, but they tried believing perhaps he did not even mean German Jews, the Yekkes, and only meant to target the Orthodox, earlocked, bearded, Yiddish-jargon-babbling Ostjuden, those religious Jews from the East: Poland and Russia.
They did not imagine how many of their neighbors were ready to seize their pianos, jewels, artwork, houses, businesses, and to turn them in and, maybe, even help burn them in their synagogues, as happened in Jedwab. They thought they knew their non-Jewish neighborly friends. They were confident that their patriotism in World War I, their medals for valor and bravery in defense of Germany, assured their safety.
Moreover, for a century they had promoted themselves as “reform[ed] Jews,” not like the backward Orthodox with loyalties to Jerusalem and Zion and the Hebrew language. No, they had won the hearts and minds of German liberals by being just like them. Berlin was their new Jerusalem. Germany their new Zion. Their rabbis now wore black robes like Protestant ministers and did not cover their heads, even in worship. They called their gathering places “temples” to demonstrate they no longer yearned for the Temple in Jerusalem. They prayed in German, abandoning Hebrew. They imported organs to emulate church melodies.
Most German Jews could have gotten out in the 1920’s but felt safe. By the time they figured it out, they had waited too long. Roosevelt closed America’s doors, and Churchill closed Haifa’s docks. Lord Moyne had asked sometime around February 1944 “What will I do with a million Jews?” (By November he no longer had to worry.) If only the Jews had known what lay under the surface when there might have been time to confront the impending doom. Instead, leaders of the Jewish organizations scoffed at Jabotinsky’s lone warnings.
The same can be said for today’s American patriots who have lost America. Even sixty years ago, the vast majority of Americans opposed abortion on demand, homosexual “marriage,” women clergy in churches, pornography in the public sphere, filthy speech on television.
If American conservatives had known then what was fermenting under the surface — the consolidating of a Deep State that would see the Left completely capture (i) mainstream media, (ii) the entertainment industry, (iii) academia, and (iv) the judiciary — they might have had time to save America by focusing on breaking the Deep State. Instead, they underestimated its web. By 2016, Trump’s pledge to “Drain the Swamp” found him and his allies unprepared for how deep the muck sank. One by one, his closest allies got handcuffed and destroyed: Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro. The Swamp drained him, and now he is indicted in a sham proceeding while crooks like Hillary and the Bidens are safe. America is lost.
Through sixty years, American courts acculturated general society to accept homosexual marriage, abortion on demand, now transgenderism, pornography, flag burning, and so much else that the Torah teaches is perverse and deviant. Media hammered home the messages endlessly. Entertainment reinforced it. And academia assured that two consecutive generations of young people have been brainwashed through (i) assuring uniformly leftist faculty, (ii) assigning uniformly leftist readings on curricula, (iii) creating enormous psychological pressure on young people to conform with the milieu around them, to “follow the script” or be socially ostracized and mocked.
There still is time to say what conservatives say, but the greater battle is lost. America is like the character in the Clint Eastwood classic, “The Unforgiven,” a movie from one of the few patriotic and conservative Hollywood personalities who, like Jon Voight, first had to establish a powerful apolitical reputation and only afterward “came out” as conservative. In that movie, Eastwood plays a rifle marksman, and in one scene shoots a villain from what seems miles away. The villain winces and smacks at his hip, as though suddenly bitten by a wasp. A cohort of Eastwood belittles him for missing his mark and merely grazing his target. But Eastwood’s character responds “No, I killed him.” And sure enough, after several more minutes, the villain collapses to the ground, dead. He had been mortally wounded without even knowing it, and then it was too late for him.
That is America.
I am a huge optimist. I am inspired as well by the words associated with HaRav Yitzchak HaLevi Herzog zt”l when he was urged to leave “Palestine” while Hitler’s Gen. Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, campaigned militarily in North Africa en route to Israel. People feared that, if Rommel reached the Holy Land, untold horrors would be inflicted on the Ashkenazic Jews’ Chief Rabbi. It is said Herzog refused to leave, maintaining that the Tanakh (Bible) and its prophecies speak of only two Exiles. There will not be a third Exile, he asserted. Rommel never made it to Israel.
There will not be a Third Exile. The pangs of the past three months will be forgotten soon enough. Societal anguish will pass. Every single effort to cede Judea and Samaria has failed. Every effort to compromise Jerusalem sovereignty has failed. The eternity of Israel is ineradicable.
The Deep State in Israel has exposed itself. People knew of the Histadrut. The Left’s infiltration into the IDF is exposed. All knew about the Left’s control of Israel’s mainstream media and entertainment, and even academia, and of course the dictatorial leftist control of the judiciary and “attorney-general.”
But the full extent was underestimated — the readiness to perpetrate treason, for example. Many assumed but never had certainty that snakes like Ehud Barak, who finally came out as Meretz, Tzippy Livni, and Yair Lapid would lobby American audiences against Israel’s freely elected government overseas, to incite anti-Israel pressure abroad. Or that a Lapid would boycott national Independence Day. Good.
It is a curse that such treason and such a Leftist Deep State exists in Israel, but — like Rabbi Akiva, on that excursion with his two Tannaitic colleagues at Mount Zion, where they cried and he found solace in the desecration of the holy soil with foxes prancing on land where the Kohen Gadol once had performed the Yom Kippur Temple service — I find consolation in that Israel’s Leftist Deep State has been exposed just in time. More than judicial reform — which absolutely will happen — Simcha Rotman and Yariv Levin have ignited a storm forcing the Deep State to blow its cover while there still is ample time to stave them off.
America is lost. Israel is found.
In America, even right-wing religious Christians cannot be organized effectively, even to boycott filthy movies, television shows, and their sponsors. So patriots and conservatives are consolidating in “red” states, and people actually are moving from California and New York to Florida and Texas to find some sanctuary from the Left. But the die is cast. In Israel there is plenty of time. Shas and UTJ are solid. Smotrich-Ben-Gvir religious Zionism has found its footing. Religious Zionists are not gullible useful idiots anymore to be used by political charlatans. Gideon Sa’ar, Zev Elkin, and their ilk have been exposed before they could gain the kind of foothold in Likud that Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert once had.
Religious and nationalist Jews are on notice to attack the imbalance at the universities and law schools. If they cannot undo the perversions of Haifa University, Tel Aviv University, and Ben Gurion, they must — and can — work extra hard to preserve some signs of sanity at Hebrew University, to improve what exists at Bar Ilan, and to build Ariel University and campuses like Jerusalem College of Technology and the like. If Kan 11, Keshet 12, and Reshet 13 are lost, it is important to advance the new growth of Arutz 14. The Knesset Channel strives to bring both sides of every controversy.This publication, Arutz Sheva and its weekly Besheva, the haredi newspapers and the many weeklies of the religious right, and what is left of Israel Hayom, must be bolstered. Israel is not America.
The military will sort itself out. Those who want to leave Israel will come to America and be swallowed away, like Korach. Secularists who attack Haredi Jews for not serving are the main families who move to America, as soon as their oldest reach age 16 or 17. That is no coincidence. That is how the anti-Haredi crowd evade IDF service, by leaving “for better job prospects.”
Meanwhile, when war comes, all the “boycotting” Leftists on reserve or other IDF duty will be back on the front lines because, as bombs start flying their way, they will have no choice. They have parents, grandparents, children, siblings, uncles, aunts, and spouses and their homes to protect. It is not like America where they would burn draft cards, cut off a toe or finger, or move to Canada (less desirable than cutting off the digit). No one bombs America — yet. So, except for one horrific day in Hawaii on December 7, 1941 and another on September 11, 2000 in Manhattan, America is not Israel. The boycotters will fight or get blown up.
There is deep blessing that the Deep State of Israel has emerged from the muck while there still is time to destroy it. Israeli general society has not adopted the universal deviations and perversions of the West. Homosexual marriage still is not a norm, despite the Mormon perversions of Utah. Abortion on demand is too frequent, but it is not the sacrament it is in America, where fools actually select candidates based on that one issue that does not even affect them despite an economy in shambles, chaos at the southern border, racial ruptures, perversions in the public schools, and so much else.
American Jews and their organizations do not matter either. They are being swallowed by intermarriage. Trump has more Jewish grandchildren than do most “Jewish leaders.”
Approximately 30-40 percent of American “Jews” are not even Jewish — even among their rabbis. Their grandchildren, so many not Jewish, march against Israel to demonstrate credibility among their intersectionalist professors and fellow students who reject them anyway.
Beneath their bold exterior, American Jewish leaders are terrified. Their world is collapsing. Jew-haters sense the weakness and are enticed as sharks are by the smell of blood. These hapless “leaders” don’t know what to do. They talk tough to Israel, just as a man henpecked at home and unsuccessful at work talks tough when he gets to sit on a synagogue board for two years. But they have no clout, not even with Democrats in Washington. Their temples have no Judaism, only “social justice.” All they have left are Holocaust museums and Israel. They desperately need Israel. Israel does not need them a whit — nor their Federations or Zionist Congresses. That was the beauty — while it lasted — of naming May Golan to replace Lapid’s lapdog as New York Consul General. They don’t matter. Netanyahu thought the ADL criticism of her appointment still matters. It doesn’t.
So there is ample advance warning. As a critical first step, the time is long overdue to fight the Left using their methods. If the way to secure power is not by democratically electing a Knesset but by bringing 100,000 into the streets, then this coming Thursday’s mass rally marks proof of the blessing that the Deep State exposed itself in time for the religious right to start turning their tactics on them.
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I think there are many good reasons to share Peloni’s view that the fight for America may still be won. The alternative media have grown much stronger in the last couple years, and its leading figures have online followings that dwarf those of legacy media. The Left is being forced to come up with ever-more creative methods of stealing elections, but there are clearly limits to how long they can get away with it now that their scams are being revealed in the light of day. The crimes of the Deep State have been so egregious, and the voices of their opponents have grown so strong, that their narrative is collapsing and a rival universe of discourse is arising which will continue to erode their base. The battle is hardly over, but the voices proclaiming truth are clearly prevailing and the rats are on the run.
From Yoram Hazony:
Very well explained.
I do agree that the American Republic has fallen, as how could you not accept this reality as being actually real. I do, however, not believe that ‘America is lost’, not by a good bit. When Germany fell to the Nazis and Ukraine fell to the Monists, a quiet settled across the land, as these conquered nations quickly accepted their conquest and their newly installed leaders as being legitimate. This is not what I see in America. Whereas Rabbi Fischer may prove the more prophetic on his outlook of America being mortally wounded, I am quite convinced that there is a great battle of wills which must be played out before this belief is proven fact. Indeed, the prospect that America is lost should be ignores the fact that she has only fallen to the control of a corrupted class of autocrats which have neither the support of the nation nor the quiet acceptance of its downfall. Rather, I would argue that the potential victory to return America to its former state is still very much still in play and that America’s ultimate loss should not in any way be counted as a fait accompli. Not yet at least.