I have posted a number of articles today illustrating the PA’s dilemma. They take a risk going to the UN without US support and they are now reconsidering the move. The problem for them is that they want the Quartet to force Israel to negotiate on their terms i.e. based on ’67 lines which Obama has endorsed and Netanyahu has turned down outright. They are also finessing the Hamas problem. Hamas said they won’t take part in the government even if they win the elections. Their choice is negotiating without preconditions which will go no where or going all in on unilateral action which will also go nowhere. I am worried that Obama will get Netanyahu to agree to another freeze in exchange for the PA accepting no conditions for negotiations. I am totally against any more freezes. Ted Belman
PLO leader slams US, German stance as counterproductive
RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — “People do not negotiate their right to statehood. Rather, this is an inherent right,” a PLO official lashed out Wednesday in the wake of US and German statements demanding Palestinian officials abort plans to seek UN recognition of statehood.
“Far from acting unilaterally, Palestinians are bringing their case for
statehood before the United Nations, the world’s preeminent multilateral body. Self-determination and respect for the sovereignty of nations are principles enshrined in the United Nations Charter, making the UN a natural forum to resolve this issue,” Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee said in a statement.
The day before, US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke out at a news conference, saying they agreed that Palestinians should not seek recognition of a state at the UN in September, calling the move “unilateral.”
Ashrawi’s sharp statement appealed to the leaders, urging them to reflect on their position and “send a very different message” if they wanted to reinforce prospects for peace.
“For the last two years, we have built our state from the ground up. Our efforts have been internationally recognized and widely praised. We fulfill all the requirements of statehood as stipulated under Article 4 of the UN Charter and the Montevideo Convention. The sole obstacle that remains is Israel’s refusal to end its occupation,” she said in a statement.
For peace to be realized, she continued, “You do not leave an occupied people at the mercy of those who occupy them and who act unilaterally in violation of international law by continuing to demolish homes, annex land, build settlements, erect apartheid walls and revoke IDs.
“On the contrary, come September, we expect President Obama and Chancellor Merkel to support the involvement of the United Nations as a positive step forward in efforts to secure regional peace and safeguard stability, and to recognize that the greatest threat to regional peace and security is Israel’s refusal to respect Palestinian rights and international law,” Dr Ashrawi concluded.
Yes, I think in large part that’s true. The State Dept’s power certainly hasn’t decreased with the decades; if anything it’s augmented, and that assures the dominance of the Executive Branch in foreign policy. On the other hand, there is http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/79276. But I wasn’t speaking of the exercise of a particular policy; it’s simply a matter of not conflating the two systems when you refer to American ‘governments.’ And taking note of the distinction is NOT a mere exercise in “pedantic bullshit.”
That’s just another way of underlining the importance of the GOP to gather to itself an overwhelming Congressional majority in 2012 — filibuster-proof and veto-proof — REGARDLESS of how things go in the Presidential election.
Okay, Part Two.
As it turned out, no German WWII cemetery would have been entirely empty of Waffen SS. But first things first.
The irony of it all is that the Bitburg visit was the inadvertent outcome of the earlier, more successful visit to Normandy the previous summer. Kohl was saddened by his exclusion from the ceremony. He later tearfully told how he & Mitterrand had visited the cemetery at Verdun — where both German AND French soldiers who had fallen in the First World War were buried — and he urged RR to participate in a similar event commemmorating the military dead from WWII.
Reagan was grateful to Kohl for Bonn’s acceptance of US nukes in ’83. He responded to Kohl’s show of emotion & casually agreed. Of course, he didn’t realize that the Verdun analogy was entirely inapplicable, since there are no German cemeteries containing the remains of both US and German soldiers. If Kohl knew that, he said nothing — and nobody else told Reagan until after the trip was announced.
When the Pres. did find out that these were only German troops, and some of them SS, he tried to get Kohl to consider an alternative to the project: Festung Ehrenbreitstein, a shrine to the German dead of both wars, near Koblenz. It contained no graves, & was often used for memorial ceremonies. But Kohl wouldn’t go for it, said he feared that the political & personal embarrassment for him from any change in the plans could lead to his govt falling. Would it have? Don’t know.
W.Germany was an important member of the Western alliance & the Cold War was still very much present. Then too, RR had a long-established policy from his own business & professional life of always “keeping a booking.” In the end, he stubbornly stuck to the agreement he’d made with Kohl. Unwise? — yes, I’d say so. Antisemitic? — no sale.
Yes, a highly questionable choice of focus, I agree; I found it bizarre, right off the bat. (And even at that, he didn’t actually use Hitler’s NAME — although the words, “Adolf Hitler” were in Ken Khachigian’s printed text — didn’t like using proper names.) He did refer to one man, it’s true. Germany, Cold War, reconciliation for the sake of the alliance against USSR, etc. Weak, thin yes, I agree. But not Jew-hatred.
Again, I agree; you’ll get no argument from me here. I DON’T believe, however, that that [“detracting from the uniqueness of the specific Jewish tragedy”] was his intent. The speechwriting assignment was given specifically to Ken Khachigian, whose Armenian ancestors had been massacred by the Turks 70 years earlier. For him the universalising of haShoah was, I’ve no doubt, cathartic, if perhaps less than professional. As Meinheer Schicklgruber replied when the question was put to him over whether he could actually get away with the preposterous Final Solution that was percolating in his perfervid brain, “Who remembers the Armenians?”
And the likelihood is that the President himself never even made the connection; not at the time anyway. He had the alliance topmost in his consciousness. Beating out (or bankrupting) the Soviet Union was paramount for him in 1985.
Unlike yourself, fella, I have never had heroes (‘godlike’ or otherwise). I certainly never ‘worshipped’ ANY president the way you worship Kahane. Unlike yourself, I have an appreciation for texture and nuance. It’s part of what fairness and objectivity are all about. But as long as you keep riding the crest of your own emotionalism, Yamit — like a surfer who just can’t let that one more wave pass him by — you’ll never be capable of seeing anything except in solid colors.
And with one eye shut at all times.
“Support”? — Enlighten me.
Names?
Positions?
Superior officers?
A redundancy.
Crutches are by their very nature artificial.
There are no ‘un-artificial’ crutches. You might want to think about the implications of that.
Nonsense.
I most certainly do not attack the messenger.
I attack his conclusions.
They are often unsupported by his facts.
I say he has an axe to grind.
And not only as to Reagan and Jews. I note that he also baldly accuses the Nicaraguan Resistance of murdering innocent civilians, religious & aid workers. (No apparent motive, just the deed.) Demonized and derogatorily labeled “Contras” by the Left, their leadership were themselves mostly former Sandinistas who believed the Marxist, Sandinista Commandantes (Tomas Borge, the Ortega Bros, et al.) had betrayed & hijacked La Revolucion after removing Somoza. “Thugs”? — Most of the rank & file were under the age of 16. The Sandinistas, on the other hand, was aided not only by 8000 Cuban ‘advisors’ but also the solicitous services of the PLO, East Germany and Libya, as well as the USSR.
And I could say quite a bit more about Prof. Gil-White’s methodology in regard also to OTHER matters not at all related to Reagan (but that would be off-point as to this discussion). It’s most unfortunate, because some of his stuff is quite good — so when he mixes it in with garbage, he taints himself and spoils the moral authority of his “testimony.” As I’ve said before, I was already aware of Gil-White’s work. But I don’t follow it ‘religiously’ as some apparently do. My strong suspicion, however, would be that this fellow has run into static elsewhere (perhaps within academia, though I don’t know) over the outrageousness of some of his conclusions. I can’t believe that I’m by any means the ‘first’ person to call him on it.
To compare the vile drivel of the Gil-White conclusion — that Reagan was seeking to “re-normalize German Nazism, and… to re-normalize antisemitism” — to the scurrilous rot of the Daily Worker‘s own specialty of character assassination;
To compare the vile drivel of the Gil-White conclusion — that “this was ‘the leader of the free world’ doing Holocaust denial via diplomacy-speech” — to the putrid pig plop of the Daily Worker
is an insult to the Daily Worker.
Also an insult to vile drivel.
‘Cowardice’ is the last thing you believe about me, bubbeleh.
Though we both know you’d LOVE to be able to believe it.
Dream on.
This will have to run to more than one post; there are simply too many points to piss on at one time.
I did NOT say that the claims of perceived antisemitism — from part of the Jewish community — were leftist “generated.” You will not put words in my mouth, Yamit; the posting record is plain.
What I did say was that the claims were exploited by the left for their own self-serving reasons having NOTHING to do with any regard for the Jewish people:
“Jewish lefties would seize upon anything – and I do mean ANYTHING — to weaken & even destroy Reagan’s presidency – and hardly for the sake of ahavat yisrael.”
(If you couldn't see that, then: more fool you.)
The assessment was correct and I stand by it foursquare. The left & their liberal media cohorts jumped on it like a dog on a bone; they promptly hunted down everybody with a Jewish name that they could find, stuck a microphone in his face and said, “Looky, looky!!!
The slander was YOURS: that RR was a “Jew hating bastard” — to which I note that you have now added a further dollop of snot (“evil”) to the memory of a good man. (Not that I’m surprised; it’s about your speed, nudnik.)
During the forties Reagan was known to have come damned near to “getting into it” with guys (fist fights) from time-to-time in Beverly Hills over antisemitic remarks he overheard; this at a time long before such comments came to be considered gauche.
He quit the Lakeside County Club in B.H. — considered a prime place for an up-&-coming, film actor to catch the eye of directors — because he learned of its “no Jews” policy. He later joined the Hillcrest Club, favored by B.H. Jews. Encouraged his friends to do the same. If I had the online time or the personal inclination (I have neither), I could easily point to plenty of other flies in your (and the good professor’s) ointment regarding RR’s ‘evil Jew-hatred.’
You can accuse him of inadequate historical understanding, political naivete or any number of other shortcomings in re Bitburg. Not antisemitism. That’s pure crap.
Not so.
Although actually I could refute Gil-White with research; the evidence is plentiful, especially the gobs of it that he left out.
But what I was doing in those paragraphs (or trying to do) was underscoring the suspicions which the events raised in me at the time, and noting the advantage of having both research AND in-the-moment awareness as superior to having only the one or only the other. It’s the difference between looking at an object with both eyes open & operating — as distinct from seeing it with only one eye or only the other. The added depth perception greatly increases perspective. That’s why I said:
“MY familiarity with the visit extends not only to research but also to personal reflection upon it at the time it was occurring.”
I remember being particularly suspicious of the “in-your-face” quality that the sequence of events seemed to have. It seemed to have the fingerprints of Buchanan all over it. I know that Ed Rollins opposed the visit, and was pissed-off that he hadn’t been consulted.
Turns out that Buchanan actually argued for an even harder line. Deaver says that Buchanan wanted an even bigger gesture of ‘resistance’ to ‘the Jews’ & the media. Buchanan told the delegation of Jewish leaders that they were “Americans first” (like there was something ‘unAmerican’ about opposing the Bitburg visit), repeatedly wrote in his notebook the phrase, “succumbing to Jewish pressure.”
Nancy was dead-set against the visit altogether. But her influence, while considerable, was not in the political arena (as the Reagan-haters have often assumed), but in the psychological dept.
No. I did NOT offer the address in ‘defense’ of him. (I had already told you, it’s pointless to try disproving a negative: a fishing expedition intended to establish that the stream has no fish in it is an exercise in futility.)
The reason I alluded to the Bergen-Belsen eulogy was simply to correct the record: to refute the specific allegation that Reagan “declined to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp.” If that assertion had not been included in your post (or link), I’d have had no occasion to mention the Bergen-Belsen visit. Go back and read the post.
How in the hell is it “puerile’? (Do you — of all people, ken ayin hara! — even know what the word means?)
It certainly is no ‘obfuscation’; I was merely taking the points in the order they were presented, and I later went on to the matter of the Bitburg fiasco.
Of course. And it was obvious that it would be TAKEN that way, no matter what was done; that’s why the Reagan people were initially disinclined to go with it. They didn’t want to be phony about it. In the end Bergen-Belsen was chosen on Weisel’s suggestion.
He made no such reference at the CAMP. You are talking about Bitburg (the advance planning for it), not Bergen-Belsen.
He was talking off-the-cuff to reporters at lunch, and he wasn’t ‘exonerating’ anybody in using the expression, “Victims themselves of the Nazis.” That was intended to allude specifically to the young kids who were forced into the Waffen SS to pick up the manpower slack as the war was ending. (If you want, I’ll find you the precise verbatim quote.) These draftees weren’t the fanatical killers of the “Regular SS,” and there were some of them in every German WWII cemetery (not just Bitburg), because Waffen SS were attached to Wehrmacht [infantry] units.
Neither Deaver nor Reagan had been aware that the Germans made this distinction between Regular SS and Waffen SS — so when Deaver checked in advance with the American Embassy in Bonn to be sure there was “nothing embarrassing” at Bitburg, he accepted the blanket assurances of Schulenberg [W. German Chief of Protocol] that “no war criminals” were buried there.
Myopic?–possibly. Naive?–probably. Sloppy?–definitely.
Antisemitic? — abso-freakin’-lutely not.
I didn’t ask you a question.
But thanks for the story! 🙂
SG,
I don’t really know what made you Jewish.
But as for me, what made me Jewish was that my father, Max Harris, born in Davenport, Iowa from a long line of Jewish peasants who had resided in the shtetls around Minsk in the western part of the Russian Empire, had a long holiday weekend on the 4th of July 1933 with his girlfriend Amelia Jacobson, a daughter of a long line of British Jewish skilled shipyard workers in Barrow in Furness in the Cumberland district. (Morris Jacobson, her dad, was a coppersmith in the famed Thornycroft shipyards where some of the Empire’s great ships of war and peace were constructed.)
Mom and dad’s 4th of July weekend apparently got celebratory enough for her to become pregnant with me as the zygote or whatever. She had to have learned about this by a couple of months later. So they drove up to Waukegan, Illinois in September 1933 and got a local justice of the peace to marry them. That made her Amelia Jacobson Harris. Then I was born right on time on April 2, 1934, at Chicago Lying-In Hospital, adjoining the campus of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park. I only became a bastard later in life, by carefully cultivating the correct temperament.
That, as precisely as I can describe it, is what made me Jewish. And now at age 77, I am still as Jewish as I was the day I was born.
I glorify ha-Shem by staying the hell out of his way, tending to my life, my family, my business, my Internet arguments, paying my taxes, avoiding joining any multitudes either to do evil or to do stupidity, and never, ever kidding myself about any kind of afterlife.
That answer you question, SG?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Whereas any Jew who recalls what makes him Jewish in the first place constantly asks the question “how does this glorify G-d, the Creator of the universe?”
Yamit,
I view all things concerning Jews to a single question:
“How does this help or hinder the expansion and power of the Jewish nation and the Jewish state?”
I never have paid much attention to the Holocaust, which in any case is little more than a Jewish version of the annual Nakhba perturbations of the Moslem Arabs of the former Palestine Mandate. I regard mass mourning of murdered Jews as a pitiable substitute for what needs to be done to insulate the Jewish nation from more such deadly events. And what needs to be done is to increase Jewish national power, so that the government of the Jewish state will be less hesitant about putting to death hardened enemies who dare even to attempt to kill Jews. In short, such a Jewish government would have at its head a man who could in fact make such a bold statement as did President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 20th century, where a Moroccan bandit had kidnapped a Greek who had pretensions to US citizenship:
“We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!”
(Nobody but nobody fucked with Teddy Roosevelt, and to be an American really meant something truly extraordinary in his era.)
Was Reagan especially friendly to Israel and the Jewish nation? Probably not. And why should he have been otherwise? Most American Jews supported his opponent, the execrable maggot James Earl Carter, who twisted Begin’s arm to strip the Sinai peninsula from Israeli control. I’m sure most of Reagan’s administration and that of his successor George H W Bush mirrored the attitude of James Baker, Bush’s key player for foreign policy niceties, regarding Jews:
“They don’t vote for us anyway, so fuck ’em.”
That’s just the way of the human race, Yamit. If you want good relations with somebody, then don’t be either their dependent or their patron. And above all, be powerful enough so they can’t toss you under one of history’s endless buses. And if you think otherwise, then you would have to be classified as of the same mindset as the Jews of Russia who stayed behind when the generation of my grandparents left that place with the start of the pogroms of 1882, and came to this country, where they wound up in and around Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, on the opposite side of the Mississippi River. Both these towns may not have been much, but they sure as hell beat the shtetls around Minsk. And in the Quad Cities, an enterprising Jewish fella or maybe his kids could develop himself or themselves into whatever they wanted to be and had the focus to become.
That, in a nutshell, is not just my American dream, but my Jewish dream as well.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
dweller trying to be an apologist for an evil Jew hating bastard does not add any credibility to you or any other subjective opinion you try to pass off as objectivity. You first mocked the Reagan Jewish criticism as being leftist or liberal anti Reagan slander and leftist agenda generated. Then you in your not so subtle way try to refute White mostly based on your own personal impressions and presumptions as opposed to his because as you stated ” he couldn’t have been older than 16 at the time” meaning your personal impressions are more valid than an academic researcher. You offer in your defense of Reagan his address at Bergen Belsen. This attempt by you here is puerile and an obfuscation of the main point!!! That point was his commemorating and commiserating the Nazis buried in the “Bitburg [Nazi] cemetery.”
it’s obvious that Bergen Belsen was an add-on to give the Jews a SOP and reduce political criticism. He had an option of commerating German common soldiers in may other cemeteries, he chose not to.
I hate to Quote Wisel, (Idon’t like him) but in this case I agree with him:
Elie Wiesel explained publicly to the American president that:
“there could be no trade-off by combining visits to a camp and to the cemetery. ‘A visit to this particular cemetery is to us unacceptable,’ he said.”[121]
The way a master dismisses a nagging slave, Ronald Reagan replied that maybe he would add a visit to a Nazi concentration camp site, but that in any case “no thought was being given to eliminating a visit to the Bitburg [Nazi] cemetery.”[122]
Ronald Reagan
Remarks at the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp
First he exonerated the Nazi war dead by calling them “Victims themselves of the Nazis”
He says at Bergen Belsen “The awful evil started by one man, an evil that victimized all the world with its destruction, was uniquely destructive of the millions forced into the grim abyss of these camps.
Even here he places all the blame for the holocaust of one man ‘Hitler’. Adds Christians to the mix to detract from the uniqueness of the the specific Jewish tragedy. Adds Anne Frank to lend to the universalism of the Holocaust message which was propagated by the likes of Wiesel himself. (that’s why I really dislike Wiesel)
I will ignore the rest of your inane comments as they go to your own personal hangups and your obvious need for god like heroes to worship where facts, plain facts will never be allowed to override your own psychological need for artificial crutches.
To even make a comparison with White and his conclusions to the ‘Daily worker’ proves everything I have said.
I haven’t even gotten to his support of the Nazi Waldheim or his support for Arafat etc. The many Nazis and Nazi collaborators who were employed by his ADMINISTRATION.
Instead of refuting points you disagree with you attack the messenger. That’s the last refuge of Intellectual cowards.
Sure-as-hell fooled me.
Pot.
Kettle.
Black.
He visited Bergen-Belsen on the 5th of May 1985. If Bergen-Belsen wasn’t a concentration camp, then I guess the place where Anne Frank died was, what, a Country Club?
To ‘deny the Holocaust’ is to claim that it’s a ‘lie,’ or a ‘fantasy,’ or a ‘hoax,’ or a ‘gross overstatement.’
There is nothing in the Gil-White article to sustain that charge against Reagan — notwithstanding Gil-White’s ax-grinding attempt to draw the conclusion
and despite YOUR hysterical attempt to exploit it by piggy-backing it.
Much of Francisco Gil-White’s data is accurate (albeit curiously partial & selective), but he occasionally tries to MAKE that data conclude what it simply does not say; whenever he does that, it is not the Professor’s finest hour.
Gil-White was scarcely 16 years old when the Reagan visit to Germany took place. It is readily apparent that his acquaintance with the events is strictly that of an academic researcher looking backward. MY familiarity with the visit extends not only to research but also to personal reflection upon it at the time it was occurring.
I recall vividly the bad taste Bitburg left in my mouth — it was insensitive, clumsy, oafish. What could the advance men possibly be thinking? What was MOST unsettling about it was the seemingly deliberate obnoxiousness of it.
And that “overreaching” quality made me smell a rat. I remember the overwhelming suspicion I had that the orchestration of events was indeed the product of an ongoing power struggle among White House advisors — this being a few years after the raid on the Osirak reactor, that had driven some of the Cabinet & staff (esp. Weinberger) damned near apoplectic toward Israel. And, yes, I also understood the realpolitik connected with the USA gesture to the German Federal Republic [“West Germany”]; the Kissinger & Nixon support for it, etc.
But while it occurred to me that there might well be an element of, not only anti-Israel inclination but also even Jew-hatred in the White House — I never for a moment made the assumption that either outlook was part of Reagan’s make-up. I’d never seen evidence of that.
And I still don’t.
If you’ve got some, then bring it.
So far, you haven’t.
What’s more, Prof. Gil-White’s contention that all the foregoing constituted nothing more, or less, than Reagan seeking to
“re-normalize German Nazism, and… to re-normalize antisemitism with a high-profile spitting session on the Jews,”
is some of the vilest drivel I’ve seen anywhere this side of the Daily Worker, circa 1985.
Arnold,
You brought me down memory lane, with Post #33. In 1986, I was in California, serving as Managing Editor of an international media ministry, supporting my own Christian “Rav”, a good man named Jim Durkin. Three years before that, I was on the North side of Chicago, eating pizza with Gen. Efrain Rios-Montt, who had recently been President of Guatemala. Like your Rabbi Kahane, he was picketed by Leftist activists (perhaps the same ones who picketed Kahane). The West Side Milwaukee hotel you stayed in was probably near Mayfair shopping center; I’m familiar with the neighborhood, and I grew up with several of those big Milwaukee cops as my neighbors.
Do you remember the Nazi demonstrations in Milwaukee during the late 1970s? I was living there at the time, and would read in the Milwaukee Journal about the massive demonstrations and counter-demonstrations downtown. I never went to the demonstrations, as I was busy working at the time and not very political (I think I was a maintenance man for a slum landlord just then). I do remember seeing an “apparition” on N. 35th St., though, one day. It was a flatbed truck, painted up all pretty, with what looked like mannequins standing up in the back. On closer inspection, I saw that the “mannequins” were about a dozen look-alike brownshirts in full Nazi regalia. Apparently, that was the whole movement, and the thing thousands of people were getting all excited about. I just had to laugh.
I never even heard of Kahane in those days. In fact, my wife and I saw our first visibly Orthodox Jews in the early 1980s, in a park on Milwaukee’s West Side. My Jewish history teacher in the late ’70s was an observant Jew, but I don’t remember him wearing any sort of head covering. Jews keep a low profile in the Midwest. When my wife and I went to Chicago a few years ago, I tried to find a shul or even a kosher deli downtown. I couldn’t find any — but for that matter, I hardly found any churches either. What I did see were two statues of muscular Indians in Grant Park, apparently a tribute to Man as his own god. I noticed also that the geese built great monuments of their own in that park, so that crossing the lawn was a little like walking across a minefield.
Thank you for writing your excerpts about the “Old Country”. I never get homesick for the place, but it’s nice to come across someone who saw the same things I did.
Yamit,
1) Your personal experiences with Rav Meir Kahane probably pre-dated mine by a decade. The first time I ever saw and heard him in person was in summer 1986, when an old-time pro-Israeli activist invited me to come to a near west side Milwaukee hotel in which he was the featured speaker for an audience mostly of Jews whose jaws were dropping listening to what he had to say, plus a few Arabs filled with hatred for just about anything and everything Jewish, a squad of some what must have been the physically largest cops the Milwaukee Police Department could assemble for the occasion.
I can believe what you wrote about some of his personal characteristics. He treated people in direct proportion to the degree in which he thought they could serve the Authentic Jewish Idea and Kach, the political party he organized after he moved to Israel. I remember that the following year, when he came to Chicago, he brought with him Ken Sidman, a Boston Kach activist. We were driving around the far north side, where, late in the day, he was scheduled to participate in a debate against some noted liberal Jew. I was driving. The Rav sat alone in the back seat, Sidman beside me in front. Along Devon Avenue, he told me to stop at a local grocery store. There, he ordered Sidman to go into the store and buy him a can of Pepsi. He didn’t ask; he ordered. He obviously could have gotten out of the car and walked into the store himself for just that purpose. Instead, he sat there imperiously waiting for his Pepsi.
I never forgot that incident, even though I overlooked in in the next three years, because I was busy helping him get out his publications. The funny thing about all this is that he never, ever tried that stuff with me. Maybe he thought I was somewhat less dispensable than his other hangers-on. And that probably was true, because I was one of the few people in his world who knew how to properly match people by zipcode, street address and lastname, and because I was an efficient editor and publication production guy. But he knew for a fact that I didn’t know a hell of a lot about formal religious Judaism and cared even less. He never, ever objected to that, and probably didn’t think it was important in terms of what he wanted from me. In any case, he know upfront that I was just an upper-midwestern American who happened to be Jewish, and he never treated me as he treated people who acted as if their lives would fall apart without him.
You are correct in your statement that Kach was strictly a one-man show. The moment he was shot dead in that New York hotel room, his show rapidly began unraveling.
Despite all that I have written above, there have been only a couple of Jewish leaders I took the time to personally interact with. Rav Kahane was one. Dr Israel Eldad of the old-time Lehi days was the other.
2) I suppose you are correct about fisking peoples posts and comments. That seems to be the way the world operates. And I’m too busy to try reforming the world over the minutiae of online decorum. In any case, this place is Ted Belman’s world. And if fisking passes muster with him, then I will accept that.
3) I too have had comments blocked from time to time. What I have been doing since then has been to copy a completed comment into an MS Word file before posting it to Israpundit, which puts it beyond copying when it disappears. Not exactly being a conspiracy theorist, I have to assume its Ted’s software and not Ted himself goofing on these comments.
4) All things considered, try to be a little more polite. Without serious reflection on some topic, you never know for certain when you are dead wrong and the other guy dead right, and not vice-versa.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Ted,
I see that you’ve allowed Yamit to viciously slander me, but you pulled my rebuttal. I saw my post got up after I posted it, and then it was taken off. Are you in league with Yamit? Do you believe it’s right to call someone every evil thing under the sun, just because he isn’t Jewish? Before Yam started in with his ad hominem attacks (his usual attack, when he’s boxed into a corner), the discussion was going rather smoothly. I hope you pulled my defense by “accident”, and will restore it. Yamit’s accusations are nearly all lies; any it would be disgusting for you to uphold them.
Arnold this is yamit. Ted’s spammer has all of my comments blocked so I am using alternative screen name till he fixes the problem.
One of my main criticisms of Kahane was his use of other people especially youngsters that he used and as often as not threw under the bus once they served his purpose. I worked for the Jewish Agency that convinced kahane to make a speaking tour of university campuses speaking to Jewish students on Aliyah. I arranged several of his venues and on occasion picked him up at the airports and drove him to the venues.
About a year after we moved into Yamit he came on aliyah and came to Yamit with his group to see it our ton was suitable for him and his followers. I was against his living in Yamit and in the end they chose Kiryat Arba. When he decided to run for the Knesset he convinced our Rabbi to be #2 on his list. I was privy to their correspondence because I had the local post office and read their telegram correspondence with each other. Very interesting from a historical POV.
I would venture a speculation that JDL fell apart because it was always personality centered around Kahane and once he left based on the types who followed him, there could not have been any serious continuance because he had built a personality cult around himself.
The only reason I posted his essay on Isolation was that was a core precept of his his political and religious belief. I posted it to contrast what he believed as opposed to your stated beliefs and because you have used your connection to Kahane to support your nationalist opinions. As you can see they don’t come close. When I said that you learned nothing from your time with Kahane, that’s what I meant.
Kahane used a bunch of kids to bunker themselves in an underground shelter and the one they took was mine ,the one I used for storage of personal items. he didn’t ask permission but moved a bunch of mostly under age kids inside and announced they would commit mass suicide. The Army had to remove them and some might have been seriously harmed or killed for a stunt that could have gone very bad. In all of the 3 years we waited for the Army to remove us from Yamit Kahane did Zip to support us in our efforts to get the GOI, to rescind their decision to remove Yamit the town and the settlers. He came down 2 months before the final evacuation and destruction of the town to make noise and perform stupid stunts to get his name in the papers and radio and TV. I saw that he was using our dead cadavers (metaphorically) for his own political ends.
Never liked being used especially when he did nothing directly to help. That opened my eyes to who Kahane really was. That said I agreed with most of his political and religious ideas and philosophy. I supported the Kahane Jewish idea but never Kahane the man. That said he should have
been elected to the Knesset and never have been barred.
Viite wrote:
Yamit,
1) You really don’t have to quote me segments of “Kahane” Magazine from 21 years ago. I edited most of Rav Kahane’s publications from 1987, when he came to Chicago for among other purposes, to recruit me to serve as his editor/publisher of a Kach newsletter and to help him publish his magazine of the Authentic Jewish Idea, which he entitled with his own name. I served him in that capacity with the magazine until his assassination in autumn 1990 and with his newsletter until the following summer, when the project was cancelled because his successors who began fighting with one another and split into separate groups. I had total responsibility for Kach Newsletter, including writing, editing, publishing and mailing from Madison WI. I helped Rav Kahane with putting together his magazine, but most of the content were from his own published works, including his long-running columns in the Jewish Press, which was published in Brooklyn NY. In any case, many of the Kach insiders who actually got his work done in this country were motivated strictly by Jewish nationalism, whose religion ranged from secondary down to non-existant. I know that not a few of the people he attracted were not even Jews. One of his most effective helpers was an efficient and beautiful young Native American woman who lived in Long Beach, California, and who helped Dave and Ira Braverman, who led the California chapter of Kach. Rav Kahane was intelligent enough to accept whatever help he could find, wherever he could find it. His appeal to such people was that he plainly was different from all or most of the other American Jews they ever previously had dealt with, many of whom exhibited characteristics of the mama-spoiled and petulant Portnoys brought to life by a novel of that name.
2) It has become apparent to me that you spend much if not most of your effort on Israpundit writing comments that are vociferous personal attacks against most of the Americans and possibly other foreigners who comment here; most of whom are people friendly to Israel, the Jewish nation and the Jewish religion. Moreover, you use “fisking” tactics to pick out individual statements with which to argue to death; such is a well-known tactic of taking other person’s comments out of context, and turning discussions with you into the Internet equivalent of wrestling with an octopus. You really out to reconsider the way you deal with other people in these discussions. Otherwise, you run risk of being ignored by those whom you purposely insult.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The state Dept, the foreign office (GB) the French foreign office are all oil dependent. They all belong to the click of orientalists. It is all about oil and later about gas. They fear the Muslims because of the oil and the gas and try to force Israel to swallow a pill of cyanide. Many American Jews do not get it.
I love fair play as well you sanctimonious schmuck. It’s you who suck!
3. Ronald Reagan denies the Holocaust
__________________________________
Ronald Reagan was famous for delegating authority. But the task of offending Jews he took firmly into his own hands, launching yet a third simultaneous attack on Israel in this busy year of 1985.
“President Reagan, who earlier declined to visit the site of a Nazi concentration camp during his visit to Germany next month because he said it would be ‘out of line,’ has decided to lay a wreath at a German war cemetery where many Nazi soldiers were buried after the Battle of the Bulge, the White House announced today.”[120]
This naturally created an uproar. You may wonder, how is it possible for the president of a country that fought the German Nazis to do something like this?
Well, but did the US fight the German Nazis? The US Establishment, remember, helped fund the rise of the Nazi party, and the government under Roosevelt energetically cooperated with Hitler’s Final Solution (see sections on 1930s and 1939-45). After the war, the US illegally and in secret absorbed the entire Nazi war criminal organization in order to create the CIA (see 1945 section). It is hard to argue, therefore, that America’s belated entry into the World War stems from the US Establishment’s in-principle objection to Nazi ideology. Isn’t it more reasonable to suppose that the US invaded Europe because the Soviets were on their way to the Atlantic? That the US had no objection to Nazis can be seen from the fact that, as soon as the Nazis were whipped into obedience again in 1945, the US immediately redeployed them. From this perspective it is hardly surprising that Reagan should have sought a) to re-normalize German Nazism, and b) to re-normalize antisemitism with a high-profile spitting session on the Jews.
And that’s what this was.
The US president was very careful to insult the Jews. In the uproar that followed the proposed itinerary of his visit to Germany (made public well in advance, so as to guarantee the uproar), prominent Jewish leaders such as Elie Wiesel explained publicly to the American president that
“there could be no trade-off by combining visits to a camp and to the cemetery. ‘A visit to this particular cemetery is to us unacceptable,’ he said.”[121]
The way a master dismisses a nagging slave, Ronald Reagan replied that maybe he would add a visit to a Nazi concentration camp site, but that in any case “no thought was being given to eliminating a visit to the Bitburg [Nazi] cemetery.”[122]
I emphasize: this was all carefully premeditated and deliberate. German chancellor Helmut Kohl had actually
“proposed that Reagan join him…in visiting both a World War II cemetery and a concentration camp site, [and yet] Reagan’s advance men accepted the first, but declined the second.”[123]
I am not trying to make Helmut Kohl look good – to include the Nazi cemetery was an outrage anyway, and in fact Kohl was apologizing for the Nazis in public.[124] My point is that the American president went out of his way to out-Nazi the German chancellor and make known his intentions to lay a wreath to honor the Nazis and to simultaneously disrespect the victims of the Shoah.
In fact, Reagan announced this a whole month in advance of his trip, guaranteeing an extended pandemonium that carried the news all around the world. And to make sure nobody thought there had been a mistake, when the protests began he did not give an inch. Then he
“unleashed a new wave of Jewish fury… by claiming that German soldiers buried [in that cemetery] were ‘victims’ of the Nazis ‘just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.'”[125]
But some might think this was Reagan’s idiosyncrasy, or his administration’s. To dispel any such notion, powerful members of the American Establishment, such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger , added their voices, calling on president Reagan not to cancel his visit to the Nazi cemetery.[126] Amazing, because even in Germany many were confused and disturbed by this, so Reagan could have taken the easy way out by calling it all a ‘mistake.’
No. In the end he laid his wreath. On the graves of Nazis.
If worldwide Jewish pressure could not get Reagan to do the slightest of symbolic retreats on such an obvious moral issue, with the whole world watching in amazement, what was the ulterior meaning?
Simple: this was ‘the leader of the free world’ doing Holocaust denial via diplomacy-speech. That’s what this was.
To begin with, there’s no proving a negative.
Not that any such attempt would satisfy a preexisting pathology like yours, Yamit.
You believe what you need to believe; reality be damned.
As to Gil-White’s remarks, there’s no need to ‘refute’ anything IN them.
He doesn’t characterize Reagan as ‘Jew-hating’ or anything of the sort.
That’s strictly YOUR baby.
Of course I did.
There’s nothing in them to confirm your vile assertions about the man.
Certainly.
And I was already amply acquainted with most of them.
There is nothing in those references or in his contentions to corroborate your slander on a decent man’s good name.
How would you know objectivity, boychik?
You’re WAY too emotional for objectivity to be found in your bag-of-possibles.
I love fair play.
Your problem is that you see NO problem in bearing false witness against your neighbor, if it will suit your purposes.
I think that sucks duck eggs.
If you were familiar you would agree or refute with your own facts and evidence. You don’t because you can’t. If you were familiar yu certainly didn’t re-read what I provided you in the Hyperlink. All of whites contentions are all footnoted for your reference.
There is no other conclusion an objective reader can come to other than Reagan was a stupid Jew hating bastard. You love him? That’s you problem isn’t it? Then you seem to follow lots of Jew hating Bastards.
In the context I was using your point is irrelevant as only the executive in the USA determines foreign policy. The Senate only has to power to advise and consent and ratify treaties and I have never seen Congress withhold financing to force the executive to conform or change any foreign policy especially with regards to Israel. Pro Israel resolutions cost the legislators nothing and and are non binding. Even when pro Israel laws are passed such as moving the embassy from T/A to Jerusalem Congress gave the executive a waiver and an out. So pls no pedantic bullshit. The so called checks and balances has shifted long ago to give the executive and the courts more power than the legislatures. Congress has long ago abrogated it’s power to narrow partisan party lines. Almost always the party in power gets almost all of their congressional members to walk lockstep with the executive, even as we have seen in the last election that by doing so many members committed political suicide for their president.
So are mine. I was already familiar with Gil-White’s stuff.
And you should read what you quote from:
“[The complaint was that antisemitism had surfaced in the office of the president!”
That doesn’t make HIM a ‘Jew-hating bastard.’
As usual you state your opinion without factual backup.
These are researched and documented facts. prove them false or go drink the water in Gaza… in the vernacular UP YOURS!!!
Reagan was a Jew hating bastard.
Jewish lefties would seize upon anything — and I do mean ANYTHING — to weaken & even destroy Reagan’s presidency
— and hardly for the sake of ahavat yisrael.
To them this was just another instrument in an organizer’s toolbelt.
No President was ever hated anywhere near so passionately by the Left
especially the ‘Jewish’ left
as that former
Roosevelt liberal,
Ronald Wilson Reagan.
The fact that those “prominent members of the American Jewish community”
would resort to using the ‘Jew-hatred’ canard
against Reagan
reflects infinitely more on THEM
than on him.
Come off it, Yahnkel. The mere fact that, as a Carthaginian, Hannibal spoke a Semitic language (Ancient Phoenician), doesn’t make him a ‘Jew.’
You are confusing (or conflating) the two, distinctly different, structures of governance — and implicitly using the term “Government” in two different ways.
Unlike Israel, an inheritor of the parliamentary system,
USA does not have “governments”
which incorporate both legislative AND executive leadership of the country
— and thus rise and fall as a unit,
and sometimes from one day to the next.
USA instead is said to have ADMINISTRATIONS,
which represent strictly the country’s executive leadership,
and which are elected for set terms of office,
irrespective of day-to-day confidence vested in them by the legislative leadership
or even by the populace at large.
The point I’m getting to,Yamit, in this little drosh on comparative civics, is that it is never correct to allude — as you do in the above-cited blockquote — to “the Policy of every Government of the USA,”
when presumably you MEAN the ‘policy of every US Administration.’
This is hardly just an academic bit of trivia, because it often happens that the actions taken by the Executive Branch of US govt may diverge greatly from the positions taken by Congress,
including not only as to legislative acts which originate in the House of Representatives
and depend on that body for their financing
but also international treaties, which in turn become binding US domestic law
only upon ratification by the US Senate.
As I said Arnold you learned nothing from Kahane!
Isolation
By Rabbi Meir Kahane H’yd
June, 1990
Kahane Magazine
Isolation. The Jew does not wish to be isolated. He fears being alone, without allies. He fears man, he trusts only in man and so – in the exquisitely Divine way of the Almighty – precisely that which he fears will be sent upon him. He fears to do that which the Almighty demands – to annex the territories and establish Jewish sovereignty over them, as part of the Holy Land of Israel. The Almighty repays him by turning them into burning caldrons of an intifada, with confused Israeli youth not knowing whether these Holy lands are indeed Jewish or “occupied.” While a world that is normal and knows that if land belongs to you then you annex it, feels free to condemn a country that does not do so as an “occupier.”
He fears to throw out the cancer raging in his midst – the Arab enemy – lest the world turn on him. He is repaid measure for measure by a grim Almighty as the world, daily, condemns him for “oppression” of people that would not have been there had he had faith in G-d rather than fear of the Gentile.
In any event, the Jew will be isolated, and that is the greatest blessing imaginable. For so long as the Jew has even one ally, he will be convinced – in his smallness of mind – that his salvation came from that ally. It is only when he is alone – against all of his own efforts and frantic attempts – that he will, through no choice, be compelled to turn to G-d. And it is only when the Jew stands alone against a world unified in hatred against him, that the Almighty will turn, in His anger and wrath, against the nations that knew Him not, and His powerful arm that will bring salvation to the Jew will be the awesome proof to the nations that the Lord, G-d of Israel, is indeed One – the only One.
That is why isolation will be. That it is why it must be. It is the greatest of blessings, and the foolish Jew of little faith sees it only as a curse. Foolish Jew, Jew of Exile, whose soul and mind has been destroyed by that Exile, who has turned from a Jew of faith into one of trembling before the man of dust
Unless. Unless we become the Jews we were meant to be. The Jews of chosenness. Of might and faith. Unless we ignore both the money and the honey of the United States and their empty threats and condemnation. Condemnation? It is dandruff to be brushed away before moving on to do the will of G-d. In any event, there is no choice. The United States will turn on Israel, slowly and subtly. The difference is that if we turn from the Gentile first, we will have the Almighty as the immediate staff and our comfort. If not, we will have neither the Gentile nor, for a terrible stage, the Almighty.
Patton was an antisemite. He believed he was the reincarnation of Hannibal and the joke was on him, as Hannibal was a Jew.
Patton like Sharon were of a similar cast. Both were glory hounds who were willing to waste the lives of their men for their own personal glory. They loved WAR! There is a debate that will never be resolved whether different tactics would have or could have ended with the same results but with far fewer losses of the men under them. I can’t ay but my father served under Patton and was in the first American recon platoon to cross the Rhine into Germany. Never thought to ask dad what he thought of Patton. He never talked of the war.
My personal opinion is that Military men like Sharon and Patton that should be locked up during peace time and only allowed out during war.
Oat our resident Goy Jew hater makes up stories about ancestors. He has more ancestors that he constantly relates to us than there are mongrel dogs. If you want proof of what I say just check Israpundit archives. He is a hopeful “end of the world messianic” and can’t wait for the Jews to start his final war of Gog and Magog so that his messiah will come Wisc him off to his Jesus paradise and we Jews get to swim in his mythological great Lake of Fire. He claims to have a Jewish ancestor and wanted in to my tribe but was rejected and booted out. He couldn’t reject his Jesus guy. His bitterness towards the Jews may be seen in many if not most of his comments. He may love Israel for his own theological reasons but he hates religious Jews, liberal Jews and only can tolerate Jews like yourself because in a certain way you mirror each other.
ArnoldHarris says:
June 9, 2011 at 11:24 pm
Yamit,
Duh! “And you, I will scatter among the nations, at the point of My drawn sword, leaving your country desolate and your cities in ruins” (Leviticus 26:33).
It has been prophesied in the Torah that Jews will survive as an eternal nation despite dispersion and being few in number:
“God will then scatter you among the nations, and only a small number will remain among the nations where God shall lead you” (Deuteronomy 4:27).
To every other people, a small population spells extinction. We know from the records that the Romans kept about 2,000 years ago, there were between 8-10 million Jews living in the world.
In most cases Jews chose to be separated from the gentile. The rabbis viewed the enlightenment as he death knell of Judaism, and rejected the offered freedoms quite correctly as you and most Jews in the West and in Israel have succumbed to neo-hellenism and are living proof the rabbis then were correct.
I predict that when the next survey is published for 2000-2010 the data will be much worse.
And, if you, as American Jew, want to understand why our numbers are dwindling and our influence waning, you should realize that America, as a nation, addresses your needs as Americans, but is indifferent to your fate as a Jew.
A distinction without a difference! The nation of Israel is defined by the religion. Without the religion there is no Jewish nation and no need for the Land of Israel. The land is not an end to itself. Jewish nationalism is also defined by the religion.
I personally am critical of your black hats for some of the some reasons and some you don’t mention but I will say again ONE of those Black Hats living in the Land of Israel is worth a million of those like you. Their Children and grandchildren and great grandchildren will be Jewish. Secular Israel is becoming more religious and those black hats are slowly assimilating into the general religious culture. In another generation or so there will be a meeting near the middle and they will also, due to birthrates be the majority.
meaningless term and no secular nationalism is sustainable over time. It it most cases can’t be transmitted to the next generation as per the children of most of the founders of Israel both right and left. Judaism and antisemitism has always been the glue sustaining the Jewish people since Abraaham.
Debatable!! Your claimed rights are only derived from the religion of Judaism not nationalism.
I pointed out to you above :To every other people, a small population spells extinction. We know from the records that the Romans kept about 2,000 years ago, there were between 8-10 million Jews living in the world. There are virtually no more Jews in the world today than there were 2,000 years ago and yet throughout all this time, the Jews remained a distinct people. This proves your postulate as FALSE!!!
Re: Your views on conversions all I can say is that you are really an idiot or just an old ignoramus. It’s good that you reside in Mt Horeb WI.
Arnold Harris,
Today is the first time I read your comments and I like the clarity.
I share your nationalist v. the religionist angle.
How can I get in touch with you?
email?
Skype?
BO,
That was quite a story about the Paxton boys in the American revolutionary era. Of course you and I are fellow Americans. And as such, we both relate to American issues as Americans. But I relate to Yamit in a unique way that you cannot. Because we both are members of the same 4000 year old Jewish nation.
In any case, you have read enough of my online stuff to understand that I say what I mean, I mean what I say, and that I at least think I understand the issues upon which I hold opinions.
On reflection of my own temperament, I have to admit I might have picked up a musket, battle-axe and saber, joined up with the Paxton boys, and probably would have gotten beaten with them. George Patton was reputed to have believed in reincarnation, and if so, that he fought in many a battle over the centuries. I believe in no such thing, but I admire spunk when I read about it.
Work hard to help retire President Blacksnake.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold Harris,
I’m glad to have you as a fellow American. I can appreciate the relationship you had with Rabbi Kahane; and I fully endorse your views on all matters as stated in Post #3.
You really put Yamit in his place; and I would, like you, like to hear a reasonable response from him to what you said. Unfortunately, after years of trying to relate to the young man (who must be in his 50s by now), I see him moved much more by the brain between his legs than the one in his head. He makes me think of the Paxton Boys, who lived in Pennsylvania along with my ancestors during the American Revolution. Some of them were at Forty Fort, when Chief Brandt and his men were advancing and setting a trap for the occupants of the fort. Some of the older, saner defenders wanted to wait for reinforcements, which would have arrived in a few days; but some Paxton boys, I seem to remember, stirred up the younger men to go out to attack the Tories and Indians. The patriots were massacred, including members of my family.
A little background on the Paxton Boys can be found in “Peaceable kingdom lost: the Paxton Boys and the destruction of William Penn…” by Kevin Kenny:
I don’t know what opportunity Hashem will afford His people, to rebuild the Jewish homeland before Messiah’s coming (return, from the Christian viewpoint). Certainly, if Messiah tarries, the Jews will have to make an about-face from their 18th-century-Polish Galut mentality and begin proselytizing. They will also have to come up with some sort of accommodation with their neighbors and present enemies in Israel (whether they live in the Galil, in Golan, in YeSh or in Jordan and Syria). The black-hat outlook has to change, as well as the
attitude of “Paxton Boy” Jews like Yamit, if the Jews are ever to live in something resembling a “Messianic Age” in Israel. Messiah will not simply come and give the Yamits of Israel lobotomies to correct their thinking; He is not Big Nurse of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”; He is God’s anointed; and I guarantee that the one who will lead the world to beat their swords into plowshares does not think like a Paxton Boy.
That said, I don’t know that God wants to wait for the Jews of Israel to get their spiritual crap together: They’re all losers, each in his or her own way; and God wants them to know that He accepts them because He LOVES them, not because He thinks they’re “winners”.
Meanwhile, I’m not Jewish; and I haven’t gotten any word from God that He wants me in Israel when the sh_t hits the fan. China? Maybe… and maybe the Hew Hess Hay, to catch the devil’s SCUDs. The real battle will be within, no matter where we are.
Kol haKavod
Yamit,
The citizens of the United States, including those who didn’t vote in the presidential elections you mentioned and no small number who never have voted at all, are totally responsible for the bad governments that have run this place at least part way into the ground. You are correct; the responsibility rests on my shoulders as well as the rest, because I have voted in every US presidential election since 1956, when I was 22 years of age, and I worked for the Republicans as an 18-year-old student activist in 1952.
But that same principle is universal. The Germans of the 1930s and 1940s were totally responsible for the crimes of Hitler and his Nazi gang, and they surely paid the price for having put them in power in 1933.
The same iron rule applies to you and the country in which you reside. Just never forget that you and everyone else entitled to vote in Israeli elections are equally totally responsible for the now endless string of Judenraten you have put into office to manage the present and future of the Jewish state.
As you have so well pointed out, the US government is not Israel’s ally or even its friend. Those of you who imagine you can count on American support when it is needed truly are acting in piteous self-deception.
But opinions are beginning to shift around the USA. Whereas the liberals and Democrats were the ones who gave lip service to Israel and perhaps some ever to Zionism, that support base for some time has been shifting to the conservative and Republican side. Portents are starting to appear that Obama will not be able to win next year’s presidential election. If so, his successor likely will be Mitt Romney, and even if he does not win, there almost certainly will be a right-wing Tea Party-controlled US House of Representatives and also a Republican-controlled US Senate. They are making major threats to cut off US funding of the UNO.
At the same time, pro-Israel organizations are springing up among the Evangelical Christian churches all across this land. You and a lot of other Christian-haters may think that hopes of proselytizing among Jews is what underlies their support of Israel. I think otherwise. Christian Zionism has been a continuous and growing force for a long time now, and these groups have renounced the so-called “replacement” theology that characterized much of Christianity’s views of the Jewish nation. In any case, they now preach love of Israel and the authentic Jewish nation in churches all across the face of America in their Sunday sermons. Which is a lot more useful than whatever Israel and the Jewish nation ever gets from the liberal Jews of America in current and recent times.
But you are free to disagree with me on this or any other issue, and I am free to treat you the same way and to the same extent.
And irrespective of all the above, you and your fellow Israeli citizens must replace the Judenraten with real Jewish nationalist governments who will provide rock-hard support to the settlement movement in Yehuda, Shomron, the lower Jordan valley, and Golan, and who can be counted upon to re-conquer, annex and settle the Sinai the next time the Egyptions try going for Israel’s jugular veins. Do that, and your country will survive. Fail to do so, and your long-term future is questionable.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
continue from page 3
1982-1983
The US rushed to protect the PLO in southern Lebanon from the Israelis.
1987-1988
The ‘First Intifada’ was a US-PLO strategy used to represent the Arabs in West Bank and Gaza as supposedly oppressed ‘underdogs’
1989
With Dick Cheney, the US began supporting a PLO state in the open as the ‘only solution’ to the Arab-Israeli conflict
1991
Bush Sr.’s administration forced Israel to participate in the Oslo process, which brought the PLO into the West Bank and Gaza.
1994
Yasser Arafat was given a Nobel Peace Prize, and the CIA trained the PLO, even though Arafat’s henchmen were saying in public, this very year, that they would use their training to oppress Arabs and kill Jews.
1996-1997
The United States exerted such strong pressure on the Netanyahu government (including threats) that, even though Netanyahu had been elected on an anti-Oslo platform, he had the necessary cover to betray the Israeli public that had elected him.
2005
Mahmoud Abbas, is the one who invented the strategy of talking ‘peace’ the better to slaughter Israelis. The US ruling elite loves Mahmoud Abbas.
GWB….Extended anti Israel policies ” Road Map” “Recognized the PLO and Declaring for the 1st time that America favors a Pali State. Pressured Israel to move out of the Territories, Building freeze….Mega military sales toSaudis, Egypt, the PLO, anf Gulf states. Supported by inaction Iranian nuclear weapons development.
You are responsible for all these leaders and their policies whether you personally voted for them or not.
continued from page 2
1973
The US assisted Israel in the Yom Kippur War
one should not consider US help in 1973 as a sign of ‘friendship’ or alliance. The US was just making Cold War moves, and this one turned out to be convenient. When such moves are not convenient, the US goes right back to attacking Israel.
1973-1975
The US supported the election of a pro-PLO Nazi war criminal to the post of UN Secretary General. US ruling elite had to know what it was doing when, on the eve of Waldheim’s becoming UN Secretary General,
“George Bush, the American [UN] delegate, issued a statement saying that Mr. Waldheim was ‘ideally equipped’ for the job.”[
That was George Bush Sr., and he likely knew precisely who Waldheim was when he said that because he was already connected with the CIA. Shortly thereafter, Bush would become Director of the CIA, and later president of the United States.
In fact the US ruling elite liked Waldheim so much that they later lobbied passionately to get him a third term at the UN (blocked by China).
1975
The US reached an agreement with Israel not to have contacts with the PLO. The US immediately violated the agreement.
1979
Jimmy Carter began large-scale US sponsorship of antisemitic Islamist terrorists, especially in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
1981
The US pushed for a PLO state in the West Bank against Israeli objections
____________________________________________________________
On November 14, 1981, the UN adopted a resolution condemning Israel for destroying a nuclear installation in Iraq.[63] Israel and the US were the only two countries to vote against.
That may look like US support for Israel. However, just a few days later the US voted for a resolution condemning Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights. The US then also reversed itself on the prior resolution concerning the attack on Iraq, launching a frontal diplomatic attack on Israel. The outgoing Secretary General of the UN, the Nazi Kurt Waldheim, exulted publicly over this turn of events, and added that, by the way, the West Bank and Gaza Arabs should be given their own state.
US president Ronald Reagan’s attacks on Israel were so sharp that many prominent members of the American Jewish community interpreted this as antisemitism.
continue to page 4
Page 2
1964-1967
Although Israel suffered terrorist attacks from its Arab neighbors during these years, when they staged a full-scale military provocation, the US refused to help. In 1967, the Arab countries surrounding Israel mobilized, staging a provocation. Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban went on an emergency trip seeking French, British, and American aid. He got nothing.
1967
After the Six-Day War, the US put pressure on Israel to relinquish the territory gained, even though it knew it was indispensable to Israeli defense.
1967-70
The Arabs attack the Israelis. The US response is to try and remove the Israelis from territory they need for their defense.
1970
Washington temporarily abandons the diplomatic effort to make Israel withdraw from the territories.(this had nothing to do with the US caring about Israel. The deeply anti-Israel Rogers Plan was abandoned only when the US discovered strategic reasons to support Israel against Soviet client states such as Syria, and to protect its own client state, Jordan. And, as we’ve seen above [see 1967 section], the Rogers plan was not, in fact, really allowed to die. US official policy has always been the implementation of UN Resolution 242, which was the core of the Rogers Plan.)
continued page 3
I agree: Then so are you responsible for: Obama, Bush,Clinton, Bush, Reagan,Carter,Ford,Nixon,Kennedy,Johnson,Ike, Truman and FDR.
Is the US an ally of Israel?
A chronological look at the evidence
The Policy of every Government of the USA till 1964 was to pressure Israel to relinquish territorial gains from out independence war.American policy of Johnson changed but would not recognize or guarantee Israels 1949 borders which were the armistice lines.(Green Line)
continued page 2
The only problem is that you’ve built it on somebody else’s land, Twinkie.
…by a gaggle of geese who have no problem playing Santa Claus with somebody else’s patrimony.
Of course, were it their own patrimony, I daresay the tune would have a distinctly different melody line.
Mazal tov.
We’ll give you a state, bli ayn hara, in
Catalunya
Kurdistan
Tibet
Biafra
— or maybe the Sudetenland.
Yeah, the Sudetenland would be good.
Well, the Czechs might have a problem with it — and the Limeys & the Frogs might feel a trifle squishy (to say nothing of the Krauts) — but who cares what they all think?
And you could always give your Palestinian state a new handle afterward;
call it something catchy & trendy, like, uh,
“Poetic Justice.”
(You are into justice — right, Twinkie?)
The sole obstacle remaining is that one cannot end an ‘occupation’ which never began.
And one cannot occupy what is legally his own.
Nathan,
There is no doubt whatsoever that Israel has been ruled for some time now by one pathetic Judenrat after another. Those of you who live there and vote there are fully responsible for this lamentable state of affairs. If not you people, then whose responsibility is it to elect a government of the Jewish nation, for the Jewish nation, by the Jewish nation? Any excuses for Netanyahu’s government are just bullshit, and I never listen to that. Every society gets exactly the kind of government they deserve, and especially so any country with open and free elections such as Israel.
For my part, I would rather live in Hell than to reside in any place where Jews could be told where they can or cannot live. That’s part of the freedom that is my birthright here in the countryside of south central Wisconsin, and that’s exactly what I would demand anywhere else.
Yamit, I don’t know who you really are or where you came from in the USA, or what connection you ever had with Rav Meir Kahane. But I was the man who helped his secretary in Brooklyn, Adele Levy, to properly organize her computer files of all his contributors and Kach activists. I was also the man who edited, published and had mass-mailed the Kach Newsletter. I was also the man who had the honor of helping Rav Kahane edit his “Authentic Jewish Idea”, which was a double-page statement that contained the essence of his ideas on Jewish nationalism. I was also the man for whom he scheduled a trip to Chicago and took the time to act as Sandek for the brit ha-mila of my youngest son, Ze’ev Stjepan Harris. And finally, two weeks before he was assassinated in a New York hotel, I was the man who hosted him for a trip to the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he faced down a howling audience of leftists, their self-hating Jewish allies, and a pack of raghead who ended up throwing their shoes at us on the stage. And that night, I also had the honor of having him as an overnight guest in our house, where I witnessed an after-midnight siyum of students from the campus who wanted to meet him personally and talk to him about the Jewish nation.
The Jewish nation, Yamit. Not the Jewish religion. The Jewish religion, to him, was the union card of the Jewish nation. I never tried to hide from him the fact that my use for religion in general counted for little in my life. He accepted me all the same. Because I always did good work for him, and he trusted my Jewish nationalist ideology.
So maybe, just maybe, I learned more from Rav Meir Kahane than you ever could have. But I suppose you have any old army story to tell of what exactly you did for him, related to him, learned from him, and all the rest. If so, I’m all ears and eyes.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold all I can say is that in all the time you claim to have spent with Kahane H”yd, you seem to have learned nothing.
Yamit,
In the ancient days following the fatal split of the kingdom of David and Solomon, it was only a matter of time before each of the surviving parts were destroyed by neighboring foreign powers. And after the leading generals of the late Roman republic occupied Judea, it was again only a matter of time before their imperial successors in a fit of anger destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem and expelled most of the remaining Jews.
If modern Israel does not expand its land area at the expense of its neighbors, once again it would be only a matter of time before some enemy state would destroy the relatively tiny commonwealth of the modern Jewish nation.
Now that the Jewish nation has recovered most of its ancient homeland, we and you can no longer be driven by the rules set up exclusively by the religious leaders. Those rules were decided upon to keep the Jews separated and unspoiled by cultural, social or familial commerce with the goyim. That system largely worked until the Age of Reason in Europe and the western hemisphere began freeing the Jews of their 17 centuries of human bondage. None of us should have any reason ever to wish to return to the degradations of that era.
And I would argue that if the nation must serve the religion, then so too must the religion serve the nation. Because the Jewish nation of the future is not one that will be ruled by a pack of black hats accoutered as if they were still living in 17th century Polish shtetls, raising crops of inbred and frequently diseased and stunted children trained in little else other than endless prayer and disputations about prayer.
We each make our own choices. My interest is squarely on the side of Jewish nationalism, and not on Jewish religiosity. I want that nation — my nation as well as yours — to grow in power and size. And yes, I want Judaism to become an expanding religion, because that is the only certain road to permanency. A fundamental rule that guides all organic matter, people, institutions and even civilizations is: That which ceases to grow, dies. Therefore, like Ted Belman, I shall welcome sincere converts to Judaism. And the more so, the better for our Jewish nation. So: Jewish proselytization is precisely what I want.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
NEITHER ARE LOYAL TO ISRAEL, Almost none of the thieving stinking Bedouin, and most of the Druze under 25. A Stinking Rotten Arab is still a stinking piece of dirt what ever name he goes by.
How about having them covert to Your religion and move to Mt Horeb WI. If it works out for you there, maybe we might consider your brilliant idea.
I hope Obama wins the next election and decides to convert to Judaism, he will then influence millions of his faithful to convert to Judaism as well and they all en mass move to Mt. Horeb WI. where their Jewish Guru will sit and instruct them all about being Jewish. Halleluiah brother.
Everyone on Israel’s side of this permanent struggle should be firmly opposed to any more freezes in construction of Jewish villages and cities anywhere in Aretz-Yisrael, and especially any place west of the lower Jordan River. Israel needs that river line as the country’s minimum defensible eastern border. But the land for which this defense is to be maintained must be Jewish populated. Otherwise, not even long-term de facto control over that land is fully tenable.
Forget about “peace”. No Moslem state, and especially no Arab Moslem state, ever makes permanent peace with any non-Moslem state, and they especially will never make peace with any Jewish state. The only realistic tactic that can be derived from such a situation, once its general permanency is clearly understood by Israel and its friends in the Christian West, is to use such permanent hostility to utilize the resultant wars as mechanisms to expand the State of Israel at the expense of her enemies.
I never shall cease preaching this doctrine because I think it is Israel’s only hope of achieving real strategic safety for the Jewish nation in some future generation. Israel must have a larger population, which in turn will build and sustain a greater and more balanced economy and bigger and stronger military forces when needed. Israel will need more land in which to sustain a larger population which can live, work and defend itself on an expanded Jewish national homeland. A larger land area means more natural resources. It means more room for defensible strategic depth. An 8,000-10,000 square mile Israel can never be anything other than a tempting target for aggressors who are religiously and culturally motivated to attack and destroy weak neighbors.
Will the Arabs in fact take the bait again after having been beaten in so many previous wars? I think they will be compelled to do so by the same cultural traits that have permanently enslaved them to their particular religious outlook. The Jewish nation must learn to use leverage and patience for strategic purposes in the same manner as the Japanese taught their great martial arts, and as the Chinese have carefully studied the inherent weaknesses of western civilization and have utilized these to begin overtaking the United States by gutting its central economy with the cooperation of the American capitalists.
The question of Arab demography interests me not at all. And not only because I have carefully studied the recent demographics of Ettinger. The Arab populations can always be bought out or forced out, expelled and dispersed elsewhere. The only ones allowed to remain would be those whose families, clans or tribes have loyally served Israel, especially the Bedawi of the Negev and the Druze of northern Israel. Others, as they perceive Israel as winning its local struggle against Islam, may be self-induced to convert to Judaism and join the Jewish nation. Perhaps not many of them, but we should not write off this possibility. And the cultural forces of Israel as a modern and free society could be put to work to undercut Arab male control over their women. In other words, using the same forces of assimilation that have beset the Jews in recent centuries in the relatively free lands of the Christian West.
It is necessary for Jews in general, and Zionists in particular, to focus on longer term societal planning with an absence of illusions.
As for the short-term outlook, the current trends in US politics is that Obama has been weakened, probably fatally, by public perceptions of what may be our permanently shrunken economy and his inability to stop the growth our now $14 trillion national debt. Mitt Romney, who almost certainly is far more friendly to the national interests of the Jewish nation than Obama ever even pretended to be, is emerging as the top runner in the Republican Party against Obama in the elections that are now only 17 months away. The Rasmussen polls, regarded in political circles here as among the most accurate, show that Romney is the only Republican candidate who could beat Obama next year. Conditions here may change, but unemployment is still growing, inflation could become rampant once more depending on whether or not the US Congress stops increasing the national debt limit — which they must do if the value of our currency is not to be destroyed. All things considered, I think there will be a fundamental change of national leadership here in early 2013. Either way, Israel must resist any Obama blandishments or paltry inducements to declare yet another anti-Jewish settlement freeze.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI