Jewish “Leaders” Statement Against Attacks on Linda Sarsour

16 Comments / 16 Comments

1. @ adamdalgliesh:

   I was sure that the College Library would have been one place you’d go to. And in 1988 she might have been an assistant there, whilst also attending College to take a degree.

   Poor, brilliant, old Swift……he had a very troubled life, not surprisingly ending in dementia. For many years I almost daily passed under the archway span of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to go down the hill to the quays… and once, toured the crypt where Swift and Stella are buried.

   Apropos of nothing…Old Archbishop Ussher whose dates of the creation of the world
   -beginning in BCE 4004- are in the LH. margin of many conservatively translated bibles, went mad and died about 10 years before Swift was born. I remember looking this up one time after reading a Science Fiction story on transference of the spirit…
   I also recall discussing this with a Darbyite….more than once…..(Plymouth Brethern). They were crazier than Ussher…..except in money matters, where those I knew were very clever, and very wealthy..

2. @ Edgar G.: Hi, Edgar. I wrote my doctoral dissertation about the Anglo-Irish writer Jonathan Swift, who was also an early Irish nationalist leader. I wrote about his “Drapier’s Letters,” in which he aroused the Irish people to resist the British government’s efforts to impose a debased currency on ton the Irish people, and to drain the country of gold and silver, transferring it all to Englishmen (in those days, gold and silver were the only legal tender). Swift organized the first Irish boycott of English goods, In fact, the first organized boycott anywhere.

   I may have met your cousin’s daughter because I did do quite a bit of research at Trinity College Library. I do remember a woman librarian who helped me to locate original manuscript sources in the library. But i can’t remember her name.

   As a result of my doctoral research I have had a long standing interest in Irish history, and the seven hundred year struggle of the Irishnpeople. Best wishes, Adam. against English-British oppression.

3. @ adamdalgliesh:

   What was your thesis about……? Interesting to hear that you did it in Dublin. At that time my first cousin’s daughter may have already been working in the Trinity College Library- much later became Head Librarian, and still later, in the Herzog Centre there…..is now the Executive Officer of something, but still there…… I haven’t been in contact for many years so am not up-to-date. but an interesting co-incidence I think..

4. Chanukkah is mentioned in the Christian gospels; but “Christmas” is never mentioned in the Bible. Go figure.

   Happy Hanukkah. Two candles 🙂

5. @ adamdalgliesh:

   Couldn’t find out much-have never looked at the NYT and don’t understand t’s format…but for YOU…..anything…..

   I see many space filler articles… I see a reference to digging a 1989 stock article from the archives and re-dating it…. .A story about the Menorah was by Florence Fabricant another about the lighting of the Menorah was by Luis-Ferre Sadurni…… (and Uncle Tom Cobley and all)……And another story by Howard Jacobson, The one that Ted re-posted was by Howard David Lukas whose name was already on the posted article I think…..the one with the 3 year old senior advisor…

   So take your pick….! I’ll expect your cheque in the mail..my standard research fee of course. 10% for payt within 10 days…standard 30 day credit, and if unpaid will be handed to the collection agency…..

6. @ Felix Quigley:

   We know you fight for the Jewish people and are very thankful for it…. I am- and I’m sure the others too. But I AM surprised, that you would expect Ted to reveal to a public forum, the details of what HAS TO BE a secret, regarding the overthrow and replacement of an Internationally recognised Sovereign ruler. One moreover, purportedly part of the West’s bulwark against the Islamic hordes.

   You know better, ,…..In fact, I believe he’s told us a little more than he should, as the impetus for the overthrow should openly come from the Jordanian people, showing that it’s an internal uprising…. and not from outside planning….

7. All the above are the enemies of the Jewish people and our fifth columnists. There is no way to describe these sickos.

8. Our modern-day Hellenist idolators do us the favor of identifying themselves publicly.

   This is cause for Hanukkah gratitude, not complaint.

9. Felix Quigley Said:

   Then there is Ted Belman who goes into a huff when asked to explain what he is up to on Jordan.

   I do no such thing. i merely state that i can’t or won’t substantiate anything about what is happening.

   Adam did some research looking for some corroberation and found nothing. So he immediately assumed nothing is happening. He might have and should have assumed that we are keeping a tight lid on what is happening and that’s why there is no information out there. t stands to reason. Both Netanyahu and Trump want no ownership of what will happen and they are not involved at all.. They avoid it like the plague. Yet Trump gave some hints and I picked up on them in Trump’s Deal of the Century and in The Jordan Option is the only game in town.

   Not only that but Mudar’s life is on the line and mine is to some extent. We have to tread carefully.

   Rather then be thankful that I am giving you the heads up you complain that I am not substantiating anything.

   When you disbelive my heads up you are in effect calling me a liar. You should start with the assumption that I am telling the truth even if i won’t substantiate any of it except for the two articles quoted.

   i have no interest in proving anything to you. i don’t have to convince you of anything. i am just giving you a heads up.

10. That list is basically a who’s who of those I’d like to gather in one big open space.
    Use your imagination.

11. @ Felix Quigley: Felix, I withdrew from this thread because a) I didn’t want to offend Ted any more than I already had by disagreeing with his assessment of Mudar Zahran’s prospects. b0 I didn’t want to offend you by repeating my disagreement with you about the achievements and ideas of Leon Trotsky. You know that like Edgar I don’t share your admiration for him. But I don’t enjoy upsetting you by reiterating our disagreements. Sometimes in life I have withdrawn from conversations to avoid or cool off conflicts. But it seems when I do that, I offend peope all the more! Tact has never been my forte.

    I am no great fan of capitalism, either. But the Soviet model of socialism turned out to be a lot worse–possibly as many as 25 million people murdered or worked to death as slave laborers, according to some historians. The death toll was almost as bad in China under Mao, and he also exploited slave labor. Now the Russians , the Chinese, the East Europeans, and the Vietnamamese have all given up on socialism and embraced capitalism. The social-democratic model has worked out reasonably well in Scandanavia and some European countries from an economic (not necessarily political) point of view, except in France, where it seems to be a flop like everything in France. I admit I don’t know what the solution is.

    Georg Landauer (German independent socialist, early twentieth century) proposed solving the problem by working people forming their own non-profit communes, and the communes trading with each other. This would eventually make capitalism unprofitable, Landauer admitted that this withering away of capitalism, and ultimately of authoritarian states as well, might take hundreds of years to complete, but he believed that this was the best that could be done. He predicted that attempting to hurry the development of socialism would only lead to a dictatorship, which proved to be true.

    A collection of Landauer’s thought-provoking essays was republished recently. I bet that you can borrow and/or read a copy though Ireland’s national library system. I researched my PH.D. thesis in Dublin back in 1988. and I know that the Irish library system is excellent.

12. Adam is this the way you work? You suddenly stopped in mid conversation on the Shaked thread, just at the point where I put down two ideas, one the issue of the Supreme Court, which some have started calling the “Supremes”. Bugger that for smart alecry! And secondly basically getting into the whole practicalities of Area C which you had introduced and I was developing, and then from you nada! You are off like the proverbial hare onto other things.

    Now when I look you are everywhere and that is good, very good. And yet bad.

    On this I am very much horrified by the Yamit like (her)!!! defeatism here.

    What do you people on this site actually expect to be happening with the strength of the American Imperialist Bourgeois Fascist (in he case of CNN and NYT) ideology.

    It is an ideology.

    Not the fault of American Jews at all who must number IN THEIR MILLIONS.

    Look at your own leadership on Israpundit. Look at the issue of Syria and ISIS.

    Look at the hatchet job that Sebastien Zorn did on Leon Trotsky a real Stalinist type of lying operation, a most nasty piece of work. Then there is Ted Belman who goes into a huff when asked to explain what he is up to on Jordan.

    Why would American Jews be in the slightest interested in all of that garbage.

    I speak here as a fighter for the Jewish people and their destiny or I would certainly not be here.

13. The Hypocrisy of Hanukkah
    It’s a holiday that commemorates an ancient battle against assimilation. And it’s the one holiday that most assimilated Jews celebrate.

    Dec. 1, 2018
    A menorah on Independence Mall in Philadelphia in 2017.Matt Rourke/Associated Press

    A menorah on Independence Mall in Philadelphia in 2017.Matt Rourke/Associated Press
    It’s the question that Jewish parents instinctively dread.

    A few months ago, I was sitting on the couch with my 3-year-old daughter, watching YouTube videos about animals in space, when out of nowhere she looked up at me and asked:

    “Dada, can we celebrate Christmas?”

    “We don’t celebrate Christmas,” I told her, putting on my serious voice. “We celebrate Hanukkah.”

    Like generations of Jewish parents before me, I did my best to sell her on the relative merits of Hanukkah. True, Christmas might have those sparkly trees, ornaments and fruitcake. But we have latkes, jelly doughnuts and eight nights of presents.

    “Do we have Santa?” she asked, hopefully.

    “No,” I said, and her face dropped. “They do.”

    I tried to reiterate the part about the jelly doughnuts and the eight nights of presents. But she wasn’t having any of it. I can’t say I blame her. During the rest of the year, the Jewish holidays we celebrate are like special, bonus celebrations we get to have on top of everything else going on in the calendar.

    With Hanukkah and Christmas, however, it’s a zero-sum game.

    [Discover the most compelling features, reporting and humor writing from The New York Times Opinion section, selected by our editors. Sign up for the Sunday Best newsletter.]

    Most of the year, it isn’t hard for our family to feel both American and Jewish. But in December — when there are wreaths and Peppa Pig Christmas specials and inflatable Santas everywhere you look — that dual identity becomes more of a question. Which is why Hanukkah is a big deal for mostly assimilated Jews like myself.

    The only trouble is the actual holiday. Not the latkes and the dreidels, but the story of Hanukkah, which at its heart is an eight-night-long celebration of religious fundamentalism and violence.

    For most of the past 2000 years, Hanukkah was an afterthought on the Jewish calendar, a wintertime festival of lights during which people spun tops and ate greasy food to commemorate what has to be one of God’s least impressive miracles — a small container of oil lasted for eight nights! More recently, as Jews have become assimilated into American society, the holiday has evolved into a kind of Semitic sidekick for Christmas, a minor festival pumped up into something it was never meant to be so that Jewish kids won’t feel bad about not having a tree.

    This is the version of Hanukkah that I grew up with: presents and chocolate gelt; latkes with sour cream and applesauce; a few somber, off-key songs that no one fully remembered, about Judah Maccabee. This is the version of Hanukkah I had in mind when my daughter and I walked down to our local branch of the Oakland Public Library to check out a stack of books about the holiday.

    Most of the books we found presented a familiar narrative — dreidels and menorahs and pious Maccabees doing battle against their enemies — but between the lines, there were some hints at a darker story, enough to send me to Wikipedia and the Books of Maccabees on the (definitely not Jewish but very helpful) Bible Gateway website, which led me back to the library for another stack of books, this one for myself.

    According to most modern scholars — and a few rabbis I called on to help me out — the story of Hanukkah is based on a historical conflict between the Maccabees and the Hellenized Jews, the former being religious zealots who lived in the hills of Judea and practiced an ancient form of guerrilla warfare, the latter being mostly city-dwelling assimilationists who ate pork, didn’t circumcise their male children and made the occasional sacrificial offering to pagan gods.

    Some of the details are up for debate, depending on which texts you consult. But everyone agrees that the Maccabees won out in the end and imposed their version of Judaism on the formerly Hellenized Jews. So Hanukkah, in essence, commemorates the triumph of fundamentalism over cosmopolitanism. Our assimilationist answer to Christmas is really a holiday about subjugating assimilated Jews.

    The more I thought about all this, the more it disturbed me. For what am I if not a Hellenized Jew? (O.K., an Americanized Jew, but what’s the difference, really?) I eat pork every so often. Before having children, my wife and I agonized over the question of circumcision. And while I’ve never offered burned sacrifices to Zeus, I do go to yoga occasionally. When it comes down to it, it’s pretty clear that the Maccabees would have hated me. They would have hated me because I’m assimilated and because I’m the product of intermarriage. And while I can’t say for certain what the Maccabees would have thought about my fondness for Bernie Sanders or my practice of Reconstructionist Judaism, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have liked those things either.

    Given all this, there’s a part of me that wants to skip out on Hanukkah altogether. Why should I light candles and sing songs to celebrate a group of violent fundamentalists?

    The answer, frankly, is that it’s not my choice. With my daughter ready to sign up for Team Santa, we have to celebrate something, and I’m not quite Hellenized enough to get a Christmas tree.

    So this year, for lack of a better alternative, I’m going to try to embrace Hanukkah in all its contradictions. When I light the candles, I’m going to celebrate the possibility of light in dark times, the importance of even the smallest miracles. And when everyone else is singing about the Maccabees, I’ll be saying a prayer for the Hellenized Jews and for the “renegade Jews” of our day.

    Then I’m going to sneak my daughter an extra piece of chocolate gelt and break out the presents. Because at the end of the day, it’s all about beating Santa.

    Michael David Lukas is the author of the novel “The Last Watchman of Old Cairo.”

    Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

    Correction: December 2, 2018
    An earlier version of this article misstated the historic enemy of the Maccabees, as commemorated in the Hanukkah story. The Maccabees fought the Seleucid Empire, not the Romans.

14. I hope that the Canary Project has placed every one of these people on their list, if they are not there already.

    This week’s,antisemitic, anti-Hannukah article in the New York Times shows what these Jews really think about “their” religion. I didn’t check to see if the author, described as an American Jewish novelist, is one of the signatories here. Could you check on this for me, Edgar?

15. Some people seem to believe that without antisemitism, the Jewish People may disintegrate and disappear.

16. These half-wits might have come from diverse backgrounds and have diverse experiences but certainly definitely NOT diverse political perspectives as these mamzerim say….They are all crazy …not like foxes as the saying is but crazy as suicidal lunatics…….

    The spongy, glutinous way they prate about “core Jewish values of compassion, humility and human dignity is enough to make a steel boiler vomit up it’s contents… ..So Ted I know exactly how you feel.. although I have a deep sea sailor’s stomach…

    A sure giveaway…of the long list of nudniks there are 41..FORTY ONE women so-called “Rabbis” and about half that amount of men also masquerading as Rabbis.
    Pretending to be “Communal Leaders” when in fact they are actually nothing more than Communal parasites.

    The only cure for them ..some not all would learn anything… would be to send them for a month’s free.. (they are accustomed…as “communal leaders” to getting everything free) “vacation” to live with Sarsour’s buddies in, say,..the Gaza Hilton…

    When you see Gloria Steinem signed on you now already that it’s rotten fish….

    This seems to be the way that Liberal American “Jews” have gone, so they are as lost to us as if the never existed….but they are doing as much damage as they can, before exiting from our people completely…Maybe one or two generations will see their finish,.leaving the empty buildings to be turned into bingo halls.
    .