Author Archives: Rabbi

It would be unfair to think ill of John Kerry because he is the grandson of an apostate Jew, who changed his name from Cohen to Kerry and pretended to be an Irish Catholic, even if such a pedigree has inevitably shaped Kerry’s views towards Israel. After all, you cannot choose your parents, grandparents or any relative. But he can be ridiculed and lambasted for making one of the dumbest comments in recent history, one that if analyzed shows either intense animus towards Israel and Jews, a warped view of life and personal responsibility or all of the above.

Intruding where he is unwelcome, has nothing to offer and can only prop up another aging anti-American dictator, Kerry is trying to “calm” tensions in Israel. He offered this gem: “We continue to urge everybody to exercise restraint and restrain from any kind of self-help in terms of the violence, and Israel has every right in the world to protect its citizens, as it has been, from random acts of violence.”

Forgive the run-on sentence (this is an administration populated by people who don’t speak intelligibly outside the four ells of the teleprompter) and parse the words themselves.

“We continue to urge everybody to exercise restraint…”  Surely Kerry must know that asking the attackers and the defenders to exercise restraint is a certain formula for a massacre if the aggressors choose, strangely, not to heed Kerry’s importuning and the attacked, foolishly, comply. He must be able to intuit, on some level, the repugnance implicit in the moral equivalence of the violence used by the barbarians to stab and shoot innocent Jews and the violence used by the civilized to thwart them. The equation alone is so monstrous that only malevolent, spiteful minds  – of which the world, clearly, has many – could utter such drivel and presume it sensible and reasonable. It is tantamount to saying: “Jews, die! And don’t kill anybody while in the process of dying.”

This inversion of morality placates and emboldens the evildoers – a clear Obama administration goal transparent in its dealing with Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and the Palestinian Authority – and can even be understood as evidence of the world’s corrupt double standard towards Israel and the Jewish people. It doesn’t make it right – in fact, it is very wrong and abhorrent – but not atypical enough to warrant any attention. But Kerry continued to call on all sides – but he meant the Jews – to “restrain from any kind of self-help in terms of the violence…” Before scrutinizing this breathtaking inanity, it is only fair to include Kerry’s succeeding clause, in which he conceded (reluctantly?) that “Israel has every right in the world to protect its citizens, as it has been, from random acts of violence.” How gracious of him.

Doesn’t Israel’s right to “protect its citizens” negate Kerry’s call for restraint on all sides? How can a nation defend its citizens by exercising restraint, unless the true defense that Kerry is seeking – one that will end all conflict – is Israel’s surrender to its enemies? That would, at least in his mind, end the cause for violence, notwithstanding the minor detail that Jews were savagely massacred in Hebron in 1929, across the land of Israel in 1936-1939, and victimized by Arab terror in the 1950’s and 1960s – in the former cases long before there was a Jewish state and in the latter cases long before the ”settlements” became the “obstacle to peace.” So the unctuous call for restraint, i.e., do not kill the attacker nor harm him in any way, is nothing more than a bland acquiescence to the mass murder of Jews. There is no quantity of liberal Jewish palaver about how great to Israel a friend Kerry is, was, or will be that can reverse the implications of his call to shackle the innocent so the murderous can have free reign. His moral compass is askew.

Even the phrase “random acts of violence” – the same gibberish uttered by Obama after Jews were massacred in a kosher supermarket in Paris earlier this year (where’s the last place one would think to find Jews? Obama: A kosher deli, of course) – understates the problem and does not properly assign blame to the perpetrators of these murders and attempted murders. The acts of violence might be “random” in terms of victims selected for carnage but they are not “random” in the sense of being haphazard or unsystematic. The Arab enemy is attacking innocent Jews and trying to slaughter as many as they can because of the blood lust for Jewish life, the cult of death and glorification of martyrdom that permeates the world of radical Islam, and their rejection of any semblance of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel or even any non-Islamic  sovereignty over any territory claimed for Islam.

That is not “random” at all, but rather a focused effort to rid the Middle East first and then the world of any Jewish national and perhaps even individual presence. This is genocidal jihad, and the hackneyed response of liberal Jews and peaceniks has always been to attack anyone who points this out and exposes how foolishly misguided they have been. In the alternative, they seek reasons for the violence that rationalize and even justify Arab terror. Those pretexts always include the lack of a peace process, the building of settlements, the attempt to change the status quo on the Temple Mount, the lack of rainfall, etc. (For all the false clamor about Israel’s desire to change the status quo on the Temple Mount, I really wish they would.) Those who think that the genocidal jihadists can be placated – like Obama, Kerry and their acolytes, even some in Israel  – should really not be allowed near a microphone or in any building where the crafting of foreign policy is taking place. They are dangerous people.

All of which leads to the one of the dumbest statements of the year, a year in which a healthy competition for that title is ongoing. He urged all sides to “restrain from any kind of self-help.” In context, Kerry must have been urging Israelis to ignore their government (the same government that he conceded has the right to “protect its citizens”), as that government has urged all Israelis who possess firearms to bear them in the streets and with them subdue and/or eliminate any terrorist who dares to raise his hand against an innocent person. In essence, “Israel” has the right of self-defense, but not the “people of Israel.” Huh?

But who in his right mind would ever demand that someone not engage in “self-help”? Answer: only a person on the political left who feels that government is responsible for everything in the lives of the citizens. It reminded me first of Ronald Reagan’s quip: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” But Kerry’s sentiment is worse than bizarre: Who ever tells people not to help themselves? New Jersey is the only state in the Union where citizens are not permitted to pump their own gasoline, and that too is peculiar. Who would tell someone not to defend his own life but to wait for someone else to come along and defend it for him? And if it’s too late, tsk tsk tsk, and we will shed crocodile tears and call for an end to the cycle of violence. That is beyond bizarre. Underneath that nice head of hair, what is Kerry thinking?

Self-help is the foundation of personal responsibility. The very suggestion that one should “restrain from any kind of self-help” is paternalistic, and when the self-help is actually defending one’s life it is downright cruel, and in this context, nothing less malicious. It is clear from the reaction in the Arab world and their fellow travelers in the West that they are distressed that the Arab attackers  in the recent wave of Arab terror have mostly been killed while trying to kill Jews, rather than being captured, arrested, tried, convicted, incarcerated and then shortly thereafter released in a prisoner exchange – a pattern to which they became accustomed and mostly enjoyed. Maybe that is the change in status quo that has them all riled up.

Kerry’s musings show his evil intent, and his offensive ramblings prove his irrelevance to the protection of both Jewish life and Western civilization. Israel needs a stronger hand, and it needs more – not less – citizen involvement in self-defense and taking the war to the Arab terrorists.

Kerry, for his own good and for the good of the world and the Jewish people, should just go to Iran and help them build their nuclear weapon. If his engineering skills are as keen as his proficiency in diplomacy and his coherence in thought, the world will be able to rest easily for decades.

On the car radio the other day, I listened to an interesting debate between Dennis Prager (on his show) and someone named Jay Michaelson who writes for the Forward and other liberal organs. Michaelson had lambasted Dr. Ben Carson, Republican candidate for President, for articulating his support for the Second Amendment  in this way: “The likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if people had been armed.” Dr. Carson later added: “Basically, what I said is when tyranny occurs traditionally around the world, they try to disarm the people first.”

For these truthful and eminently reasonable statements, Michaelson attacked Dr. Carson for his “rant,” called him “ignorant,” and thoughtfully added that Dr. Carson’s declarations are “profoundly anti-Semitic, immoral and disgusting.” And of course the conservative candidate was then assailed for invoking the Holocaust.

It is difficult to escape the sense that liberals are threatened by the Carson candidacy as it might tend to diminish the support of a voting bloc whose near unanimous voting patterns in the past are again being counted on heavily by the Democrats. Carson’s life story is so compelling – raised in a broken, one-family home in a dangerous part of an inner city, only to be saved by the determination and will of his mother, and who becomes an acclaimed neurosurgeon – that it imperils many liberal shibboleths, especially the ones that demand government intervention in every aspect of life and diminish the role of family and personal responsibility in an individual’s destiny. The liberal fear is palpable, as Dr. Carson’s intellect, integrity and humility (three qualities not often seen in politics, and certainly not in tandem) make him a formidable candidate and challenge their world view. The attack even sounds, to me, a bit racist…

No people invoke the Holocaust more than people who criticize others for invoking the Holocaust. It is as if a group of Jews (usually, liberal journalists) have assumed the responsibility of being guardians of the legacy of the Holocaust and only allow it to be used on their terms. For example, Mr. Prager pointed out that the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, recently invoked the Holocaust in urging European hospitality to the hundreds of thousands of migrants from Syria and comparing them to European Jews who found no haven before the Holocaust. (The differences are staggering, of course. The Syrian exodus seems to be disproportionately young people who have chosen – perhaps wisely – not to fight for their country, they have bypassed several countries on their way to Europe, and (who knows?) might harbor in their midst an untold number of jihadists capable of wreaking havoc on the European continent or in the United States. None of that was applicable to European Jews.)

Asked whether he considered Rabbi Sacks’ statement a similar exploitation of the Holocaust, Michaelson stammered, couldn’t answer, conceded the point and tried to change the topic. In other words, invoking the Holocaust is appropriate when it suits a favored political goal but not when it supports a disfavored political goal. There is more than an element of hypocrisy in that.

But on the substance, can it be plausibly argued that Ben Carson was wrong?  The facts are that Jews were disarmed before the Holocaust, that Jews in Europe who wished to fight were severely handicapped by a lack of weapons, and the most frequent request from partisans was not for sympathetic editorials or eulogies in liberal publications – but for weapons, the more the heavier the deadlier, the better. Can anyone reasonably assume that the Nazis would have been able to round up Jews in town after town, city after city, with little resistance, if Jews had been armed? It is so obvious that it beggars the imagination that any reasonable person could challenge it.

Would an armed Jewish community have been able to prevent the Holocaust? Probably not, although it certainly would have changed Hitler’s calculus. That, too, is obvious; if it would have made no difference to him, he would not have made the effort to disarm all Jews. And all Dr. Carson said was Hitler’s ability to accomplish his goals would have been “greatly diminished.” Exactly which part of that is “anti-Semitic, immoral and disgusting”? Indeed, one can cogently argue that, given our history, advocating for gun control that limits the access of Jews to weapons for self-defense is “anti-Semitic” and “immoral;” others can decide whether it is also disgusting.

In essence, Michaelson attempted to underscore his support for gun control by invoking the Holocaust – and Godwin’s Law – beating to the punch anyone who would try to draw lessons from the Holocaust about the elementary right of personal self-defense. That is as exploitative of the Holocaust for personal and political use as anything that has evoked the same criticism.

In the end, the radio conversation veered into a general discussion of gun control because Michaelson was unable to show that Dr. Carson’s contention was “anti-Semitic” (itself a bizarre accusation), “immoral,” or “disgusting.” He was game enough to be interviewed and take the heat, but without apologizing for his vitriol or hyperbole. (He should also retract the contention in his article that the Second Amendment does not protect individual gun ownership. Not only did the drafters perceive such but the Amendment’s long legal history has also vindicated that reading, to the chagrin of liberals. Try to amend the Amendment, if you wish, but don’t read into it what is not there.)

On that note, Michaelson tried to invoke the Israel experience where gun ownership is widespread but much more regulated than in the United States. One need only look at the recent Arab savagery in Israel and the number of Jewish civilians armed with weapons who are first responders at the scene of Arab terror to realize gun ownership is both widespread and useful. (Of course, Israel could really benefit today from “knife control” legislation, as knives kill and maim, and little is done to prevent their proliferation among the Arab population. After all, it’s never the people who are responsible for their actions, it’s the weapon, or the sellers of the weapon…)

Michaelson got a fair hearing and, of course, is entitled to his opinions. Would that he granted the same to others!  But Jews should not be so promiscuous in flinging accusations of Jew hatred against people they despise for their conservative politics, or really anyone who is not an actual Jew hater. So, too, not every invocation of the Holocaust merits rebuke or we will not be able to learn anything from or apply any lessons of the Holocaust. That itself – the tendency to deny the relevance of the Holocaust to anything – is itself a form of Holocaust denial. Of course, Holocaust references can be abused, and the Holocaust is sui generis as an historical event, but the Holocaust can also be instructive as to man’s capacity for evil, the dangers of passivity in the face of that evil, the relentless hatred of Jews that persists in many quarters, basic human rights including the right of self-defense (a right that, even today, makes much of the world and many liberal Jews extremely uncomfortable when practiced by Jews) and man’s responsibility towards his fellow man.

Too much time and energy are wasted on trying to prevent the last Holocaust, when our efforts should focus on preventing the next one right now in the planning stages in Iran, among the jihadists and other enemies of Israel.

To criticize Dr. Carson – a lover and keen supporter of Israel and the Jewish people – on these grounds is outrageous and deserves repudiation. He wrote yesterday in the Jerusalem Post: “What I do know however, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is that I never intended for my words to diminish the enormity of the tragedy or in any way to cause any pain for Holocaust survivors or their families.” What his political opponents – and this is what it is all about – are touting as an apology is nothing of the sort but actually just an expression of his elementary decency as a human being.

It is just one of the characteristics that those same political opponents – especially including Jews – would do well to learn from him.