Sunday, April 28, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
Sunday, April 28, 2024
From Ian:
Natan Sharansky: The Fight for Freedom, from Exodus to Gaza
Natan Sharansky: The Fight for Freedom, from Exodus to Gaza
On the first night of Passover, Jewish families around the world read the Haggadah, which tells the story of our people's Exodus from Egypt and the beginning of our history as a free people. The conclusion that emerges is that we will always have to fight for our freedom each day and in each generation.Seth Mandel: The Ignoramuses of Hamasville
When I attended my first seder in Moscow 50 years ago, everyone gathered was a product of the Soviet regime. We all began as assimilated Jews, disconnected from and ignorant of our heritage. Yet soon we began to study Hebrew and Jewish traditions in secret. Many of us had KGB "tails," agents assigned to monitor and report our activities to the authorities. We didn't know that the end of our story would be as spectacular as the Exodus itself and helped bring down the Iron Curtain, allowing millions of Jews to return home to Israel.
This year when we gathered to read about those who aspired to kill us, we thought about Hamas. We recalled the hostages, who have spent more than six months in captivity, enduring horrors that civilized minds refuse to imagine. We recalled American universities, where professors and students have celebrated the terrorists' Oct. 7 massacre.
Yet reviewing our millennia-long journey strengthened our determination and optimism. If we stand strong in defending our rights as free people in our land, our persecutors will be carried away by the floods of history, as Pharaoh's army and the Soviet empire were before it.
My point here is not that these kids don’t know anything—although that’s true. My point is that teenagers following the crowd for a chance to touch the hem of an upperclassman’s garment ought not to make policy. The vapidity of this trend was well expressed by a young actress explaining why she’ll continue to advocate “for Palestine” despite people warning her that the you-know-whos in Hollywood won’t like it: “I went campaigning door-to-door for marriage equality in Ireland, I went on marches for abortion rights. I’ve always cared about causes and social justice… To me it always becomes about supporting all innocent people, which sounds oversimplified, but I think you’ve got to look at situations and just think, ‘Are we supporting innocent people no matter where they’re from, who they are?’ That’s my drive.”Progressive Racism
Lincolnesque, truly. But she actually nails an important part of this: Hating-on-Israel is today’s campaigning-for-abortion-access-in-Ireland. Who knows what tomorrow’s cause will be for our heroes?
Do you know what tomorrow’s cause will be for Israelis? Same as it was today: defending their existence and trying to get their hostages back. And I’m pretty sure it’ll be the day after tomorrow’s cause too.
Similarly, for the protest leaders who shout about wanting to kill Zionists, their goals don’t change day to day. Nor do the goals of the Nazi-like murderers in whose honor these protests are organized. But the numbers of these protests, which are supposed to show some measure of righteousness, are ballooned by two categories: people who want to kill Jews and people who treat political causes like a car radio, flipping from station to station in search of the popular songs of the day. (I realize many of them may not know what a radio is.)
Israel doesn’t get to wake up with a hangover, sleep till two in the afternoon and find a different party the next night. This is real life. If Hamas isn’t defeated, Israelis will continue living next to the skeletal framework of an underground tunnel system that exists to hold future Israelis hostage. And above that tunnel system will be the people who intend to take those hostages.
We should stop excusing the people who plead ignorance as they follow murder-minded grad students. And under no circumstances should policy be made with them in mind, or because enough of them are standing elbow-to-elbow a hundred yards from their dorm. The people who live in the real world can’t afford it.
The vast majority of contemporary Westerners protesting against Israel today are selective racists. "Racist" in that skin color does count for them (big time!). "Selective" because they ignore the number of victims.
Sudan is undergoing a humanitarian crisis of monumental proportions, starting a year ago. Airstrikes have hit civilian centers on an ongoing basis. In many regions, hospitals and health services hardly function. Thousands of civilians have been killed, including massacres that are clear war crimes. The UN reports that 3,000,000 Sudanese children are malnourished. World Food Program trucks have been blocked, hijacked, attacked, and looted. Yet not a peep is heard from Westerners.
In Myanmar, an estimated 50,000 have been killed since the military coup in 2021, and over two million displaced. Most of this is due to the military junta's blanket use of air strikes and shelling of mostly civilian targets. Here, too, one would be hard pressed to find any protests.
Since 2000, the Ethiopian conflict has led to 350,000 civilian fatalities. According to the UN, close to 30,000,000 people now require emergency food aid. Have you seen any protests at Harvard or Columbia regarding such mind-boggling suffering?
When one realizes the disparity between the number of Gazan fatalities (a bit over 30,000 if the Hamas-based numbers can be believed - not to mention that at least 10,000 of these are terrorists) and the humongous numbers around the globe, it becomes clear that selective racism is certainly a factor in singling out Israel when the devastation and humanitarian crises are far worse elsewhere. Israelis are racist? The protesters should look in the mirror. Their avoidance of the greatest political-human tragedies in the world today constitutes the real racism.
Sunday, April 28, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
There have been many articles about "unconscious bias" or "implicit bias" in the context of racism over the past several years. For example, the University of California San Francisco defines it this way:
Unconscious biases are social stereotypes about certain groups of people that individuals form outside their own conscious awareness. Everyone holds unconscious beliefs about various social and identity groups, and these biases stem from one's tendency to organize social worlds by categorizing.Unconscious bias is far more prevalent than conscious prejudice and often incompatible with one's conscious values. Certain scenarios can activate unconscious attitudes and beliefs.
George Washington University has an entire set of resources on defining and combating implicit bias.
Yet at this same GWU campus you can see these signs, in public, today:
"Students will leave when Israelis leave. Students will go back home when Israelis go back to Europe, US, etc. (their Real homes.)"
Now, who are the "Israelis" in this scenario?
Are they referring to the Jews who escaped - and who didn't escape - the Holocaust to go to the only place they could live in safety. Obviously.
Does this include the millions of Israelis whose ancestors were ethnically cleansed from Arab lands? Of course it does. They are the "etc."
Are they referring to the two million Israeli Arabs? Clearly not. They are referring to Jews, and only Jews.
Even though many if not most Israeli Arabs and Palestinian Arabs proudly trace their own family histories back to Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere, they are not being told to leave to their "real homes."
Only the Jews must be ethnically cleansed from the Middle East. "Israeli" in this case is a code word for Jews and only Jews. And no one can deny that.
Now, hundreds of GWU students and faculty are walking past these signs every day. These are people who claim to be attuned to the evils of implicit bias. These are the people who give courses in the topic.
And not one of them has said, hold on - we are guilty of the same crime we accuse everyone else of.
Those who are reading that sign and thinking that this is an acceptable political viewpoint, and not a call for ethnic cleansing of a group of people based on their heritage and religion, is guilty of implicit bias against Jews by their own definition.
These campus protests are one of the"certain scenarios" mentioned above that can activate subconscious bias. Jews see this and are calling it out. But the very people who claim that they work on themselves to erase this implicit bias are the ones perpetuating it - and they they try to gaslight Jews by saying that there is no antisemitism in their movement at all, disregarding the Jews' own feelings.
Many of the leaders of these protests are dyed-in-the-wool antisemites. But most of the students and faculty who join in for the ride are only implicit antisemites - they swear they don't have a hateful bone in their bodies.
But they walk past this sign every day. And they are not saying a word about it.
- Sunday, April 28, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Mahmoud Abbas addressed the World Economic Forum meeting today in Riyadh.
During his speech, spoken while sitting in the audience for some reason, he said that what Israel is doing in Gaza is worse than anything that happened in World War II:
Abbas is misrepresenting what Borrell said in December, when he compared Israel's airstrikes in Gaza to Allied airstrikes in Germany during World War II, saying that proportionally Gaza had more destruction.Borrell said a few days ago that what is happening in Gaza has never happened not even in the Second World War in Germany. Others have confirmed and have acknowledged that what is happening today in Gaza and in the West Bank has exceeded what took place in the second world war in Germany and in other European countries.
That is true. Germany is a lot bigger than Gaza and there are plenty of areas in Germany that would not have been legal military targets. In Gaza, Hamas ensured that nearly all civilian areas in Gaza host terrorists, weapons caches or are above Hamas tunnels.
But that is not what Abbas is telling the world. He is deliberately implying that experts are calling Israel worse than the Nazis.
- Sunday, April 28, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
If you compare those statistics with those from March 31, you see that more than half the reported 2,732 deaths this month are military aged males - who take up far less than 25% of Gaza's population.
Chances are that the vast majority of them are members of armed terrorist groups.
The self-reporting mechanism from families of "martyrs," which the ministry seems to cross check for accuracy, show that 56% of those reported under that system are military age males.
There are other notable statistics that the media somehow manages to avoid mentioning.
You remember the many stories about Gaza children supposedly dying of starvation and malnutrition? At the end of March, the health ministry counted 28 of them.
All month we were told that Israel is not allowing sufficient food into Gaza, especially the north, and mass starvation is imminent. But today, the count of those who died from starvation remains the same: 28.
It isn't quite a famine when there are no victims.
One other statistic published that media and NGOs are curiously uncurious about: nearly half the patients who are requested to get treatment in Egypt or abroad are rejected, apparently by Egypt.
It is fascinating to see so starkly that reporters and "human rights" organizations lose all interest in Gaza's statistics when they make Israel look good, or make Egypt look bad.
Saturday, April 27, 2024
From Ian:
Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time
Hatred of Israel is the great moral disorder of our time
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem… (Psalm 137)Arsen Ostrovsky and Amjad Taha: It's Time to Act Against Antisemitic Behavior on Campus
It is the great moral disorder of our time.
Dear Israel is but a spit of earth on a huge globe. Three years after six million Jews were put to torture, humiliation, whippings, rape, medical experiment, starvation, and vile death, was it not surely time — time for all the nations of the Earth who had reached some moral understanding of life and government — to allow Jewish people time to rest, time to mourn, time to see what and who might be left of them.
To find just one period, just one time, just one place where and when they did not have to start up in the middle of the night when unfamiliar sounds disturbed, did not have to hear demagogues howling at them from street corners, or put up with the trendy, ignorant western pseudo-radicals shouting in bullhorns from library steps. To not see their shops and homes targets of mobs and slanders, their synagogues battered.
A time when they might gather on a bit of land where dogs were not set upon them; where children did not mock them; where passerby thugs did not attack their elders in the street; where Jews unique in their sorrow and pain could meet with some of their tormented doubles, if for nothing else but to share laments and profound griefs, generate solace by shared company and memory.
Ah, Jews. Ah, Israel.
Poor Jews. It was not enough that Europe built a hecatomb of your kind because a madman and his mad country hated you. When you were nearly ripped out of history altogether, your spectacular survival over centuries and millennia genuinely threatened, averted as much by the chances of a war in which one side ignored you while the other industrialized your killing.
A guilty world — no, only a part of what should be a guilty world — offered you a spit of land: dust, bush, waterless (the former B.C. cabinet minister was correct in her description). I believe it’s called a desert.
It was “presented” as the homeland for Jews in 1947. For (wrung with accents of burning pity whenever the word was said in this context) the “survivors.”
This was when “survivors” meant people — men, women, children, infants — who had been rounded up, packed into railway cars, families ripped asunder, thrown into hideous camps with sadistic guards and vicious dogs, worked to death, starved, and for days, weeks or (some few) for years, spat upon, beaten, treated like less than dogs — hollowed out from torture, starvation and hopelessness.
To still be breathing after that! That’s a survivor.
(One of the heresies of our careless times is how we have let moralizing idiots, fat and comfortable woke types, haul out this word — “survivor” — to describe their own ignorant obsessions, their hypertrophic sense of privilege, to claim our attention.)
When universities continue to permit anti-Jewish hatred under the guise of anti-Zionism; indulge hate groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and cannot even answer whether calling for genocide against Jews is against university policy, what did they think was going to happen?Andrew Neil: Anti-Semitic campus know-nothings aren't pro-Palestine... they're pro-WAR! And, in their stupidity, they're making the strongest case yet for Israel's survival
In a statement ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover, President Joe Biden said "this blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous—and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country."
Condemnations of the protests and expressions of solidarity with Jewish students are certainly welcome, and in fact necessary, but in the absence of urgent action, they are hollow and meaningless.
The following, therefore, is a 10-point action plan to restore order and protect Jewish students:
1. These ugly scenes must be labeled not as peaceful protests, but as pro-Hamas demonstrations by antisemites.
2. Universities need to call in the police to remove these rioters and anarchists from their encampments on campuses. If the police won't, then the National Guard should be called in.
3. Leaders must speak to Jewish students who are scared to enter campus, listen to them, and provide all the support they need.
4. Students found in breach of school policy must be punished, including with expulsion, and banning of their registered student organizations, while foreign students found in violation should have their visas revoked and be deported.
5. Lecturers, professors, and staff found taking part should also be disciplined.
6. Do not cancel in-person classes. That would be cowering before the bullies and haters, putting students who want to learn at a disadvantage. If universities and teachers take appropriate disciplinary measures and security precautions, there should be no need to resort to virtual classes.
7. Follow the money to find out who is funding these protests and protesters. Qatar, for example, has poured billions of dollars into Ivy League universities, buying up schools, chairs, and fellowships.
8. Initiate an avalanche of lawsuits and Title VI claims. Jewish students are not powerless and universities that receive federal funding are prohibited under the Civil Rights Act from discriminating against students on the basis of race or national identity, or allowing a hostile environment to form.
9. The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, the most widely endorsed definition of Jew-hatred in all its manifestations, must be adopted and applied by every university. The IHRA definition has already been adopted by more than 40 countries, thousands of civil society organizations and has received bi-partisan support in the United States.
10. And lastly, Congress must immediately pass legislation rescinding federal funding from any university that does not take satisfactory action against this tidal wave of antisemitism or fails to protect Jewish students from discrimination or harassment.
We are at an inflection point where universities must decide whether they want to remain respected places of higher learning for all or become no-go zones for Jewish students. The decision is theirs.
Nobody is wondering that now as, even in America, radical Muslim leaders call for the destruction of Israel, backed by students at the nation's most elite universities and therefore those possibly (and frighteningly) running the country in the years to come.
America's Muslim population can only grow while Jews will become an ever smaller percentage of the total population.
Violent Islamism has a strong footing in many Western democracies these days and its influence is likely to grow stronger. Suddenly that Jewish homeland looks more necessary than ever.
This sorry tale still has some way to run. The pro-Hamas protestors have strong allies on the Left of the Democratic Party. They will be out in force come the Democratic convention in Chicago this August.
Chicago, of course, was the scene of the most violent Democratic convention ever in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, when Mayor Daley's somewhat robust police force clashed with radical demonstrators trying to disrupt the convention.
I don't say we're in for a repeat as bad as that but it will not be pretty on the streets of the Windy City this summer.
The President, for today's protestors, is 'Genocide Joe'. They will be out to pressure the Democrats into ending their support for Israel the way they wanted the party to end its support for the Vietnam War all these years ago.
Vietnam involved the conscription of hundreds of thousands of young American men to fight a massive war on the other side of the world, which eventually cost over 55,000 American lives. That gave the protests a special edge and relevance. Israel involves none of that, which is why it does not have the same piquancy for most folks.
But pro-Palestinian sentiments are the coming force in the Democratic Party, with all the attendant anti-Semitism we are currently witnessing.
There can be no compromise with such forces, whatever the superficial attractions of winning the youth vote by pandering to know-nothing students. We shall see if Biden is up to the challenge and stands firm in his resolve to support Israel.
Friday, April 26, 2024
From Ian:
Douglas Murray: International Criminal Court’s vicious smear tactics against America’s allies
Douglas Murray: International Criminal Court’s vicious smear tactics against America’s allies
Of course, this whole thing is a fantastic moral inversion. It is not the Israelis who are committing war crimes.Douglas Murray on Iran attack, anti-Israel marches, and Israel’s resilience
It was Hamas who committed war crimes — live on camera — on Oct. 7.
Will Khan prosecute the leadership of Hamas?
Good luck to him if he tries.
It seems unlikely that the terrorist group will suddenly come out of their hostage-surrounded tunnels in southern Gaza or their luxury penthouses in Qatar and fly to The Hague.
One thing you can say with confidence about Hamas is that they’re not big “laws of war” guys.
And good luck to anyone who tries a citizen’s arrest.
Vladimir Putin will benefit from this, naturally. It would be a big win for him if he could point to the Israeli PM and say, “You see, the ICC tries to prosecute everyone.”
Such a move would also be a huge blow to all the internationalists who want to see an international court with some legitimacy.
Khan’s move — if he goes ahead with it — would blow up this infant global project at its foundation, making Republicans and Democrats alike become its biggest enemies.
And of course, such a disgraceful step would not stop the war in Gaza.
The Israeli war cabinet has made it clear they want nothing short of total victory.
That means the destruction of Hamas and the return of all remaining hostages.
If the ICC and others want to stop this war, they should focus on achieving that.
The fact they can do no such thing shows them up as the partisan eunuchs that they actually are.
But if they try to make this move against the Israeli PM and others, Khan and the ICC won’t delegitimize Israel — as they hope.
The court will simply delegitimize itself.
And vindicate the view of patriotic Americans of both political parties that this country should have no part in the farce at The Hague.
A Labour victory, which has many Muslim voters, would likely not be better for Israel, but he expected it to be similar to Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s policy but weaker.Seth Mandel: Hamas Propaganda Gets a Pass from ‘Disinformation’ Watchdogs
He credited Labor leader Keir Starmer for his work to improve the party and “lancing the worst of the antisemitism” but the foundations of the political movement were still radical.
Cameron “has been pretty bad as a friend of Israel during this conflict. His own anti-Israel sentiment seeps out fairly regularly.”
“I don’t think there’ll be that much difference to begin with,” said Murray. “The problem is always whenever a conflict emerges with Israel involving any of Israel’s neighbors, it doesn’t matter what size the conflict is, actually.
The responses to it get more and more vicious. And that’s something I’ve noted for a long time now, and I’m deeply concerned. This is a relatively large war compared to previous Gaza wars, but it’s not a large war compared to some others in Israel’s history. How the Labour Party will behave when they’re in government, we’ll see.“Back in the UK after almost six months in Israel, Murray said he was struck by how Israelis had met the challenges before them, but also how they were still dealing with the societal tremors of October 7.
“I’m deeply moved and inspired, really, by the young men and women of Israel,” said Murray. “I think they’ve been absolutely remarkable. I think the question which every society that isn’t completely asleep always asks itself is, ‘Would we be what our fathers or grandfathers or forefathers were in the time of trial?’”
He said that in the West, they had not been tested in such a fashion in a long time, and some older Israelis doubted the newer generations’ ability to stand fast. He said the older generations were no longer worried.
He met many soldiers serving in the Gaza and West Bank arenas, and in his eyes, “this generation of Israelis has stepped up to a historical moment, and they’ve been shown to be magnificent and brave and courageous.”
As he told President Isaac Herzog in a recent meeting, “They don’t do any of it out of hatred. They do it out of love. Love and the desire to defend their loved ones, their families, their people, their nation, their home. I see no hatred in the hearts of the young soldiers I meet. I see just the desire to live in peace and the knowledge that in order to live in peace, you must sometimes wage war, especially when war is waged upon you.”
While the soldiers fought, the country still grappled with a trauma that Murray said is still being processed. It was a trauma that many in the world did not understand.
He had spoken to Nova massacre survivors and their therapists, and they told them it was too soon to talk about PTSD.
“This country is still in the trauma,” said Murray. “I think that will be the case for a long time to come. The trauma being the deterrence that Israelis have believed they had for 50 years now broke down.”
Some of the wounds could be healed to a certain extent “with the return of any hostages that can be returned, but also with the reestablishment of Israel’s deterrence in both the military and intelligence fields. I think that’s the real end to it, to this conflict. The real end is when Israelis in the North and the South know that they can sleep safely in their beds. I spent many months living with the displaced people from Kiryat Shmona and elsewhere. I think of these people every day. Even when I’m not with them. They have to be allowed to return to their homes in safety.”
So why is Jankowicz back in the news? To combat the type of misinformation and disinformation spread by Hamas through Christiane Amanpour? Of course not. Through her dark-money group called American Sunlight, unnamed donors have funded her new crusade to investigate how Republican legislators have made it easier to be mean to women (read: Jankowicz) on the Internet.
The sad part about the disinformation scam is that disinformation does exist, you just wouldn’t know it by the attempts of progressive political activists who, like Jankowicz, have turned its pursuit into a McCarthyite partisan campaign. Indeed, the entire Israel-Hamas war since Oct. 7 has been infused with reporters’ startlingly unethical allegiance to obvious Hamas propaganda. That propaganda benefits progressive allies of the “disinformationists,” so it gets a pass.
As exposed repeatedly at major U.S. outlets, Hamas has created a network of fixers who have used their access to pose as photojournalists and shape the war narrative. Al Jazeera has now been caught credentialing several members of Gaza-based terrorist groups. And influential celebrity pundits like Amanpour have seemingly been successful in pressuring their networks to ease up on the fact-checking process that could filter out Hamas-planted stories. Obviously manipulated casualty statistics put out by Hamas have now made their way into regular media use without the disclaimer that used to accompany them. The filter is gone.
The result of all this is the spreading of physical violence against Jews around the world and the corruption of diplomacy by Westerners who have been reading from an Iranian script and occupying college campuses in deference to Iranian militias.
It’s fertile soil for aspiring watchdogs and disinformation researchers, if only we could find them.
From Ian:
Josh Hammer: Restore Order and Crush the Campus Jihadist Thugs
Josh Hammer: Restore Order and Crush the Campus Jihadist Thugs
n his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, President George Washington reached a stirring conclusion: "May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."Meet the new Left, who think Hamas are good and that Swastikas are woke
Washington is rolling in his grave right now at Mount Vernon.
Jews are so "afraid" at Columbia University that an Orthodox campus rabbi recently urged students to "return home as soon as possible." The situation at many purportedly "elite" universities is dire, as jihadist mania supplants Black Lives Matter as the vogue, faux-moral cause rotting the minds of impressionable Gen-Zers.
Hamas' useful campus idiots are, at best, blithering morons. They do not realize that Zionism—the Jewish people's national liberation movement in their ancestral homeland—is the quintessence of the very "anticolonialism" and "indigenous people's rights" they claim to champion. They are clueless about international law and how the doctrine of uti possidetis juris establishes that Israel has the best legal claim to Judea and Samaria (i.e., the "West Bank"). They know nothing about warfighting; John Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at West Point, has demonstrated that Israel's combatant-to-civilian death ratio in Gaza since the war began is "historically low for modern urban warfare."
Why let inconvenient facts get in the way of the thrill one feels for supporting a chic social justice movement ... er, genocidal terrorist organization?
The activism now upending Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and other morally bankrupt institutions is done in explicit support of a U.S. State Department-recognized foreign terrorist organization. Keffiyeh-wearing mini-jihadis at Columbia recently chanted "We are Hamas!" and "Long live Hamas!" Other agitators at Columbia called for Tel Aviv—a liberal secular city that will remain in Israeli hands under any possible future settlement with the Palestinian-Arabs—to be "burned to the ground." At the University of Michigan (where my speech in November was shouted down by a pro-Hamas mob), student Hamasniks distributed a pamphlet that says "Freedom for Palestine means Death to America."
Give them credit for the candor.
It wasn’t long ago when the activist Left had a whole laundry list of systems and impersonal forces that it was battling against: sexism, homophobia, white supremacy, ableism – you name it. The Millenial Left may have nodded along to Bernie Sanders’ old labour-Left leanings. Still, they largely abandoned the class struggle of old for a struggle against boutique oppressions that were contingent but intersecting, hence the rise of so-called “intersectionality.”George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israel-hating protests
That’s the once-trendy academic philosophy that relies on a view of power relations of society, where advantages and disadvantages are filtered primarily through identities: race, gender, and sexual orientation. But intersectionality is old hat. It’s not revolutionary enough anymore now that it’s been mainstreamed and gotten absorbed and institutionalised by the blob of liberal media and corporate institutions – including, believe it or not, the Scottish government.
So, in the wake of the shock of the massive Israel-Hamas war since October 7 and a lack of purpose after the political failures of Left-wing populism – the Western Left has found a way to get its groove back by simplifying yet expanding its moral framework.
Goodbye, intersectionality – hello, “It’s All One Thingism.”
In this nebulous new cosmology, Palestinians – even Hamas themselves – aren’t just engaged in a specific geopolitical fight over territory and resources. No, they’re the tip of the spear of a perceived collective liberation against the West, the Global North, “colonisers,” whatever you want to call the Bad Guys. It’s a magical world in which all politics and world affairs once seen through intersectionality’s colourful prism have been flattened into (somewhat ironically for self-proclaimed atheists) a more Biblical view of the world: black-and-white, good and evil.
“Palestine is every single issue in one issue,” wrote Scarlett Rabe, a singer-songwriter who describes herself as an anti-racist mother and an abolition feminist/womanist, in a viral tweet in February. “It’s reproductive justice. It’s social justice. It’s climate crisis… It’s not just one issue; it’s all the issues in one.”
All One Thingism explains why a group of a few hundred masked protestors who chanted “Death to America” and “Hands off Iran” this week also employed the relatively meaningless slogan “From Chicago to Palestine.” Or that another viral post on Instagram by a person wearing a “Fatties for a Free Palestine” T-shirt insisted that “Palestinian solidarity is not a niche issue. Fat liberation and Palestinian liberation go hand in hand.”
George Soros and his hard-left acolytes are paying agitators who are fueling the explosion of radical anti-Israel protests at colleges across the country.
The protests, which began when students took over Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus lawn last week, have mushroomed nationwide.
Copycat tent cities have been set up at colleges including Harvard, Yale, Berkeley in California, the Ohio State University and Emory in Georgia — all of them organized by branches of the Soros-funded Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — and at some, students have clashed with police.
The SJP parent organization has been funded by a network of nonprofits ultimately funded by, among others, Soros, the billionaire left-wing investor.
At three colleges, the protests are being encouraged by paid radicals who are “fellows” of a Soros-funded group called the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR).
USCPR provides up to $7,800 for its community-based fellows and between $2,880 and $3,660 for its campus-based “fellows” in return for spending eight hours a week organizing “campaigns led by Palestinian organizations.”
They are trained to “rise up, to revolution.”
The radical group received at least $300,000 from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2017 and also took in $355,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund since 2019.
It has three “fellows” who have been major figures in the nationwide protest movement.
Nidaa Lafi, a former president of the University of Texas Students for Justice in Palestine, was seen at an encampment at UT Dallas Wednesday making a speech demanding an end to the war in Gaza.
Lafi, a former legislative intern for the late Democratic Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, graduated from the school last year with a degree in global business and is now a law student at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
In January, she was detained for blocking the route of President Biden’s motorcade after he arrived in Dallas for the funeral of Johnson, her former boss.
At Yale, USCPR’s fellow Craig Birckhead-Morton was arrested Monday and charged with first-degree trespassing when SJP’s branch, Yalies4Palestine, occupied the school’s Beinecke Plaza, the Yale Daily News reported.
Birckhead-Morton — also a former intern for a Democrat, Maryland rep John Sarbanes — emerged from custody to address a sit-in blocking traffic in New Haven.
The most high-profile of the fellows is Berkeley’s Malak Afaneh, co-president of the Berkeley Law Students for Justice in Palestine.
She has been a serial speaker at an anti-Israel protest on the campus this week — which came after she first shot to prominence by hijacking a dinner at the law school dean’s home to shout anti-Israel slogans, then accused the dean’s wife of assaulting her when she asked the radical to leave.
- Friday, April 26, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
From The Daily Princetonian, yesterday:
He's a bit reality challenged as well.
Earlier today, Professor of History Gyan Prakash held his seminar on the courtyard, inviting others to join. His course HIS411: World After Empire is typically held at 1:30 p.m. on Thursdays.“The readings were very connected to what’s going on over here. So, they [students] read Angela Davis, who speaks about how political activism is also a site of thinking about connections between different struggles and thinking about it internationally.” Prakash said. “This spot was also a good teaching moment for students.”
How utterly degusting it is for a professor to force his students to effectively take his political position in order to attend his class in a space where 95% of Jews would be unwelcome as Zionists.
The course description is exactly what you would think:
This seminar will examine this global history of anticolonial, anti-racial, and postcolonial thought during the twentieth century. We will read the works by key 20th century anticolonial thinkers and activists - Mahatma Gandhi, WEB Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, Amilcar Cabral, Albert Memmi, Frantz Fanon, Angela Davis, Edward Said, and others. Will read these historical texts critically and ask: How do they understand colonialism and its relationship between colonial domination and race, culture, and economy? How do they understand colonialism as a global system? How do they think of liberation and world transformation?
Prakash hates America as much as he hates Israel:
If we are learning anything over the past couple of weeks, it is that Ivy League schools are a huge waste of money and time. If anything, there is an inverse relationship between the quality of education and the prestige of these schools.
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- Friday, April 26, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
Is it 1938 again?
Maybe it is more like 1933.
From AP, April 19, 1933:
The percentage of Jews admitted to elite universities in the US has dropped by half since the beginning of the 21st century. It isn't quite down to their relative population in the US, but DEI policies aim to do exactly that - to have colleges reflect the demographics of the US population.
And this is what the Nazis wanted in their own universities.
The anti-Israel protesters are demanding that universities divest from any "Zionist" donors as well as from investing in Israeli companies, again startlingly similar to what the Nazis intended to stop "excessive foreign control" of their academia.
Here's a story from The Guardian, November 30, 1938 about Warsaw University - before Germany invaded Poland:
Compare with how the "encampments" treat "Zionists" who dare to try to enter a public area:
The irony of Columbia students telling Jews to "go back to Poland" could not be starker.
Who will benefit from the exclusion of Jews from elite Ivy League universities? The ones that welcome Jews. (The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, May 19, 1933:)
Which sounds a lot like what Brandeis University announced this week:
Brandeis University, the historically Jewish school outside Boston, has extended its transfer application deadline in a bid to appeal to students who are unhappy with their own schools’ responses to campus anti-Israel protests.“As a university founded in 1948 by the American Jewish community to counter antisemitism and quotas on Jewish enrollment in higher education, Brandeis has been committed to protecting the safety of all its students, and, in the current atmosphere, we are proud of the supports we have in place to allow Jewish students to thrive,” Brandeis President Ron Liebowitz wrote in an email to the community.
Israeli universities said much the same.
The United States is of course not Nazi Germany. But there is enough rhyming going on here to frighten anyone who cares about the future of America.
- Friday, April 26, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
“This is the biggest mass grave since the beginning of the war,” Mahmoud Basal, spokesman for Gaza’s Civil Defense, a search and rescue department within the Hamas-controlled territory, said Thursday before calling for an international investigation.A New York Times analysis of social media videos and satellite imagery found that Palestinians had dug at least two of the three burial sites weeks before Israeli troops raided the complex.Gazan authorities say that mass graves had been dug on the hospital grounds before an Israeli raid there in February but accuse Israel of later opening the site to add bodies.While The Times could not determine the cause of death for individual people, the initial burials took place in January and February amid a weekslong Israeli offensive in the city.Israel on Thursday denied accusations that it was responsible for digging the graves at the complex, but previously said it had opened them in the search for the bodies of hostages abducted to Gaza.Videos shared on social media and verified by The New York Times show that two sites with multiple mass graves were dug at Nasser and bodies were buried starting in January.Satellite imagery shows that the large mass grave first dug by Gazans underneath the palm trees in the southern part of the complex was disturbed by Israeli forces, including with a bulldozer, lending credence to the Israeli claim that they exhumed and reburied bodies.There is no clear sign that Israeli troops dug new graves or added bodies to existing ones.
As has been the case so many times, the NYT has clear proof that Hamas routinely lies to the media. It cannot find a shred of evidence that the IDF is not telling the truth. But even throughout this article, it carefully parrots Hamas claims and does everything it can to cast doubt on the Israeli position unless it can find its own definitive proof that Israelis are telling the truth.
By now, any Hamas claims should be assumed to be lies. (That was the case six months ago as well.)
News media reported about the same graves in January and February, dug by Gazans. Hamas now makes up a ludicrous claim about them. And even as the media notes the two facts, it still takes Hamas lies seriously and gives them credibility.
There is a real story here: Hamas routinely lies. When have you seen a mainstream media outlet report that?
- Friday, April 26, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
On Thursday, Israeli police closed roads surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem to ensure settlers' access to the Buraq Wall.The historic Mughrabi Gate was closed yesterday afternoon, Wednesday, in the face of extremist settlers’ incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque, at the scene of hundreds of settlers desecrating Al-Aqsa, where collective prayers, epic prostrations, and plant offerings are held.The scene of the settlers who participated in the storming, in the morning and evening periods on the second day of the Jewish Passover, reflected a significant doubling of the numbers of the stormers compared to the storms during the past six months.About 874 settlers participated in the storming, while the number of tourist raids reached 85 foreigners who entered Al-Aqsa Mosque as part of Israeli "tourism."Yesterday, Tuesday, during the morning and evening periods, on the first day of the Jewish Passover, 292 settlers carried out a raid, in addition to 173 under the name of “tourism.” The raids were led by former Knesset member Yehuda Glick, and the raids witnessed the performance of provocative songs and demonstrations of “epic prostration” under the protection of... Israeli forces.
It turns out that Brussels-based Euronews is part owned by TV networks of many countries, not only from European nations but also Egyptian, Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan. Apparently Euronews outsources the Arabic stories and doesn't bother checking them for antisemitic terms like Jews "desecrating" their holiest spot.
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Thursday, April 25, 2024
- Thursday, April 25, 2024
- Elder of Ziyon
From Naharnet:
Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has revealed that he has “received major warnings from the Europeans and Arabs” regarding the Israel-Hezbollah clashes, a media report said on Thursday.U.S. mediator Amos Hochstein has also told him in their latest phone call that “there is a need to cease fire in the south and not wait for the course of the war in the Gaza Strip,” al-Akhbar newspaper reported.Hezbollah has meanwhile informed Mikati and other Lebanese officials that “the threats -- regardless whether they are serious or a repetition of the intimidation campaign -- will change nothing in the decision to maintain the military support for Gaza.”
Whatever happened to "Ceasefire Now"?
Ah, that's only for Jews. Everyone who is shooting at Jews can continue firing.
Princeton University:
New York City:
These are not peace protesters. They want war. They support Houthi missiles at ships. They support Hezbollah anti-tank weapons at civilians. They support Hamas attacks at a concert.
They say this explicitly. Believe them.
From Ian:
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like 1938
It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like 1938
If Jews do not feel safe on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, in New York City, in the United States of America, where can they feel safe?Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Contagion of University Pro-Hamas Protests
NYC is home to some 1.3 million Jews, the most outside of Israel. Jewish men and women have thrived in The Big Apple for hundreds of years, enjoying religious freedom, prosperity, political power, and the affection and goodwill of millions of their gentile neighbors, colleagues, and loved ones.
Jewish culture is NYC culture. New Yorkers of all stripes schlep packages to the Post Office, kvetch when things go awry, and mock their friends when they act like putzes. Those of us who call NYC home need not be Jewish to speak and act this way. We live in New York. We pick it up.
However, things lately have been far from dancing the Horah.
Protests began after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre against Israel. The Iranian-sponsored terrorist group butchered some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 hostages from Israel, America, and other nations. These demonstrations have devolved from opposition to Israel’s self-defense against these killers from the Gaza Strip, into support for Hamas, and now open hatred of Jews, per se.
At Columbia University, many pro-Hamas protesters are dressed in the black and white keffiyeh headdresses that are the Brownshirts of the Palestinazis. In recent days, they have waved Hamas flags, yelled Hamas slogans, and intimidated, threatened, and assaulted Jewish students, particularly those who wear yarmulkes and otherwise visually identify themselves as Jews.
Israeli and U.S. flags have been set ablaze.
“We are Hamas!” one protester yelled, just outside the campus gates, while banging a pot against a police barricade.
“You guys are all inbred,” one protester screamed at sophomore Jonathan Lederer and some 20 Jewish students singing songs of peace on campus Saturday, just before the pro-Hamas faction threw water in their faces and hurled projectiles at Lederer’s head and chest.
The anti-Semites also chanted: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” Also: “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”
“Go back to Poland!” another pro-Hamas thug screamed at a Jewish student. “We all know how things turned out the last time the Jews were in Poland,” he said on Fox & Friends yesterday morning.
“The environment at Columbia University is absolutely dreadful,” graduate student Xavier Westergaard said Monday on America Reports. Campus police may not do anything “when presented with issues ranging from ‘I’ve just been spat on,’ ‘I’ve just been yelled at,’ ‘I’ve just been kicked.’ People are yelling, ‘Jewish students die,’ ‘Jews go back to Poland.’ This is insane. It feels like anarchy, and we are not being supported by our university.”
The situation unfolding across college campuses in the United States is a complicated one, and bears reflection. I do not propose anything definitive, but I wanted to share a few thoughts.Seth Mandel: Dr. Snowflake and Mr. Intifada
A Very Brief History of the University:
The first question we must ask is “What are universities even for?” It is not an easy one. They began as institutions to train clerics in theology and philosophy, and evolved gradually into places for training gentleman scholars. Oxford and Cambridge in the 19th century did not live up to the model St. John Henry Newman describes in The Idea of a University, but they did a much better job than we do today. Over time, led by the Germans, universities became multiversities, where scholars ceased to attempt to build a comprehensive view of the world, instead locking themselves in siloed sub-fields.
Restoration, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Next, American universities led the transition away from scholarship and towards professionalization. People started studying “business arts,” as if business were the same sort of activity as the pursuit of truth for its own sake. I have nothing against business. Making a good living for one’s family is noble. But insofar as it is an art, it is a servile one, not a liberal one. Accompanying professionalization was, paradoxically, radicalization. People who wanted to get on with life started studying to be accountants and engineers; radicals took over what remained of the liberal arts. This decay is best chronicled by Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind, a book I encourage you all to read.
Now we are witnessing the completion of the university’s unraveling. We hardly even produce professionals now, but activists who take a few Zoom classes on racialized communism and spend the rest of their time scrolling TikTok and indulging resentment. Middle managers may not be philosophers, but at least they do something useful. A degree in Queer Theory prepares you for no life beyond perpetual adolescent whining. The professors of the 60’s gave up the classics to focus on changing the world. Well, they succeeded. Moral formation has been replaced by sweet, glorious self-pity and the narcissistic pursuit of utopia. Beauty is something to be deconstructed by art and architecture students in ever-uglier buildings. And truth? In their minds, there is no such thing. Only power remains. How terrible it must be to see the whole of existence through culturally Marxist eyes! Terrible, but, at least, cognitively undemanding.
The radical cultural Marxists weakened universities and, by extension, society. They also made it easier for radical Islam to infiltrate universities, filling the moral vacuum the radicals created with their hazy relativism. This unholy combination of radicals and Islamists then preyed on the impressionable elite students entrusted to the universities. Long story short: We have future graduates of Columbia, NYU, Harvard, and beyond bleating Pro-Hamas slogans spoon-fed to them by hardened extremists. Students who fancy themselves freedom fighters shouting “Intifada and martyrdom.” In their obnoxious gullibility they fail to see what those slogans would mean if applied to their young lives. If you’re wondering, look at what happened to the Israeli students at the Nova festival on October 7th. So ignorant and out of touch are these Ivy League scholars that they do not know that the kids dancing at that ill-fated festival were young, liberal peaceniks.
Unhoused, unfed, and even temporarily unschooled, this freedom fighter would have her story told. Except, it wasn’t actually her story. In fact, Isra Omar and her peers were warned explicitly of the consequences of their Hamasville tent city, which they set up the same day Omar’s mother browbeat the president of the university from which Omar was threatened with suspension. It’s just that Omar genuinely could not imagine that she personally would face consequences—as if she were just any other kid. Her mother the congresswoman worked very hard to intimidate Columbia President Minouche Shafik on television before Congress, and yet she was given no special treatment.
Ilhan Omar’s fellow squadnik Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has her back. She worried about “violent” cops at Columbia (of which there have been exactly zero), demanding to know why “counterterror units” were on the scene. That is, she worried that people who pledged their sympathy to a terror organization and then called on that terror organization to come kill Jewish students on campus might be made to feel unsafe by the presence of antiterrorism police.
Back to that hearing: Shafik was asked why Columbia hired as a visiting professor Mohamed Abdou, who was repeatedly, vocally supportive of Hamas and their Oct. 7 slaughter of innocents. Shafik wavered on what Abdou was doing on campus at the moment, but she swore he’d never teach his “Decolonial-Queerness & Abolition” class at Columbia again. (Which didn’t answer the question of why he’d been hired in the first place.) This week while reporting on the protests at Columbia, Free Beacon reporter Jessica Costescu noticed Abdou hanging around the encampment and started filming the scene. She was approached by a student who told her to stop filming for “safety” reasons.
So you see, these students and their congresspersons aren’t heartless monsters. They care deeply—for themselves. They just want to feel safe to threaten some Jewish students and to physically assault others. And of course, if there are Jews who want to join them in pledging fealty to Hamas, they will advocate for their safety too. It’s a big tent city.
- Thursday, April 25, 2024
- Varda Meyers Epstein (Judean Rose)
07Oct23, hamas, hostages, Judean Rose, MDA, personal essay, Varda
I slid off the chair to the floor, but I know nothing of
this. I am gone. Only later do I ask Dov, my husband, how it happened. “Slid”
was his word. “You slid off the chair onto the floor,” said Dov.
“Did I hit my head?”
“No, the medics kind of caught you and eased you down to the
floor.”
“Then what happened?”
“The MDA guy immediately started compressions,” says Dov, with some awe in his voice. He is obviously impressed with the grace and speed
with which this impromptu team of medics sprang into action.
I chew this over for a few days, this scenario, as
described to me by my husband.
Slowly more questions occur. “What did I look like?”
“You were white,” his voice catches.
I hear that it is too difficult for him to speak about
it—he had watched me die. Still, I have to ask. “Like all-over white? Were my
lips white?”
“You were completely white,” he says.
I take mercy on him and table my questions. For now.
As for what I remember, it was this. I knew nothing. Not a
thing. And then I was aware of blackness, and slowly color came, pixelated at
first, and stole over the blackness and I heard, “Varda, Varda!” my husband’s
voice, and the medics’ voices, and someone was slapping my face, and the MDA
guy said. “Varda, your heart stopped for two seconds. You are going to the
hospital.”
“No, no. I don’t want to go.”
Basically, at this point, I was not compos mentis. I think I
hadn’t been for much of the time the medics were with me, because if it had
really been a money thing—my mind would have long been at rest. The medics
called MDA in spite of me, which already meant I was off the hook for payment.
And now that my heart had stopped, there was no way I would not be admitted,
which meant I would not have to pay for an ER visit. It is therefore impossible
for me to explain the true reasons for why I continued to protest. “Is it about
the money, or something else?” asked the MDA guy as I continued to protest.
“It’s the money . . .” I said.
“Ah ha! Varda,” said the MDA guy,” you are not going to have
to pay. Your heart stopped.”
“. . . and my
husband,” I said, in a feeble voice. “He needs me to take care of him,” but no
one heard me. They were too busy strapping me onto a stretcher in preparation
to take me out of our apartment for transport in the ambulance.
“I’m sorry. I’m so heavy,” I said, embarrassed.
“You’re not so heavy,” said the MDA guy.
As they take me out of the apartment, I see the sky is no longer dark, as it
had been when I awoke that morning. More embarrassment, thinking of the
neighbors on our quiet street, waking up to the ruckus of medics loading
someone in crisis (me) into an ambulance. I feel bad to be the cause of this
too early, too noisy, rude awakening.
I am in the ambulance, and as we drive away, I feel as
though I am flailing from side to side, unmoored. “But how will I keep from
falling?” I say aloud.
“Don’t worry,” says Elisheva the medic, who is also my
friend. “We strapped you in very well. You can’t fall.”
It didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel the straps, but I
trust Elisheva. There is no place to look but up, so I do. I am looking at the
interior of the roof of the ambulance. Everything is as if in brownout. Then
suddenly the brown lifts away and the “ceiling” looks bright white. “I feel
better!” I cry out.
Elisheva says, “Good, good!” encouraging me. Then the
brownout returns. This happens several times. Each time the foggy, beigey brown
clears to white, I say, “I feel better!” surprised. Relieved.
Each time, Elisheva says, “Good!”
At some point during the ride to the hospital, I wonder why
this is happening to me. And then I know. It is October 7. It is the atrocities, the
war, the ongoing situation with the hostages. I lift my head and look at
Elisheva, “The hostages,” I cry to her, knowing she will feel me. “I can’t
bear it,” I say and both she and the MDA guy look at me, and the brownout comes
once more.
It was the most alive I had felt since this whole thing
began. And I knew that what I had promised would not happen, had happened.
At the start of the war I had said to myself, “I will not let Hamas break me,”
and now it had. I had broken. It had been too much for me. I was human, flesh
and blood. It was too much for a body to bear and not be overcome. I had
suppressed it too much. Had tried to, anyway.
I had vowed not to write about the atrocities, not to play
the poor us card before the world. I talked “around” the harshness, the
hideousness of Hamas and what they had done and continue to do, in my columns. I
wrote about rape fear, rather than rape. I wrote about Gazan support for Hamas;
the “ceasefire deal with the devil;” the dirty money trail that led to October
7th; the fickleness of Joe Biden in regard to his (non)support for
Israel; and so on and so forth. Anything but to talk about women raped until
finally dead, their legs that could not be closed, but stood at odd angles, broken.
Raped front and back, the men, too. Women raped in front of their husbands,
husbands raped in front of their wives. Daughters, sisters, children in front
of parents, in front of each other. Sights and sounds that would haunt the
survivors, the few of them that remained, forever.
I vowed not to write about any of this, even as it ate me
from inside. I knew it was eating me from inside. But it was not fair for me to
be feeling this. I was not the one suffering. The suffering belonged to the
raped, the murdered, the decapitated—those who could no longer feel, and those
who felt still, wherever they were, in the depths of some tunnel suffering
unimaginable horrors.
I remember the day I heard about Hamas baking a baby in an
oven. I was in the car with my husband when I read it on X, and I cried out.
“What?” asked my husband.
But I could not tell him. First because I was too consumed
with the pain, the thought of the baby and what it experienced, and then
because I knew it was too upsetting to share. It was something that was new to
me. It had obviously just come to light. I didn’t want anyone else to have to
know this—to have to live with this knowledge of the baby, in the oven, and
what it experienced. Even now, I can’t write about it without crying.
I moaned and cried in the car the whole way home, telling my
husband, “You don’t want to know. It’s too awful. It’s too awful.”
He understood I had heard about an atrocity just come to
light and he said I was right. He didn’t want to know. So I moaned and wailed the whole way home. I couldn’t stop. I cried about this on and off for days.
Couldn’t, shouldn’t wipe it out of my mind, and it ate away at me and ate away
at me. But I did not deserve to have this pain, I thought. It wasn’t about me,
but about the victims. I had no right to make it about me.
Years ago, when my column was hosted on a different
platform, it was understood that the terror victim beat was mine. I had a knack
for making people feel the horror, for making it real, for making the victim
real, someone the reader had never met. I had a knack for making women cry, reading my words.
And it began to feel icky, to feel exploitative. I didn’t
want to have thousands of pageviews only when I wrote about tragedy that
didn’t feel as though it rightly belonged to me. It was a writerly trick, no
more. I stopped. I didn’t want to do it anymore.
Plus, I have to say it affected me. I took it to heart. I
thought about the victims all the time. I dreamt of them. I carried them with
me. It hurt my heart. My heart. And finally my heart stopped. It had had
enough, had broken.
Hamas had, indeed, broken me. Broken my heart.
Several times a day I think about the hostages and the
victims of October 7, and my eyes well up with tears. “No! It’s not about YOU,”
I chide myself, though I know that this is my people and I too, own the sorrow
and the tragedy.
And yet something inside me feels guilty for imagining that
I know anything at all about what these people, MY people had suffered—even now
continue to suffer! I can picture it all in my writer’s mind. I’m a creative. I
picture everything in “living color,” the full horror of it all. I hear the
sounds, the flames, the screaming, I picture the baby. I can’t, I can’t.
***
In the ER, Elisheva sits by me as I go in and out of that strange brownout.
“How long is this going to take,” I ask her. “I need to get home to take care of
Dov.”
“You’re not going to be taking care of Dov, now.”
“But he just had surgery!” I moan.
“You’re not going to be caring for Dov. And you’re not going to
be cleaning for Pesach.
I continue to protest.
“Varda, this is serious,” she says.
Finally, I get it. Just as I finally understood that I had
to go in the ambulance—had to go to the hospital. I lie back. I accept it
for what it is. I died.
“You weren’t with us for a while,” says Elisheva, “You were
lucky you were awake when it happened.”
***
The day the war breaks out, I awaken to the noise of war. Booms.
Artillery. I know what I am hearing. My husband comes home from shul to tell me
what he knows. But he sees that I know and understand that we are at war.
Not that I did know or understand. I could not have imagined
the full horror of it all. No one could have imagined it except for the sick
minds of the black-souled terrorists who perpetrated deeds the Devil himself could
not imagine and would never have contemplated.
My youngest begins getting ready to go back to base. His
elder brother says, “What’s with all the panic? Slow down,” and I hear the
younger say, “You don’t understand!” and then whisper something about thousands
of terrorists on the loose, terrible things happening, terrible.
He gets ready to go, and as he’s going down the walk to his
car, the sirens go off and we make him come back in to go into the safe room. Finally,
he is able to leave with whatever food I can pack for him in a hurry.
Later, as the holiday comes to a close, the other son says
to me, “Don’t listen to the news. I’m telling you, Eema. Don’t listen to the
news.”
Telling me not to listen to the news is like telling me not
to breathe the air, not to drink water. I am all about the news. “Don’t do it,
Eema,” he says, my son, so wise beyond his years. “It’s not just the war on the
battlefield. There’s also the psychological war. They want to break us, Hamas.”
That stays with me. “Hamas wants to break us.”
I vow that Hamas will not break me. I say it to myself all day long—say it
until I am blue in the face. But invariably, I hear things on the news. I
cannot live under a rock. I need to know what is going on. And I hear terrible
things. Things that break me more and more.
Each time I chide myself. “How dare you make it about you? How dare you,” but I
can’t stop it from eating away at me. It nibbles at my heart, at the very core
of me.
Sometimes I listen to the testimonies of the survivors obsessively. I can’t
stop. I also cannot bear to hear them. “You’re not the only one,” I tell myself.
“Everyone in the country feels what you feel. Everyone. And the survivors have
it far worse—feel it far worse than you ever could”
But the hostages? How can I not feel this? The scenarios of
what is happening to them come to me unbidden. I can’t help it. I picture it
all. I picture it all. I cannot stop.
And it eats away at me, at my heart, until my heart says “ENOUGH,” and stops on
a strange dark morning.
I don’t really understand why, after it stops, my heart
once more begins to beat, except that God puts this instinct to live in all of
us. We live, sometimes with terrible knowledge, in spite of ourselves. Whether
or not we feel we can bear it all—all that life throws at us.
Later, in the hospital, the doctor comes to tell me that my
heart stopped for 30 seconds. He seems impressed by this number. My son who accompanies me to the hospital trades glances with me. We’d gone from the two
seconds cited by the MDA guy to 30.
That was in the ER.
Sometime after I am moved to the Intensive Care Cardiac
Unit, another doctor comes and says, “You had a ‘pause’ of 40 seconds.”
My son and I look at each other, both of us thinking, “First
two seconds, then 30 seconds, and now 40??”
The doctor nods. “Yes,” he says. “I counted it. There was a lot of ‘noise’ on
the EKG but I counted it myself and it was 40.”
We can see this is a long time from his perspective—that he
is impressed by this number.
 |
| Actual screenshot from my hospital release letter detailing the 40-second "pause." |
The next morning, the ward cardiologist comes to see me and he explains that there are pauses, long pauses, and very long pauses. Mine was apparently impressively long. “That is a LOOOOONG pause,” the white-haired physician tells me, adding that in his entire career, he had never seen such a long “pause.”
After many days and much testing—the tilt test, a shot of
atropine, an MRI—the doctors decide to put in a pacemaker. The local anesthetic
doesn’t work, and I scream as the knife slices into my flesh. “This is
nothing,” I tell myself on the table, “compared to what the hostages are
suffering, compared to what the victims of October 7 suffered.”
I am certain Hashem is giving me just the smallest taste of
what they felt/feel in their agony. Just the tiniest taste, so that I will have
some understanding, just a glimpse of what they went through, are still going
through. They deserve that, the victims and survivors. They deserve for us to
know and to feel it, too.
Our people, a part of us. A part of my own flesh, my own
blood, my own people, my nation. My heart. I hope that in some way, my
experience on the table will serve as a kapara against whatever sins had
brought this down upon our people. “This is my exchange, this is my substitute,
this is my atonement.”
Once home, I ask two cardiologist friends, “What’s the
longest ‘pause’ you’ve seen in a patient.”
One says, “Ten seconds,” the other says, “Ten, maybe 15 seconds.
Three seconds earns you a pacemaker, he adds.”
Neither one had seen a 40-second pause.
When I go back for my two-week checkup, the doctor squints
at me, trying to place me. I say, “I’m the one with the 40-second pause,” and
she remembers the case immediately, if not my face. What was my face to these
physicians? I was a “pause.”
The longest pause they had seen. I was a miracle: In spite
of Hamas, and almost in spite of myself, I lived.
Hamas broke me, but didn’t break me, because I lived.
My heart is not the same and there is lasting damage, yet I
live to tell the tale.
I live.
Because that is what the Jewish people do. We live
and outlive our enemies. And there is not a thing they can do about it. It’s
ordained by someone far more powerful than Hamas. And Hamas will come to know
this as the flames begin to lick at their feet for all eternity.
No one can best Hashem. No one. The Jewish people will dust
themselves off, never forgetting what has been done to them, and they/we will
continue to live.
Our God is more powerful than Hamas, than even the worst
that Hamas can do to us. The evil ones will never, ultimately, win.
As for me, my heart will never be the same, and that is only right. I am not stone, should not be stone when my/our people are suffering.
Now I know: it’s not that my heart betrayed me. I had to break, a
least a little. My injured heart proved to me that I am human, something that Hamas will never be.
Earlier: Part I: Varda wakes up, and begins to feel truly ill, and Part II: The medics arrive.
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