Three Transgressions - Part 1 - 1977

“ K A H A N E”

The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea

Tevet 5737       January 1977

THREE TRANSGRESSIONS

Part one

“For three transgressions of Judah…” (Amos 2)

And so it begins and 1977 comes early.  We are a people that dearly loves to fool itself and we look away from reality in the hope that it will go away.  But though we look away it will not go away and illusion is but the father of delusion and myths are no substitute for answers to reality. The irony is that every time a Jew speaks up as a Jew and discusses the issues in Jewish terms and Jewish solutions, he is derided as “mystical,” and “impractical,” and “unrealistic.”  We are at that unprecedented age when the Jew who speaks of history and events in terms of G-d and Divine direction, is mocked and looked upon as an embarrassment or worse.  Non-believer and “religious” believer, alike, become diplomats and geopoliticians and the one never thinks of G-d while the other leaves him behind in the synagogue where he “belongs” since, when it comes to politics, we must be “practical.”  

Well, 1977 will show just how impractical and absurd are the secularists and the “religious” allies who reject the mysticism of the truly religious and turn with “cleverness” and “cunning” to Washington, F-15 planes, Lebanese Christians and other “practical” allies and saviors.  Those who trust in Man and mock the unrealistic Jew who follows the ancient and time-honored Jewish way of faith and self-help will learn quickly enough who is the truly practical and who the absurdly ridiculous fool.

We may struggle against wanting to see the truth and we may twist and turn our heads from looking at it, but the realities will never go away and we had best understand them even as they move ominously closer and closer with their threat to Jewish survival.  The realities cannot be denied and they are, starkly and simply:

For Israel, no change.  There remain tens of millions of Arabs, all dedicated to one thing: The elimination of any Israel, of any size or shape.  There are no moderates – there are only Arabs like Sadat who are cleverer than those others who openly say what Sadat means.  And so the Egyptian meets Congressmen and piously speaks of “peace” and “justice” if only Israel will retreat from the lands which Egypt had in its possession in 1967 and which did not stop her from going to war anyhow – for what purpose??? And the pathetic Ribicoffs stand and praise him as a man of “courage and peace” (as did so many Jewish and Israeli leaders in 1975) and the Arab deserves a medal for holding back his laughter…

And the reality remains.  A United States whose interests are so different and so opposed to those of Israel and a Carter and a Ford differ only in accent, as far as Jews are concerned.  America seeks oil, Arab business offers, Arab investment and non-involvement in any confrontation in the Middle East in this post-Vietnam era.  America seeks to continue the very successful (from its point of view) Kissinger policy.  The German Jew (Kissinger) was a tragedy for Israel, but for the United States – he drove the Russians out of the Middle East influence they once had.  And this was done only by promising the Arabs that Washington could do for them, which Moscow could not – force Israel to retreat.  If Carter does not do that, the Russians will return and American materialistic interests will be threatened.  Only the “practical” fools, the gentilized Jews, prefer to believe that America will support Israel because it is a “democracy.”  (Of course, America’s yardstick for supporting nations is whether they are democracies, witness Franco Spain, Salazar Portugal, Greece’s Colonel, South Korea…).  American policy is and always has been the Roger Plan, total Israeli retreat from ALL the liberated lands in return for an Arab piece of paper.  THAT IS THE REALITY for all the gentilized Jews of “practicality.”

The reality is that the sudden burst of Sadat “moderation” and PLO “change of heart” concerning a “Palestine” state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are both aimed at making things easier for America to abandon Israel.  Indeed, Washington has long pleaded with the PLO to make “de facto” moderate statements so as to allow Washington to support the “Palestinian” cause without seeming to abandon Israel.  We are seeing a coordinated Egyptian-Syrian-PLO-Washington plan to get a Geneva Conference that would set the ground for an overall “Peace Plan’ that would demand from Israel complete retreat from the liberated lands and place the onus for further Mideast conflict on Israeli “stubbornness” and “intransigence.”  It will set the stage for more American “reassessment” and delay in arms and money shipments.  It will set the stage for serious and permanent change in American policy towards Israel with a “clean conscience” and a massive sigh of relief from American leaders and people alike.

The reality is Israeli total isolation in the world as it joins South Africa and Rhodesia in the “pariah” class.  And the irony will be that those who so derided and scorned Jews who said to trust alone in G-d will be left with neither G-d nor the Man they so avidly wooed…  The reality is a retreat from lands on which a “Palestine” will be built that will sit a few miles from Israel’s heartland with its missile covering Israeli air space and “volunteers” from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, Pakistan and North Vietnam moving up to the shadow of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

All this is the very real and practical result of the policy of the gentilized Jews who run both Israel and American Jewry.  The ones who never allow the name of G-d to pass their lips, the ones who mock the truly religious, the ones who pompously pontificate on the need for practical thinking and allies.  Well, there are no allies and the Jew who is “practical” today in the same un-Jewish sense that his forefathers were when they scorned the impractical Isaiahs and Hoseas and Jeremiahs and turned with fawning and flattery and prostration to Egypt and Assyria – will find that Assyrians and allies of our time will betray him as swiftly as they did in times of yore.

And the reality for American Jewry is that the Galut, the bitter exile of the Jewish people, did not stop at the western shores of the Atlantic and was not barred from entering the United States.  The exile – that bitterest of all curses, punishments and sins – cannot and will not ever be a sweet refuge. 

(conclusion next week)

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Three Transgressions Part 2

“ K A H A N E”

The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea

Tevet 5737       January 1977

THREE TRANSGRESSIONS

(Conclusion)

And the reality for American Jewry is that the Galut, the bitter exile of the Jewish people, did not stop at the western shores of the Atlantic and was not barred from entering the United States.  The exile – that bitterest of all curses, punishments and sins – cannot and will not ever be a sweet refuge.  The curse of the Tochach (admonishment) will never be changed even though Reform and Yeshiva men alike rip out its pages from their Torahs.  “And the L-rd shall scatter thee among all peoples… and among these nations shall thou have no peace.”  How we ignore those Torah parts that disturb our tranquility! How superb we are at rationalizing them away! How angry we become at those who persist in speaking about it.  How we prefer to create the myth of American Jewish bliss that nothing can disturb since “it cannot happen here!” but, the reality is that it will because it must, because the All Mighty knows full well that unless we are forced to, we will never go willingly back to the Land.

And the reality of Soviet Jewry is that never since Stalin have they faced such a potential for pogroms and physical threats.  The illusion was that public protests and demonstrations could only hurt and when Jewish militants disproved that, the myth arose that it was really the twice-a-year establishment picnics and the respectable protests that had been the true cause of the sudden emigration flow and that became a delusion that everything would always remain as a permanent victory.  But, the reality is that Jewish refusal to mount ever-greater attacks on détente and Jewish betrayal of Henry Jackson and now the worst perfidy of them all – the Israeli and Jewish treachery and selling out of all Soviet Jews who will not go to Israel – are all things that are aiding a potential Holocaust for Soviet Jewry. Where is the sense of urgency, where is the note of emergency? They are the realities and in the delusion that is born of such apathy, we prefer not to see the danger and be forced to act and do unpleasant things.

We are a people that dearly loves to fool itself and deeply resents those who refuse to allow us to.  But the reality is here and it is clear.  Jewish destiny and Jewish history are not things of chance, of permutations and combinations.  They are directed and ordained and we cannot avoid that which shall be unless we do that which should be.  A refusal to be Jewish under the pretense of being “practical” will only make us un-Jewish and the most impractical of peoples.

Faith.  Only this is the key to the redemption and salvation of the Jew and how tragic it is that from one end of the spectrum to the other, from the secularist and Marxist Jew to the pious, practitioner of ritual in the yeshivas, real faith and real understanding of this era and the call of Jewish destiny is so lacking.  It is the era of the final redemption that can come so quickly and so magnificently if only we are prepared to believe in the G-d of history, the Jewish Creator of all and director of that which will be.  There is a Jewish destiny that awaits us and this is ours for the asking and taking.  The Messiah knocks and the door waits to be opened if only we turn the key.  The key is faith; real faith.  Faith based on courage and boldness and sacrifice.  Faith that is more that lip service but is measured by three intensely practical concrete yardsticks:

1)    Faith and courage in knowing that the rise of the State of Israel is the decree of the L-rd and the end of the humiliation of the exile.  That every victory won by Jews is proof that the L-rd, G-d of Israel, is the true Creator and the Decreer of history.  That every retreat and defeat is a retreat to that Hillul Hashem that saw two millennia of humiliation for the Jew and his G-d. That retreat from Jewish land, from any part of Eretz Yisroel is a Biblical prohibition and is more than a retreat from land.  It is a retreat from Kiddush Hashem, a retreat from redemption, a retreat from faith in G-d, a retreat from Jewish Destiny.  “Not one inch” is not a political or military imperative – it is a theological and Torah cry.  If we stand firm and call out to the L-rd, rejecting fear of man and rejecting need of man if that need is based on prostration and fawning flattery – then we will have been true in one aspect of our faith.  Then we will have rejected the stupid, impractical and unrealistically mystical belief in the gentile – in Man – and returned to the practical realistic, Jewish believe in trust in the All Mighty.

2)    Faith and courage in leaving the comfortable Exile with its fleshpots and luxuries that so tempts us and seduces us.  The strength to leave comfort for duty, obligation and -commandment.  The courage to choose to fulfill the difficult mitzvah of living in the land rather than wallowing in the impurities and spiritual filth of the Exile.  The faith in G-d that allows us to admit that we, irreligious and religious alike, small and great together, have sinned against the land.  Rejection of the rationalizations and false “pilpul” that helps us to stay and rot in the inevitable graveyard that the Exile will become.  Faith in the land, strength to go home.

3)    Faith and courage in doing what we must for fellow Jews.  Feeling the pain of each and every Jew who is in pain and the readiness to sacrifice and suffer with him, to save him.  A rejection of apathy, a throwing off of indifference, a burial of fearful contemplation and selfish interests.  Massive and powerful demonstrations and attacks on the Russians – clear warnings at what awful thing could happen should Soviet Jewry be under physical attack. 

         
          Massive and powerful protests now, even before the full United

          States pressure begins against any possible US strangulation of Israel.  

          Jewish action instead of reaction.  Massive and powerful demands

          that American Jewish leadership become democratized so that the poor 

           and the elderly and the weak will be aided so that Jewish funds go only 

          to help Jews.  Faith and courage to consider what the gentile wills 

          say  and to reply:  Who cares?  Faith and courage to know that if we do  

          what the All Mighty wishes – the love or hate of the gentile is irrelevant.

Three acts of faith that can absolve us of our three transgressions.  Only thus can we be practical, realistic, pragmatic.  Only by being Jewish can we stop being ridiculously mystical and believe that our salvation lies in the hands of the gentile. We are a people that is different, that is chosen, that is great, that can never be destroyed.  Why do we persist in refusing to recognize ourselves?  Why, if we are giants, do we insist on being dwarfs?

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The Wisdom of the Nations-Every Jew a 22 -1977

“ K A H A N E ”

The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea

May 1977      Sivan 5737

THE WISDOM OF THE NATIONS

If one tells you that there is wisdom among the nations- believe it.  So speak the sages of the Talmud in laying down for the Jew the principle that, outside of the study of Torah, there is indeed wisdom and art to be learned from the non-Jewish world.  And, truly, the world of our times is filled with gentile wisdom that is proper and necessary for the Jew to learn and in which he should become proficient.  In one of these areas the nations of the world have a long lead on us and have been studying their art for centuries with as much zeal and diligence as the Jew bent over his Gemora in the long winter nights and the hot summer days.  It is an important art, this gentile craft, and one which is more than a luxury for our people.  It is an area whose knowledge and proficiency is basic to survival, and Jewish existence in this era of the jungle trumpets forth the need for studious and diligent Jewish study of Torat Ha’amim – the wisdom of the nations.  I speak of the art of shooting, the craft of self-defense, the marriage of the Jew and the gun.

“Jewish youth, learn to shoot.”  So wrote the late, great Zev Jabotinsky in an essay that has to rank as one of the most brilliant and prophetic writings of modern Jewish times.  The days were the 1930’s; the era Churchill so aptly labeled the Locust Years.  In Eastern Europe, the pogromchiks and anti-Semites of all intellectual stripes fumed and raved against the Jew.  The seeds of Jew-hatred sprouted there with unbelievable speed and in the Third Reich the catalyst for the worst of anti-Jewish horrors had surfaced.  And Jabotinsky watched the agony of his people and beheld – as a latter-day Jeremiah – the black future that was moving inexorably upon them.  He saw it all, felt it all and sat down to write his essay.  He called it ‘Oifen Pripitchek.’

What knowledgeable Jew does not know the song of that name!  The haunting tune and indescribable words of the poet Warshawsky paint for us a picture of the Jew that opens for us the secret of his survival.  A fire is burning on the hearth and the house is warm.  The melamed – the teacher of tiny children – sits about with his little wards and teaches them their first Hebrew letters.

‘Learn my children, learn with diligence,” he tells them.  “Remember what you learn here, Aleph, Beis, Gimel…”  And as he teaches his three and four year olds, he speaks to them but, in reality, to himself and to each of us.

“Children, you will get older and then you will understand yourselves, how much within these letters lie tears and how much pain…”

And Jabotinsky took this song – this unofficial national anthem of Diasporan Jewry – and used it as his point of departure.  The Rebbe continues to teach his children, continues to sigh with the persecution and pain of centuries but continues his lesson saying: “One must be strong to survive all that we have borne and consolation can be found only in strength.”

Every generation has its Aleph Beis and Jabotinsky takes his Rebbe and has him look at his tots, the tots whose fathers and grandfathers before them faced a hostile and vicious Jew-hating world, who were beaten and wracked with pain, who died at the hands of nations who knew how to shoot.  And Jabotinsky’s Rebbe sees his tots who will have to face the same muzhiks and the same animals, who will face the guns of the nations, and he teaches them the new Aleph Beis – “Young men, learn to shoot!”

It does not matter that the Aleph Beis is difficult.  It is not relevant that it is strange and we are instinctively repelled by it.  The Rebbe must teach his children that “of all the necessities of national rebirth, shooting is the most important…  We are forced to learn to shoot and it is futile to argue against the compulsion of an historical reality.”

There were too few Rebbes in real-life who taught Torat Ha’amim to their children, and in the Eastern Europe of Jabotinsky’s time he was vilified and condemned for his new Aleph Beis.  ‘Fascist,’ Fuehrer,’ ‘militarist’ were but some of the kinder epithets used by enemies and by those whose lack of vision and timidity blinded them to the realities of what was happening.  They looked at the clock and saw that it was six, while Jabotinsky was already reading midnight.  Because they hooted him down and because they had not learned to tell Jewish time and because Jewish youths were told not to learn to shoot, the black night came down upon European Jewry, finding them unprepared, ill equipped, untrained and amei haaretz (ignoramuses) in Torat Ha’amim.  They paid for their ignorance by the millions and for their clumsiness with whole communities.  If a handful of the enemy could pursue with ease a thousand Jews, it was because they had mastered the art of shooting while the Jew – the man of the book – stood naked in his incompetence.  The nations had the rifles and we did not.  The Jewish dropout paid the supreme penalty.

Every Jew a 22.  Let it be shouted and let the educational campaign go forth.  Let Aleph Beis be taught to Jewish young men and women.  Let the study halls be filled with Jewish diligence and deep scrutiny.  Young Jewish men and women, learn to shoot.  Drink thirstily at the feet of the non-Jew this one art in which he excels.  Learn, practice and outdo all the rest for we dare not be as ignorant as our fathers were before us and we cannot repeat the errors of the past.  If Jewish neighborhoods are prey to muggers and rapists and robbers because it is well known that Jews and Jewish homes have no guns – let it be changed.  If Jews are victims of hoodlums and hooligans because the Jew is not one who is armed and dangerous – let it be different.  If the Jewish image is one of fearful timidity and ignorance in Torat Ha’amim,; if the nations of the world laugh at our backwardness and confidently beat us for it – let Torat Ha’amim also go forth from Zion and the voice of Jewish strength from every Jewish neighborhood and home.  If there is a difference in the level of crime and violence in an Italian neighborhood as compared with the Jewish one, the difference is that within the mind of the hooligan, one has the shadow of the gun while the other is filled with peaceful ignoramuses.

If those who, in future days, would bring to these shores the night of the long knives, contemplate such thoughts with confident impunity, let them hear that Jews are leaning their new Aleph Beis.  The bully and the hoodlum do not so swiftly move to trample Jews when their own noses will be bloodied and when the taking of a Jewish life is pursued at the risk of his own.

The problem is not the non-Jew, but the Jew.  What is needed is a change in his psychology and in the way he looks at the gun.  He must be made to understand that, in a world where the nations master the art of shooting, Jewish survival depends upon Jewish knowledge of the same and on non-Jewish knowledge that the Jew has this knowledge.  A wild dog fears a whip; the mad-dog anti-Semite fears the gun.  He should; being proficient with it he knows what it can do to the Jew – and to himself.  With love of peace and desire for tranquility, young Jewish men and women, learn to shoot.

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Down With Chanukah 1972

DOWN WITH CHANUKAH 

December 15, 1972

Rabbi Meir Kahane Writings (5732-33) (1971-73)

            If I were a Reform rabbi; if I were a leader of the Establishment whose money and prestige have succeeded in capturing for him the leadership and voice of American Jewry; if I were one of the members of the Israeli Government’s ruling group; if I were an enlightened sophisticated, modern Jewish intellectual, I would climb the barricades and join in battle against the most dangerous of all Jewish holidays – Chanukah.

            It is a measure of the total ignorance of the world Jewish community that there is no holiday that is more universally celebrated than the “Feast of Lights”, and it is an equal measure of the intellectual dishonesty and of Jewish leadership that it plays along with the lie.  For if ever there was a holiday that stands for everything that the mass of world Jewry and their leadership has rejected – it is this one.  If one would find an event that is truly rooted in everything that Jews of our times and their leaders have rejected and, indeed, attacked – it is this one.  If there is any holiday that is more “unJewish” in the sense of our modern beliefs and practices – I do not know of it.

            The Chanukah that has erupted unto the world Jewish scene in all its childishness, asininity, shallowness, ignorance and fraud – is not the Chanukah of reality.  The Chanukah that came into vogue because of Jewish parents – in their vapidness – needed something to counteract Christmas; that exploded in a show of “we-can-have-lights-just-as-our-goyish-neighbors” and in an effort to reward our spoiled children with eight gifts instead of the poor Christian one; the Chanukah that the Temple, under its captive rabbi, turned into a school pageant so that the beaming parents might think that the Religious School is really successful instead of the tragic joke and waste that it really is; the Chanukah that speaks of Jewish Patrick Henrys giving-me-liberty-or death and the pictures of Maccabees as great liberal saviors who fought so that the kibbutzim might continue to be free to preach their Marx and eat their ham, that the split-level dwellers of suburbia might be allowed to violate their Sabbath in perfect freedom and the Reform and Conservative Temples continue the fight for civil rights for Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Jane Fonda, is not remotely connected with reality. 

            This is NOT the Chanukah of our ancestors, of the generations of Jews of Eastern Europe and Yemen and Morocco and the crusades and Spain and Babylon.  It is surely not the Chanukah for which the Maccabees themselves died.  Truly, could those whom we honor so munificently, return and see what Chanukah has become, they might very well begin a second Maccabean revolt.  For the life that we Jews lead today was the very cause, the REAL reason for the revolt of the Jews “in those days in our times.”  

            What happened in that era more than 2000 years ago?  What led a handful of Jews to rise up in violence against the enemy?  And precisely who WAS the enemy?  What were they fighting FOR and who were they fighting AGAINST?

            For years, the people of Judea had been the vassals of Greece.  True independence as a state had been unknown for all those decades and, yet, the Jews did not rise up in revolt.  It was only when the Greek policy shifted from mere political control to one that attempted to suppress the Jewish religion that the revolt erupted in all its bloodiness.  It was not mere liberty that led to the Maccabean uprising that we so passionately applaud.  What we are really cheering is a brave group of Jews who fought and plunged Judea into a bloodbath for the right to observe the Sabbath, to follow the laws of kashruth, to obey the laws of the Torah.  IN A WORD EVERYTHING ABOUT CHANUKAH THAT WE COMMEMORATE AND TEACH OUR CHILDREN TO COMMEMORATE ARE THINGS WE CONSIDER TO BE OUTMODED, MEDIEVAL AND CHILDISH!

            At best, then, those who fought and died for Chanukah were naïve and obscurantist.  Had we lived in those days we would certainly not have done what they did for everyone knows that the laws of the Torah are not really Divine but only the products of evolution and men (do not the Reform, Reconstructionist and large parts of the Conservative movements write this daily?)  Surely we would not have fought for that which we violate every day of our lives!  No, at best Chanukah emerges as a needless holiday if not a foolish one.  Poor Hannah and her seven children; poor Mattathias and Judah; poor well meaning chaps all but hopelessly backward and utterly unnecessary sacrifices.

            But there is more.  Not only is Chanukah really a foolish and unnecessary holiday, it is also one that is dangerously fanatical and illiberal. The first act of rebellion, the first enemy who fell at the hands of the brave Jewish heroes whom our delightful children portray so cleverly in their Sunday and religious school pageants, was NOT a Greek.  He was a Jew.

            When the enemy sent its troops into the town of Modin to set up an idol and demand its worship, it was a Jew who decided to exercise his freedom of pagan worship and who approached the altar to worship Zeus (after all, what business was it of anyone what this fellow worshipped?)  And it was this Jew, this apostate, this religious traitor who was struck down by the brave, glorious, courageous (are these not the words all our Sunday schools use to describe him?) Mattathias, as he shouted: “Whoever is for G-d, follow me!”  

            What have we here?  What kind of religious intolerance and bigotry?  What kind of a man is this for the anti-religious of Hashomer Hatzair, the graceful temples of suburbia, the sophisticated intellectuals, the liberal open-minded Jews and all the drones who have wearied us unto death with the concept of Judaism as a humanistic, open-minded, undogmatic, liberal, universalistic (if not Marxist) religion, to honor?  What kind of nationalism is this for David-Ben-Gurion (he who rejects the Galut and speaks of the proud, free Jew of ancient Judea and Israel)?

            And to crush us even more (we who know that Judaism is a faith of peace which deplores violence), what kind of Jews were these who reacted to oppression with FORCE?  Surely we who so properly have deplored Jewish violence as fascistic, immoral and (above all!) UN-JEWISH, stand in horror as we contemplate Jews who declined to picket the Syrian Greeks to death and who rejected quiet diplomacy for the sword, spear and arrow (had there been bombs in those days, who can tell what they might have done?) and “descended to the level of evil,” thus rejecting the ethical and moral concepts of Judaism.

            Is this the kind of a holiday we wish to propagate?  Are these the kinds of men we want our moral and humanistic children to honor?  Is this the kind of Judaism that we wish to observe and pass on to our children?

            Where shall we find the man of courage the one voice, in the wilderness to cry out against Chanukah and the Judaism that it represents-the Judaism of our grandparents and ancestors?  Where shall we find the man of honesty and integrity to attack the Judaism of Medievalism and outdated foolishness; the Judaism of bigotry that strikes down Jews who refuse to observe the law; the Judaism of violence that calls for Jewish force and might against the enemy?  When shall we find the courage to proudly eat our Chinese food and violate our Sabbaths and reject all the separateness, nationalism and religious maximalism that Chanukah so ignobly represents?  …Down with Chanukah!  It is a regressive holiday that merely symbolizes the Judaism that always was; the Judaism that was handed down to us from Sinai; the Judaism that made our ancestors ready to give their lives for the L-rd; the Judaism that young people instinctively know is true and great and real.  Such Judaism is dangerous for us and our leaders.  We must do all in our power to bury it.

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The Temple Mount - 1987

UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS FOR COMFORTABLE JEWS

By Rabbi Meir Kahane, written in 1987

The Temple Mount (excerpts)

Once upon a time, in the exile, the Jews would decide every major step by the proposition:  What will the gentiles say.  Then they created Israel, where Jews would be sovereign and free….Laugh not, but rather weep for generations.

Jerusalem. Where the Palestinian autonomy and eventual state is being built.  Jerusalem, which mirrors so much of the other desecrations that fills the land. 

The Temple Mount is not in our hands.  East Jerusalem is not in our hands.  Judea and Samaria and Gaza and the Golan are not in our hands.  The Biblical Eretz Yisrael which we liberated through G-d’s decree in 1967, is not in our hands.

The Temple Mount is in their hands, the foxes, the cunning Arab foxes.  And the words of Motta Gur ring hollowly – and it is we who are to blame.  We took a miracle and disdained it.  We, who took holiness and profaned it.  We who were given a Zion, a Jerusalem, Temple Mount – and gave it over to the jackal-foxes.

He who controls the Temple Mount will control Jerusalem.  And he who controls Jerusalem will control the Holy Land.  And the desecration of the Land and of G-d is inconceivable.

JEWS TERRIFY ME   

I have never been afraid of the Arabs; it is the Jews who terrify me.  The ultimate danger to Jews has never been the gentile; it is the Jews who have always been their own worst enemy.  And no Arab state or combination thereof can ever bring Israel to its knees.  To accomplish that, they must look to the enemy within, the Jews of self-hate, of cancerous guilt, the lemmings of Suicide Now.  To our bitter regret, there is no lack of these; the enemy is indeed within the gates, within the walls.

THE DREAM

The hope is not yet lost – the hope of two thousand years, to be a free people in our own land…” (from the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikva’)

The following appeared as a letter to the editor in the Histradut labor newspaper Davar (June 30, 1986

“On June 19, we were waiting on line to see the doctor, some 30 of us.  An argument broke out between a young woman elegantly dressed and obviously well off, and an elderly man.  He quietly explained to her that it was his turn to see the doctor.  She began screaming at him and among the gems said: ‘I am an Arab; this land is mine and who needs you Jews here? Go back where you came from.’

“A large crowd gathered from all the departments – and, now, pay attention:  An Arab woman stands between perhaps 100 Jews in a Jewish institution waiting to see a Jewish doctor and shots.  Then she slapped the elderly Jew.  He wished to hit her back, but could not reach her.  She gave him a hard blow and sent him flying.  He lost consciousness, blood flowed from his head, and he was given oxygen and taken by ambulance to the hospital.  But, no one touched the Arab woman!  What would have happened if this had been a Jewish woman among Arabs?  The police came and she shouted:  I am not afraid of anyone, not you or the police….”

In the year 5707 –1948 by the gentile calendar that the Jews had lived under for so long-the dream was realized.  A Jewish State was declared in the Land of Israel.  A Jewish State!  No more fear, no more terror in the streets!  A Jewish State! Free and proud and a kingdom of Kings!    Hardly!

More attacks on Jews pre-Oslo years, can be found in “Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews,” Chapter 7 – The Dream

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The Bulldozers Of Hate -1987

RABBI MEIR KAHANE

UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTIONS FOR COMFORTABLE JEWS  -

 

THE BULLDOZERS OF HATE (Excerpts) 1987

This is the background.  That is the record of people and parties who screech in hate against Kahane.  And it is that background and that record that help so much to explain the sickness of soul and the capacity of these people today.  Those who killed and trampled on Jews yesterday are clearly capable of repeating it today in their unadulterated, blind, psychopathic hatred of Kahane and of what has come to be called “Kahanism.”  Not the slightest willingness to meet and intellectually discuss the very real issues.  Hate, only hate.  And murder, in the eyes and in the souls of the haters.  The hate and murder that come from a long left liberal-humanist tradition.  The hate and murder that blind and block all reason, logic, normalcy.  The hate and murder that turn man into a savage beats, lusting and yearning to lash out and kill.

The hate and murder that lays bare the sheer hypocrisy of “democrats” who call for the shutting of mouths and the utter fraud of “humanists” calling for physical violence against those they oppose.  The naked contradiction of soul of liberals who call for the end of rights and freedoms for those they consider dangerous to their views.

And so, the Kach Movement prepares for its annual convention.  It applies for a hall in Jerusalem’s Convention Center, owned by the Jewish Agency, the public body set up to coordinate Zionist activities between Israel and Jews in the exile.  Arye Dulzin, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, a corpulent, wealthy Mexican Jew refuses the application.  He bitterly differs with Kach’s policies, will not allow the public hall to be rented by a Zionist political party that sits in the Knesset.  The night before the scheduled convention, the Communist Party has the hall for a concert featuring a Soviet Moslem singer.  No doubt a radical Zionist.

The court forces the Jewish Agency to rent the hall.  That, it turns out, is the easy part.  The second half of the problem, the storm troopers of the left, is not so easily disposed of.

: Large ads appear in all the papers.  They read:  “There is no place for Kach in our country.”  Peace Now and a host of other leftist groups, including one called Ma’ane – an umbrella group formed to fight Kahane – openly proclaim their intention to stop the convention; thousands of leftists are bused in from kibbutzim and other cities.  A large PLO flag is carried as well as banners against Kahane, Kach and “racism.”  Leftist and Arab Knesset members speak; Teddy Kollek brays.  The message is the same: Stop the “fascists.”

As Kahane arrives, the leftists grow mad with rage.  The police succeed in getting Kahane through the crowd into the hall, but Kach members are attacked and physically beaten.  The police, after an hour of indifference, now give the Border Patrol, the tough special police force known for its sympathy to Kahane, orders to push the leftists back.  In a letter to the Histradrut paper, Davar, one of the leaders of the anti-Kahane crusade, veteran leftist Dov Yirmiya writes: “I am a criminal; I broke the law when I burst the barriers near Convention Center to stop the arch-racist.  I broke the law and am proud of it.”

Gideon Rafael, former director-general of the Foreign Ministry writes in the Jerusalem Post, calling for a mass violation of the law in order to stop Kahane.  He says: “A human wall of non-violent but steadfast resisters can make the slogan, ‘Kahane shall not pass’, an irresistible reality, a wall that stands firm even if confronted by baton-wielding mounted police.”  And Rafael exemplifies the babbling and dangerous “progressive democrat” as he continues: “It is unthinkable that the political authority responsible for the police would permit it to trample down non-violent defenders of Israel’s democracy.”  Translation:  Since we have decided that Kahane is dangerous, we expect the political minister who runs the police to give orders to them to allow us to break the law and prevent Kahane from speaking.

A leaflet at a Kahane rally, issued by the Israeli socialist left, is headed: “He has no right to speak!”  Its operative sentence reads: “Preventing Kahane and his associates from their racist incitement is a remarkable example of civic action and no factor, government or other, has the right to stop us.”

Young children are mobilized by the leftists to come to Kahane rallies with whistles and to shout him down.  Leftist writer Teddy Preuss, writing in the newspaper Davar, says: “In view of the apathy of the Knesset, citizen organization is the last barrier to fascism.  By organizations, I mean the taking of steps more practical than whistles.  How the mounted police will behave is not difficult to imagine, but this is the danger that the supporters of democracy must take upon themselves.”

The call is to smash the law and destroy the opposition. All this I have seen.  The twisted faces, the obscene gestures, the curses, the hate.  The face of those who want a civil war.  Once again, the face of The Season.

How important, how terribly important it is for all to know them, as they truly are.  No one can even begin to understand their awesome sickness of soul and thus learn to discount their vicious lies and wild, savage defamation, unless he really knows their past, their awful crimes, their terrible readiness to stop at nothing to crush those who stand in their way.

And those in the Exile.  The Jewish leaders, the feudal barons of the Exile.  How they hate and fear Kahane and move heaven and earth to silence him there.  How they frantically use their awesome money and power that has created such a feudal empire, to attempt to prevent Kahane from appearing before Jews.  They who control Jewish public funds and disperse to only those institutions they see as acceptable. Through the weapons of fear and monetary blackmail, they rule unfettered, never elected by the community, never questioned by the bleating flocks.  Benevolent despots, they move patronizingly among their fawning serfs, dispensing favors and honors, sure of both their power as well as of the timidity, apathy, fear and docility of the serfs.  But when a rebel rises up and when he dares to cry out the truth of their nakedness, their ugliness, their threat to the very existence of the sheep, the flocks, the Jews – then the fangs are bared, the ugliness revealed.  Then the fascists arise!

They are frozen at the thought of Kahane describing their own Establishment’s emptiness, of their having sat quietly by during the Holocaust, of their apathy concerning Soviet Jewry, of their policies of “the melting pot” and interfaith and all the rest that led to the spiritual destruction of hundreds of thousands of Jewish youth.

They are terrified at having Jews asked by Kahane the simple question:  Do you agree that Arabs have the right to democratically, peacefully, quietly and non-violently become the majority in Israel and vote the Jewish state out of existence?  They shudder at Kahane describing the weekly murders of Jews in Israel; the incredible assimilation and growth of intermarriage in Israel between Jews and Arabs; the clear, logical, painfully obvious fact that Arabs in Israel do not want to live in a Jewish state and will do everything possible to make sure that their national anthem will not be the “Hatikva” that speaks of “the soul of a Jew yearning.”  They resent Kahane’s laying out of the basic contradiction between western democracy and a Jewish state.

Above all, their blood chills at the Kahane message to his Jewish audience:  Who elected your Jewish leaders?  Who elected the feudal barons who control Jewish funds; allocate Jewish moneys, run the community as their fiefdom?  They, who are so bankrupt, can never allow Kahane to tell the Jewish community: Your Jewish leaders are bankrupt!

And so they must attempt to silence Kahane, and the methods they use do not matter.  You ask:  If Kahane is so insane and so wrong, why not debate him and before millions of people, destroy him once and for all?  A magnificent question. Why not debate Kahane; he will destroy him.  And so, when Kahane comes to any Jewish city and demands a debate or meeting, they run in terror.  Of course they tell the news media that their that their reason is that they do not wish to “legitimatize” Kahane.  But the truth is clear.  The same ones who will meet with Arabs because “one must meet with those with whom we differ….”; the ones who, if Farrakhan wrote and asked for a meeting to “dialogue,” would fall all over themselves – these can never meet with Kahane.  For the Arabs and Farrakhan are really not threats to the Jewish feudal barons.  Kahane is.  He rips away their pretensions.  He tells the sheep:  Look at your shepherds, your murderers…

The feudal barons are terrified of Kahane.  The thought of the Knesset member being heard by Jews is so nightmarish to them for the sublimely simple reasons that they know that once Kahane has an opportunity to meet and speak with Jews, the ugly and false image that ahs been so perfidiously constructed will melt away as snow in the warm spring sun.

The fat, the powerful, the frightened.  Kahane frightens them more than any Jew since the rise of Israel.  For he speaks of a total change of society.  The remaking of Israel into a Jewish state.  The permanent remaking of values to Jewish ones, the creation of new and permanent generation of Jews.  The promise that the feudal barons, the Hellenists, the mixed multitude, the Hebrew speaking gentiles in Israel and the foreigners in Jewish Establishment clothing in the Exile will be forever thrown out of power.

That is the greatest of all fears, and as we see that fear coming out of their pores, the vicious smell of their natural reactions, fascism, fills the air and the nostrils.  They will stop at nothing.  They have in the past murdered, bodies and souls.  Why not the same now, when their very kingdom is at stake?

Anyone reading this Rav Kahane article and is not on my personal list to receive the weekly articles written by Rav Kahane and would like to be, please contact me at:

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Of Russians And Syrians And All The Rest -1983

“ K A H A N E”

The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea

Summer 5743 -1983

VIEWPOINT

 

Of Russians and Syrians And All The Rest

A remarkable thing is happening on the northern borders of Israel.  There have always been Arabs there but today there are others, indeed, a whole host of peoples from north, south, east and west.  And Russians and Americans.

The gropers and other blind will see in this the ordinary, the shallow, the starkly obvious.  The presence of the Americans is seen as a natural extension of Reaganism.  The entry of the French and Italians is understood as a necessary adjunct to the entry of Americans as part of the multinational force.  The Irish, Fijis, Norwegians and Dutch are part of the normal Untied Nations intervention.  The Russians have appeared as part of their political need to prevent western influence in the Arab world.  All logical and clear.  Except for those who have Jewish eyes to see.

If one does not even bruise a finger in this world except that it is ordained above, what shall Jews, who really believe, say about what is unfolding in the Middle East?  What we see is the beginning of the final act of the final era.  The beginning of the redemption that unfolded with the rise of Israel in 1948 has entered the final stage and the end approaches.  Those who never saw the beginning of the redemption can, of course, not understand its final stage.  But it comes and the Russians and Syrians and all the nations that suddenly appear on the borders of Israel, are harbingers of the terrible and needless suffering upcoming.

The babbling blind who rush about searching for peace and tranquility must somehow be made to understand that there can be no peace now or ever except in one way; that the final redemption can come about in only one of two ways and there is absolutely no other way.  And that the Jew and the world are bound by a destiny that they cannot escape and that they must bow to, and that from these iron laws of history there is no flight. “If you walk in my statues… I will give peace unto the land.” Those are the thunderous words of the Torah and there is no escape from them.  Peace and tranquility and escape from suffering can come only by our bending our neck beneath the yoke of G-d.  There is no other way.  And the redemption can finally come in only one of two ways.  If we bow to G-d and follow His laws it will come immediately and majestically.  If not, it will come, but only preceded by the terrible anguish and pain that He has warned against.  This is the iron law of G-d; there is no other way.

The awful gathering of the hordes of Gog and the nations that shall accompany him, has begun.  The Russians are coming, and the Syrians and all the others.  The world has discovered the Jews.  The entire world is gathering against us.  We can destroy them utterly and with glorious majesty – if we deserve it by bowing to His will.  If not, it will soon become clear even to the blindest that the Prophets spoke of our very times. The Russians are here, and the Americans, and it is the beginning of the end.

The Flood That Cometh

Ronald Reagan will surely go down in history as the Avon Man, the great Cosmetic salesman of our time.  Rarely has a man so shallow in both intellect and policy been more successful in covering up his emptiness and a cosmetic façade of success.  And never was that more evident than at the ludicrous Williamsburg summit which avoided every conceivably difficult and crucial issue in the name of some remote concept called “unanimity” whose origins lay in the Reagan need to show glittering success so that his campaign for a second Presidential term will be successful.

Thus, the Grand Canyon of Presidential shallowness uses all the clever tricks of the acting trade, a device that every great political actor, such as Menachem Begin, so well knows will capture the minds of the mindless Golems called “the people.”  So who speaks about the real problems of the West – the insoluble unemployment question, and issue that now increasingly includes millions of intellectual proletarians, the harvest of too many university graduates who cannot find the too few jobs, the result of liberal insanity that agrees that everyone must go to college?  Who speaks about the issue of western deficits which can never be cut because the people would never stand for it and the weak politicians give the mob all they demand lest their refusal to do so result in their ouster from power?  Who speaks of the inexorable rise in interest rates that are the result of this insanity, a thing that will abort any recovery before it begins?  Who speaks of the fact that the west has permanently priced itself out of world markets and ahs lost forever jobs and industry to the cheap-labor Third World? Who speaks of the greed of people encouraged by the cynical politicians who then become victims of their own rhetoric and who cannot tell the people the bitter economic and social truths?

And so the tiny politicians and the frightened ones remain silent in a mass case of Louisltis (“Apres mol le deluge…”)   And that flood surely cometh in overwhelming measure as part of the Divine hand of Fury at the nations.  There is no stopping it and for the Jew who remains behind in the exiles there is only the prospect of utter calamity.

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Next Year In Jerusalem - Maybe - 1971

MEIR KAHANE

WRITINGS 5732-33   1971 -73

NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM –MAYBE

 December 24, 1971

The synagogue if filled from end to end.  Every seat is reserved, every inch of space taken up.  The Yom Kippur Neila service is drawing to an end.  A day of repentance, prayer and charity fades to a close.  A congregation, elevated for a day at least, watches as the Shofar is raised and a long clear, vibrant blast fills the hall.  Five hundred voices cry out spontaneously –

L’Shana Ha’Ba’ah B’ Yerusalayim!  “Next year in Jerusalem!”

The crowd files out to begin yet another year of bitter exile amidst television and Miami Beach.

The synagogue is dark and hushed.  A few candles flutter in the corners, their flickering flames lighting the pained and saddened faces of the congregation sitting on low benches waiting for the Tisha B’Av services to begin and the mournful tune of the Eycha – Lamentations – rises softly, punctuated by the sobs of the mourners for Zion.  Every mind is shattered as the picture of the beloved homeland, bereft of its children, comes to mind.  Every pious Jew sitting in the room sighs and dreams of the day - may it soon come - when G-d will allow him to, once again, kiss the soil of the homeland – courtesy of a three-weeks American Jewish Congress guided tour, and then back home again to the painful fleshpots.

The dream of settling in Israel is a basic part of the Jewish faith.  It is an obligation but it is more than that:  “It is a dream.  How many seas would the tears of our ancestors have filled as they wept for the privilege of returning to Zion?  How piercing would have been the totality of their cries as they prayed to the yoke of nations and bring us upright to our land!”

Who can begin to fully quote the letter of the obligatory law to settle in the Land of Israel as expounded by our rabbis and who can adequately describe the acceptance of the spirit of that obligation by our ancestors, the dreamers of Zion?  What would they not have given for the opportunity of returning and walking four cubits on its soil?  How they would have flocked to the airports and harbors as the great vision approached fulfillment!

I write this as a traditional, observant Jew.  For myself I have written and spoken and pleaded a thousand times over to all Jews of America to leave and return to Israel – not for religious reasons – but for the elementary need to save their lives.  I believe in the marrow of my bones that the days of the Jew in the Untied States are numbered and that there is coming a storm of physical brutality that portends a holocaust.  What 48 prophets could not convince Jews to do, says the Talmud, Haman’s ring accomplished.  There is a Haman’s ring in the American Jewish future and for the sake of our children and grandchildren the time to evacuate is now.  I have said this and will continue to say this to all Jews.  But, for the observant ones there is another, an added; perhaps, an even more important reason.

Every traditional Jew must take a long and deep look at himself.  He must ask difficult and painful questions.  How is it possible to honestly pray three times a day to the Almighty to restore us to Zion when that restoration is ours at a cost of a few hundred dollars, courtesy of El Al?  What rationalizations can we invent to answer those who question our lamentations for Zion when the Jewish Agency is prepared to grant long-term loans for housing and transportation for those who wish to settle in Israel?  What can hide our shame as we fervently proclaim “Next Year in the Land of Israel” when next year has already come, when the gates of the Holy Land stand open, when the obligation to return can and demands to be fulfilled?

All this has nothing to do with the particular religious Jew’s attitude toward the government or State of Israel.  We speak here, not of political Zionism, but of the original and permanent obligation to go up and settle the Holy Land – an obligation that is clear and binding upon all - from the Mizrachi through the Agudat Israel to Amram Blau and the Neturei Karta.

What kind of Jews are we who profess a Judaism that builds up a dream in ritual and prayer – until it is at the very center of our aspirations – and then make a mockery of it in practice?  Those who are able to return and do not must cease to weep salted tears and put an end to insincere lamentations.  Let us rather admit that we have eaten too long at the fleshpots of galut – exile – and that the bribery of the good life has compromised and blinded us.  When a famous Rosh Yeshiva chided Ben Gurion on the secularism of Israel, the then Prime Minister cunningly replied: “Let the American religious Jews come here and put me out of office.”

He could well afford to be clever for he knew that most would not come.  The Catskills have overshadowed the hills of Jerusalem and the Rockaways conquered the Jordan and the Mediterranean.  Electric appliances have replaced the flame of sacrifice and the television set the Book of Lamentations.  In a sense it is symbolic of a general loss of ability to sacrifice on the part of the American Jew – and the religious one is little different.  It is a sad and dangerous thing.

From the religious point of view there is a double tragedy here.  What power lies in the hands of a dynamic religious immigration!  What a noble impression and Kiddush Hashem – Sanctification of the Name – it would create in the young Israeli mind if religious Jews showed the courage of their convictions!  What a Jewish State could be shaped out of a State of Israel!

Certainly it is difficult; to be sure there would have to be sacrifices in the economic standard of one’s life.  Yes, there is a language barrier and no doubt employment would be a problem for a time and life would not be quite as materially sweet as back home with the good life and the American Nazi Party.  But, since when has a religious Jew assumed that life was made to be sweet and that the Almighty placed him here so as to be comfortable?  Is the excuse of economic difficulty enough to justify, in the religious Jew’s mind, the rationale given him by the non-observant for violating even the rabbinical laws of Sabbath?  Is the Jew who tells us that economic need makes it imperative that his store remain open on the Sabbath since that is by far his busiest day, given dispensation?  Do we calmly accept the decision of people not to send their children to yeshivot because of the economic difficulty involved or do we call upon them to make that sacrifice that is needed for the great commandment of Torah study?

Yet, here, on a question that every authority in the past has conceded is a religious obligation we find the religious Jew ready to join behind the Hadassahs , the ZOA’s and the Bnai Births in their shabby attempts to transform the galut - the exile – of America into such tortured sophistry as “chutz l’aretz” (outside the land).  The very one who girds his loins for battle against all who seek to lighten some other halachic burden now suddenly descends into the intricacies of pilpul to explain that in reality Maimonides believes that the settlement of the land is only a rabbinical injunction (thus “merely” putting it on the same level as eating chicken with milk or doing business on the Sabbath); that one is free of the obligation if there is danger; that there are economic difficulties, ad infinitum.

No argument will blot out the shame of our craven surrender to materialism.  The words we mouth in our daily prayers; the slogans we shout at the conclusion of Yom Kippur and at our Passover Seder all become empty and meaningless words when we have no intention of following them.  It is up to the yeshivot to teach and to emphasize the religious obligation of a Jew to live in the Land of Israel.  It is up to the traditional congregation to take steps to implement it.  Mitzvat Yishuv Eretz Yisroel (the commandment to settle the Land of Israel) becomes more than merely another of the laws.  It becomes a mirror reflecting our weakness and hypocrisies.  Next Tisha B’Av it would do well for us to weep – not for the land but for ourselves.

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Listen World Listen Jew Introduction - 1978

RABBI MEIR KAHANE

LISTEN WORLD, LISTEN JEW (1978)

INTRODUCTION

            I sit here, in the Land of Israel: Jerusalem; Home.  It is night and the stars twinkle with fierceness and a multitude of heavenly lights such as I have not remembered for many years.  Across the valley sleep the hills of Benjamin and the lights of Ramalla shine directly across from me as to the left I strain to see Nebi Samuel, the grave of the Prophet Samuel.  The night is totally quiet, carrying with it a stillness not born of the fear of other urban areas where people cling to their dwellings in the concrete jungle, but rather the gentle, peaceful quiet that affords tranquility to the soul and pause for thought to the mind.

            I am home in Jerusalem and inside sleep my children who have returned with me.  Tomorrow they will go to school, climbing the hills that forever bear the footprints of those who preceded them here so many years ago–their ancestors.  They will walk the hills of Jerusalem, tread its streets, mingle with their brothers and sisters from Riga and Casablanca, pray at the wall and shyly–and then not so timidly–touch its craggy surface, add their lip prints to those who preceded them for twenty centuries and then joke in Hebrew with the bus drivers, drink their Jewish grapefruit juice as they read their Jewish newspaper and exult in their Jewish city.

            “Our feet are standing within thy gates O Jerusalem,” and they will never leave.  This is Zionism, and the United Gentiles call it “Racist” and debate how to take my city away from me.  Foolish world; sooner will the sun fail to rise tomorrow.  The Jews have come home to their Zion and have welded their city together with a fierce tightness that none-least of all the humor that is the United Nations-can sunder.  A people which patiently bides its time for millennia will not easily-ever-give up its state and capital.  A nation stubborn enough to awaken for centuries at midnight to weep for Zion and so obstinate as to pray in the North, the South, East and West, three times daily, four times on Sabbaths and holidays and five times on Atonement for the day when the Divine Presence will return to the Holy City, will surely do little more than yawn when the haters thunder about “Zionist hooligans.”

            For two thousand years we wept for the Zion they tore from us with blood and fire; today it is returned to us and never again will it leave our possession.  For centuries we were forced to visit as strangers at the sufferance of those who mocked and reviled us; today we sit as  balel-batim, possessors and holders of title to our possession and never again will that title be effectively challenged.  For a score of years no Jew could tread on the doorstep to the Holy Mount and place his slips of pleadings in the crevices of the Wall because Jordan was busy keeping the area Judenrein even as it was using the Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives to line latrines.  Today a thousand Jews and more will pray at the Wall even as all others can pursue their own faiths with no one to prevent them.  Never again will all the haters with all their lackeys and running dogs of Jew-hating imperialism, return us to the horrors that once were.

            My first Sabbath in Jerusalem was the occasion for the reading in the Law of the words of the Prophet Isaiah: “For the sake of Zion I will not be quiet and for the sake of Jerusalem I will not hold my peace.”  Let the world hear and the politicians remember.  A people whose G-d keeps His word is not to be trifled with; a L-rd whose people is so determined is not to be taken lightly. “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem,” for if an alien hand attempts to seize it again it will surely be cut off.  Pray for the peace of Zion because if there will be war over it, the whole world will be plunged into a holocaust-and in the end it will remain Jewish.  In blood and fire did Zion rise again-never again to sink to its knees.  This is surely the promise we give the world, and the guarantors whom we bring as surety are the same ones our ancestors once brought before the Almighty at Sinai-our children.  They walk the streets of Zion and their Jerusalem and with the strength of their young and mighty arms will they assure that those streets and stones and hills and homes will continue to be Jewish ever more.

            A certain resolution on Zionism has been passed at the United Nations.  In reality, it is a resolution on Judaism.  It is important that a reply be given.  It is important that the world know precisely what Zionism is and what the Jewish people are.

           

It is important that the nations hear our proclamation: “Listen world; I am a Zionist, I am a Jew!”

And listen, too, Jew.  Listen so that you will understand yourself who you are and what and why.  For there is no escape from it even if one should be so foolish as to desire to flee, the greatness and majesty of the Jewish destiny.  Listen so that you will be able to stand proud and tall and know what to reply-with dignity and not hesitant defensiveness.  So that you will know from where you came and to where you go, since without the former it is impossible to know the latter.

And so, listen Jew as we speak to a world that understands as little as you about the eternity of the Jewish people. Listen, as the Jewish Idea is proclaimed.  Listen, and learn.  Listen and return.

Listen world, listen Jews.

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