Fear, The New Zionism - 1986

 

Beyond Words

1985-1990

Volume 5 

FEAR, THE NEW ZIONISM

Written January 10, 1896

If there is anything left of secular Zionism to prove its success in the wake of its ideological tatters and bankruptcy, it can only be the claim that it took the Jew out of the ghetto, out of the exile, out of fear and terror, and created a state of security and safety for the Jewish people.  Alas, the truth is that what has occurred is that Israel is in the process of creating a new Minsk, Pinsk, Sa’ana and Brooklyn.  Fear has become a permanent resident of Israel, moving into the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of Jews who fear the night, fear to hitch rides, fear to drive in the evening through Arab villages, fear to allow their children to play alone in the streets.

Four Jews have been stabbed within two months, within the Old City of Jerusalem, capital of Israel, home of Teddy Kollek and his Arab friends.  One was Yossi Martin, a tank commander, whose girlfriend blurted, “I will never again enter the Old City.”  Fear. It is hard to find Jews who are prepared to use the Damascus Gate to walk to the Western Wall.  Fear.  The Jerusalem weekly paper Kol Ha’ir printed a survey asking, “Should we continue going to East Jerusalem?” Fear.     

As yet another soldier, waiting to hitch a ride, was murdered in cold blood (just three kilometers from his Petach Tikvah home), the response from hysterical politicians was, “compel public transportation to give rides to (female soldiers!”  Which led, of course, to outrage and the brave new Zionist demand, “free bus transportation to male soldiers, too.”  And, since this leaves civilians to the pleasure of the Arabs who move freely and without fear about Israel, naturally a columnist in the Histradrut paper Dvar wrote an article, “Home Before Dark,” in which he outlined his terror, driving through Jerusalem late at night.

That secular Zionism from its beginning was the bankrupt and naked of all ideological meaning was obvious to me long ago.  But here, we see in the State of Israel, that rose in order to sanctify G-d’s name through Jewish power and strength and victory, the exact opposite – Hillul Hashem, desecration of G-d’s name – as the same fear and terror of the Exile is recreated in Hebrew on the soil of the Holy land.

The nations, the gentile, understand Jewish destiny and truth only in terms of power and victory.  If for two millennia they were able to persecute, trample, humiliate, burn, gas and massacre the Jew – to them this was proof not only of Jewish impotence, but of the very non-existence of the G-d of the Jewish people!  Defeat, humiliation and weakness of the Jew have always been the yardsticks of gentile desecration of G-d’s name, whereas power and victory of the Jew over his enemies have always been proof to the gentile that the G-d of Israel is One and the only one.  Kiddush Hashem, sanctification!

The pitiful secularists of Israel, joined by the ghettoized ritualists, have institutionalized fear in Israel.  They desecrate G-d’s name daily.  The answer to Arab arrogance, to attacks on Jews, stoning of Jews, stabbing of Jews, murder of Jews – is not to have Jews fearfully ride public buses or use the “Jewish” Jaffa Gate rather than the “Arab” Damascus Gate in the Old City.  It is not to tell Jews to keep a watchful eye out for bombs and explosive devices.  This is the policy of Minsk and Brownsville, Brooklyn.  This is pandering to the fear and humiliation of the ghetto and Exile we left.  This is the reincarnation of Hillul Hashem in the Land of Israel, the Land of Kiddush Hashem.

The answer to the Arab who desecrates G-d’s name by attacking Jews is to rise up with the Jewish wrath of G-d and drive the contemptuous Arab from the land.  For in the end, the removal of the Arab is the removal of desecration.  Jewish power and strength and pride and confidence – walking with the G-d of Israel – are the Jewish reply to Both Arab and Hellenized Jew.

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Down With Chanukah 1972

DOWN WITH CHANUKAH 

Written in 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.

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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The Face of Demotarianism" Rabbi attacked by Shin Bet

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,

1960-1990

Volume 6

 “Beyond Words” is a newly-published seven volume collection of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s writings that originally appeared in The Jewish Press, other serial publications, and his privately-published works.

“Beyond Words” also includes a number of extra features:

Chronology of Rabbi Kahane's life.

“Beyond Words” now can be bought at Amazon.com.  On the search line, type…  Beyond Words Kahane.

THE FACE OF DEMOTARIANISM

July 21, 1989

In the summer of 1976  I was invited to the police station in Tel Aviv.  Since the invitation was delivered by three plainclothed men who arrived to take me there, it seemed prudent to comply. Arriving at the station, located on Dizengoff Street, I was ushered into a third-floor room, whose door was totally devoid of any identifying sign.  A rather balding man sat at a desk and introduced himself as “Brenner.”  It was glaringly clear that this was the local office of the Shin Bet, the General Security Services, whose legendary James Bond deeds never include their exploits against Jews.

“Brenner” proceeded without delay to inform me that he was unhappy over my activities and told me directly:

“We do not warn more than once and this is the second time that I am telling you to stop it.”  (A message to that effect had been delivered to me by the Shin Bet some months earlier, through my brother.)

I considered it prudent not to point out the essential contradiction in what he had said but, instead, asked”

“Stop what?  Exactly what would you like me to stop?  Breathing?”

“Brenner” was not amused.  Indeed, Brenners are never amused, lacking that sense of humor which is the major demarcation line between normal people and the totalitarian mind.

I am not here to argue with you, he said.  “If you do not stop, you will regret it.”

That ended the interview and, needless to say, I did not “stop it,” whatever “it” was, and continued with my ideological struggle.

And so, it happened that on the night after the Fast of the 17^th of Tammuz, 1976, I found myself walking slowly and leisurely on Rechov Chana (Chana Street), a small, poorly lit street in the Shikun Chabad area of Jerusalem, located between Sanhedria and Ezrat Torah neighborhoods.  I was returning from giving a class to a group of Jewish Defense League leaders who had arrived in the country for an eight-week leadership training course.  It was close to 11 P.M. and the street was empty of passersby as I walked home.

And then I heard it.  The merest sounds behind me, but hearing it undoubtedly saved my life.  I began to turn to see what had made the noise and, there, just beginning its descent, was a sack.  A burlap sack being brought down over my head.  Instinctively, I threw myself down on the ground, in the gutter, and began shouting loudly: Mechablim!  Mechablim! (Terrorists!  Terrorists!).  The assailants (there were two as I saw later) were professional and methodical.  Foiled in their efforts to get me in the burlap sack, they attempted to hit me with what were apparently blackjacks – heavy metallic weapons.  I began to roll and continued to roll over and over, the whole time shouting, and they had great difficulty aiming at me, though they were eventually able to fracture a hand and cause a deep gash in my head.
 

Had Divine Providence not caused me to hear that slight sound and see the sack, I would have been caught in it and surely killed.

By this time, people began to come out of their houses in response to the noises, and an automobile suddenly rounded the corner, coming toward us.  The attackers fled, and I could clearly see that there were two of them.  They had not made a sound during the entire assault, a thing that clearly ruled out robbers or muggers.  They were “Brenner’s” men, the Shin Bet carrying out its threat, the Shin Bet of the Jewish state against a Jew.

In the years that followed, many were the stories I heard about the methods used by the Israeli General Security Services.  Jews accused of being “right-wing extremists,” and who were alleged to have attacked or planned to attack Arabs, were held in tiny cells where they could not lie down and without blankets against the bitter cold.  They were awakened again and again, and interrogated again and again, sometimes with plastic bags placed over their faces.  Charges, patently false, were fabricated, and witnesses simply lied.  Promises were made that were broken and, in general, the worst of James Bond Western culture was used.  

Two points:

I have not the slightest objection to any method used against enemies of the Jewish people who wish to destroy us.  I find it intolerably obscene, however, that such methods to be used against Jews who are not the enemies of the state of Israel.  Nothing could more graphically underline the gentilization of the Jewish state than to see who the Shin Bet people are and how their callousness to fellow Jews emerges from their total lack of Jewishness of soul.

Secondly, I say all this because there is no mitzvah to be silent when Jews suffer at the hands of other Jews.  There is no Ahavat Yisrael. Love of Jews, in silence concerning evil done by Jews to their fellow Jews.  Indeed, true love of Jews demands that our voice cry out loudly against the injustice being done to Jews inside Israel.

I am particularly incensed at the outrageous, totalitarian treatment meted out to two young Kach Yeshiva students arrested on the Temple Mount.  The Mount – victim itself of a massive Hillul Hashem by the gentilized leaders of a gentilized state – finds Jews barred from praying there or exercising their G-d give right of freedom of religion on their holiest site on this earth.

The two Kach young men, David Axelrod and Ben-Zion Gapstein, were attacked by the gang of Moslems that is hired by the infamous Wakf, the Moslem Religious Council, headed by the Mufti (and no greater band of Jew-haters can be found on this earth).  The two Kach people fought back, injuring several Moslems, when the Israeli police attacked them, too.  Most of the police in the Old City of Jerusalem are Arabs, another desecration of G-d’s Name, another disgrace and outrage.  The police attacked the young men with clubs, and the Jews fought back.  They were arrested, charged with attacking police “under serious circumstances” (sic)   and have been held since May 27^th (I write this on July 6^th) without bail.

In what civilized Western state is no bail allowed for two young men with no criminal record and on such a relatively minor charge?  The purpose of bail is not to punish the accused (the accused is innocent until proven guilty) but merely to insure his appearance at trial.  In Israel, the refusal to allow bail (and how often did that happen to me!) has a specific purpose. Punishment.

David and Ben-Zion will sit until October at least (since the summer recess begins soon, followed by the High Holidays).  They may be found innocent, but will have lost more than four months of their lives.  This is a common thing in the country.  As is the outrageous court habit of deciding to keep a suspect in jail because he refuses to “cooperate” with the police, meaning that he exercises his right to remain silent!  As is the outrageous habit of police (used against me several times) under which, at the arraignment, the police officer tells the judge that the evidence is “secret” and cannot be shown to the prisoner or his attorney, for “security reasons.”  Not only do the defendant and his attorney have not the slightest clue as to what the police are talking about and what evidence there is against the suspect, but time after time, the “secret” evidence consists of a note from a police officer to a colleague stating, “we have good reason to believe that ‘x’ is guilty of a serious attempt to . . . “  Of course, this is nonsense, but the judge, especially when the officer in charge is from the Shin Bet or the Department of Special Services, is both unsure and impressed by the apparent seriousness of the note.

The practice of not informing a suspect of his “crime,” of course, reaches its zenith in the concept of “administrative arrest” under which a defendant is sent to prison for six months without benefit of a trial or even knowing what the charge is.  After the six months are over, the Minister of Defense can sign yet another order for yet another six months, ad infinitum.

Or the practice of police asking that no bail be granted because “we have not yet finished investigating the case.”  The truth is that nowhere in a Western civilized country is this argument used, and in the cases in which it was used against me, it proved to be a total fraud.  They never bothered to ask me anything about the case until the last day or so of the remand, at which point they came back to the judge to say that they still had not finished.

The entire world understands the opposed concepts of democracy and totalitarianism.  In most cases, the two are easily distinguishable and we have little difficulty in pointing out to which of the two systems a particular country belongs.  But Israel has succeeded in creating a system of Demotarianism, totalitarian regime clocked in much of the trappings of democracy, but to those who run afoul of its inner system – and especially if they are particular thorns in the side of the government – the totalitarian nature is clear.

The success of the government in creating this Demotarianism is due to the basic fact that Jews wish to believe only the best about the country.  They do not want to believe things about it that puncture the illusions Jews so badly need.  But David Axelrod and Ben-Zion Gapstein are clear and cruel exhibits in the indictment of Israel as a Demotarian state.  As a poor Alan Goodman, who shot two Moslems on the Temple Mount.  Anyone who knows Goodman knows that he is simply not sane.  He is simply not in possession of his faculties.  When a gentile, an Australian, burned down Al Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount in 1967, the Israelis hastened to declare him crazy and to expel him from the county.  But because Goodman, clearly mad, is a Jew, the Israelis had to make of him an example to the world of Israeli “justice.”  He sits today, as he has for years, alone in a cell in Ramle Prison, slowly going crazier.

Israel.  Neither the Jewish state we dreamed of nor even a democracy.  I sit here, a citizen, and look at it, seeing the face of Demotarianism.

[The police never investigated the attack against Rabbi Kahane and not a single one of the news media carried a word of the attack BG]

  

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The Wall Is Tumbling - 1987

Beyond Words

Selected Writings of Rabbi Meir Kahane,

1960-1990

Volume 5

 “Beyond Words” is a newly-published seven volume collection of Rabbi Meir Kahane’s writings that originally appeared in The Jewish Press, other serial publications, and his privately-published works.

“Beyond Words” also includes a number of extra features:

Chronology of Rabbi Kahane's life.

“Beyond Words” now can be bought at Amazon.com.  On the search line, type…  Beyond Words

Kahane.

The Wall Is Tumbling

November 1987

The massive tumble of the great financial Wall Street on the week of Sukkot was such a clear clarion call and such a glaring object of warning, that only the people of whom the Prophet (Isaiah 42:19) said, “Who is blind but My servant, or deaf my messenger,” could neither hear, nor see, nor understand it.  As the Wall Street came tumbling down, sending all the investors – including the newly rich in Flatbush, Staten Island, Monsey and Teaneck – fleeing from the tax shelter; and as three Texas banks collapsed in one week, and as the dollar continued its spectacular plunge; and as the United States trade deficit continued its stupendous gallop; and as more and more U.S. jobs were permanently lost to the Third and Fourth and twelfth Worlds; and as personal debt in the U.S. climbed over the five trillion mark and tens of millions sand deeper into a  quicksand of debt that they can never escape – the Jew saw nothing.  

He neither saw nor understood; he did not wish to see or understand that the American Exile he so confidently claimed “different” and the American fleshpot (Chinese? Glatt?) he knew would never lose its succulence and the new Jerusalem which he had made into a gigantic “Mikdash m’at” was collapsing.  As it must.  As the All Mighty decrees.  The same All Mighty who too many of His dutiful worshippers really take to be a jolly sort of relic to whom one prays three times daily as to keep Him satisfied so that He gives us a good Galut.  A solid Wall Street.

The Exile can never be anything but a punishment and a curse for us, and for those who “despised the beloved land” (Psalms 106:24), the wall will come tumbling down, taking all the Jewish humpty dumpties with it.

And that is the ironic truth.  The Exile of America that is so symbolized by a Wall Street is, indeed looked upon as a wall of permanent strength and tranquility by the Jew – including, G-d help us, the practitioner of Jewish ritual, that irreligious Jew who goes under the title “Orthodox.”  And Israel, on the other hand, is seen as the Sukkah it really is: In Judah is G-d known . . . in Shalem  [Jerusalem] is set His Sukkah, and His dwelling place is in Zion” (Psalms 76:2-3).  But it is seen as a Sukkah in the worst sense  - a weak, temporary, shaky structure, threatened by evil winds that can topple it.  And so they choose the Wall – the gentilized wall of Galut.  Foolish Jews.  Faithless Jews.  No wall of Exile can ever survive for the Jew.  For him there are, in the end, only ghetto walls, walls of Warsaws.  The Galut was made as a punishment, not a place of comfort and stocks and bonds and shares and futures.  There are no Jewish futures in the Exile.

It is walls of Galut that come tumbling down.  It is the Sukkah of Zion that can never be destroyed.  For on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those that escape” (Joel 3:5).  Jew, come home.  That is the ultimate lesion of the Wall Street.

[Today Rabbi Kahane’s warnings about the economic collapse are seen.  In addition, the  protestors that are occupying Wall Street are blaming the problems on the Jews. Too many are loudly calling for the Jews to get out of America.  The Jews still hear, see and understand nothing.  BG]

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