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Yossi Klein Halevi’s lecture at yesterday’s Eighth Annual Ariel Avrech Memorial Lecture was riveting and deeply meaningful for all who attended. A video of Yossi’s entire talk will be posted here on Seraphic Secret in about two weeks.
In the meantime, I want to focus on one aspect of Yossi’s talk that, for me, stood out as a beacon of common sense and guiding wisdom.
Channeling his father, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary, Yossi Klein Halevi was and is trying to see today’s world through his father’s unique sensibilities.
After the full horror of the Holocaust was unveiled, Yossi’s father was tortured with how easy it was for the Nazis and their collaborators to murder, on an industrial scale, six-million Jews.
How was it possible that as late as 1944, when they already heard stories of mass slaughter from the East, that Hungarian Jews were lulled into a false complacency and then herded together for organized slaughter?
The answer is simple: The human capacity to deny evil is almost limitless.
And here’s the lesson that Yossi’s father taught him: When someone says they are going to kill you—you must believe them.
Yossi’s father reserved a special scorn for a group he labeled “Stupid Jews.”
These are post-Holocaust Jews who are ignorant of Jewish history, Jews who refuse to learn the lessons of Jewish history, or Jews who, for whatever pathological reasons, twist the meaning of Jewish history into an unrecognizable narrative that turns good into evil and evil into good.
Yossi explained that Israel is facing existential threats on multiple fronts. The threats have nothing to do with national borders or with so-called refugees.
Israel’s very existence is threatened.
This existential threat flows from a poisonous Jew-hatred that permeates the Arab Muslim world and is supported by Western enablers.
Those who deny this threat or minimize the various dangers are, by definition, Stupid Jews.
This does not mean they are literally stupid. Many of these Stupid Jews have degrees from the Ivy League. Nevertheless, they are stupid because they lack wisdom, they lack simple common sense. Hence, the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and most organs of the mainstream media are overflowing with Stupid Jews.
Let me add that Hollywood is positively stupid with Stupid Jews.
Repeat after me: When someone threatens to kill you and your family—believe them.
If you don’t:
You.
Are.
Stupid.
In private talks Yossi and I agreed, and we do not see eye to eye on all issues (Yossi thinks J Street should be put on probation whereas I think they should be put in cherem) that Iran is the greatest existential threat to Israel and the Jewish people.
Item: Israel is fighting several Iranian proxy armies, specifically Hamas and Hizbullah in Gaza.
Item: Lebanon is well on its way to becoming a satellite of Iran via Hizbullah.
Item: Syria and Iran are closely allied.
Item: Turkey, once Israel’s staunchest ally in the region, is now tight with Iran and all cooperation between Turkey and Israel is done and done. This is a huge blow for the Jewish State. Turkey and Israel once shared vital intelligence and the IDF trained over Turkish air space.
Item: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, now ascendant in the, ahem, Arab Spring, is coordinating closely with Iran.
Item: As the Obama Middle East Doctrine takes hold—Yossi labels it “amateurism mixed with arrogance.” I call it outright hostility—American influence wanes and Iranian power expands.
Item: Iran is racing towards becoming a nuclear power. If Iran crosses the nuclear threshold the tectonic shifts of power in the region will be catastrophic for Israel and the freedom loving west. A nuclear umbrella protecting genocidal yearning Islamists is a world that allows no limits to evil.
Israel has to stop fighting Iran’s multiple proxies and go for a kill shot to the Mullah’s fascist theocracy: an attack on their nuclear facilities.
Such an attack will signal that modern Israel is not filled with Stupid Jews.
Because the ultimate lesson is this: Stupid Jews are dead Jews.
I get the sense that Israel does not beleive it can take out Iran’s nuclear weapons – because they are all thinking of terms of doing it all with one blow, and actually to do this you need repeated airstrikes.
Netanyahu’s policy seems to be that of trying to gte the United States to do this.
Meanwhile….
According to today’s Wall Street Journal, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may believe that Israel is using genies to spy on Iran: (or maybe he wants people to believe that he believes that)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357323069853958.html
“Mr. [Seyed] Sadigh [an alias] is considered the top sorcerer among Iran’s ruling elite, according to associates, clients and government
officials. He says dozens of officials call on him regularly and that he has met President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad twice, the last time two
years ago, but has stayed in contact with the president through members of the administration.
“Officials seek me out because I can help untie some difficult knots,” says Mr. Sadigh in an interview at his summer home. “We have had a
long battle to infiltrate the Israeli Jinn and find out what they know.”
….
“His regular roll call includes Jinn who work for Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, and for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
Occasionally, he says, he beckons Jinn who are in the service of Arab Gulf countries.
Some typical questions his visitors ask of the Jinn: What does Israel have on Iran’s nuclear program? Is it planning to attack Iran? What is
Washington’s plan for a soft war on Tehran? Are Arabs polluting Iran’s waters? What is Saudi Arabia’s contingency plan for when Shiite
Islam’s 12th Imam, the Mahdi, re-appears from hiding to save the world?
[I don’t understand this. Why isn’t Ahmadinejad worried that Israel will use genies to take out Iran’s nuclear program?? There would be plausible deniability – even if it was found out that genies working for a foreigh power did it, it could be suspected that maybe the genies were working not for israel, ofr the CIA, but for Saudi Arabia.]
Mr. Sadigh’s work with government officials comes as his profession is at the center of a controversy that threatens to bring down Mr.
Ahmadinejad’s administration. Since late April, more than two dozen officials in the president’s inner circle have been arrested on charges of practicing sorcery and black magic. The accusations are part of a larger struggle for power by conservative clerics and rival political factions.”
@Sam vis a vis “the end of Israel…”
Sam – I suspect that you are insincere however, giving you the benefit of the doubt – you are, by all standards, a “Stupid Jew.”
One can easily deduce this due to the fact that, by your post above, you have absolutely Zero knowledge of history.
If you took the time to read and study some history of the Jews; the Arabs; Islam; and the Middle East of the last 200 years, you would understand that your “stupid” beliefs above are entirely false and without merit.
Do yourself a favor. Read history. Learn.
Meanwhile, Robert, regarding your belief that it is necessary to stage a military attack by Israel on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
I suspect that it is not.
This is not 1981 where the only option to destroy something is to blow it up.
Based on the last two theoretical Israeli operations – shutting down Syrian air defenses to bomb their nuclear program and, possibly injecting the stuxnet virus into Iran, it seems that Israel is using other, cleverer options to fight against Iranian nuclear power.
It appears doubtful that Iran will ever achieve nuclear warheads based on the covert operations and assassinations that Israel seems to be undertaking.
However, it would also appear that Israel ought to be launching a massive, comprehensive military strike on Gazan, Syrian, and Lebanese missile facilities to indeed, make your point, that Israel is not filled with Stupid Jews.
Why they have not done this yet bothers me more than Iran.
Robert, I am ignorant when it comes to jews and Judaism. I’m in my own bubble I think. I don’t even know why the State of Israel was created. The idea itself suggests intolerance and racism. A Jewish State. Oh. A Jewish State in the middle of Arabic Muslim land. A land which has been for 1300 years ruled by Muslims and Arabs until the English Occupation and then the Israeli State.
A Jewish State that was created by blood. Blood of arab women and children who were killed by defiant Israelis. Just like U.S, Israel worked on displacing the original people, killing them and erasing their identity. U.S succeeded in that whereas Israel did not.
I’m jewish and I’ve been living in Jordan for a while. People here are preparing their kids for the future war to the dissolute the state of Israel. I tell them about the holocaust, they tell me since being a victim gives the victim the right to be unjust and criminal.
The Arab spring began with two targets Robert.
1. Creating a democratic rule for Arabs and start a path in modernism and scientific and social progress. Meaning that Israel won’t be the only oasis for democracy.
2. Dissolution of Israel and getting creating the Palestianian state which belongs to Islamic identity.
The end is near. Hostiles are rising. Thing is unlike US, Arabs are surrounding us. They are breeding and teaching their kids for that day. The end of Israel.
Sam, what on earth are you talking about? Did you learn all this from some Hollywood movie?
” I don’t even know why the State of Israel was created. The idea itself suggests intolerance and racism. A Jewish State. Oh. A Jewish State in the middle of Arabic Muslim land. A land which has been for 1300 years ruled by Muslims and Arabs until the English Occupation and then the Israeli State.”
And how did the Arabs, the Mameluks, and then the Ottomans come to rule the area we call “Palestine” for 1,300 years? They invaded it, they killed people, and they stole it from the Byzantine Empire. The Romans stole it from the Greeks, who stole if from…the Jews.
In 1917, the British took it over and proposed a two state solution, because they were already Jews and Muslims living there together. Every so often, the Muslims decided to attack and slaughter the Jews, and the British had to defend them. As they would do with India (dividing it into Pakistan/East Pakistan for the violent, radical Muslims who would not live with Hindus in peace), they proposed a two state solution; this proposal was called “The Balfour Report.”
In 1937, the British tried to implement this plan; the Jews said, “Yes,” but the Arab Muslims, led by Amin Al Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and co founder of The Muslim Brotherhood, said “Never!” The Muslim Brotherhood was, and still is, the Nazi Party of the Middle East, founded to unify the Arab race and to exterminate…the Jewish race. They allied with Nazi Germany in WW II and raised Bosnian Muslim SS units to help fight on the Eastern Front.
The United Nations proposed a two state solution in 1948 and President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak proposed a two state solution in 1999/2000; both proposals were accepted by the Jewish people and rejected by the Palestinian Arabs. The Palestinian Arabs insist that all the land belongs to them and that they will never share it with Jews. Actually, the Arabs were given 75% of the original Palestine, in the form of the Transjordan, now known as Jordan; the rest was to be split between Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
You say that a Jewish state is “racist,” but you have no complaints about Islamic states; Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Mauritania, and Afghanistan under the Taliban, are/were all Islamic states. It is illegal for Jews to enter Saudi Arabia and it is illegal for any non Muslim to enter Mecca. Do you see anything wrong with that? No.
Jews were invited back to Palestine after the Arabs conquered Jerusalem; they too lived there for 1,300 years. Many Jews did immigrate from Europe to Palestine, just as many Africans, Latinos, and Asians have migrated to Europe and America. Have you ever seen a Latino, an African, or an Asian walking down the street in and told him or her, “Go back to your country!” No, because Jews are the only people in the world who are not allowed to immigrate without permission.
Why was Israel formed? Because Jews tried to live in Europe and Russia, under the protection of non Jewish states, and the result was the Holocaust in Germany/Eastern Europe and the Soviet pogroms in Russia. The Jews got tired of being persecuted and killed, so they immigrated to Palestine and the United Nations gave them a charter to reestablish the nation of Israel. When they went there, they found most of the land lying fallow and useless, so they bought it from Arab land owners, they used their education and diligence to make it productive. They did not have an army, so they could not have “invaded” Palestine and stolen it from anyone; they bought the land.
Let us humor you, and say that the Jews “conquered” Palestine (with their checkbooks), can you tell us how many nations the Muslims have conquered? Mohammed started Islam in one Saudi Arabian city: Medina. He then conquered Mecca and the rest of the Arabian peninsula, where Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, and Oman are located.
Then the Salaf, the successors of Mohammed, conquered large areas of the Byzantine and Persian empires in Palestine, Central Asia, Asia Minor, and North Africa. These areas now include Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Mauritania, and others that make a total of 57 majority Muslim nations, not including the Islamic conquest of Spain and Portugal.
We can safely say that Muslims, who once only lived in Medina, have conquered what now makes up over 50 nations. If the Jewish people “conquered” (with their checkbooks) one nation, the size of New Jersey, then they are truly the most inept imperialists who ever lived. The Arabs/Muslims have outdone them, as have the Greeks, the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, the Huns, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Zulus, the Nubians, the Aztecs, the Mayans, the French, the British, the Dutch, the Italians, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Vikings.
Why are you not so concerned about these people and their conquests which are taught as being “glorious empires” in the halls of our colleges and universities, while little, tiny, insignificant Israel is described the grandest and most horrifying colonialist, imperialist, barbarian invasion in human history? Compared to most national and ethnic groups, the Jewish people have conquered almost nothing and they did it with their checkbooks.
Arabs and Muslims are indigenous only to the Arabian peninsula; all other territory occupied by them was conquered by the sword and stolen, but such is way of human history. We all live in land that was stolen from someone, at some time, but we are not seeking to massacre people over it. When does this retribution end? The answer is: it never ends.
The Arabs/Muslims are not only at war with Israel, but also Russia, China, Singapore, Thailand, The Phillipines, Nigeria, France, The U.K., Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Germany, and many others. Their grievance is always the same: “We refuse to live with infidels; we want our own land. We want to be separate, even though we live in your country.” All over the world, radical Islam is at war with the infidel; it cannot live at peace with them.
There are 57 Muslim majority states; 22 of them are Arab states. There is one Jewish state; the Arabs think that is “one too many,” and you seem to agree with them. The problem is anti Semitic racism, that says that Jews do not get their own state, while every other racial group has their own. No one has ever suggested a new state for the Jews, because the world thinks that they do not deserve one. The problem is anti Semitic racism and nothing else; that is why Israel exists. The Jewish people need their own state, because they are tired of being target practice and entertainment for the dictators, tyrants, thugs, terrorists, and criminals of the world.
57 Muslim majority nations, 22 Arab nations, and the Arabs and Muslims say that they do not have enough land? The only thing worse is that you believe them. The Jews have one nation, and if they have to die defending the one piece of land that they have managed to find safe haven on, then they will be glad to do it. At least they will die with dignity and courage, and not in the streets of some European, Russian, or Muslim nation, dying like dogs and rats, like they used to; that is why Israel exists.
Shalom, Israel.
Robert, here are two quotes from General Douglas MacArthur that I find fitting; one in regards to your post about “Stupid Jews,” the other in regards to you and Ariel. And a special third quote after General MacArthur’s wisdom:
“The history of the failure of war can almost be summed up in two words: too late.
* Too late in comprehending the deadly purpose of a potential enemy.
* Too late in realizing the mortal danger.
* Too late in preparedness.
* Too late in uniting all possible forces for resistance.
* Too late in standing with one’s friends.”
His quote is so timely and almost seems penned for this specific time of danger, doesn’t it? I feel like it is evening and darkness is approaching. All the warnings from our enemies have been issued countless times … it is getting very late … hopefully not too late.
The second quote from General MacArthur:
“Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.
Build me a son whose wishbone will not be where his backbone should be; a son who will know Thee and that to know himself is the foundation stone of knowledge. Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort, but under the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge. Here let him learn to stand up in the storm; here let him learn compassion for those who fail.
Build me a son whose heart will be clean, whose goal will be high; a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men; one who will learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past.
And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor, so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.
Then I, his father, will dare to whisper, ‘I have not lived in vain.’
-General Douglas MacArthur
“I have had a good life.”
-Ariel Avrech
Why didn’t the Jews resist? I was in Korea in the earliest days of that war. When we captured thousands of Chinese POW, I saw them strong out for miles, one after the other, being marched off to a prison camp. Very few American guards. They could have made a break for it. After all, they were not children or old people but young warriors. And yet: unarmed,where were they to run to? And so they went along, complacently. That is the nature of man, when hope seems gone. Just perhaps you will survive and all will be ok.
The 1984 documentary “Kaddish” relates the story of Yossi Klein Halevi’s father life and the effect of on the family when the lost their father.
This was truly an unforgettable documentary, I don’t think it is currently available for purchase.
Here is the IMDB link:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162419/
speaking of Stupid Jews……..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/us-boat-to-gaza-is-a-quar_b_871928.html
My father A”H was Hungarian. By 1944 male Jews of military age had been taken off to labour battalions, an adjunct of the Hungarian armed forces reserved primarily for Jews. Labour battalions had a deliberately-high mortality rate, but they weren’t explicitly a way of killing Jews. By 1944 radios had been confiscated, the mail and the press was censored, and nobody really knew what was going on. So when the Hungarians were rounding up the Jews from the countryside and deporting them on trains the Jews (a) didn’t know that most of those trains were going to Auschwitz; (b) didn’t know that there were extermination camps; (c) had not been told “we are going to kill you”; (d) lacked both arms and men of fighting age; (e) were in relatively small groups within a large, militarised state.
So if Yossi Klein Halevi thinks that Hungarian Jews knew enough or had the means to revolt then he’s an idiot. As for his specious suggestion that they might as well have revolted, since they were going to die anyway … well, many didn’t, my father and his parents among them. So he’s wrong there, too.
Idiot.
When someone says they are going to kill you—you must believe them.
Except that so many politicians, here and in Israel, hear Iran or Hamas talk about pushing Israel into the sea and wonder why Bibi won’t negotiate with them. Can’t we all just get along? They can’t really be serious about destroying Israel when the IDF is so powerful. People want to believe in the best from other people that they are sure the leadership in Iran or Gaza are kind hearted and peace loving just like themselves.
So yeah, the Germans don’t really want to kill people just because they are Jews and Hamas just wants some land, they don’t hate Jews. No one can be that evil, right? Someone should explain to our president what ‘Never Again’ means.
Maybe it’s that other human failure – fighting the last war. Hungarian Jews, like European Jews generally, had survived a lot over the preceding few hundred years and probably thought that this would be more of the same.
People whose education exceeds their intelligence and mental flexibility often tend to *reify* ideas and labels. Hence, they may assume that “Democrat” means the same thing in 2011 that it did in 1943′ or that “Germany” meant the same thing in 1943 that it did in 1914.
Miranda – the hope for life and wanting to believe the best in people can make people do foolish things…IMO….
The ability to deny what you are seeing is a universal trait.
Think of the 10s of millions of “stupid Germans” who allowed themselves to be led by a murderous despot.
As one remarked years ago how could a country that produced Beethoven be taken by a Hitler?
And it was a Faustian bargain – the devil promised them utopia if only they’d follow him.
Then there is the Left in the west and the Cold War – refusing to believe Khrushchev.
In other words it isn’t just the Jews Robert.
How was it possible, that as late as 1944, when they already heard stories of mass slaughter from the East, for Hungarian Jewry to be lulled into complacency and herded together for the slaughter?
Robert, they were starving, unarmed, surrounded by a population that was all too ready to collaborate with the Nazis. How could they resist?
What makes me bitter that the same people who, for 66 years, have been saying, of the Jews of the Holocaust, “Why didn’t they resist?” start calling the Jews of Israel war criminals and Nazis the minute they start resisting.