Rabbi Avraham Feld

  "Mohammed Wept"  
 A Response to Islam 

Chapter Ten
History Repeats Itself


Since the Holocaust, “Never Again!” has been a rallying cry of the Jews. As the brilliant media analyst Caroline Glick points out, we must be careful not to let the enormity of the Holocaust (and it certainly was a tragic crime of unimaginable enormity) prevent us from noticing other enemies who may be sneaking up behind us. Today’s anti-Semitism is shrouded in a different cloth. Instead of calling for mass deportations and exterminations at death camps, the modern anti-Semitism calls for the destruction of the Jews by way of destroying the Jewish state of Israel . The agenda is similar; Jews should once again be in a state of powerlessness reminiscent of pre-holocaust Jewry. The tools are sometimes different; using even “liberal” self-hating Jews to undermine the unity and strength of the Jewish people.

Since the mega attacks of September 11, moderate Muslims have commanded their communities leaders to preach against hate, violence and jihad, thereby hoping to avoid attracting poisonous genocidal elements to their communities. This is a good time then, for remembering that Jews too must call for a condemnation of anti-Semitism (self-hate) in their communities. All the best and persuasive Arab propaganda comes from defeatist and self-hating Jews attacking and arguing with other Jews. For example, Iylana Dayan patched footage of celebrating Israeli soldiers onto footage of a completely different event - a shot Arab teenage girl – a suspected suicide bomber. Another example, parties within the parliament harshly blame each other for not successfully dealing with the difficulties of security and solving the dilemmas brought about from the situation with the Palestinians. These accusations hurled at one another, fly back and forth in the eye of the media, and are caught by Arab propagandists and turned against us.

On the subject of history repeating itself; the issue of releasing terrorist prisoners can be addressed. Common sense and standard military procedure, is to release prisoners after the war is over and judicial procedures and sentencing have been concluded. Also, prisoners of war are soldiers of a defeated army, not the terrorists (see Geneva convention). The Germans supported the Nuremberg trials. That is an example of confidence building. If the PA were interested in anything other then dismantling Israel in stages, then they would be hanging their own terrorists. That would be confidence building.

The media have given us myriad examples (and this is likely the tip of the iceberg) of Palestinians killing Palestinians – usually without benefit of any fair judicial procedure. (Amnesty International has condemned PA’s security courts as being in gross violation of justice) So obviously, it is not as if they don’t carry out capital punishments! Since 1998, many of the so-called collaborators (helper’s of Israel ) whose duty it was to stop terrorism, have been murdered. In 2002, at least 28 of these people have been murdered. In 2004 another 9 were arrested, including a human right’s activist. Right now, there are 52 people on the PA’s death row and Abu Mazen has ordered the mufti to hurry up and finish off the killings.

Who exactly are they killing? Terrorists? No. Seven of the “criminals” are accused of working with Israel . What does this mean? Did they hijack Abu Mazen’s money in foreign accounts? Did they put pigs in all the mosques? Absolutely not. In the current situation, the only issue on which Israel and Palestinians might cooperate, is fighting terror. The PA has received land, weapons, legitimacy, and billions of dollars in order to fight terror. They must do so in order to hold up their end of the deal. Instead, more and more factions of the Fattah are turning into terrorist organizations themselves and are using the very resources given them to stop violence, to finance the carrying out of attacks on Israel .

The seven prisoners mentioned above are accused of doing exactly what the PA promised to do in negotiations with Israel ; work toward thwarting terror. Some of these people are falsely accused. Don Abu Mazen and his Murder inc. sometimes allow accusations to be made for complex ulterior motives: inter-family tribal squabbles over honor issues, and monetary/property claims and debts. An innovative Don Abu Mazen Murder Inc. debt re-financing plan for example, would be to accuse the creditor as being a collaborator with the Zionist entity, then arrange his demise thereby canceling the debt by canceling the creditor. A note of history; the motive behind many pogroms was likewise financial; a Jew was owed money, and the solution was to liquidate the Jew along with the debt. In those cases, where the accused are indeed Israel ’s little helpers (mischievous elves), it is Israel ’s moral imperative to rescue them from the jaws of torture and death.

Minimally speaking, for the release of these fallen angels, why is a prisoner-exchange not arranged and demanded? Gratitude and appreciation for the help and good one has received, are hallmarks of Judaism, Judeo-Christian moral standards, and secular ethical humanism as well. We are negligent in these areas if we do not rescue immediately these prisoners of conscience and activism. In our recent past, terrorists have been released in the thousands, and each time proved to be a recipe for escalating violence, angry rallies and PA media frenzy (even if the only funerals to be broadcasted had been staged). Thus the hoped-for confidence building results were smashed.

Unlike the PA, Israel did hold up her end of the deal. Many prisoners were released with the hope of inspiring kindness and cooperation, however the autonomy used the actual prisoner releases to paradoxically stir up further hateful unrest. The newly released prisoners committed more acts of terror. We learn nothing from even this recent modern history. We give terrorists freedom to build confidence – with whom? With the master minds of terror? Sources within the Shin-Bet say that “incarceration is meant as a deterrent.” They also comment that released prisoners will “simply rebuild infrastructure and renew their capability to launch attacks as soon as they return home.” Abu Mazen’s PA arrested senior terrorists and as was done throughout the Oslo sham, quickly granted them freedom, and even rehired them.

This policy of arrest and release is called the “revolving door” by security officials. In addition, through the experiences of Camp David I and II, it has been clearly demonstrated that no amount of Israeli concessions changes the tune of Arab oil owned critics. PLO spokesman have reiterated that the goal is to destroy Israel ; the toll is the establishment of another Arab state. In this case, in contradiction to John Donnes admonition not to inquire for whom “the belle tolls; (it tolls for thee,”) Israel should listen to the bell of warning, ringing throughout Israel and the free world. Again, many other friends of mine (less radical) have said with great emotion, Yalla! Defeat the criminal terrorists that are controlling us. Crush them, destroy them. Cut the hands off of any one who throws a rock at Israelis. Start with a new schooling for our children. Then there will be hope for a better future.

My left-wing friends say they hear the rattling and rumbling of the anti-war peace train of the 60s - despite all of the facts and wisdom above. I say to them, listen again. Turn down the volume on the hype and noise of the media. Listen again more carefully. Indeed the rumbling and rattling is familiar, but this particular sound is not the sound of a peace train, but rather is reminiscent of the Nazi special one-way ticket trains. It is utter arrogance for Israeli’s to wonder how the six million went as sheep to be devoured by wolves, yet ruling coalitions, one after the other have imported the wolves, have armed them with money, legitimacy and weapons, and even laid out the table on which to devour the hapless sheep.

The Enemy Within: Be Your Brother’s keeper and Keep Up The Morale Among your People


Two historic metaphysical problems accompanying the Jews since biblical times (and that we still have not successfully overcome) are the sin of the spies (Numbers 13-1) and the selling of Joseph (Gen. 37-13). The Israelis are ready at a hearts beat to sell out their fellow loyal citizens and modern-day pioneers. Israel ’s intrusive left-wing court has unbelievably ruled that the exiled Israelis may not receive monetary compensation for their amazing farms and agricultural enterprises and achievements. Instead, in true Soviet style, they can only get land in exchange for their land, and only where the supreme soviet tells them to go. In addition the whole affair is dubious; the lands are not prepared for crop introduction, many seasons will be lost. Definite calculations cannot even be made because of the exponential nature of the difficulties involved, a lack of a clear government policy and contradictions within these policies. 17% of Israel ’s agricultural exports come from the Gaza strip. The Jewish communities pioneered hydroponics greenhouse techniques producing clean, fresh, pesticide free (no outdoors and no dirt equals no bugs) fruits and vegetable all year round. For those who remember the markets of Israel 15 years ago, some of these products had very short seasons and therefore were usually unavailable. Many weren’t grown at all previous to these communities sprouting up from the desert. Speaking of sprouts…..These Gaza community enterprises are responsible for the plethora of greenery and lush fruits piled in the open air markets or cleanly sealed shut in the modern supermarkets. Strawberries, cherries, blackberries, succulent baby lettuce, crisp iceberg, green beans, peas pods, celery, asparagus, brussel sprouts, bunches of fresh pearl onions and scallions, chives, capsicum, mint, dill, parsley, cuzbara. 15 years ago, a head if lettuce was an item on a treasure hunt list for visiting students from abroad! What a loss. When the math is in, it appears as though the average Gaza evacuee will receive about 60% of the value of their previous existence; home, etc. By all normal standards they should receive 100% of their value (in monetary compensation) plus compensation for the trauma of the upheaval and all that that implies.

To add insult to injury, leftwing commentators have taunted that if the residents won’t resettle where the government dictates them to resettle then the government should provide monetary compensation based upon the worth of the residents 30 years ago. This is ridiculous and is reminiscent of the causeless hatred that prompted the sale of Josef so many millennium ago.

Literally hundreds of left-wing Labor, Shinui and Meretz parties have severely criticized Mitzna’s plan of unilateral withdrawal under fire. They have pointed out in detail the tragic results that will occur as a result of that plan. The sources of these predictions have come from people such as Shimon Peres, Yosi Beilin, Yosi Sarid, Shlomo ben Ami, and Ben Eliezer. The results of such a unilateral withdrawal will create a military catastrophe.

We would give up strategic depth (that is, physical distance from other powers) and would get nothing in return. We do not have the technology (and neither will we have it any time soon), to stop short-range missiles. Maj. Gen. Aaron Ze’evi , expert in intelligence has warned “We could wake up facing a Kassam rocket with a 12Km range.” Cease fires are merely “temporary calm.” Other experts have stated that they are merely tactical efforts aimed at achieving long range political and military goals – namely Israel ’s destruction. Foreign Minister Silver Shalom warned that the current quiet is a ticking bomb that will blow up in our face. A host of other generals have also explained that there is a war, but that we are not fighting as though we are at war, a war which must be fought ‘till the end. General Naveh has said that you should not let a lull in fighting (tahadiyeh) lure you into a false sense of security.

We have been under terrorist attacks for the last 120 years and there is no end in sight. Other strategic analysts see that the creation of another Palestinian state in what should be Israel would severely shift the balance of power. Israel ’s minimum security needs do not allow for the establishment of another Palestinian state. Professor Ephraim Enbar director of the oxy-moronic “Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies” passionately explained that “Contrary to popular wisdom, such a state is not a recipe for stability; it is a recipe for enhancing the Palestinians terrorist potential. J. Miller, in “The Challenge of Radical Islam,” Foreign Affairs, Spring ’93. expresses that a PLO/Fatah Islamic State would simply be incompatible with basic truths, principles and freedoms that most Americans assume to be self-evident.

Foreign Secretary Shalom argues that the terrorists pose an ongoing threat not only to Israeli citizens, but also to the US and Europe . Their infrastructure must be dismantled if there is to be any hope of bringing calm to our region. Europe can make no bigger contribution to bringing peace to this region then bringing the reign of Palestinian terror to an end. The new president of the European Union, Jean Asselborn, in a statement reflecting a consensus of opinions, said that “the end of terror has to start first.” Likewise, the Wall Street Journal recently declared (Jan 2 –05) ‘the civilized worlds romance with terrorists is finally over.”

The pro-Arab media blitz is constantly blurring and obscuring the true intentions of the Arab leadership. Foreign investments, pressures, and personal interests also weigh heavily upon Israel , and further cloud her decision-making abilities. For example, the Shimon Peres Peace Center has hundreds of millions of dollars that comes from corporations, that further down the line have to do with Arab investment monies. Carolyn Glick, assistant editor of the Jerusalem Post, shows how Sharon’s assistant Dov Weisglass represented Arab casino share holders (there were plans to open in the Gush Katif hotel a casino expected to bring in tens of millions in profit). Yosi Ginosar, who had set up meetings between Omri Sharon and Arafat, was also on the board of directors of the Shimon Peres Peace Center . Mohammad Rashid, Jabril Rajoub and Abu Mazen, all have been investors in the casino.

The links of corruption between the west and Saudi Arabia are extensive and influence Israeli politics. As the left-wing liberal publication The American Prospect says, the above links, "are deep, overlapping, and opaque: the Saudi investment in the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm whose rainmakers include George Bush Senior; the Saudi bank rolling of his presidential library; the lucrative contracts doled out by the Saudis to Halliburton when Dick Cheney (current vice-president) was at the company's helm. The main law firm retained by the Saudis to defend them against the 9-11 families is Baker, Botts-as in James Baker, the Bush family consigliore, and of course there is oil, the black glue connecting all of the dots. (M. Steinberger, October 2003). Weisglass’ legal scandals in the states, along with these revelations, are not newsworthy in Israeli mainstream media.
Radical relativism has blurred boundaries and blurred vision.

Israel like the rest of the western has been profoundly injured by deconstructive critics, defeatism, and the unbridled relativism that invades the media (the dictatorship of relativism). The brave, brilliant, British journalist, N. Phillips comments: “there is the cult of postmodernism to which the media, like the rest of intellectual Britain, has fallen victim. Some time ago, British journalism decided that objectivity was bunk and truth was relative. Facts stopped being sacred and news reporting became an expression of opinion. Those influences have propelled the Left into an unholy alliance with the Arab and Muslim world. As a result, both Western leftists and Eastern zealots share the perception of America and Israel as the Great and Little Satan, and march shoulder to shoulder at demonstrations against the Iraq war in Britain and Europe behind placards saying “No blood for oil” and (in Arabic) “Jews to the gas.”.

The famous sociologist Max Weber, Daniel Bell’s book The End of Ideology, Carl Marx’s egoism, etc. etc., all have succeeded in the reduction of morality, religion, and metaphysics, to material interests and irrational forces. This moral and cultural relativism has permeated western education. As pointed out by Professor Edward Shields. “Denial of the possibility of objective knowledge has become more commonplace and academics….preach these denials day in and day out.” This extreme relativism, and snobbish worship of the subjective is described by William James in an indelibly descriptive quote; “ a Beethoven string quartet is nothing more then the scraping of horses tails and cat’s bowels.”

Dr. Paul Eidelberg, genius and writer of the classic work Demophrenia illuminates how much this extreme relativism has confused Israeli leadership, blurring the differences between truth and goodness vs. falseness and evil. This is also known as moral equivalency, blurring the difference between the arsonist and the fireman who put out the fire. Para-Marxist attitudes, post-Zionism, and democratic complacency, dull the vision of Israeli leaders and their ability to see Islam fundamentalism as the serious problem it is. They fail to awaken from their dream of radical relativism where mistakes are simply a different perspective, and evil is only a difference that we have yet to understand. Therefore, they viewed Israeli’s miraculous victory in the Six Day War in sterile, secular terms, and not as a victory of good over evil. (Dr. Paul Eidelberg)

There was an extremely poor turnout for a pro disengagement rally. They sang one of the songs with extreme gusto: John Lennon's "imagine" which wishes for a time when there will be no religion, no heaven no G-D. Dr. Anita Tucker says, " For the goal of no religion, no heaven etc, they are willing to sacrifice freedom, democracy, and to allow the terrorists to rearm, and take over the world." The scholarly Jonathan Rosenthal, writing in the Jerusalem Post says, “Admitting that one values nothing beyond oneself threatens the favorable self-image which our emotional well-being requires. So western elites have developed a series of gestures to signal their essential goodness, a genre that New Republic critic Lee Siegel labels, the ‘appearance of goodness.” Not surprisingly, the opposition to war appears to be good, even in cases where good must take a stand against evil.

The Baal Shem Tov founded the Joyous, dancing, musical, mystical Chassidic movement within Orthodox Judaism. One of his messages, that can be found on the Wall of Remembrance at the Yad vaShem Holocaust Memorial, is as follows: “Remembrance is bound up with Redemption, Forgetting is bound up with Exile”. The extreme left wing seeks to cover up over Israel’s memory, they want to induce amnesia; their rushed, frantic, frenzied push to give away historic biblical Israel is part of the above; they mistakenly calculate that getting rid of Gaza, Golan, Judea, Samaria, Temple Mount and Old City will sever Israel from its roots and memories.

As the writer David Grossman said, the Israeli military redeployment is in fact a redeployment from the inner regions of our soul. As many left-wingers have said, they have become totally tired of history. They want only to help us forget our memories and their failures, and to cringe and look away from the resulting bloodshed. Horace,, the Greek thinker, said “Quia rides? Mutato nominee, de te fabula narratur.” Take this Latin and ----- --! In English this comes out to “Why do you laugh? Change the name, and the story is told of you!” Or as the much more ancient Hebrew expression vis-à-vis biblical sacrifices, “If not by the grace of G-D, go I.”

The recent betrayals and criminal negligence inherent to the OSLO Accords, are to their minds quickly forgotten, already ancient history, and passé. (see the writings of Professor Yoram Hazony and Professor P. Eidelberg's, "How to Empower the people").

The wise and pragmatic David Dudkevitch, who is the leader of the covenantal faith community of Yitzhar quotes Rav Kook: “If Zionism does not eventually call in the name of G-d it will become, over the years, an enemy to the Land of Israel . The rejection of Judaism as the guideline for a modern Jewish state is what led this government to give up a part of the state of Israel in exchange for a pottage of lentils.

“Who would have believed that they would give up the land for nothing, for fantasies? Who would have thought they would send soldiers to evacuate thousands of people from their houses? It destroys the fabric of life.

Once it was self-evident that we must support settlements (both Labor and Likud did so). It was clear that the people, who climb up on the hills and build are Jewish pioneers. The barren and empty hilltops are significantly distant from Arab villages, contrary to media hype. It was clear that the security of these pioneers took precedence over the security of our enemies.”

Interestingly, the fact that Islam can more easily understand traditional Judaism, and can more readily tolerate religious-Jewish control of land, leaves a feeling of distaste to left-wingers, and a lingering unease.
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