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Jerusalem News 904. Views, Jews, Ten Tribes News
3 March 2010, 17 Adar 5770
Contents:
1. History's oldest hatred by Jeff Jacoby
2. Changing Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap by DAN BILEFSKY
3. The Mutually Beneficial US-Israel Relations by Yoram Ettinger, Ambassador (ret.)
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1. History's oldest hatred by Jeff Jacoby
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/
editorial_opinion/oped/articles/
2009/03/11/historys_oldest_hatred/
ANTI-SEMITISM is an ancient derangement, the oldest of hatreds, so it is strange that it lacks a more meaningful name. The misnomer "anti-Semitism" - a term coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm Marr, who wanted a scientific-sounding euphemism for Judenhass, or Jew-hatred - is particularly inane, since hostility to Jews has never had anything to do with Semites or being Semitic.
Perhaps there is no good name for a virus as mutable as anti-Semitism. "The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan, religious, and secular societies," write Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager in "Why the Jews?," their classic study of anti-Semitism. "Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the Jewish state have been condemned as 'racists.' Poor Jews are bullied, and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been called a 'fifth column,' while those who stay together spark hatred for remaining separate."
There was Jew-hatred before there was Christianity or Islam, before Nazism or Communism, before Zionism or the Middle East conflict. This week Jews celebrate the festival of Purim, gathering in synagogues to read the biblical book of Esther. Set in ancient Persia, it tells of Haman, a powerful royal adviser who is insulted when the Jewish sage Mordechai refuses to bow down to him. Haman resolves to wipe out the empire's Jews and makes the case for genocide in an appeal to the king:
"There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among . . . all the provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from those of other peoples, and the king's laws they do not keep, so it is of no benefit for the king to tolerate them. If it please the king, let it be written that they be destroyed."
When the king agrees, Haman makes plans "to annihilate, to kill and destroy all the Jews, the young and the elderly, children and women, in one day . . . and to take their property for plunder."
What drives such bloodlust' Haman's indictment accuses the Jews of lacking national loyalty, of insinuating themselves throughout the empire, of flouting the king's law. But the Jews of Persia had done nothing to justify Haman's murderous anti-Semitism - just as Jews in later ages did nothing that justified their persecution under the Church or Islam, or their repression at the hands of Russian czars and Soviet commissars, or their slaughter by Nazi Germany. When the president of Iran today calls for the extirpation of the Jewish state, when firebombs are hurled at synagogues in London and Paris and Chicago, it is not because Jews deserve to be victimized.
Many Jews are no saints, but the paranoid frenzy that is anti-Semitism is not explained by what Jews do, but by what they are. They are the object of anti-Semitism, not its cause. That is why the haters' rationales can be so wildly inconsistent and their agendas so contradictory. What do those who vilify Jews as greedy bankers have in common with those who revile them as fiendish Bolsheviks' Nothing, save an irrational obsession with Jews.
At one point, Haman lets the mask slip. He boasts to his friends and family of "the glory of his riches, and the great number of his sons, and everything in which the king had promoted him and elevated him." Still, he seethes with rage and frustration: "Yet all this is worthless to me so long as I see Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king's gate." That is the unforgivable offense: "Mordechai the Jew" refuses to blend in, to be just like everyone else. He goes on sitting there - undigested, unassimilated, and therefore unbearable.
Of course Haman had his ostensible reasons for targeting Jews. So did Hitler and Arafat, so does Ahmadinejad. Sometimes the anti-Semite focuses on the Jew's religion, sometimes on his laws and lifestyle, sometimes on his professional achievements. Under it all, however, it is the Jew's Jewishness that the anti-Semite cannot abide.
With all their flaws and failings, the Jewish people endure, their role in history not yet finished. So the world's oldest hatred endures too, as obsessive and indestructible - and deadly - as ever.
2. Changing Face in Poland: Skinhead Puts on Skullcap by DAN BILEFSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/
28/world/europe/28poland.html
Published: February 27, 2010
Extracts:
WARSAW ' When Pawel looks into the mirror, he can still sometimes see a neo-Nazi skinhead staring back, the man he was before he covered his shaved head with a skullcap, traded his fascist ideology for the Torah and renounced violence and hatred in favor of God.
'I still struggle every day to discard my past ideas,' said Pawel, a 33-year-old ultra-Orthodox Jew and former truck driver, noting with little irony that he had to stop hating Jews in order to become one. 'When I look at an old picture of myself as a skinhead, I feel ashamed. Every day I try and do teshuvah,' he said, using the Hebrew word for repentance. 'Every minute of every day. There is a lot to make up for.'
Pawel, who also uses his Hebrew name Pinchas, asked that his last name not be used for fear that his old neo-Nazi friends could harm him or his family.
Twenty years after the fall of Communism, Pawel is perhaps the most unlikely example of the Jewish revival under way in Poland, of a moment in which Jewish leaders here say the country is finally showing solid signs of shedding the rabid anti-Semitism of the past.
Before 1939, Poland was home to more than three million Jews, more than 90 percent of whom were killed by the Nazis. Most who survived emigrated. Of the fewer than 50,000 who remained in Poland, many abandoned or hid their Judaism during decades of Communist oppression in which political pogroms against Jews persisted.
Today, though, Michael Schudrich, the chief rabbi of Poland, said he considered Poland the most pro-Israel country in the European Union. He said the attitude of Pope John Paul II, a Pole, who called Jews 'our elder brothers,' had finally entered the public consciousness.
Ten years after the revelation that 1,600 Jews of the town of Jedwabne were burned alive by their Polish neighbors in July 1941, he said the national myth that all Poles were victims of World War II had finally been shattered.
'Before 1989 there was a feeling that it was not safe to say, 'I am a Jew,' ' Rabbi Schudrich said. 'But two decades later, there is a growing feeling that Jews are a missing limb in Poland. The level of anti-Semitism remains unacceptable, but the image of the murderous Pole seared in the consciousness of many Jews after the war doesn't correspond to the Poland of 2010.'
The small Jewish revival has been under way for several years around eastern Europe. Hundreds of Poles, a majority of them raised as Catholics, are either converting to Judaism or discovering Jewish roots submerged for decades in the aftermath of World War II.
In the past five years, Warsaw's Jewish community had grown to 600 families from 250.
Pawel's metamorphosis from baptized Catholic skinhead to Jew began in a bleak neighborhood of concrete tower blocks in Warsaw in the 1980s, where Pawel said he and his friends reacted to the gnawing uniformity of socialism by embracing anti-Semitism. They shaved their heads, carried knives and greeted one another with the raised right arm gesture of the Nazi salute.
'Oy vey, I hate to admit it, but we would beat up local Jewish and Arab kids and homeless people,' Pawel said on a recent day from the Nozyk Synagogue here. 'We sang about stupid stuff like Satan and killing people. We believed that Poland should only be for Poles.'
One day, he recalled, he and his friends skipped school and took a train to Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, near Krakow. 'We made jokes that we wished the exhibition had been bigger and that the Nazis had killed even more Jews,' he said.
Even as Pawel embraced the life of a neo-Nazi, he said that he had pangs that his identity was built on a lie. His churchgoing father seemed overly fond of quoting the Old Testament. His grandfather hinted about past family secrets.
'One time when I told my grandfather that Jews were bad, he exploded and screamed at me, 'If I ever hear you say such a thing again under my roof, you will never come back!' '
Pawel joined the army and married a fellow skinhead at age 18. But his sense of self changed irrevocably at the age of 22, when his wife, Paulina, suspecting that she had Jewish roots, went to a genealogical institute and discovered Pawel's maternal grandparents on a register of Warsaw Jews, along with her own grandparents.
When Pawel confronted his parents, he said, they broke down and told him the truth: his maternal grandmother was Jewish and had survived the war by being hidden in a monastery by a group of nuns. His paternal grandfather, also a Jew, had seven brother and sisters, most of whom had perished in the Holocaust.
'I went to my parents and said, 'What the hell'' Imagine, I was a neo-Nazi and heard this news' I couldn't look in the mirror for weeks,' he said. 'My parents were the typical offspring of Jewish survivors of the war, who decided to conceal their Jewish identity to try and protect their family.'
Shaken by his own discovery, Pawel said he spent weeks of cloistered and tortured reflection but was finally overcome by a strong desire to become Jewish, even Orthodox. He acknowledged that he was drawn to extremes. He said his transformation was arduous, akin to being reborn.
'When I asked a rabbi, 'Why do I feel this way'' he replied, 'The sleeping souls of your ancestors are calling out to you.' '
At age 24, he was circumcised. Two years later, he decided to become an ultra-Orthodox Jew. He and his wife are raising their two children in a Jewish home.
Pawel noted that he was still singled out by the same anti-Semites who once counted him among their ranks. 'When younger people see me on the street with my top hat and side curls they sometimes laugh at me,' he said. 'But it is the old ladies who are the meanest. Sometimes, they use the language I used when I was a skinhead and say, 'Get out and go back to your country' or 'Jew go home!' '
And now he is studying to become a shochet, a person charged with killing animals according to Jewish dietary laws. 'I am good with knives,' he explained.
3. The Mutually Beneficial US-Israel Relations by Yoram Ettinger, Ambassador (ret.) - Feb 22, 2010
http://www.israelunitycoalition.org/
news/article.php'id=5144
YnetNews
Extracts:
The February 2010 visit to Israel by Admiral Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff, sheds light on the larger context of US-Israel relations, which transcends the Arab-Israeli conflict, leverages Israel's unique capabilities, and benefits both the US and Israel. The visit reaffirms that US policy toward Israel is based, primarily, on regional and global strategic interests and not on domestic politics. US-Israel relations do not resemble a one-way-street (the US gives and Israel receives), but a mutually-beneficial two-way-street.
Admiral Mullen's visit to Israel centered on a series of aggravated mutual threats and on the implication of the expected US withdrawal from Iraq related to those threats: Iran's nuclearization, global Islamic terrorism, domestic and regional war in Iraq, escalation of the ballistic threat, Iran's subversion of the Gulf and the Middle East, Al-Qaeda's entrenchment in Yemen which controls key sea lanes for oil tankers, the war on the Saudi-Yemen border, the intensification of Iranian-Syrian cooperation, the enhanced Middle Eastern profile of Russia and China, the Islamization of Turkey, etc.
The evacuation of US forces from Iraq could trigger a political/military volcano, with boiling lava sweeping Saudi Arabia, the Gulf and Jordan, further deteriorating the region, highlighting Israel's contribution to the national security of its most critical ally, the USA.
For example, in 2010, US special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan leverage Israeli battle tactics and 61 year counter-terrorism experience. US Marines benefit from the Israeli-developed 'Pioneer' unmanned aerial vehicle, which provides intelligence otherwise unobtainable, preempting terrorists, thus saving many lives. A US special operations colonel told me ' in the office of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid ' that his battalion benefited in Iraq from Israel's unique contribution in the areas of training, urban warfare, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), car bombs, booby-traps, suicide bombers, roadblocks and checkpoints, interrogation of terrorists and anti-tank missiles. According to Brig. General Michael Vane, Deputy Chief of Staff at the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, the Israeli experience played a role in defeating terrorists in Iraq's 'Sunni Triangle.' According to Senator Daniel Inouye, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee and its Subcommittee on Defense and a veteran of the Intelligence Committee, contends that 'Israel's contribution to US military intelligence is greater than all NATO countries combined.'
In September 2006, Israel demolished a nuclear plant in Syria, thus dealing a blow to the anti-US Syria-Iran-North Korea axis, while upgrading the posture of deterrence and joint interests of the US and Israel.
In 1982, Israel's air force was the first ever to destroy a Soviet built surface-to-air network. Israel destroyed 23 most advanced Soviet surface-to-air missile batteries, employed by Syria and considered impregnable. Israel's battle tactics and lessons, electronic warfare and other technological innovations were shared with the US, thus tilting the global balance of power in favor of the US.
In 1981, Israel devastated Iraq's nuclear reactor, in defiance of brutal US and international pressure ' including a military embargo ' thus according the US the conventional option during the 1991 war against Iraq. It spared the US and the world a nuclear confrontation, along with its mega human losses and mega-billion dollar cost.
In 1970, a Soviet proxy, Syria, invaded a US ally, Jordan, aiming to topple the Hashemite regime and activate a pro-Soviet domino scenario into Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. US forces were overly-involved in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, but Israel mobilized its military, forcing a Syrian evacuation of Jordan, thus preventing a collapse of pro-US regimes, a setback to US national security, havoc in the Arab oil producing countries and a blow to the US standard of living. Israel's capability of snatching roasting chestnuts out of the fire ' with no US involvement ' transformed President Nixon into a supporter of enhanced US-Israel strategic cooperation, in spite of the fact that only 12% of US Jews voted for him, and irrespective of severe US-Israel disagreements over the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Former Secretary of State, General Alexander Haig, a former Supreme Commander of NATO, refers to Israel as 'the largest, most battle-tested and cost-effective US aircraft carrier, which does not require a single US personnel, cannot be sunk and is located at a most critical area for US national security interests.'
If Israel did not exist in the eastern flank of the Mediterranean ' adjacent to most critical oil resources and water lanes, in the intersection of Europe, Asia and Africa ' the US would have to deploy a few aircraft carriers to the region, along with tens of thousands of military personnel, costing scores of billions of dollars annually and risking involvement in additional regional and international confrontations.
The Jewish State constitutes a battle-proven laboratory, which has improved thousands of US-made military systems and technologies, sharing with the US such improvements, thus enhancing the competitive edge of the US defense industries, expanding US employment and export base, upgrading US national security and saving many US lives and mega billion of dollars in terms of research and development cost. For instance, the current generation of the F-16 includes over 600 modifications, which were introduced by Israel.
If there had been an Israel-like nation in the Persian Gulf, there would not be a need to dispatch hundred of thousands of US military personnel to the region!
The US-Israel strategic cooperation surged meteorically during 1949-1992, despite rocky disagreements over the Arab-Israeli conflict, entirely due to a series of mutual threats and joint interests, which are much more pertinent to US national security.
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