My inbox is jammed this October 7 with every Jewish group imaginable vying for my attention and asking me to attend their day of mourning and hear kaddish recited.
Not my flavor.
I deeply believe there is something very unhealthy — actually toxic — in living one’s life whining, begging for sympathy, and constantly in mourning. Arabs who hate Jews will not pour rain on my calendar. Let them be the ones to add days of annual mourning: the Nakba (our Yom Ha’atzma’ut, Israel Independence Day), Yom Yerushalayim (the day we liberated Jerusalem from them), the day we liberated Hevron from them.
Let them mark new days of mourning: the day Israel eliminated Mohammed Deif, the day Israel eliminated Sheikh Yassin, the day Israel eliminated Ismael Haniyeh, another day of sorrow individualized for each member of the Radwan top command, yet another day for each of the nine top Hezbollah commanders. Fuad Shakur Day. Yom Nasrallah. Pagers Day. Walkie-Talkie Day. Fill a year’s calendar.
We already have enough of our own days to mourn: Tisha B’Av, 17 Tamuz, 10 Tevet, Tzom Gedalia. (The Fast of Esther is not related to mourning, and our rabbis teach that Yom Kippur actually is one of the two happiest days in the Jewish calendar because it is the day we are cleansed of sin.)
Yes, for this year, I can understand October 7 as a day to remember, like a Pearl Harbor Day or 9/11. But that’s it: One and Done. Besides, the Arabs did not pick that day because October 7 is the secular morrow of the Yom Kippur War 50 years earlier. They picked it because it was a Jewish holy day unto itself, Sh'mini Atzeret / Simchat Torah. They attacked the Jewish people on a day we devote specially to honoring the G-d of Israel and celebrating His greatest gift to us, His Torah.
Many speak of October 7 being the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocuast. I get why that sends a clear message, but I see it differently. There were 2,000 years of “October 7”s before the Shoah. Hitler was only the most recent variation on a theme. A thousand years ago, on 3 Sivan 1096, Crusaders sent by the Pope massacred 1,300 Jews in Mainz, Germany. In all, the Crusaders instigated by the Pope murdered more than 10,000 Jews, practically annihilating the Jewish communities along the Rhine, including Mainz, Speyer, and Worms. And the Jews of France and of England.
Thus it always has been — for 2,000 years. The massacres of 1348-1351 that wiped out one third of European Jewry — just like the Shoah — amid the Bubonic Plague, as popes and English, French, and German leaders blamed us for poisoning Europe’s waters to cause the Black Death. The Blood Libels, going back to Blois, France in 1171. Louis IX, yet another murderous Jew-hating son of France, ordering the public burning of 24 cartloads of Torah manuscripts in 1242. Understand that it was a time before Guttenberg’s printing invention, so books were handwritten and hand-copied. Only G-d alone knows what Torah learning from that Age of Rashi and his grandchildren, the Ba’alei HaTosafot, was lost forever as those words burned in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. The Church elevated Louis to sainthood for his efforts.
That cathedral and its spire burned in 2019.
To me, October 7 is not so much a one-time Arab event but a footnote to a continuing 2,000-year journey. If it was the most Jews murdered in a day since the Holocaust, it was not nearly the second-most Jews murdered in a day.
What’s more, although the Arabs are central to the cause and blame, the primary and paramount villains, this one was made possible by Jewish irresponsibility. If Jews — not Arabs, not Biden or Obama or Harris, but Jews comprising a Knesset majority — had not expelled 8,500 fellow Jews from Gaza in 2005, then October 7 never could have happened, just as Hezbollah never could have happened as it has if not for Ehud Barak and the Knesset Jews who backed his unilateral retreat from south of the Litani River.
Jews likewise have little business blaming others for the obvious, inevitable horrific outcomes of the 1993 Oslo Accord giving Arafat a formal entity in Judea and Samaria by which to control newspapers, television, schools, summer camps, and even street namings to inculcate two generations of newborn Arabs to hate Jews murderously and devote their lives to stabbing and shooting Jews. It was Jews who armed the Arafat police force. It was Jews who legitimized the AEJS (Arab Entity in Judea and Samaria). It has been Jews who collect taxes for the AEJS and then send them the collected funds, so the Arabs then can pay their terrorists, dead or alive, and their families decent living wages.
The Holocaust? The Crusades? The Inquisitions? Those are mostly on the Hitlers, Popes, and Europeans from England to Spain, and always with Satanic Germany and Despicable France at the epicenter. But the AEJS and all their murders is on Jews, as is Hamas’s reign over Gaza and Hezbollah’s reign over South Lebanon. It took Jews and Knesset majorities led by Israel’s never-ending flow of incompetent and myopic generals-turned-politicians to plant those seeds of self-destruction.
And that is the problem with cultivating among all Jews everywhere a Holocaust Mentality that centers public thought on blaming others half a century later, crying to others for endless sympathy half a century later, and building endless Holocaust museums at the expense of building, say, Jewish day schools and using those monies to assist with yeshiva tuition instead of funding and staffing more Holocaust memorials. What a waste! When American Blacks in 2024 whine that all Americans now owe them “reparations” for slavery perpetrated by others 150-200 years ago, does that resonate? Well, neither do Holocaust museums and endless Holocaust memorials. It creates a mentality: “Support Us because We’re Losers.” Support Us; We’re Losers.
That is not healthy, not normal, and it doesn’t even work. For all the Holocaust Museums in America, how’s that anti-Semitism doing? Two generations of American schoolkids forced to get Holocaust education thrown into their public school curriculum, alongside sex education and respect for “gender transitioning.” Two generations of kids forced to go to the local Holocaust museum on a class outing one day a year. Now all those “Holocaust-educated” all are in college. Have you happened to notice lately what an American campus looks like? They learned the word “Genocide” at the Holocaust museum outing. Guess what?
“Support Us; We’re Losers”? No one buys that. People look around and see Jews doing pretty, pretty, pretty good. All over Hollywood and Broadway. Streisand, Spielberg. Top doctors, lawyers, Silicon Valley moguls. All over the media — TV and online and hard copy news outlets. Jews, Jews, Jews. In the Middle East, with Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, the AEJS, and Iraq all around it, only the Jews have a nifty country worth visiting regularly.
For me, there is only one particularly special message from October 7. For the first time in 2,100-plus years — the very first time — if Jews decide they have the guts to do so and do not forget that all protection and success is only in G-d’s hands, Jews finally can hit back so hard that the world cannot stop them — if Jews so choose. Their “courts of justice” can declare “war crimes” and “genocide”; their “criminal courts” can issue arrest warrants; frogs can call for international embargoes of offensive weapons to use in Gaza; fools in America can call for “ceasefires” and “Two State Solutions.”
Yet — amazingly — none of it matters. Witness the past few weeks. Blinken, Biden, and Harris bark “Ceasefire! Ceasefire! Two State Solution.” The United Nations barks. Le Macron aboie comme un chien. During that fortnight, Israel feigned paying attention and caring but finally actually ignored them. The result? They all know the world is a better place after the dozens of targeted eliminations.
For the first time in 2,100-plus years, Jews can respond to the regular reenactments of Gaza October 7, 2023, and 3 Sivan 1096 not by reciting Kaddish at a Holocaust museum and whining “Support Us; We’re Losers” but by butchering, wiping out, and eliminating every oppressor who dares raise a hand against Jews or display two bloody hands outside a window. Deif, Haniyeh, Shakur, Nasrallah — all of them: puff! Gaza attack tunnels: puff! UNRWA terror centers: puff! The Arab Entity in Judea and Samaria: soon enough — puff!
Iran? The only thing holding Israel back is whatever capability limitations may exist. That cannot be helped if logistical limitations exist. But if Israel is capable, October 7 is not a time for mourning but a time for Purim on Steroids. If we have learned anything from Nasrallah, it is that turbans are not effective protective headgrear.
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