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Israeli “trolls” on Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
People should be aware that Wikipedia, Facebook and other places sometimes contain individuals who post items while misleading people about their identities.
Please keep in mind that facebook and other online forums are in many ways anonymous and, according to several articles in the israeli media and elsewhere, are infiltrated by IDF soldiers and students with false identities. See, for example https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/142374#.UHjVdRgYLuw and https://electronicintifada.net/content/ei-exclusive-pro-israel-groups-plan-rewrite-history-wikipedia/7472 and https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israeli-students-get-2000-spread-state-propaganda-facebook
I expect that some of the posts critical of me originate with such “trolls,” as they are apparently called.
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Aid and Comfort to the Enemy: American Legion Honchos Betray Liberty Veterans
My latest article is at https://honorlibertyvets.org/legion.html#.ZqKVZWLMK38
Of course, now Israel partisans (and probably these reprehensible American Legion bigwigs) will claim I’m “anti-Semitic,” a foolish and unfounded charge. Of course, the last refuge of scoundrels is name-calling.
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Education and Sharing Day: Honoring a racist religious leader
I’ve recently written an article about the upcoming day of national observance, “Education and Sharing Day.”
The article reveals that the person being honored on this day taught that Jews and non-Jews are different species and that non-Jews were put on earth to serve Jews. My main source (there are also others) is Israel Shahak, an Israeli professor whose books were praised by Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal, Catholic News, Jewish Socialist, London Review of Books, and others.
Imagine if we had a national day honoring someone who said that Jews were only put on earth to serve non-Jews… there would be an uproar (and should be). Yet, the reverse has been going on for 36 years…
And adherents of this view have a great deal of power in Israel-Palestine, with direct impact on Palestinians. I hope people will disseminate this information and that we can get this national day of observance changed. I’m going to contact my Congressional representatives now.
I hope others will join me in writing to their Congressional representatives (contact info is here) something like the following:
Dear Senator/ Congressperson:
A national day of observance called “Education and Sharing Day” was authorized by several joint Congressional resolutions to honor Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
Since Schneerson espoused racist teachings, and was opposed to teaching such “secular” subjects as reading, math, history, and science, I request that you introduce a resolution asking that this national day of observance either be canceled or changed to honor someone whose teachings better represent the principles that most Americans believe in.
For more information see https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/07/why-is-the-us-honoring-a-racist-rabbi/
Below is the article:
The Extremist Origins of Education and Sharing DayWhy is the US Honoring a Racist Rabbi?
If things proceed normally, President Barak Obama will soon proclaim April 11, 2014 “Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A.” Despite the innocuous name, this day honors the memory of a religious leader whose lesser-known teachings help fuel some of the most violent attacks against Palestinians by extremist Israeli settlers and soldiers.
The leader being honored on this day is Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, charismatic head of a mystical/fundamentalist version of Judaism. Every year since 1978, a Presidential Proclamation, often accompanied by a Congressional Resolution (the 1990 one had 219 sponsors), has declared Schneerson’s birthday an official national day of observance.
Congress first passed a Resolution honoring Schneerson in 1975. Three years later a Joint Congressional Resolution called on President Jimmy Carter to proclaim “Education Day, U.S.A.” on the anniversary of Schneerson’s birth. The idea was to set aside a day to honor both education and the alleged educational work of Schneerson and the religious sect he headed up.
Carter, like Congress, dutifully obeyed the Schneerson-initiated resolution, as has every president since. And some individual states are now enacting their own observances of Schneerson’s birthday, with Minnesota and Alabama leading the way.
Schneerson and his movement are an extremely mixed bag.
Schneerson has been praised widely for a public persona and organization that emphasized “deep compassion and insight,” worked to bring many secular Jews “back” into the fold, created numerous schools around the world, and had offered, in the words of the Jewish Virtual Library, “social-service programs and humanitarian aid to all people, regardless of religious affiliation or background.”
However, there is also a less attractive underside often at odds with such public perceptions. And some of the more extreme parts of Schneerson’s teachings – such as that Jews are a completely different species than non-Jews, and that non-Jews exist only to serve Jews – have been largely hidden, it appears, even from many who consider themselves his followers.
As we will see, such views profoundly impact the lives of Palestinians living – and dying – under Israeli occupation and military invasions.
Who was Rabbi Schneerson?
Schneerson lived from 1902 to 1994 and oversaw the growth of what is now the largest Jewish organization in the world. The religious movement he led is known as “Chabad-Lubavitch,” (sometimes just called “Lubavitch” or “Chabad,” the name of its organizational arm). Schneerson was the seventh and final Lubavitcher “Rebbe” (sacred leader). He is often simply called “the Rebbe.”
Founded in the late 1700s and originally based in the Polish-Russian town of Lubavitch, it is the largest of about a dozen forms of “Hasidism,” a version of Orthodox Judaism connected to mysticism, characterized by devotion to a dynastic leader, and whose adherents often wear distinctive clothing. (Spellings of these terms can vary; Hasid is also written as Hassid, Chasid, etc.)
There is an extreme cult of personality focused on Schneerson himself. Some followers consider him the Messiah, and Schneerson himself reportedly sometimes implied this was true. Some Lubavitch educators consider him divine, making such claims as, “the Rebbe is actually ‘the essence and being [of God] … he is without limits, capable of effecting anything, all-knowing and a proper object of worshipful prostration.”
While many secular Jews and Jews from other denominations disagree with its actions and theology, Chabad-Lubavitch is generally acknowledged to be a powerful force in Jewish life today. According to a 1994 New York Times report, it is “one of the most influential and controversial forces in world Jewry.”
There are approximately 3,600 Chabad institutions in over 1,000 cities in 70 countries, and 200,000 adherents. Up to a million people attend Chabad services at least once a year. Numerous campuses have such centers and the Chabad website states that hundreds of thousands of children attend Chabad summer camps.
According to the Times, Schneerson “presided over a religious empire that reached from the back streets of Brooklyn to the main streets of Israel and by 1990 was taking in an estimated $100 million a year in contributions.
In the U.S., the Times reports, Schneerson’s “‘mitzvah tanks’ – converted campers that are rolling recruiting stations whose purpose is to draw Jews to the Lubavitch way – roamed streets from midtown Manhattan to Crown Heights. And the Lubavitchers’ Brooklyn-based publishing house claimed to be the world’s largest distributor of Jewish books.”
Non-Jewish souls ‘satanic’
While Chabad sometimes openly teaches that “the soul of the Jew is different than the soul of the non-Jew,” Schneerson’s specific teachings on this subject are largely unknown.
Quite likely very few Americans, both Jews and non-Jews, are aware of Schneerson’s teachings about the alleged deep differences between them – and about how these teachings are applied in the West Bank and Gaza.
Let us look at Schneerson’s words, as quoted by two respected Jewish professors, Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in their book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (text available online here. This book, praised by Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and many others is essential reading for anyone who truly wishes to understand modern day Israel-Palestine. (Brackets in the quotes below are in the translations by Shahak and Mezvinsky.)
Some of Schneerson’s rarely reported teachings:
“The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression: “Let us differentiate.” Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a case of “let us differentiate” between totally different species.”
“This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world … The difference in the inner quality between Jews and non-Jews is “so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species.”
“An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.”
“As has been explained, an embryo is called a human being, because it has both body and soul. Thus, the difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish embryo can be understood.”
“…the general difference between Jews and non-Jews: A Jew was not created
as a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews.”
“The important things are the Jews, because they do not exist for any [other] aim; they themselves are [the divine] aim.”
“The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews.”
Most people don’t know about this aspect of Schneerson’s teaching because, according to Shahak and Mezvinsky, such teachings are intentionally minimized, mistranslated, or hidden entirely.
For example, the quotes above were translated by the authors from a book of Schneerson’s recorded messages to followers that was published in Israel in 1965. Despite Schneerson’s global importance and the fact that his world headquarters is in the U.S., there has never been an English translation of this volume.
Shahak, an Israeli professor who was a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, writes that this lack of translation of an important work is not unusual, explaining that much critical information about Israel and some forms of Judaism is available only in Hebrew.
He and co-author Mezvinsky, who was a Connecticut Distinguished University Professor who taught at Central Connecticut State University, write, “The great majority of the books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter.”
According to Shahak and Mezvinsky, “Almost every moderately sophisticated Israeli Jew knows the facts about Israeli Jewish society that are described in this book. These facts, however, are unknown to most interested Jews and non-Jews outside Israel who do not know Hebrew and thus cannot read most of what Israeli Jews write about themselves in Hebrew.”
In Shahak’s earlier book, Jewish Religion, Jewish History, he provides a number of examples. In one, he describes a 1962 book published in Israel in a bilingual edition. The Hebrew text was on one page, with the English translation on the facing page.
Shahak describes one set of facing pages in which the Hebrew text of a major Jewish code of laws contained a command to exterminate Jewish infidels: “It is a duty to exterminate them with one’s own hands.” The English version on the facing page softened it to “It is a duty to take active measures to destroy them.’”
The Hebrew page then went on to name which “infidels” must be exterminated, adding “may the name of the wicked rot.” Among them was Jesus of Nazareth. The facing page with the English translation failed to tell any of this.
“Even more significant,” Shahak reports, “in spite of the wide circulation of this book among scholars in the English-speaking countries, not one of them has, as far as I know, protested against this glaring deception.”
Praised by Said, Chomsky, etc., Shahak is almost unknown today
This pattern of selective omission, it seems, applies to Shahak himself, whose work is largely unknown to Palestine activists today, even though he was considered a major figure in the struggle against Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and his work was praised by diverse writers.
While Shahak was alive, Noam Chomsky called him “an outstanding scholar,” and said he had “remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value.”
Edward Said wrote, “Shahak is a very brave man who should be honored for his services to humanity … One of the most remarkable individuals in the contemporary Middle East.” Said wrote a forward for Shahak’s Jewish History, Jewish Religion.
Catholic New Times said: ‘This is a remarkable book …[It] deserves a wide readership, not only among Jews, but among Christians who seek a fuller understanding both of historical Judaism and of modern-day Israel.”
Jewish Socialist stated: “Anyone who wants to change the Jewish community so that it stops siding with the forces of reaction should read this book.”
The London Review of Books called Shahak’s book “remarkable, powerful, and provocative.”
Yet, very few Americans today know of Shahak’s work and the information it contains.
American tax money & Jewish Extremism in Palestine
If they did, it’s hard to believe that Americans would allow $8.5 million per day of their tax money to be given to Israel, where such teachings underlie a powerful minority that is disproportionately influential in governmental actions.
Nor is it likely that a fully informed American public would allow donations to religious institutions in Israel that teach supremacist, sometimes violent doctrines to be tax-deductible in the U.S.
One organization raised over $10 million tax-deductible dollars in the U.S. in 2011 alone – removing money from the U.S. economy and enabling illegal, aggressive Israeli settlements in Palestine. And some of this money went to benefit individuals convicted of murder – including the murderer of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The New York Times obituary on Schneerson reported that Schneerson was “a major political force in Israel, both in the Knesset and among the electorate,” but failed to describe the nature of his impact.
One of a sprinkling of writers willing to publicly discuss Shahak and Mezvinsky’s findings is Allan Brownfeld, who is less reticent. Brownfeld is editor of the American Council for Judaism’s periodical Issues and contributor to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
In a review of Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Brownfeld describes Schneerson’s views on Israel:
“Rabbi Schneerson always supported Israeli wars and opposed any retreat. In 1974 he strongly opposed the Israeli withdrawal from the Suez area. He promised Israel divine favors if it persisted in occupying the land.”
Brownfeld reports that after Schneerson’s death, “[T]housands of his Israeli followers played an important role in the election victory of Binyamin Netanyahu. Among the religious settlers in the occupied territories, the Chabad Hassids constitute one of the most extreme groups. Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer of Palestinians, was one of them.”
Another such Chabad Hassid is Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg (also sometimes written as “Ginzburg” and “Ginsburgh”), who studied under Schneerson in Crown Heights and who heads up a major Chabad institution in the West Bank.
Ginsburg praised Goldstein, the murderer of 29 Palestinians while they were praying, and considers all non-Jews subhuman.
According to author Motti Inbari, Ginsburg “gives prominence to Halachic and Kabbalistic approaches that emphasize the distinction between Jew and non-Jew (Gentile), imposing a clear separation and hierarchy in this respect.”
In his book Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? Inbari states, “[Ginsburg] claims that while the Jews are the Chosen People and were created in God’s image, the Gentiles do not have this status and are effectively considered subhuman.”
Professor Inbari, an Israeli academic who now teaches in the U.S., writes that Ginsburg’s theological approach continues “certain perceptions that were popular in medieval times.”
“For example,” Inbari writes, “the commandment ‘You shall not murder’ does not apply to the killing of a Gentile, since ‘you shall not murder’ relates to the murder of a human, while for him the Gentiles do not constitute humans.”
Inbari reports, “Similarly, Ginzburg stated that, on the theoretical level, if a Jew requires a liver transplant to survive, it would be permissible to seize a Gentile and take their liver forcefully.”
While the mainstream American press almost never reports this kind of information, an April 26, 1996 article in Jewish Week by Lawrence Cohler reported on Ginsburg’s teachings, including their problematic roots in Jewish texts.
Cohler reported that a professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Rabbi Moshe Greenberg, “called for radically revising Jewish thinking about some Jewish texts on the grounds that scholars such as Rabbi Ginsburgh are far from aberrant in their use of them.”
Cohler quoted Greenberg’s concerns: “‘There’ll be a statement in Talmud… made in circumstances where it’s purely theoretical, because Jews then never had the power to do it,’ he explained. And now, he said, ‘It’s carried over into circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered.’”
A rabbi associated with Ginsburg coauthored a notorious Israeli book, The King’s Torah, which claims that Jewish law at times permits the killing of non-Jewish infants. American donations to the Chabad school Ginsburg heads up, and that published the above book, are tax-deductible in the U.S. Ginsburg, who endorses the book, teaches classes throughout Israel, the U.S. and France.
Such extremism is opposed by the majority of Israelis, and major Jewish religious authorities condemn it, a Chief Rabbi, for example, stating: “’According to the Torah, every man is created in God’s image.”
Yet, such extremist views continue to exert a powerful influence.
Israeli military manuals echo extremist teachings: “kill even good civilians”
Israeli military manuals sometimes replicate extremist teachings. For example, a booklet authored by a Chief Chaplain stated, “In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians…” Such teachings by the IDF rabbinate were prominent during Israel’s 2008-9 attack on Gaza that killed 1,400 Gazans, approximately half of them civilians. (The Palestinian resistance killed nine Israelis during this “war.”)
Chicago writer Stephen Lendman has described these teachings, giving a number of examples.
Lendman writes, “In 2007, Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, called for the Israeli army to mass-murder Palestinians:
“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1000. And if they don’t stop after 1000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000. Even a million.”
Lendman reports that some extremist Israeli rabbis teach that “the ten commandments don’t apply to non-Jews. So killing them in defending the homeland is acceptable, and according to the chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council:
“‘There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them…. A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.’”
Lendman writes, “Rabbi David Batsri called Arabs ‘a blight, a devil, a disaster…. donkeys, and we have to ask ourselves why God didn’t create them to walk on all fours. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean.’”
Another such rabbi is Manis Friedman, a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi inspired by Schneerson who served as the simultaneous translator for a series of Schneerson’s talks. (Friedman is currently dean of a Jewish Studies institute in Minnesota.)
A 2009 article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports, “Like the best Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis, Manis Friedman has won the hearts of many unaffiliated Jews with his charismatic talks about love and God; it was Friedman who helped lead Bob Dylan into a relationship with Chabad.
“But Friedman, who today travels the country as a Chabad speaker, showed a less warm and cuddly side when he was asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors.”
In Moment magazine’s article, “Ask the Rabbis // How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?” Friedman answered:
“I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral.
“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).”
Lendman reports, “Views like these aren’t exceptions. Though a minority, they proliferate throughout Israeli society…”
They also, Lendman notes, work to prevent peace in Israel-Palestine.
Shahak and Mezvinsky note that when the book containing Schneerson’s statements quoted above about Jews and non-Jews was published in Israel, he was allied to the Labor Party and his movement had been provided “many important benefits” from the Israeli government.
In the mid-1970s Schneerson decided that the Labor Party was too moderate and shifted his support to the more right-wing parties in power today. The authors report, “Ariel Sharon was the Rebbe’s favorite Israeli senior politician. Sharon in turn praised the Rebbe publicly and delivered a moving speech about him in the Knesset after the Rebbe’s death.”
Roots in Some Early Texts
Brownfeld decries the fact that few Americans are properly informed about the fundamentalist movement in Israel “and the theology upon which it is based.”
He notes that Jewish Americans, in particular, are often unaware of the “narrow ethnocentrism which is promoted by the movement’s leading rabbis, or of the traditional Jewish sources they are able to call upon in drawing clear distinctions between the moral obligations owed to Jews and non-Jews.”
Teachings that Jews are superior and gentiles inferior were contained in some of the earliest Hassidic texts, including its classic text, “Tanya,” still taught today.
Brownfeld quotes statements by “the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism,” Rabbi Kook the Elder, and states that these were derived from earlier texts. [Kook, incidentally, was also an early Zionist, who helped push for the Balfour Declaration in England before moving to Palestine. He was the uncle of Hillel Kook, an agent who went by the name “Peter Bergson” and created front groups in the U.S. for a violent Zionist guerilla group that operated in 1930s and ’40s Palestine.]
Brownfeld quotes Kook: “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
Brownfeld explains that Kook’s teaching, which he says is followed by leaders of the settler movement in the occupied West Bank, “is based upon the Lurianic Cabbala, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late 16th to the early 19th century.”
Shahak and Mezvinsky state, “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”
Again, Shahak and Mezvinsky report that this aspect is often covered up in English-language discussions. Scholarly authors of books about Jewish mysticism and the Lurianic Cabbala, they write, have frequently “willfully omitted reference to such ideas.”
Shahak and Mezvinsky write that it is essential to understand these beliefs in order to understand the current situation in the West Bank, where many of the most militant West Bank settlers are motivated by religious ideologies in which every non-Jew is seen as “the earthly embodiment” of Satan, and according to the Halacha (Jewish law), the term ‘human beings’ refers solely to Jews.”
Israeli author and former chief of Israeli military intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi touches on this in his 1988 book Israel’s Fateful Hour.
Harkabi writes that while such extremist beliefs are not “widely dominant,” the reality is that “nationalistic religious extremists are by no means a lunatic fringe; many are respected men whose words are widely heeded.”
He reports that the campus rabbi of a major Israeli university published an article in the student newspaper entitled “The Commandment of Genocide in the Torah,” in which he implied that those who have a quarrel with Jews “ought to be destroyed, children and all.” Harkabi writes that a book by another rabbi “explained that the killing of a non-Jew is not considered murder.”
Brownfeld writes, “Although messianic fundamentalists constitute a relatively small portion of the Israeli population [most Israeli settlers are motivated by the subsidized lifestyle US tax money to Israel provides], their political influence has been growing. If they have contempt for non-Jews, their hatred for Jews who oppose their views is even greater.”
Brownfeld cites the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had started to make peace with the Palestinians, writing that it was just one “in a long line of murders of Jews who followed a path different from that ordained by rabbinic authorities.” Brownfeld reports that Shahak and Mezvinsky “cite case after case, from the Middle Ages until the 19th century.”
The authors report, “It was usual in some Hasidic circles until the last quarter of the nineteenth century to attack and often to murder Jews who had reform religious tendencies…”
They quote a long article by Israeli writer Rami Rosen, “History of a Denial,” published by Ha’aretz Magazine in 1996. This article, which cannot be found online, at least in English, is also cited in the book Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination, by Israeli professor Ehud Sprinzak.
In his Ha’aretz article Rosen reported: “A check of main facts of the [Jewish] historiography of the last 1500 years shows that the picture is different from the one previously shown to us. It includes massacres of Christians; mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus that usually took place on Purim; cruel murders within the family; liquidation of informers, often done for religious reasons by secret rabbinical courts, which issued a sentence of ‘pursuer’ and appointed secret executioners; assassinations of adulterous women in synagogues and/or the cutting of their noses by command of the rabbis.”
While Rosen’s article may seem shocking, in reality, it simply shows that members of the Jewish population, like members of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and diverse other populations, have at times committed atrocities, sometimes allegedly in the name of their religion. The difference, as Shahak and Mezvinsky point out, is that such information is largely covered up in the U.S. Such cover-ups, however, don’t make facts go away. They merely bury them, where they smolder and at times eventually lead to exaggerated perceptions.
U.S. media rarely report that some extremist Israeli settlers are intensely hostile to Christians, and in one instance threatened peace activists who came to the West Bank to participate in nonviolent demonstrations, “We killed Jesus and we’ll kill you, too.” There is also a record of official hostility. For example, a few years ago an Israeli mayor ordered all New Testaments to be rounded up and burned.
Schneerson’s “schools”
While Schneerson is honored on national “Education” days, the reality is that the elementary schools he created often failed to teach children “basic reading, writing, spelling, math, science and history,” according to a graduate.
In his article “National Education Day and the Education I Never Had,” Chaim Levin reports on his experience at the Chabad school “Oholei Torah” (Educational Institute Oholei Menachem) in Crown Heights, New York – the site of Chabad’s world headquarters:
“I have profound respect for the late Rebbe and his legacy. However, I remember very clearly those talks that [Schneerson] gave – the ones we studied every year in elementary school about the unimportance of ‘secular’ (non-religious, formal) education, and the great importance of only studying limmudei kodesh (holy studies). As a result of this attitude, thousands of students were not taught anything other than the Bible throughout our years attending Chabad institutions.”
The goal of such schools, Levin writes, was to produce “schluchim,” missionaries who would promote Chabad all over the world.
Meanwhile, he notes, “Failure to provide basic formal education cripples children within Chabad communities. We cannot ignore the harm done…” Levin writes, “Until this day, Oholei Torah and many other Chabad schools — particularly schools for boys and a few for girls in Crown Heights and in some other places — do not provide basic formal education.”
Education and Sharing Day 2014
In his 2000 article, Brownfeld writes that Shahak and Mezvinsky’s book should be “a wake-up call “to Americans, particularly Jewish supporters of Israel.”
Fourteen years later, however, very few people are aware of these books and their powerful information, and U.S. tax money continues to flow to Israel. The main author, Israel Shahak, is now dead, as is Edward Said; Noam Chomsky rarely, if ever, mentions him; and Shahak’s co-author, Norton Mezvinsky (uncle of Chelsea Clinton’s husband), is a member of a Lubavitch congregation in New York.
In many ways, little seems to have changed since 1994, when Congressmen Charles Schumer, Newt Gingrich, and others introduced legislation to bestow on Schneerson the Congressional Gold Medal. The bill passed both Houses by unanimous consent, honoring Schneerson for his “outstanding and lasting contributions toward improvements in world education, morality, and acts of charity.”
And in two weeks, Americans will be officially called on to observe a da y that honors Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the Lubavitcher movement.
That is, unless masses of people contact their Congressional representatives to demand a whole new direction: a “National Education and Sharing Day” that honors an individual who values education, and who believes that all people – in the words of the Declaration of Independence – are created equal.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest. Her book, Against Our Better Judgment: How the U.S. was used to create Israel, contains additional information on Rabbi Kook’s family connection to American front groups for Israeli terrorists. (Kook was unusual in his support for political Zionism; most Jewish religious leaders at the time considered the movement heretical). Weir is NOT the British historian.)
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Edward Said:
“…not everyone is afraid, and not every voice can be silenced…”
CounterPunch, March 16, 2001
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To Israel Fanatics: I am NOT the British history writer, please leave her alone!
A British writer named Alison Weir is receiving threats and harrassment from Israel partisans who have her mixed up with me. I hope others will help me spread the word that she is NOT the one they wish to hurt.
She is the author of apparently excellent books about British history, and she should be allowed to continue her life and her work without being attacked by pro-Israel fanatics who can’t even get their target straight.
Below is her email to me:
I write to appeal to you to make your disclaimer more prominent on your websites. You can see, on my website www.alisonweir.org.uk, that I have very prominent disclaimers on the Home and Contact pages, and today I have had to make them even more prominent. I still receive emails from people who think I am you, and today I received one that was so obscene and threatening that I have reported it to the police.
It is clear from emails from readers that some have stopped buying my books because they think they are written by you, and various worrying incidents during US book tours have made me feel that it is unsafe to visit the States, and – a nervous traveller to begin with – I have stopped touring. All this because of a name – but it should not be impacting on my career, and I shouldn’t have to keep defending myself against complaints that have nothing to do with me.
Everyone should have the right to the free expression of their views, but please could you work with me to make it absolutely clear that we are not one and the same person.
I have copied in my literary agent and my US publishers so that they are aware of this situation.
Thank you.
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Israel Shahak reply to criticism of “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”
The Response...from Israel Shahak
Israel Shahak, Tel. and Fax 02-5633-99
2 Bartenura St. Jerusalem 92184, IsraelA VINDICATION
Answer to the slanders of Stefan Bialoguski against “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel” by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky (Pluto Press, 1999).
Stefan Bialoguski thinks that intellectual and often public terror employed in the USA and other countries against Jews who speak the truth about Judaism, whether in form it took after the inception of Talmud or its continuation in Orthodox Judaism will succeed against an Israeli Jew like me.
Contrary to the great majority of American Jews, Israeli Jews enjoy three great advantages with regard to the freedom of expression on Jewish issues: they read Hebrew and can read Halacha and other Jewish documents in the original, and are not dependent on the falsehoods circulated about those by rabbis and Jewish organizations.
They see, with the help of their Hebrew press, whose behavior is much more honest when reporting Jewish issues than the American one, what Orthodox rabbis (almost all Israeli rabbis are Orthodox) do when they have political power, and many of them noted long ago the close resemblance the Orthodox rabbis bear to the Ayatollahs in their aims, and also the close resemblance between the Halacha and the religious law now established in Iran. I have no doubt that had the common Israeli slogans “Israel will not be an Iran” or “Israel will not be rules by Jewish Ayatollahs” – meaning the rabbis – been raised in the USA, American defenders of Jewish zealotry and discrimination if directed against non Jews, would have protested as strongly against such typical Israeli slogans as they do against “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”.
Let me add that increasing numbers of Israeli Jews are beginning to see that it would be a very good thing for Israel if something similar to the First Amendment to the USA Constitution would become the law in the State of Israel. Even the Israeli Jews who did not yet adapt this view usually despise the American Jews who want to carry the separation of the church from the state to its greatest extent in the USA (because they think it is in the Jewish interest) and vehemently oppose it in Israel (because they think that in this case it is against the Jewish interest).
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the secular part of the Israeli Jews has been educated, to large extent, on Prophetic books of Old Testament, and its other parts such as the Psalms, which contrary to the Talmudic literature, attack especially what the great majority of the Jews regarded as authoritative when this literature was composed. Therefore for us, the secular Israeli Jews, to attack Jewish institutions and laws, even when hallowed by time, and use the sharpest language while doing so, as the Prophets and other Jewish poets preserved in the Old Testament did when criticizing Jews (usually they used much sharper language than I am using), is the most normal thing; it is something which preserves our freedom and our sense of continuity as Jews.
Let me add that the best hope of better future in the Middle East lies in all its peoples criticizing their religions, customs and past. Continuing to be enslaved to past leads to perpetuation of all conflicts.
Therefore, before I begin my answer, let me quote three Biblical passages. I doubt whether the usual American Jewish audiences fed on the stuff approved by the ADL are aware of their existence, but those passages will help to explain to people with open minds not only what I am saying but also the way in which I express it. Prophet Ezekiel, speaking in the name of the Lord says: “Moreover, I gave them statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not have life” (chapter 20, verse 25). I say about the Halacha what Ezekiel said about some Biblical laws. The poet of Psalm 50, says: “But to the wicked God says: ‘what right have you to recite my statutes, or to take my covenant on your lips? For you hate morality and you cast my words behind you. If you see a thief, you are friend of his; and you keep company with adulterers’” (verses 16-18).The last words apply with particular force to the Orthodox rabbis in Israel and also the USA. A few months before the Israeli elections of 1996, it was found that Netanyahu was an adulterer, as he himself had to admit. This fact and the Halachic view of adultery as one of three most heinous sins did not diminish the support Netanyahu got from Orthodox rabbis.
It is known to the readers of the Hebrew press that majority of Orthodox rabbis have the greatest regard for Jewish thieves (and one can add drug smugglers and money-launderers) who donate a part of their ill gotten money to Jewish religious institutions, but eat kosher food. Prophet Micah says: “Hear this, you heads of the house of Jacob and rulers of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with injustice. Its heads judge for a bribe, its priests teach for hire, its prophets divine for money; yet they lean upon the Lord and say: ‘Behold, the Lord is among us! No evil shall come upon us’” (chapter 3, verses 9-11).
The beginning of any struggle for justice in the Middle East must be recognition of the fact that for the last 52 years Zion, that is State of Israel, had been built with blood, mainly of the Arabs, and founded on the most horrifying forms of injustice which when applied to the Jews are rightly condemned as anti-Semitism. Let me give here give only a single example, before entering Halachic argument. During 18 years of Israeli occupation of Lebanon about 25,000 Lebanese and Palestinians lost their lives as compared with about 800 Israeli soldiers. It is a significant fact of Israeli politics that numbers of non Jews killed in Lebanon had little or no influence on Israeli decision to leave it, even when they were members of South Lebanese Army, allied with Israel. On the other hand, the relatively small numbers of killed Jewish soldiers were the chief factor, even in the eyes of Israeli organizations calling for withdrawal, to mobilize the Jewish public opinion and force the government to withdraw.
The great majority of the Orthodox and traditional Jews (in the USA even more than in Israel) is quite indifferent to numbers of non Jews killed by the Jews, while it is very sensitive to a single Jew killed by non Jews. The same happens with discrimination: there is very little, if any protest from great majority of the Orthodox and traditional Jews when Jews discriminate against non Jews, in our case the Arabs, together with screams of fury against any hint of discrimination (or abuse) against the Jews themselves.
Surely, such an attitude by a public so devoted to the worship of the Jewish past must be influenced by that past. As I have shown (especially in my book “Jewish history, Jewish religion”; chapter 5 “The Laws Against Non Jews”), this attitude derives from the many Halachic laws against non Jews.
After this necessary preface, let me answer in some detail the accusations made by Stefan Bialoguski. I hope that when I have dealt with them, the malicious ignorance on which they are based will became apparent. As to his quoting rabbi Laufer of Jerusalem as his authority, this only reminds me of the faithful communists during Stalin who used to quote a “an authority” from Moscow to confirm the usual falsehoods of another totalitarian system. Such “authorities” may have known all works of “Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin” as the phrase was then, but they used them only in order to be approve Stalin’s crimes.
Similarly, Orthodox rabbis, whether in Israel or the USA were silent, for example, when quite recently one of their colleagues, Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh proposed in major Hebrew paper that the State of Israel should slaughter “women, children and old folks” in Palestinian towns and villages and, in generally do to them what was done in Sodom and Gomorrah (the case will be discussed in detail below).
Not rabbinical competence is needed here but a protest against Orthodox rabbis proposing, supporting and defending atrocities when committed by Jews in name of Halacha.
In any case, Bialoguski forgot, or perhaps never learned, the basic halachic rule in case of a dispute: “let us bring the book and see”. My answer is full of references to books; let him check those references by himself and not be enslaved to any rabbis.
Let me begin with the lesser issue of stealing and robbing which will illustrate the systematic falsification of Halacha used by Bialoguski. What he quotes is the halachic prohibition of stealing from anyone. But on this issue there is a crucial difference in Halacha between Jews stealing from non Jews and Jews robbing non Jews. The difference between theft (in Hebrew “gne’iva”) and robbery (in Hebrew “gezel”) is the same as in most systems of laws. Theft is defined as taking one’s property by stealth while robbery is defined as taking one’s property openly, using violence.
It is clear that the stealing of Palestinian land in the Territories (and before this inside Israel in the early 1950s) was done by employing state power, indeed often by employing army units, and is to be defined – as what was done to the land of the Indians by the USA – as robbery.
As I will show below, the Halacha makes a distinction (known to anyone who has even a minimal knowledge of the subject) between theft committed by a Jew, which is totally forbidden no matter from whom, and robbery committed by a Jew. While it is forbidden to Jews to rob a fellow Jew under any circumstances, the situation is quite different in Halacha in the case of a Jew robbing a non Jew, where under well defined circumstances Jews are indeed permitted to rob non Jews.
Accordingly, there is in Halacha a special issue known by the name of “robbing the non Jew” (in Hebrew “gezel hagoy”), which appears under this name in the authoritative Talmudic Encyclopedia, and the circumstances in which such robbery is either permitted or forbidden are discussed in great detail, as I will show below. Here I will only remark that Bialoguski omits this.
But before discussing robbery, let me return to the issue of stealing and show that behind the prohibition of stealing from anyone, there is in Halacha the most glaring discrimination between Jews and non Jews, omitted by Bialoguski and most “authorities” who write about Judaism. This is the issue of punishment to be inflicted according to Halacha on a Jew who steals. If he steals from a Jew he has to pay twice the value of what he had stolen, or return what he had stolen, if possible, and pay its value in addition. The first part is regarded as the restitution and the other as the punishment. But in case of Jew stealing from a non Jew he is only to pay the value of what he had stolen, only because he had stolen from a non Jew.
The reason given by Maimonides, following the Talmud, is that in Biblical verse specifying the punishment for theft it is written “he will pay twice to his fellow” and according to Halacha the word “fellow” means only Jews, and excludes the non Jews (Maimonides, Laws of Theft, chapter 2, rule 1).
The important commentary on Maimonides’ Code, “Magid Mishneh”, written by rabbi Yoseph Karo, the author of Shulchan Aruch, and other commentators fully agree with this shameful discrimination.
Let me add two observations you will not hear from “experts” on Judaism in the USA. If, for example, somebody would have proposed that Jews in the USA would be discriminated in exactly the same way as the Halacha discriminates against non Jew; that is he would propose that any non Jew stealing from a Jew would be exempt from punishment and will have only to pay the value of what he had stolen, but not be punished in addition, he would be justly regarded as anti-Semite. It would not help him if he would sanctimoniously exclaim, as Bialoguski does, “but I am against stealing from anybody, including the Jews!”
This example shows that what Bialoguski is doing with his selective quotations from Halacha is similar to what the worst anti-Semites do when their tenets are attacked.
Second, this example shows that most Americans, including the educated ones, know nothing about the real Judaism because they were brainwashed by apologists and propagandists and are in now in the same situation as were the faithful communists before the famous Krushchev’s speech of 1956, who also were sure that they know about “the true situation inside the USSR”, but in realty knew nothing about the reality of Stalin’s regime, because they were brainwashed by authorities they had blindly followed.
Let me now deal with the views of the Halacha in the case when a Jew robs a non Jew. As is told in great detail in both Babylonian (the usually used one) Talmud and the Jerusalemite Talmud, the earlier talmudic Sages had disputed whether it is permitted or forbidden for a Jew to rob a non Jew and in what circumstances. Those disputes are studied by present day talmudic students as boys (I too studied this subject at the age of fourteen), since an important part of them is contained in a popular Talmudic Tractate, Baba Kama (p. 113b) in addition to other places. Although the more offensive passages have been censored out in most of printed texts, they are preserved in booklets, used on such occasions, called “The omissions from the Talmud”, so that the entire dispute, of great length and many complications, is explained and its effect can be imagined.
Briefly, the Sages who permit Jews to rob the non Jews (recorded especially in another popular Tractate of Babylonian Talmud, Baba Metzi’a, p. 111b) and in the Jerusalemite Talmud, Tractate Baba Kama, chapter 4, halacha 3) opine, for example, that since it is written (Leviticus, chapter 19, verse 13): “You shall not oppress your friend or rob him”, the words “your friend” mean that those prohibitions apply only to the Jews.
Their opponents, especially Rabbi Shimon speaking in the name of Rabbi Akiva, admit the force of this reasoning and have recourse to a specious kind of argument. They argue as follows (I am slightly paraphrasing): “How do we know that robbing a non Jew is forbidden? We learn in the case of a Jewish slave sold to a non Jew that he must be redeemed and not taken by force, since it is written: ‘after he is sold he may be redeemed’ (Leviticus, chapter 25, verse 48) and this means that another Jew is forbidden to liberate such slave by force. Therefore we learn from this case that other forms of robbery from a non Jew are also forbidden”. Other rabbis argued that if a Jew robs a non Jew he causes a “desecration of the Lord’s Name”, since the robbed non Jew will curse the God of the Jews when he knows who had robbed him. This in their view – and not the fact that robbery took place – is the reason why Jews should not rob non Jews.
However, this reason for prohibiting Jews to rob non Jews will operate only when the identity of the Jewish robber is discovered. It follows that according to those Sages a Jew can rob non Jews on condition that he is sure that he, or his identity will not be discovered. A very nice lesson in ethics, indeed! Some Sages who prohibited Jews from robbing non Jews introduced an important distinction, much favored now by Gush Emunim rabbis and others of their ilk. They reasoned that robbing or not the non Jews is determined by the verse: “You shall eat all the nations that the Lord your God will give you”. This is supposed by those holy
Sages to mean that the Jews can rob non Jews only when the latter “are given to them,” meaning when they rule them (Baba Kam, ibid.).
Other Sages have said (more honestly in my view) that when “the Jews are powerful” (in Hebrew “yad Israel takifa”) they are permitted to rob the non Jews but they are not permitted to do so when they are not powerful. Some of the Sages who permit Jews to rob non Jews under all circumstances have added an argument worthy of our consideration. They argue that robbing non Jews is permitted since it is written: “He stood and measured the earth; He looked and shook the nations” (Book of Habakkuk, chapter 3, verse 6). This verse is alleged to mean that the Lord had seen non Jews not keeping the Seven Noachide Commandments and because of this allowed the Jews to take their property (in Hebrew “amad ve’hitir mamonam le’Israel”, Baba Kama, p. 38a).
Finally, let me note the fact about which most American (with the exception of Orthodox or, possibly, Conservative Jews too) are ignorant: this halachic dispute is possible because the prohibition “You shall not steal” in the Decalogue is considered in Halacha to mean not what it says, but to prohibit “selling (that is kidnapping) Jews into slavery”. Halachic prohibitions of stealing and robbery derive from other biblical verses; in case of stealing from the verse “You shall not steal, nor deal falsely, nor lie to your friends”, and in case of robbery from the verse “You shall not oppress your friend or rob him” (Leviticus, chapter 19, verses 11 and 13).
Both verses contain a qualification of the prohibition: the acts are forbidden only if done “to your friends” or “your friend” (Hebrew terms used in those verses which mean without any ambiguity “friend”, are mistakenly translated as “neighbor” or by other neutral term in standard English translations). Because of this qualification, Halacha needs special reasons for prohibiting Jews from stealing or robbing non Jews, or, the case of robbery, halachic authorities can permit it, either in general or on some occasions. This is also the reason why the punishment for stealing is absent in the cases where a Jew steals from a non Jew. It should be clear that this discussion still goes on and is all the time modified by new circumstances, of which the most important is the fact that the Jews in the State of Israel have power over non Jews, even more in the Territories than in Israel itself, contrary to Jewish situation which existed and still exists in diaspora. Halacha is a dynamic system both for good and evil, and the Jewish power, coupled with almost total absence of any criticism of Judaism by Jews themselves has caused – as usual – a great change for worse in the area of Halacha in the last
50 years, especially on the issue of how Jews should behave to non Jews according to their religion when they are the powerful group. It is a fact that the views I have quoted above are regarded as sacred texts whose study is the surest way to bring a Jew to Paradise, and that no rabbi (not only among the Orthodox and the Conservative rabbis but even among the Reform ones) will say what should be said, namely: those are wicked and immoral views who have a highly corrupting influence both on those who regard them as sacred and on those who do not condemn them as wicked.
Indeed, the verses from Psalm 50 I quoted above, “But to the wicked God says: ‘what right have you to recite my statutes, or to take my covenant on your lips? For you hate morality and you cast my words behind you.”, apply, first of all, to all rabbis who do not condemn such opinions. Thus, quoting isolated halachic pronouncements made some hundreds years ago, without the reasoning that stands behind them, as Jewish apologists are usually doing, is highly misleading.
I will not attempt to multiply quotations on the subject of stealing and robbing, although because of conditions of intellectual terror and threats of worse employed habitually by such Jewish organizations as ADL, and the falsification of Jewish history and halacha carried out by most of Jewish scholars, all what I have quoted or paraphrased must be unknown in the USA. Let me add that until not many years ago, and for similar reasons, most of what had been done to Indians in the USA was likewise unknown. I have quoted enough to show that the assertions of Bialoguski about halachic attitude to Jews taking the property of non Jews is a false generalization, either based on gullible ignorance or on a wish to hide injustice when committed in the name of Jewish religion.
It is known in Israel that most of religious, that is Orthodox Jews, whether in Israel or the USA did not protest against massive take over (in my view robbery) of Palestinian property solely for the benefit of Jews, taking place now for 52 years. (The few exceptions merely confirm the rule.) The Jewish opposition to this robbery mostly comes from Jews who are opposed – often violently opposed – to the Orthodox form of Jewish religion. One of the reasons for this politically very important difference is the halachic attitude to non Jews and their property.
Let me now pass to the more important issue of prohibition of killing in the cases where a Jew kills a non Jew. (There is no dispute that Halacha prohibits both Jews and non Jews to kill a Jew, except under special circumstances, and also prohibits non Jews to kill each other.) As in the case of stealing, Bialoguski quotes at me the general prohibition out of Shulchan Aruch that Jews are prohibited to kill non Jews, even idol worshippers. Jews should be the first to beware of using such general prohibitions as their only defense, since during all the times when they were killed or exterminated the general prohibition against killing was present in the codes of law of the states or religions responsible for their killing. Let me add that when the Indians were massacred in all parts of American continent, often by forces of the state, a law prohibiting killing of anybody was always in the code of the state guilty of murdering or condoning the murder. Legally, and in practice condoning a killing of a person because he belongs to a certain group is done by keeping a general prohibition against killing followed by laws permitting or even enjoining the prohibited act in certain circumstances, or making the killing of human beings of a certain category or under certain circumstances into an act which is not punished or even enjoined.
Let me give some examples of such attitudes out of Halacha itself in case of killing of non Jews by Jews. Since Bialoguski is quoting Shulchan Aruch, composed by rabbi Yoseph Karo, I will quote Karo’s opinion about what should be done to non Jews with whom Jews are at war. When Karo comments on Maimonides’ rule about Jews “with whom we are not at war” which states that they should neither killed nor saved when in danger – contrary to the treatment meted to Jewish heretics who should be killed by any possible way (Maimonides, of Murderer and Preservation of Life, chapter 4, rule 11; quoted in full in “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”, p. 120), in his commentary “Kesef Mishneh”, he adds what should the Jews do with the non Jews with whom they are at war. Writes Karo: “Our rabbi (i.e. Maimonides) used a precise language when he wrote ‘non Jews with whom we are not at war’, since it is written at the end of Tractate Kidushin, and also in Tractate Sofrim ‘You should kill the best of the non Jews’; that means [you should do so] during a war”. This horrible law did not remain buried in abstract rabbinic discussion but has been frequently quoted by important rabbis as a guidance to what the State of Israel, and also individual pious Jewish soldiers should actually do.
Out of many such instances which sometimes – but not always, I am sorry to say – caused a scandal among secular Israeli Jews and the media, but never among the rabbis in the USA, let me quote just three cases. Quite recently, rabbi Ginsburgh (about whom more below) was interviewed by the Hebrew paper “Maariv”, one of the three major Israeli papers. When asked how Israel should behave in the current war, Ginsburgh first proposed destroying of Arab property and then: “Secondly, I propose to liquidate all saboteurs. Any who has blood on his hands should be liquidated at once, and let us not to wait for him to sit in prison and be freed afterwards. Nests of saboteurs can be liquidated within one hour. Yamit (a settlement in Sinai, evacuated by orders of Begin in 1982. I. Shahak) which was a worthy Jewish town, was evacuated in one hour. It is possible to do the same to Beit Jallah. Places where are shootings or confrontations should be blown up immediately” Question: “Even if innocent people live in such places?” Answer: “According to Halacha, during the war one makes no distinction. One gives an opportunity to those who want to escape to do so; afterwards one fights against everyone, including children, women and old folks. The entire village should be destroyed. We are speaking about what was done to Sodom and Gomorrah. But under Arafat we speak about murderous leadership hating us, and doing everything until it gets the entire State of Israel. Thus, just as it happened in Sodom and Gomorrah, had there been there a few innocents we, perhaps, could consider further. . But under Arafat most people are totally wicked. Therefore we should say to the few righteous ones: ‘go out’ and then blow up the entire city” Maariv Friday Supplement, 12 January, 2001).
No Orthodox or Conservative rabbi said a word against this view about what Halacha says Jews should do to Arabs, presumably because they all know that it is the correct view. I also presume that whatever Bialoguski, the ADL and similar Jewish organizations say against me for having translated the learned ruling of rabbi Ginsburgh, none of them will dare to say in public that he misrepresents the Halacha and enter into learned discussion with him about the question whether the Jewish religion in its Orthodox form really enjoins the killing of “children, women and old folks” during war, or whether Palestinians should be compared to the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah and the Israeli army to angels of the Lord who had destroyed them.
The second example was already quoted in my “Jewish History, Jewish Religion (pp. 77-79). It concerns a case of pious Jewish soldoer in the Israeli army who studied in the prestigious religious college “Midrashiyat Noam”, who asked his teacher, rabbi Shimon Weiser, “whether it is permitted to kill unarmed men – or women and children? Or perhaps we should take revenge on the Arabs?” noting that standing regulations of the Israeli army prohibit such acts. His questions, the learned answer of rabbi Weiser, who condemns the regulations of the Israeli army for being derived from non Jewish sources, and the answer of the soldier in which he specifies what he has learned, were published in the 1974 yearbook of that college. Rabbi Weiser quotes in full the dictum shortened by rabbi Karo. “Rabbi Shimon used to say: ‘kill the best of the non Jews, dash the brain of the best of the snakes” as being applicable to what the Jewish soldiers should do during a war. After learned halachic discussion his instructions to pious soldiers are to kill all non Jews except if “it is quite clear that he has no evil intent”. The soldier responds: “As for the letter itself, I have understood it as follows: In wartime I am not merely permitted, but enjoined to kill every Arab man and woman whom I chance upon, if there is reason to fear that they help in the war against us, directly or indirectly. And as far as I am concerned I have to kill them even if that might result in an involvement with the military law”. I heard about no rabbi who questioned that ruling. My last example is chosen in honor of our newly elected Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. His first major exploit was the massacre of Kibyeh, in which many Palestinian civilians, including women and children were killed. Since some Israeli Jews (not too many) protested against this, many rabbis rushed to Sharon’s defense, proving that the massacre was conducted according to the strictest standards of the Halacha. The most eminent of those rabbis was Rabbi Shaul Israeli, for many years one of the highest rabbinic authorities of the National Religious Party and of the religious Zionism in general, who published an article entitled “Kibyeh Incident According to the Halacha” in the yearly rabbinic journal “The Religion and the State” (in Hebrew “Hadat Ve’Hamdinah”) for the year 5713 (1953). The article, a dazzling display of halachic scholarship quoting and discussing every possible source from Talmud till the modern times, comes to following conclusion: “We have established that there exists a special term of ‘war of revenge’ and this is a war against those who hate the Jews and [there are] special laws applying to such war Accordingly, if the enemies of the Jews had attacked them once but retreated, and they intend to attack them again they are to be defined as the haters of the Jews and a war of revenge should be waged against them. In such a war there is absolutely no obligation to take precautions during warlike acts in order that non-combatants would not be hurt, because during a war both the righteous and wicked are killed. But the war of revenge is based on the example of the war against the Midianites (see Numbers, chapter 31) in which small children were also executed (verse 17, ibid. “Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones”) and we might wonder about this, for how they had sinned? But we have already found in the sayings of our Sages, of blessed memory, that little children have to die because of the sin of their parents And our final conclusion is that we should continue with acts of retaliation and revenge against the haters of the Jews and such acts are considered to be a war of religious obligation (in Hebrew “milhemet mitzvah”). Every calamity and hurt that happens to the enemies, their allies and their children from such actions is caused by them and is [merely] the reward of their sins. There is absolutely no obligation to refrain from acts of retaliation out of an apprehension that innocents would be hit by them, because it is not we who are causing all this but them, and we are innocent”.
Indeed, the learned opinion of Rabbi Israeli has been followed, so far as I know, by all Orthodox rabbis of any standing in the case of wars waged by the Jewish State. It is only in wars waged by non Jewish state such as the USA, which does not enjoy the benefit of Biblical and Talmudic precedents, that some of such rabbis have permitted themselves (hypocritically, in my view) to raise humanitarian objections and castigate non Jewish authorities.
Our next consideration will be the issue of punishment prescribed by the Halacha for a Jew who killed a non Jew, compared with punishment for killing a Jew. After all, spitting on the street and murder are both forbidden by law but are, nevertheless, very different acts. The punishment legally inflicted for a given offence shows us the view of the authors of the code about its gravity, and to a great extent also the opinion of the society about it. In case of a religious code, such differences also show us the view about the gravity of the sin committed when a believer does something prohibited by the code of his religion. Just as in Christianity there is a great difference between a mortal and venial sin, so in Orthodox Judaism there is a graduation of sins according to punishment to be inflicted, if possible, for committing them.
The greatest sins are those meriting the punishment of death and the smallest those where no human punishment is to be inflicted, but are left to God’s judgment. Killing a Jew is regarded as one of the three worst sins of the first category. However, Maimonides, who like Shulhan Aruch begins his “Laws of Murderer and Preservation of Life” with a general prohibition of killing anybody (chapter 1, rule 1), states a few rules afterwards: “One who kills a resident alien is not to be put to death by a rabbinic court because it is written ‘If a man willfully attacks his friend to kill him’ (Exodus, chapter 21, verse 14), and it is unnecessary to add he is not put to death for killing a non Jew” (ibid. chapter 2, rule 11). “Mechiltah”, an important and ancient collection pf laws from the Talmudic period, states explicitly that the punishment of a Jew who kills a non Jew is “reserved to Heaven” (chapter “mishpatim”, section 4).
In the next rule Maimonides states that a Jew who kills a non Jewish slave of any Jew is put to death because “the slave had accepted the commandments of the Jewish religion (in Hebrew “mitzvoth”) and became a part of God’s inheritance”. The same distinction is repeated in the case of accidental killing. In case of Jew who had accidentally killed another Jew the penalty is exile to a special refuge town. A Jew who killed incidentally a non Jew is not punished. In case of a non Jew, even a residential alien, who had accidentally killed a Jew, death penalty is inflicted. (See Maimonides, ibid. chapter 5, rule 3). The Halacha has no system of alternative penalties. One who, for whatever reason, is absolved from a punishment due to him, is free from any further human punishment, except in the case of killing a Jew which will be described below (Maimonides, Laws of Murderer and Preservation of Life, chapter 4, rule 9).
Therefore when Halacha states that a Jew who killed a non Jew is not put to death, this means that he will not receive any human punishment, exactly as stated in “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”. Bialoguski who object to this statement, cleverly refrains to state that according to Halacha a Jew who killed a non Jew should not be punished; instead he prates about the prohibition of such killing. Yes, killing of non Jews by Jews is prohibited by Halacha in the same way that spitting on street is prohibited in a city; such killings are treated by Orthodox Jews as being venial sins. This is the real reason why Gush Emunim rabbis and let me add, other rabbis as well, who anyhow object to the Israeli code of laws as being “un-Jewish” because it is based on English and latterly also on American law which, contrary to the very Jewish Halacha punishes killers without a distinction of the religion of their victims, try to obtain amnesties or reductions of punishments for every Jew who killed an Arab, but make no such effort in the case of a Jew who killed a Jew. The Hebrew press discusses such cases, which occur frequently, in great detail. I forbear to discuss the purely hypothetical case of an extreme anti-Semite daring to propose in the USA that there should be difference in legal punishment inflicted on one who killed a Christian and one who killed a Jew and try to excuse his offence by claiming that he is, nevertheless, against killing of Jews, just as Bialoguski does.
Even though it is very difficult to inflict a death penalty on a Jew according to the Halacha (it is much easier to inflict it on a non Jew, but this is another issue), murderer of a Jew is put to death in a most barbarous way, described by Maimonides. “One who kills a Jew (literally “who kills souls”, in Hebrew “horeg nefashot”), without presence of two witnesses who saw him at the same time but was seen by one after the other; or if he killed before witnesses who did not warn him; or if witnesses were found invalid during a check but not in interrogation (those are necessary conditions to inflict death penalty on a Jew according to the Halacha); then those murderers are imprisoned in a small cell and fed with small amount of bread and a little water until their guts become narrow, and afterwards they are fed with barley until their belly bursts and they die from seriousness of their illness” (Maimonides, Laws of Murderer and Preservation of Life, chapter 4, rule 8). The difference between this treatment, amounting to torturing a person to death, in case of one who killed a Jew and the absence of any human punishment in the case of a Jew who killed a non Jew, shows us the difference between the value of life of a Jew and non Jew in the Halacha, and also explains many things in Israeli politics. It also affords us a glimpse about the kind of state Israel will become, if it becomes a state according to the Halacha, fully attuned to ancestral Jewish morality and tradition, as so many Orthodox Jews desire. It can be presumed that Bialoguski is a part of this tendency.
Let me add that the wish to establish Halacha as law of Israel is particularly strong among those whom “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel” calls “Messianists” because they believe that they prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah – who will, of course, rule according to the Halacha. Gush Emunim movement can be regarded as the most active part of the Messianists.
One of most important aims of “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel” was to warn people outside Israel, but especially the American Jews (who because of their ignorance of Judaism tend to be especially gullible about the aims and the principles of Orthodox Jews in general and those in Israel in particular) about what Israel influenced by Jewish Orthodoxy might do when Halacha will fully determine its policies. In my view, proved by the examples I quoted above, influence of Halacha will bring about atrocities worse than any committed by Israel so far, but also dangers. Many American Jews may not be very concerned by dangers to Arabs or to world peace, but it is obvious that policies based on Halachic ruling of what the Jews can do to non Jews when they are powerful enough will turn to be also dangerous to the Jews themselves. In the first place, they will corrupt them.
The trivial value of life of non Jew in Halacha is shown also by its manner of reasoning why Jews are prohibited to kill non Jews and by Halachic laws about life of non Jews both ancient and modern. According to great majority of Halachic authorities the prohibition to kill non Jews is not derived by the Halacha from the commandment “You shall not kill” (in Hebrew it is “You shall not murder”) in the Decalogue, just as we have seen above that the prohibition not to steal from not Jews is not derived from the commandment “You shall not steal” in it (see the detailed survey in Talmudic Encyclopedia, the original Hebrew, volume 5, article “goy”, pp. 355-356.
The survey adds that the prohibition of killing non Jews is valid only in the absence of war, since “during war the saying ‘kill the best of non Jews’ applies.) In fact, Halacha is based on complete separation between Jews and non Jews. I will illustrate this attitude by one law not affecting the lives of non Jews, showing both the extent of the separation and the extent of tolerance granted by Halacha to non Jews when Jews have the power. Writes Maimonides: “A non Jew who studies Torah (Old Testament and Talmud are included in this term) is guilty of offense meriting death. He should study nothing except their Seven Commandments (the sa called Noahide Commandments given to Noah). In the same manner a non Jew who did not work on Sabbath, even [if he did not work] on another day of the week, if he made it into a Sabbath, is guilty of offense meriting death. Needless to say he is guilty [of offence meriting death] if he had established a holiday.
The general rule is that one should not allow them to innovate about religion from their own reasoning. A non Jew should either convert to Judaism and accept all commandments, or stay in his religion without either adding or subtracting anything from it. [However], if he (a non Jew) did study the Torah or refrained from working on the Sabbath, or innovated anything, he should be beaten up and punished and be told that he is guilty of offence meriting death for what he had done, but he is not executed” (Laws of Kings, chapter 10, rule 9).
Let me add a few other laws or modern rabbinic pronouncements where disregard for a life of a non Jew or even putting him to death is especially glaring. Let us begin with the case of sexual intercourse between Jewish male and non Jewish female, regarded as much worse by the Halacha than the equally forbidden sexual intercourse between Jewish female and non Jewish male, one presumes because of the attitude to the female as a temptress prevalent in Judaism no less than in other religions. Maimonides pronounces: “If a Jew has coitus with a non Jewish woman, whether she is be a child of three or an adult, whether married or unmarried, and even if he is a minor aged only nine years and one day – because he had a willful coitus with her, she must be killed as is the case with a beast, because through her a Jew got into trouble (Laws of Prohibited Intercourse, chapter 12, rule 10; the law is also enunciated in the article “goy” of the Talmudic Encyclopedia). The words “as is the case with a beast” refer to the halachic law stating that a beast with which a Jew had sexual relations is to be killed, for a similar reason to the killing of non Jewish female. Even more important is the prohibition on the Jews to save the life of a non Jew in normal times, and especially the prohibition to violate Sabbath for the sake of saving a non Jewish life as the Jews are enjoined to do for sake of saving a Jewish life. The subject is treated in “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel” (p. 120), and I have treated it more extensively in my “Jewish History, Jewish Religion” (pp. 80-87), so I will quote here only one law. If Jews see on the Sabbath a ship in danger of sinking they are forbidden to violate the Sabbath in order to save it “if nothing at all is known about the identity of those on board”, because the probability is that passengers are non Jews. This pronouncement occurs in one of the major commentaries on Shulchan Aruch written by renowned Rabbi Akiva Eiger who died only in 1837, and the commentary is printed regularly with the text (ibid. Orach Hayim, paragraph 329). I assume that Bialoguski can ask rabbi Lauffer of Jerusalem about his behavior when he sees on the Sabbath a ship in danger in the case he was not previously informed whether there are Jews among the passengers. Rabbi Lauffer must be thoroughly familiar with this law. I have not yet heard about one Orthodox rabbi opposing rabbi Eiger or any Reform rabbi referring to this law, although I should add that opposing him is not enough: he should be condemned as an immoral person, in the same way as the worst anti-Semites are.
After many quotations from Hebrew let me finish my vindication with an English language quotation, taken from an important Jewish publication appearing in New York, and so easily available to all, about the real attitude of Orthodox Jews to non Jews. On April 26, 1996 “Jewish Weekly” important American Jewish magazine published a long and very respectful interview of its staff writer, Lawrence Cohler, with rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, under the title: “Hero Or Racist? Are Jewish lives really more valuable than non-Jewish ones? Radical rabbi just freed from an Israeli prison thinks so”.
Let me explain that Ginsburgh was imprisoned without trial some time after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, because as one who had publicly approved from the halachic point of view the massacre of Baruch Goldstein, and lauded that murderer to the skies, was suspected of some involvement in encouraging the murder of Rabin. Let me quote from that interview (worthy of being studied by everyone who wants to know what Orthodox Judaism is. Ginsburgh is correctly described in that interview as an important leader of the Lubavitch Hassidic sect. Let me quote some of Ginsburgh views from that interview. “Citing explicit instructions he says he received from the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Ginsburgh has also strongly defended Jewish revenge attacks on Arabs, at least after-the-fact.
Whether he would tell a Jew to engage in in such a random attacks beforehand ‘is a different story’, Rabbi Ginsburgh said. But after such an attack took place in response to an Arab provocation, ‘You can’t even hint it was a bad thing’. Among other things, he explained, the jurisdiction of an Israeli court in such a case is illegitimate because ‘Legally, if a Jew does kill a non-Jew, he’s not called a murderer. He didn’t transgress the Sixth Commandment: Thou Shall not murder. This applies only to Jews killing Jews. Therefore [in a Jewish state] his punishment is given over to heaven’ rather than to a secular court”. Let me emphasize the key word in this morally repulsive passage is “random”, and that Halacha as correctly enunciated by Ginsburgh permits Jews to kill not only Arabs but non Jews in general at random, if other non Jews “made a provocation”. In other words, Halacha allows Jews to lynch non Jews.
In terms of the Halacha Ginsburgh is simply accurate and no rabbi had tried to prove him wrong. What I had stated above and what was written in “Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel” is only a milder version of what Ginsburgh said, but the real offence was to say it to everybody and not to a Jewish audience. The interview says that “in 1989, Rabbi Ginsburgh was personally involved in the events that led to such a killing when he led a large group of his yeshiva students on an armed West Bank ‘walking tour’ that slipped around Israeli Army restrictions and assertively through a Palestinian village. The tour ended in a melee that saw the rabbi stoned by angry villagers, the yeshiva boys rampaging through the village setting fires and vandalizing, and a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who was sitting in her house shot by one of the yeshiva tourists”. In other words, the event described by The Jewish Week as “tour” was just a pogrom, one of the many organized in the West Bank by Halacha-keeping Jews in the last decades. The most interesting thing about those Jewish pogroms was that no rabbi of importance condemned any of them. In this case, no Orthodox rabbi found a word to say about that “13-year-old Palestinian girl”, who was murdered by Halacha-keeping Jews. “At the trial of the yeshiva boy charged with the killing, Rabbi Ginsburgh said bluntly, “The people of Israel must rise and declare in public that a Jew and a goy are not, God forbid, the same. Any trial that assumes that Jews and goyim are equivalent is a travesty of justice”.
In accord with this principle of total difference between Jews and non Jews and absolute inferiority of the latter, Rabbi Ginsburgh asserted that “If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA. Later, Rabbi Ginsburgh asked rhetorically, ‘If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. ‘Jewish life has infinite value’ he explained. ‘There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life’”.
On the day of the publication of this article, the item about halachic permission to stop “innocent non-Jewish passing by” tt his liver, this part of interview was translated into Hebrew and published in Haaretz, the most prestigious Israeli paper, by its correspondent Yair Shaleg. (The story did not appear in the New York Times.) A few days afterwrds, Sheleg called on Orthodox rabbis to oppose this view and declare that it contradicts the Halacha. No one did so till the present day.
Let me add that the few New York rabbis asked by The Jewish Week to comment on Ginsburgh did not say that his views are wrong or that they should be condemned. One said they are based on “statements out of context”. Another admitted that “The sad thing is, these statements are in our books,” but they are “purely theoretical.” (Apparently, the murder of that 13-old-girl was “purely theoretical” because she was not Jewish.)
No one said even a fraction of what I presume he would say had similar statement been made with the word “Jew” and “non-Jew” reversed. In addition to what I had quoted in this Vindication, I conclude from the refusal of any Orthodox rabbi (including “Rabbi Lauffer of Jerusalem” so trusted by Bialoguski) that Ginsburgh’s views represent correctly the views of Halacha and of Jewish Orthodoxy about non Jews, and about how Jews should treat them if only they have the power to behave according to Halacha.
Let me add to those who kept silent because, presumably, they agree with Ginsburgh about the non Jews, not only in the Middle East, the Anti Defamation League and similar Jewish organization who follow the media to protest against what they consider a defamation of Judaism. It can be presumed that Ginsburgh’s views are for the ADL not a defamation but a part of Judaism. It is against this situation that I wrote this Vindication.
Israel Shahak
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1996 Jewish Week article on Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh / Ginzburg
The Jewish Week, April 26, 1996, pp. 12, 31.
Hero Or Racist?
Are Jewish lives really more valuable than non-Jewish ones?
Radical rabbi just freed from an Israeli prison thinks so.
Lawrence Cohler
Staff Writer
The triumphal cheers of some 500 Lubavitch chasidim shook the hall on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights Sunday night as a tall, white-haired rabbi basked in their toasts to his recent victory over the government of Israel’s effort to silence him.
A sea of men in black hats and women in long dresses hailed Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh from separate sides of the ballroom of the Oholei Menachem Yeshiva. And amid round wood tables stacked high with challah, herring and rounds of vodka, Rabbi Ginsburgh joined them heartily as glasses rose to his long life.
But ask Lubavitch leader Rabbi Shmuel Butman about Rabbi Ginsburgh’s view that the Torah would “probably permit” seizing an innocent non-Jew for a liver transplant to save the life of a Jew, and Rabbi Butman, who helped organize the welcome, politely demurs.
“That is a purely halachic question,” he says, using the Hebrew adjective for matters pertaining to traditional Jewish law. We don’t get into that.”
“In general, he’s a very pious individual,” said Rabbi Butman, director of the Lubavitch Youth Organization. “And we’re sure he carries responsibility for what he says.”
Not everyone is so sanguine.
Rabbi Walter Wurzburger, a professor of philosophy at Yeshiva University and former president of the Rabbinical Council of America, the Orthodox Zionist rabbinic body, noted, “Even the devil can quote Scripture.”
The government of Israel’s attempt to stifle Rabbi Ginsburgh’s teaching and lecturing to his followers – including some in the West Bank, where he is dean of a yeshiva in the Palestinian town of Nablus – crashed in failure late last month. After he was jailed for three weeks without charge or trial, a member of Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the government had insufficient evidence to justify holding Rabbi Ginsburgh under Israel’s administrative detention laws.
It marked the first time that administrative detention, which until recently has been applied overwhelmingly to Arabs, had ever been successfully challenged. And among many Lubavitchers, the government’s precedent-setting defeat was greeted as a miraculous, classically Judaic victory of the weak over the strong. It was this feeling, which makes daily news headlines a source of faith for so many of them, that permeated the hall Sunday night.
But Rabbi Ginsburgh, an intense but soft-spoken 52-year-old with a long white beard, looks far from the image of tousle-haired David facing the behemoth Goliath. At the same time, his quiet demeanor clashes sharply with the image of a dangerous, demagogic extremist of the sort that Israeli officials have invoked.
Still, no one doubts that his pronouncements and teachings have been controversial.
Regarded as one of the Lubavitch sect’s leading authorities on Jewish mysticism, the St. Louis-born rabbi, who also has a graduate degree in mathematics, speaks freely of Jews’ genetic-based spiritual superiority over non-Jews. It is a superiority that he asserts invests Jewish life with greater value in the eyes of Torah.
“If you have two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first,” Rabbi Ginsburgh told The Jewish Week. ”If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.”
Later, Rabbi Ginsburgh asked rhetorically, “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that.
“Jewish life has infinite value,” explained. “There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”
Notwithstanding this, Rabbi Ginsburgh hastened to add that nothing in this view undermines the holiness of non-Jewish lives.
“Just the opposite,” he insisted. ”…Ultimately the light they recognize from Jews will make their lives more valuable. Jews are essentially a giver nation. And non-Jews are receivers.”
Rabbi Ginsburgh is also an ardent sympathizer of Baruch Goldstein, the Brooklyn-born physician who massacred 29 Palestinians at prayer in a Hebron mosque in February 1994. While stopping short of endorsing Goldstein’s act outright, Rabbi Ginsburgh described him unambivalently as “a Jew who gave up his life for his people.” In a recent book devoted to Goldstein he called the massacre “an act of bravery whose source was divine grace.”
Citing explicit instructions he says he received from the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Ginsburgh has also strongly defended Jewish revenge attacks on Arabs, at least after-the-fact. Whether he would tell a Jew to engage in such a random attack beforehand “is a different story,” Rabbi Ginsburgh said. But after such an attack took place in response to an Arab provocation, “You can’t even hint it was a bad thing.”
Among other things, he explained, the jurisdiction of an Israeli court in such a case is illegitimate because “Legally, if a Jew does kill a non-Jew, he’s not called a murderer. He didn’t transgress the Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not murder. This applies only to Jews killing Jews. Therefore [in a Jewish state], his punishment is given over to heaven” rather than to a secular court.
In 1989, Rabbi Ginsburgh was personally involved in the events that led to such a killing when he led a large group of his yeshiva students on an armed West Bank “walking tour” that slipped around Israeli Army restrictions and assertively through a Palestinian village. The tour ended in a melee that saw the rabbi stoned by angry villagers, the yeshiva boys rampaging through the village setting fires and vandalizing, and a 13-year-old Palestinian girl who was sitting in her house shot by one of the yeshiva tourists.
At the trial of the yeshiva boy charged with the killing, Rabbi Ginsburgh said bluntly, “The people of Israel must rise and declare in public that a Jew and goy are not, God forbid, the same. Any trial that assumes that Jews and goyim are equal is a travesty of justice.”
In an interview at The Jewish Week, Rabbi Ginsburgh delivered his comments in a soft, unassuming voice with no sign of bitterness or hate.
In fact, he said, one reason the court ultimately felt compelled to free him was because his most controversial statements came not as personal opinions but always as citations from scripture, Kabbalah or recognized rabbinic authority.
Rabbi Ginsburgh also defended many of his statements as more musings and reflections in a struggle towards conclusions, rather than conclusions themselves.
“Torah is a complex matter,” he said he told the judge, “especially Kabbalah. You must consider many factors.” But in the course of working through this, he said, there is “a thinking-aloud process.”
“Even when you understand there is a justification for doing certain things,” said Rabbi Ginsburgh, ”studying Kabbalah sweetens the mentality.” The process usually calms, rather than inflames, his students, Rabbi Ginsburgh said.
“In class I’m teaching them not to act on these things, not because they are wrong, but because our way to influence the situation is completely different. If they think the thing to do is to get up and act violently, I teach them that that’s wrong.”
But to Israeli authorities, Rabbi Ginsburgh’s citations and outloud thinking were the stuff of incitement. They viewed many of his talks as incendiary and tried – unsuccessfully – to stifle his lectures to his students in the Nablus yeshiva in particular.
Finally, just hours after the devastating suicide bombing in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Circle last March, amid a wrathful national mood, Rabbi Ginsburgh gave a Purim lecture on a long letter by the Lubavitcher Rebbe about “the mitzvahs of war for the sake of revenge and war for the sake of conquering the Land of Israel,” said Rabbi Ginsburgh.
“The rebbe explained that war for the sake of revenge was a much higher mitzvah,” said Rabbi Ginsburgh, recalling his talk to the crowd.
It was soon after this that Prime Minister Shimon Peres signed a 60-day administrative detention order against him “to prevent Rabbi Ginsburgh from continuing his incendiary preaching of revenge.”
The public outcry that followed came mostly from the right. But some civil libertarians also protested his jailings as beyond the pale, even for Israel’s administrative detention law. That law empowers the authorities to jail without charge individuals who threaten public security. But unlike most other detainees, they noted, Rabbi Ginsburgh was jailed explicitly for his speech rather than his acts.
Still, when the court finally ordered him released, citing insufficient evidence that his statements had incited or would incite anyone, many Lubavitchers had no doubt it was their effort that turned the tide.
Rabbi Ginsburgh himself told the Crown Heights audience Sunday night, “The most important thing I want to convey is that the claim against me is a claim against the Torah, a claim against chassidus, a claim against the Lubavitcher rebbe.”
But not everyone agrees with how Rabbi Ginsburgh uses these sources, of course.
“It’s the greatest tragedy to take isolated texts and use them without tradition,” Rabbi Wurzburger said. ”[Rabbi Meir] Kahane did this, too. You can always take statements out of context.”
Even within Lubavitch, there are critics: Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, the former administrator of the rebbe’s secretariat and current head of the sect’s international operations, termed Rabbi Ginsburgh’s views, as related to him in a phone interview, ”totally outrageous.”
But Rabbi Moshe Greenberg, a professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, called for radically revising Jewish thinking about some Jewish texts on the grounds that scholars such as Rabbi Ginsburgh are far from aberrant in their use of them.
Rabbi Greenberg, who has written extensively about Jewish scriptural views on racism and ethnic chauvinism, said, “The sad thing is, these statements are in our books.”
“There’ll be a statement in Talmud… made in circumstances where it’s purely theoretical, because Jews then never had the power to do it,” he explained. And now, he said, “It’s carried over into circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered. [These statements] are brought forward by people who themselves have no social responsibility and have not been elected to represent the Jewish people. But they’re called Torah scholars. And not having responsibility, they can say such things. Their self-confidence and self-righteousness is part of their total divorcement from consequences.”
But Rabbi Ginsburgh’s own thoughts were far from that this week. Preparing to go on to Los Angeles as part of the fund-raising tour his supporters had planned, he exulted that his bout with repression had gained him “thousands” of more listeners.
“Even my prosecutors got a lesson in chasidic thinking,” he said, smiling, ”because they had to study my thinking for their prosecution.”
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Contributing editor Jon Kalish contributed to this article.
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My talk at National Summit to Reassess the US-Israel “Special Relationship”
C-Span broadcast the entire Summit live on March 7th from the National Press Club. You can see all the talks on our website
I was the fourth speaker on the fourth panel. Below is what I said:
Hello, I’m Alison Weir, president of the Council for the National Interest and executive director of If Americans Knew. Thank you. There are full citations in my book [ Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel ] for everything that I’ll be saying, and some of it will be quite surprising. So I want you to look at the citations if you would like.
For most of my life, I knew very little about Israel-Palestine. I was deeply aware of the Nazi holocaust, sympathetic to Israel, and had seen the movie Exodus.
But then in fall of 2000 the departure of my youngest child for college coincided with the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada with its images of children throwing stones against tanks, and I finally began to pay attention to a distant part of the world that I had thought had little to do with me and my family.
When I paid attention, I noticed how one-side the news coverage seemed to be, providing far more information from and about Israelis than Palestinians.
Growing curious, I looked into what the internet had to offer and discovered a wealth of information directly from the region from Palestinians, Israelis, and others that revealed a far darker reality than our media were reporting – a reality in which Israel’s massively powerful military, it appeared, was using extreme violence against a population that was largely unarmed, killing many and injuring multitudes.
The strategy, I read in a report by an Israeli academic, was to keep deaths below the level that would trigger world outrage, while maiming as many as possible; a common practice was for Israeli snipers to target knees and eyes. In the first month alone over 7,000 Palestinians were injured, including numerous children.
I noticed little of this was being reported by one of my main news sources, NPR’s Linda Gradstein, and I began to notice a pattern of media filtration that continues through to today, in which some facts are repeated and some never reported.
While we are repeatedly told that rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel, we seem never to be told that over 10 years of largely home-made rocket fire has killed a total of 29 Israelis – nor do we learn that during this same period Israeli forces have killed 4,000 Gazans.
We tend to hear, often in detail, about Israeli children who have been tragically killed.
We hear far less often about the Palestinian children who were killed first, and in far larger numbers.
It is my view that all of these deaths are tragic. 
After several months of researching such information, I finally decided I needed to go and see for myself if things were truly as bad as I was beginning to believe.
I quit my job as a small town weekly newspaper editor and traveled over to the region as a freelance reporter, traveling throughout the West Bank and Gaza in February & March 2001 – long before rocket fire from Gaza – and took photographs of what I saw.
When I returned, I began an organization to tell Americans the facts on this issue.
I also began to study it intensely. I was especially curious about the U.S. connection, reading book after book by respected authors and scholars.
I was completely unprepared for what I found.
I discovered an extraordinarily powerful and pervasive special interest lobby of which I had previously been almost entirely unaware.
Even more surprising, I discovered that this was just the latest incarnation of a movement that has been active in the U.S. for over a century. A movement called “political Zionism” – its adherents are called Zionists – that has profoundly impacted my nation and others, and yet that many Americans do not even know exists.
I discovered that political Zionism, a movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine, had begun in the late 1800s, and that by the early 1890s there were organizations promoting this ideology in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Boston, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.
By the 1910s the number of Zionists in the U.S. approached 20,000 and included lawyers, professors, and businessmen – and was becoming a movement to which, as one historian put it, “Congressmen, particularly in the eastern cities, began to listen.”
By 1918 there were 200,000 Zionists in the U.S., and in 1948 there were nearly a million.
While politicians from both parties increasingly saw Zionists as potential voters and donors to curry or at least placate, the U.S. state department opposed Zionism, believing it was counter to both U.S. interests and principles.
President Taft’s Secretary of State Philander Knox stated in 1912 that Zionism involved “matters primarily related to the interests of countries other than our own.”
A U.S. commission that studied the situation in Palestine in 1919 concluded, “the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.”
In 1947 American statesman Dean Acheson stated that supporting Zionist objectives would “imperil not only American but all Western interests in the Near East.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff reported that a Zionist proposal “would prejudice United States strategic interests in the Near and Middle East,” and predicted, “the Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the United States] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations….”
Such reports and memos go on and on…
During this time, however, Zionists were working strenuously – and ultimately successfully – to combat such wise recommendations.
They employed a wide variety of stratagems – from open public advocacy to various covert activities. Their initiatives targeted every sector of the American population – including Jewish Americans, the large majority of whom for many decades were either non-Zionist or actively anti-Zionist, and who still today most likely are misinformed on what is being done allegedly in their name.
In 1943 a Zionist organization, in the words of its leader, launched “a political and public relations offensive to capture the support of Congressmen, clergy, editors, professors, business and labor.” A directive ordered: “In every community an American Christian Palestine Committee must be immediately organized.”
An annual report crowed: “We reach into every department of American life.”
When Britain failed to accede to Zionist demands, an American rabbi named Baruch Korff fomented a plan to drop incendiary bombs on London that was only prevented when a young American aviator divulged it to the Paris Police. 25 years later Korff, his terrorist past expunged from the public memory, became close to President Richard Nixon, influencing his Middle East policies. Nixon jocularly called him “my rabbi.”
Perhaps my most surprising discovery of so many surprising findings involves an extremely well-known and highly regarded Supreme Court Justice – Louis Brandeis.
According to a 1978 article in the respected scholarly journal American Jewish Historical Quarterly, by Dr. Sarah Schmidt, an Israeli professor of Jewish history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a book by Peter Grose, former editor of Foreign Affairs, diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, and associate at the JFK School of Government Harvard, Louis Brandeis was a leader of “an elitist secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate.’”*
According to Schmidt and Grose, this society promoted Zionism throughout the U.S. Its initiates underwent a solemn induction ceremony in which the inductee was told:
“You are about to take a step which will bind you to a single cause for all your life…… until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life–dearer than that of family, of school, of nation.”
Grose writes “The members set about meeting people of influence here and there, casually, on a friendly basis. They planted suggestions for action to further the Zionist cause …”
“As early as November 1915,” Grose writes, a leader of the Parushim went around suggesting that the British might gain some benefit from a formal declaration in support of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.”
Brandeis directed Zionist activities secretly from his Supreme Court chambers through his loyal lieutenants – one of whom eventually became a Supreme Court Justice himself, another particularly influential one: Felix Frankfurter.
A number of authors report that Brandeis was a close friend of President Woodrow Wilson and used this access to advocate for the Zionist cause, at times serving as a conduit between British Zionists and the president.
In fact, some Zionist leaders bragged, and British officials, rightly or wrongly, believed that Zionists had played a significant role in the U.S. decision to enter World War I.
Numerous individuals, both Jewish and Christian, attempted to oppose Zionist endeavors.
One was Dorothy Thompson. According to the Britannica Encyclopedia, Thompson was “one of the most famous journalists of the 20th Century.”
She had graced the cover of Time magazine, had been profiled by America’s top magazines, and was so well-known that a Hollywood movie featuring Kathryn Hepburn and Spencer Tracey and a Broadway play starring Lauren Bacall, were based on her.
Thompson had been the first journalist to be expelled by Adolph Hitler and had raised the alarm against the Nazis long ahead of most other journalists. She had originally supported Zionism, but then had visited the region in person. She began to speak about the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that Israel had violently forced out in its founding war to create a Jewish state on land that was already inhabited, and narrated a documentary about their plight.
Thompson was viciously attacked in an orchestrated campaign of what she termed “career assassination and character assassination.” She wrote: “It has been boundless, going into my personal life.”
Before long, her column and radio programs, her speaking engagements, and her fame were all gone. Today, she has largely been erased from history.
In the coming decades, other Americans were similarly written out of history, forced out of office, their lives and careers destroyed; history was distorted, re-written, erased; bigotry promoted, supremacy disguised, facts replaced by fraud.
Very few people know this history. The excellent books that document it are largely out of print, their facts and very existence virtually unknown to the vast majority of Americans. Instead, false theories have been promulgated, mendacious analyses promoted, chosen authors celebrated, others assigned to oblivion.
George Orwell once wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Perhaps by rediscovering the past, we’ll gain control of the present, and make a better future for all our children.
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* Citations for all the above statements in my talk and additional information can be found in my book, Against Our Better Judgment: The hidden history of how the United States was used to create Israel.]
I showed a number of slides during my talk. These will be available on the video of the Summit to be uploaded at https://natsummit.org/ when our videographer has had time to produce this.
For a documentary that is currently being made about Dorothy Thompson, see The Silencing of Dorothy Thompson Trailer (youtube.com)
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My latest interaction with the ADL
Originally published by CounterPunch:
If Americans Knew: A Modest Proposal to the Anti-Defamation League
Dear Abe Foxman,
Thank you! Our organization, If Americans Knew, is enormously honored by our inclusion in your recent Top Ten list of “anti-Israel groups” – in reality, organizations working most strenuously and effectively to oppose Israel’s brutal human rights abuses and violent ethnic cleansing project.
As you note, hundreds of such groups “operate in the U.S. today,” and, I might add, a great many of them produce profoundly valuable work. This makes us particularly honored to have been included among the ten most effective.
Your organization apparently finds those working on behalf of justice and equality for all abhorrent when this includes Palestinians. Happily, many disagree with you. In fact, a large and growing number of people (of all ethnicities, religions, races, and political persuasions) believe that universal principles of morality do not contain exceptions.
Britain’s “Redress Information & Analysis” calls inclusion on your list “one of the highest accolades truth-telling fighters against racism and bigotry could hope for.”
Your Top Ten report appears to be an important element of your fundraising outreach, which rakes in almost $60 million for your annual budget – on top of your $115 million net assets.
Yet in looking through the report, I notice that almost all of us Top Ten groups have quite small budgets. Ours, which is one of the smallest, is less than 1/400th of your yearly revenue. Your salary alone – $688,188 – dwarfs the entire yearly budget for all but two of these groups, and is over four times the annual budget for our entire organization.
The truth is, all our groups are struggling, and our financial survival is at times in real jeopardy.
Abe, this should worry you.
What will you do if we go under? How will you raise such large sums of money? How in the world will you pay yourself two-thirds of a million dollars each year if you can’t scare your donors with distorted stories of what we do and frightening myths about why we do it?
But there is a solution:
I propose that you give If Americans Knew a nickel of each dollar you raise. After all, you use our work to raise this money. You name me among the five most “anti-Israel” (i.e. pro human rights for all) individuals in America. You used our billboard image to illustrate your report on the ten organizations your donors should be most terrified of, and put it at the very top of your home page.
I further propose that you provide a similar amount for each of the other nine organizations whose work you use (or, more accurately, distort) to raise your vast sums of money.
Under this proposal, you would still get the lion’s share of the money, while ensuring that your Top Ten groups won’t disappear from the scene – and from your fundraising strategy.
In all honesty, however, there could be a drawback to this proposal. If our organization (and the others on the list) had a nickel for each dollar the ADL raises, this budget could help us make our ideas more widely known in the marketplace of ideas.
This could be devastating for you.
Even though your budget would still dwarf ours – and even though the ADL is only one of numerous multi-million dollar organizations propagandizing for Israel – we and our colleagues are marketing a product that would likely win out over yours in any sort of fair competition.
After all, you’re selling a lemon: lies, tribalism, cruelty, endless war, and fear and hatred of entire populations; while we’re marketing truth, equality, dignity for all, and peace through justice and self-determination.
For this reason, I sincerely doubt you will adopt my proposal.
But I hope, in seriousness this time, that perhaps someday you’ll do something even better:
You’ll join us. You’ll decide to make the ADL into a real anti-defamation league; an organization that believes in the worth of all human beings, both in Palestine and beyond, that doesn’t promote division and difference, and that instead reveres our common humanity and works to protect all the world’s children from suffering and injustice.
That’s my real proposal. I hope you’ll consider it.
Best wishes,
Alison
Alison Weir is the executive director of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest, which is a co-sponsor of the billboard mentioned in the article, and is also on the Top Ten list. She can be reached at contact@ifamericansknew.org
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By the way, it appears that Foxman’s salary is even higher than I thought. The latest info is that it’s about $740K, not including $50K benefits.
Also, there are a number of additional highly significant groups that the ADL missed. The two that most come to mind for their excellent work are the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (WRMEA) and the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP).
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The latest news from the Palestinian Territories…
From the Independent Middle East Media Center (IMEMC), a must-read source of daily news…
Wednesday October 02, 2013 – 07:59Local sources in the Nabi Samuel village, northwest of occupied East Jerusalem, have reported that a number of extremist Israeli settlers attacked and destroyed a car wash facility that belongs to a resident in the village. The attack is the fourth of its kind in two months. Full StoryWednesday October 02, 2013 – 06:49[Tuesday evening October 1, 2013] Palestinian medical sources have reported that several residents have been treated for the effects of teargas inhalation after Israeli soldiers invaded the Al-Khader town, south of the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Full StoryWednesday October 02, 2013 – 05:24Tuesday October 1, 2013, Palestinian medical sources have reported that a Palestinian child was shot and injured by Israeli army fire at the entrance of the Al-Jalazoun refugee camp, north of the central West Bank city of Ramallah. Full StoryWednesday October 02, 2013 – 00:24Israeli forces Use Excessive Lethal Force Killing Palestinian Civilian, Wounding, and Arresting another One in the North of the Gaza Strip. Full StoryTuesday October 01, 2013 – 14:06The Ahrar Center for Prisoners Studies and Human Rights issued its monthly report revealing the Israeli soldiers shot and killed two Palestinians, and kidnapped 278, in September. Full StoryTuesday October 01, 2013 – 12:38[Tuesday at dawn October 1, 2013] For the second time in two days, extremist Israeli settlers broke a gravestone in a Christian Cemetery that belongs to the Latin Patriarchate in occupied East Jerusalem. Extremists also slashed tires of six cars. Full StoryTuesday October 01, 2013 – 11:14Tuesday at dawn, October 1, 2013, a number of extremist Israeli settlers burnt a Palestinian car, in Burin village, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Israeli extremists also slashed tires of five cars in Silwan, in occupied Jerusalem. Full StoryTuesday October 01, 2013 – 09:25[Monday Evening September 30, 2013] Israeli soldiers stationed across the border with Gaza fired a number of shells into an area, east of Beit Hanoun, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. The attack came after a Palestinian was killed, and another was injured in the area. Full StoryTuesday October 01, 2013 – 01:10Monday evening [September 30, 2013] Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man, injured and kidnapped another, near the border fence, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. Full Story
Monday September 30, 2013 – 12:12Monday [September 30, 2013] Israeli soldiers invaded different parts of the occupied West Bank, violently broke into several homes and kidnapped at least five Palestinians, including one
