Israel Aid Bill – an Anti-Semitic Hobson’s Choice

Mike Johnson’s Israel aid bill is anti-Semitic.  There, I said it.  And here’s why.

Israel, our close ally, needs our aid in its fight against the terrorist Hamas.  It is traditional for the US to supply such aid without strings attached and without playing political games.

While it made sense to disengage the Israel aid bill from a bill to provide more aid to Ukraine, that should have been done without the attachment of a poison pill. 

But Johnson has made aid to Israel contingent upon cuts to IRS funding that will pay for the bill.  That is, he has made aid to Israel contingent upon a vote for a Republican partisan cause.  This is purely political; this bill, if passed, is dead on arrival at the Senate and thus whether passed or not in the House, it will not provide any aid to Israel.

Never before has this country made emergency aid to a close ally directly contingent upon a cut in other government spending.  While I personally oppose, for many reasons, the IRS and other funding in the Inflation Reduction Act, this is not the time or place to cut that funding in order to provide aid to Israel that is fighting a war for its very existence.  This is not the time for political gamesmanship.

Johnson’s first act as Speaker was to pass a resolution in support of Israel.  But when it comes to actually providing aid that Israel desperately needs, he turns the problem into a political game where he can grandstand for the Right wing of his party while putting Israel last.

The bill sets up a Hobson’s choice in which Congressional representatives are put in the position of accepting one of two choices, both of which are equally objectionable.  There is really no choice or alternative to having to select a completely objectionable result.

No American should vote for a bill which puts emergency aid to an ally contingent on passage of a partisan and political funding cut elsewhere.  This is a horrid and frightening precedent to set.

Congressional Representatives are asked to vote for a bill that is bad for America in order to vote for necessary aid to our ally.  If they choose to vote for this important aid to Israel they in effect must vote against America and if they vote for America they end up existentially hurting Israel.

This is not right.  And in my mind it is just another form of anti-Semitism.  Shame on the Speaker and shame on anyone who stands with him on this bill. 

This bill should and must be immediately amended to simply provide to Israel the aid that it needs as it fights for its very life against terrorism. 

Israel

Saturday morning when the terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas began, the world changed.  There is the world before Simchat Torah 5784 and the world after.  And there is the transition zone which, sadly, is where we are now.

We are not only on the brink of World War 3, but we have people cheering for annihilation of not only Israel but of all the Jews.  Pro-Palestinian protestors around the globe, including right here in the USA, shout “Kill the Jews”, “Gas the Jews”, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (meaning that the entire State of Israel, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be destroyed). 

The history and facts of Israel from times before Christ to the present, do not support or justify the claims by Palestine against Israel.  An objective recitation of this history is hard, but not impossible, to find these days and I wish that more people would study it.  But, even assuming that the claims against Israel were true, even if one chooses to see Palestinians as some sort of victims of Israel, and even if they choose to mount pro-Palestinian protests, it does not justify supporting the heinous, violent, and inhuman acts committed by the Hamas terrorists.

We have totally lost our moral compass.   The bleeding hearts, who want to excuse every offense and create offenses where none exist, still cannot bring themselves to distinguish a terrorist from someone with an alleged grievance.  To do so would disrupt their utopian false truth; they cannot see that their utopic vision is not and never will be a reality.  And yet their hearts are cold as stone towards the atrocities committed against Jews.  That, in my book, is clear antisemitism.

The Current Dysfunction

How did we come to this point?  The answer to that has many layers.  We can start with the present which includes the current administration’s completely dysfunctional international policies and actions. America has gone from a strong international voice for, and beacon of, democracy to a weak and dysfunctional shadow of its former self.

The dysfunction of this administration includes:

• The Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco that allowed terrorists to supply themselves with American weapons.
• A failure to even attempt to understand the Russian view on Ukraine, while pushing Putin into a position where he was left with little choice but to attack Ukraine.
• Supporting not only the military actions in Ukraine but also the corrupt use of American funds to sustain the entire Ukraine economy.
• Failing to support the Abraham Accords and not only allowing but tacitly encouraging the rise in anti-Semitic behavior here and around the world.  
• Providing $6 billion to Iran, knowing that Iran is a supporter of the terrorist acts against Israel.

The press has not been silent, but it carefully edits its words to downplay the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah (also attacking Israel from Lebanon) are terrorist organizations:

• Rather than use the word terrorist they call them simply militant groups.
• The defensive acts of Israel are equated with the unprovoked terrorism of Hamas.
• Israel is blamed for collateral damage of their defensive strikes, but there is little notice that the terrorists intentionally targeted innocents, children, and babies and further that the death they imposed upon those innocents was prolonged with pain and horrendous suffering.
• The media mostly fails to report that while Israel attempts to avoid civilian and other collateral damage, Hamas actually uses civilians and especially children as shields as they place their military sites directly under or above places such as hospitals and schools.

You cannot equate the aggressive and horrendous actions of Hamas with the self-defensive acts of Israel!  Yet too many, whether with or without knowledge of the actual facts, do.

Beyond the Surface – Humanity, Purpose, and Amalek

The misguided and dysfunctional political and media actions only touch the surface.  We live in a country where the people have a voice.  Yet, that voice remains either silent or simply a thoughtless mouthpiece for the buzz words, phrases, and memes of the Left.  How did the American people lose not only their voices but their minds?

An Israeli soldier currently fighting in Gaza referred to his enemy as Amalek.   In the Hebrew Bible, Amalek is both a nation and a nomadic tribe seen to be the arch-rival of ancient Israel.   While the Amalekite nation no longer exists, Jewish wisdom holds that the memory of the devious enemy Amalek lives on in in all forms of antisemitism carried out against Jewish people.

According to Midrash (Hebrew Biblical interpretation) Amalek represents the belief in chance, of the haphazard dictates of “fate” and “destiny,” which oppose the Jewish belief in Divine providence. Amalek’s philosophy negates the concept that there is a purpose to humanity or to creation itself, again the antithesis of Jewish philosophy.   Amalek’s chief weapon is to foment doubt among the faithful.

Regardless of whether one believes in or has even read Judeo-Christian scripture and teachings, I think this description of Amalek provides a wonderful way to characterize and personify much of what we see around us and the causes of this void and valueless place in which the world finds itself today.  

Let’s just take the phrase, “Amalek’s philosophy negates the concept that there is a purpose to humanity.”  All around us we see that human life has become or is becoming meaningless, with no value.  It has become disposable.  Why is it so easy to kill another human being over such simple things as who gets a parking spot?  It is easy if one believes that humanity is meaningless.  And if one’s life is meaningless, why would several lives suddenly have meaning?  Mass shootings, if life is meaningless, then are themselves meaningless; they are easy to carry out if one need feel no guilt about killing what one sees as a purposeless nothing nor compassion for meaningless corpses.  It becomes easy to be only concerned with satisfying one’s own urges at any one moment if anyone who might be hurt by that satisfaction is nothing but meaningless and valueless.

That sentence continues “or [no purpose] to creation itself.”  If there is no purpose to creation, no need to find meaning in something greater than oneself, then, again, there is no need to even have a moral compass let alone consider whether performance of some heinous act might violate it.  Indeed, “Amalek’s chief weapon is to foment doubt among the faithful.” 

The influence of Amalek is seen well beyond Israel and the Jewish faith.  All around us we see people leaving their faith, people who have a huge void within themselves because they have nothing greater than themselves to believe in.  This loss in faith, this loss in human purpose is killing us all.

Will the world awake; will we save ourselves?

What has happened to us as a nation and a world?  We have listened to the voice of Amalek who has led us to doubt who and what we are.  But it is not just our belief in something greater than ourselves that is doubted and lost.  With a loss in faith we have lost all the values that come with that faith.  Our whole culture now leads us to doubt and deny everything that has made us the great nation that we are.   We are led to believe that we can and do take the place of God; that we need nothing but ourselves.  And with that seems to come the belief that we are entitled to whatever we desire regardless of whom that may hurt.

Those who see this as the Utopia they dream of do not want it questioned. They take command over what we learn.  Schools no longer teach children to use their minds to think and critically assess an issue.  We erase history, ignoring not only the sage wisdom that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” but also the fact that “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.” 

We evolve as a society and civilization in part because we learn and grow from the past and in part because we value our purpose as one individual within humanity at large.  And when one has a purpose, one generally sees that purpose as a part of a greater good.  As such, one values human life beyond one’s own selfish being. 

Today’s leaders leave much to be desired.  But we the people also leave much to be desired.  We have stopped thinking.  We have stopped caring.  We have stopped believing.  We are being led by false but devious dreams created by Amalek and many leaders along with their followers whom he represents.  We have lost our purpose and our soul. 

There is time.  The terrorist attacks on Israel have shaken the world as have the reactions to those attacks.  The question is:  Are they enough to shake us all awake from the nihilistic nightmare future that the devious tactics of Amalek have put before us?

Joshua fighting Amalek, A print from the Phillip Medhurst Collection of Bible illustrations in the possession of Revd. Philip De Vere at St. George’s Court, Kidderminster, England.  CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

Two Truths

“Everything faded into mist.  The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

               -George Orwell, 1984

I look about me and think to myself that maybe, in today’s world, there is not one, but two truths that are trying to but cannot coexist.  At least, while likely not true for universal truths, it seems that people are willing to adjust their definition of daily truths to one that coincides with their wishes and desires.

We often like to say: look at the facts, the evidence, because it cannot lie.  And while that is true, it may not necessarily be the truth of our daily life.  For some, truth is absolute realism.  Picture a painting of a table on which stands a wilted bouquet of flowers.  That may be what indeed a photograph would capture at that moment. 

Now picture the same painting but with a glorious and bountiful bouquet of freshly blooming flowers.  The painter may be thinking that if he tends to his garden, that will be the bouquet that he can paint next week.  It does not exist today, but for him it absolutely exists in the future and hence is part of his truth today.

Early in the Soviet era writer Maxim Gorky counseled a young writer that it is not enough to say “I wrote the truth.”  Rather, the author must ask himself two questions:  Which truth? and Why?  At that time Gorky was referring to the truth of pre-revolutionary Russia versus the truth of what Russia was becoming.

Much the same may be going on in today’s America.  Those who would have America remain true to her core values and the Constitution see truth as the descriptions, facts, and evidence that are true to that America and the traditional beliefs/values of its population.  Those who are looking for great social change see truth in the picture they paint of what we can be and are becoming.  To them it is true that a person can choose their gender or shift it as they please, resulting in statements such as “men can become pregnant”, a statement which is factually and scientifically inaccurate and thus not a truth to the realists, but something which those trying to recreate a future see as a realistic future truth and hence a truth to them today.

Obviously, these opposing truths and many others cannot coexist.  Laws are affixed to one reality.  Opposing truths result in opposing laws or just anarchy.  Education – its needs, goals, and how to achieve them – is similarly at odds.  How one manages everything, from the food one puts on one’s plate to international relations, suffers.  The concept of opposing truths is currently on full display in the reactions to the terrorist attacks on Israel:  those whose truth is the factual history of the region are in opposition to those whose truth is the factually inaccurate but desired narrative that Israel is a guilty oppressor.

If the revolutionaries (and that is perhaps a good term for the progressive Left and its truth) prevail, then their narrative which is their truth, while not the reality of today, will become the reality of tomorrow.

That might not be so if we retain a pathway to current and past truths of this country and its values, accomplishments, and failures.  But if they are not retained, even if only as part of history, then they will be lost, and the revolutionary truths will be the only truths.

Interestingly, some would argue that part of the reason for the fall of Soviet Russia is that it retained and revered its prerevolutionary classics.   The works of the great Russian authors – Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, Chekhov, etc. – retained a picture of the prerevolutionary reality and the values it conveyed, values that were in direct opposition to Communism.  At least some have traced the intellectual force behind Gorbachev’s glasnost to be the youthful reading of Russia’s great literature.  “The Bolsheviks did not realize that by having their children read Tolstoy…they were digging the grave of their revolution.” (Slezkine, The House of Government, quoted in Morson, Wonder Confronts Certainty).

Perhaps today’s Progressive Left learned from that Bolshevik mistake.  Perhaps it is for that reason that they feel the need to cancel and destroy anything that represents the past and current truth of America and how they justify their openly asserted belief that free speech must be canceled.  If there is no other truth, then their revolutionary truth that is yet to be can become the only truth. 

The analogy is not completely misplaced because for the Progressive Left, the destruction and reimagining of America is as obsessive a cause as was the Russian revolution to the Bolsheviks.  As the Russian people discovered, when the revolutionary lie becomes the truth then the reality is not that of the glorious utopian vision, but a very ugly existence. 

But the Russian people had access to their past truth, a truth that was actually more real than that within which they lived.  If today’s Progressive Left Cancel Culture has its way, we and future generations will not have that access.  We will not know what else was and could have been, and our truth will be as hollow as the unachievable dream narratives of the Progressives.

Like Gorky we must ask: Which truth and Why?  The truth that has been America for 247 years, or the truth that the Progressive Left believes will become the new truth.  A vision is not a truth but a narrative dream.  America’s truth is fading into the mist.  We must not allow America’s truth to be erased and the Left’s revolutionary dream to become a nightmare of false truth.

(Image AI Generated in response to prompt “Two Truths in Opposition")

Presiding over the Annihilation of Democracy

Apparently, Joe Biden doesn’t just want to annihilate America as we know it, but the Middle East as well.  Perhaps it’s all part of his new world order. 

  Destroying America

By now it must be obvious to anyone who is paying attention that President Biden’s domestic agenda is incredibly destructive to every core American principle and value.  He is not merely enlarging but is totally bloating the powers of the federal government, far beyond what even the broadest reading of our Constitution would allow.  The effect of that agenda is the loss of personal freedoms and of what were until now Constitutionally protected rights.  And, if HR-1, which Biden fully supports, is passed, the voice of the people via free, fair, and integrous elections will be seriously impaired if not lost.

Beyond the seemingly dictatorial government power grab, Biden’s agenda is destroying the American spirit.  He pays people to not work.  His policies destroy any reward or incentive for hard work, whether it is removal of AP classes to satisfy “equity” (while at the same time destroying any motivation for a student to excel), or the fact that one can now earn more on unemployment than being employed (encouraging dependence on the State for one’s survival while removing any suggestion of personal responsibility), or that companies that spent time and effort during the previous administration’s Warp Speed to develop Covid vaccines can now not patent those vaccines and thus earn the financial reward to which they, until now, would be entitled for their efforts (and let’s hope we don’t have another pandemic because the drive to innovate has essentially been quashed when the innovators must share the rewards of their efforts with those who sat back and did nothing). 

A core premise of our nation, at least prior to this administration, is equality.   We don’t always manage to get it right, but we have always strived for equal treatment of all.   As has been explained by myself and many others, equality is not equity.  Equality does not guarantee equal results, but it does give (or at least strives to give) all individuals the ability to go after that which they themselves want their life to be.  And, in an America that values tolerance, we respect goals that differ from our own.

There is a fairness to equality that is not present in equity.  Equity simply strives to have the same result for everyone.  There is no guarantee that result is arrived at fairly or that it is what the individual is seeking.  Equity actually requires significant inequality and discrimination as it provides extra benefits and rewards to some while denying benefits and rewards to others so that all will have the same result; a result determined not by the individual but by those in power.

What equity does is give us mediocrity and no incentive for an individual to strive to be the best that he or she can be.

Biden’s policies are also creating a suffocating weight around the neck of our country far greater than the weight of the Albatross on the Ancient Mariner.  The country’s debt was not good, but Biden makes it far worse with his stimulus and other giveaways, all of which he and the Left seek to make permanent and all of which must be paid for by taxpayers.  His policies are causing inflation.  His energy policies not only cause gas prices to rise, but also create rising costs for any product that is transported, whether by truck, train, or plane.  While Biden says he won’t raise taxes on the middle class, the burden of all his programs will be a far more serious strain on the middle class. 

President Biden also seems to have no respect for the rule of law.  Not only did he speak out in favor of one result prior to the jurors’ decision in the Chauvin case, he regularly inserts his opinion into legal issues without actual knowledge of the facts (for instance his erroneous statements about the Georgia voting law which continued even after Washington Post fact checkers had given him “4 Pinocchios”.)   

The Biden Administration is also breaking immigration law in any number of ways.  These include not enforcing border controls, keeping children locked up for days or even weeks in horrific and crowded conditions, releasing migrants into the interior of our country without a return court date, encouraging sanctuary cities (whose very purpose is to violate and disregard federal immigration law).

The upshot of the above, and actually of just about every action that the President takes, is to tear America apart and down.  If he is allowed to keep this up for 4 years (or even 2) he will have, in effect, annihilated the America that we know, the America that was a shining star to the world.

   Destroying Middle East Peace and/or Israel

Biden’s acts of destruction go beyond our borders.  Look at the Middle East, the place where the previous administration was able to do the impossible and negotiate 4 peace accords that were a major step in achieving a new understanding between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Since his inauguration, President Biden has essentially ignored Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu while pandering to Israel’s enemies.  He provided money as well as tacit support to Iran which emboldened Iran to provide missiles and other weapons of war to Hamas. 

Hamas is an admitted terrorist organization whose goal, stated in its own charter, is to “obliterate” Israel.  Styling themselves as some sort of victim class, Hamas has begun firing rockets against Israel.

We all know that our current administration loves any victim class and will bend over backwards to support the alleged victims against their perceived oppressors.  So, rather than condemn the terrorist aggression, Biden calls upon Israel to stop defending itself and cease fire.  There is absolutely no condemnation of Hamas, no acknowledgement of its mission to destroy Israel along with all Jews, not even a nod to Israel’s right to protect its own people.  

Israel’s army is superior to Hamas, and that seems to be a reason to condemn Israel.  Perhaps Biden would like to see equity between the armies of Israel and Hamas, but such equity would probably destroy Israel.  Israel is the most humane of any armed force:  it always provides a warning of upcoming strikes when planning to strike an area where civilians may be present.  Hamas on the other hand uses civilians and especially children to shield their rocket launchers and other weapons. 

But the Left is anti-Israel, and as with everything else, Biden is either strongly Leftist or caves to the Left.  So, today, he demanded a "significant de-escalation" by Israel.  No call for Hamas to disarm.  No acknowledgement that Hamas is the aggressor.  No recognition of Israel’s need to protect its own people.  No grief over the suffering or death of the Jews.

Thankfully, Prime Minister Netanyahu is a leader who cares about his country and its citizens whom he is bound to protect rather than one or another cause du jour.  He stated that “Israel will push ahead to return the calm and security to the citizens of Israel."  That is his job, and President Biden should acknowledge the right of our longtime ally and only democracy in that region to protect itself from terrorist attack.

But Biden does not.  In the interest of pleasing the Left he seems willing to see Israel destroyed along with America.  He seems to care nothing for the people of America or our longtime ally Israel.  He seems to care nothing for democracy or freedom. 

What’s next, the world? If Biden and his far-Left policies continue, democracy will be destroyed not only in America, but in the entire world.  And then, where will those seeking freedom and the right to exercise their inherent, inalienable, and God-given rights go?