Category Archives: Judaism & Jews

What Do Paris Hilton And A-Jad Have In Common?

Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Freedom of Religion, Homosexuality, Iran, Islam, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Correctness

The following is from the current column, “What Do Paris Hilton And A-Jad Have In Common?”, now on WND:

“Gay Paree” refers to Paris, the capital of France, after which socialite Paris Hilton must have been named—that is, unless her parents are even more provincial (and pretentious) than they appear, and named their ditz of a daughter for the Texas city, northeast of Dallas–Fort Worth.

A-Jad is American English—and the perfect nickname—for Ahmadinejad, first name: Mahmoud. Residence: Iran. Occupation: Iranian president, alleged dictator, and general fall guy for the West.

What do Paris Hilton and A-Jad have in common?

OMG! Don’t tell me that Paris too has disrespected Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar—a dissing that has hardened into a handy political tool with which to whip any enemy of the neoconservative political faith.

Baying for the blood of Iran, the warbots are now bouncing off the walls. Why? Because the UN—whose moral and intellectual heft is on par with Hillary Clinton’s and that of Hollywood’s Idiocracy—invited A-Jad to speak on a day sacred to 13.4 million (count this writer among them) of the world’s population.

One tenet of the Jacobin orthodoxy concerns Iranian nuclear installations. These must be hit, and now. The neoconservative faction is unperturbed by the fact that Iran has been crippled economically. Consider, for example, its SWIFT eviction from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. Consequently—and since Barack Obama’s reign of terror abroad began—the Iranian currency had lost 65 percent of its value.

But no. American men and matériel should be allowed to reach all corners of the world, so move in for the kill we must.

Mon ami’ Mahmoud is not. But neither does this (Jewish) writer imagine that the seven billion (minus 13.4 million) people of the planet are obliged to respect Yom Kippur. Such an impossible standard would damn many a Jew to eternal punishment.

Back to the original question. The insufferably pompous Piers Morgan would have no problem answering it. Both Paris and A-Jad have been caught in flagrante delicto. …

Read on. The complete column, “What Do Paris Hilton And A-Jad Have In Common?”, is now on WND.COM.

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UPDATE IV: “Jesus, No Radical”? (Jesus’ Jewishness)

Ancient History, Christianity, Classical Liberalism, Hebrew Testament, Islam, Judaism & Jews, Justice

“Jesus was no political radical or rebel. He was God” is how the ever-provocative Jack Kerwick introduces his latest Belief.Net blog to Facebook Friends.

Maestro, pray tell, why are the two categories of the title—“G-d” vs. “political radical”—mutually exclusive?

One might have theological reasons for designating “G-d” and “political radical” as mutually exclusive, but reason is reason. It has to work a priori, surely?

Jews (at least those who think) think of Jesus as a preacher in the great tradition of the classical Hebrew prophets, whose genius, courage and yes, radicalism is hard to match—they were forever telling the stiff-necked people where to get off in no uncertain terms.

UPDATE I: “Yiddishkeit.” In reply to the thread on Facebook: Jesus was indeed a Jew (or a Hebrew), with everything that being a Hebrew would imply. A lot of people describe Jewish traits negatively. But you can be sure that Jesus was not without a dose of “Yiddishkeit,” as my blond, blue-eyed, Jewish mother would call it.

UPDATE II: Meathead: One should never place Russell Kirk in the company in which you placed him. For one, Kirk was against the wars Buckley embraced as a matter of principle. As I read Kirk, he was a classical liberal of enormous talent.

UPDATE III (June 14): The “because” is unfairly placed in yours sentence below, Jack Kerwick.

As for Ilana’s contention that Jesus was a “radical” because, like the prophets of old, He told “the stiff necked people where to get off in no uncertain terms,” how does that make Jesus, or anyone, a radical?

Here is what I wrote in the post above:

In punctuation, the sentence indicates that the last clause is but an example of the “genius, courage and yes, radicalism” of the prophets, and hardly exhaustive.

In meaning, how does the last clause, which you rightly seem to disparage as inexhaustible, qualify the words “genius, courage and yes, radicalism”?

It doesn’t. Yours is a somewhat unfair read of the sentence.

As for conflating, as you do Jack, the views of Jews on Christ with those of Muslims: That, in my view, is a grave error.

Statism Second Nature to Newt

Business, Elections, Free Markets, Gender, Judaism & Jews, Pop-Culture, The State, Welfare

Rudderless and clueless: That’s Newt Gingrich. First he got fired up over the fact of firing in the private sector, attacking “Mitt Romney for what are the prerogatives of private property and the fiduciary duty of a CEO managing private property to fire workers when necessary.”

Now Newt is raging against Romney’s decision, taken in 2003, to veto “a $600,000 expenditure while he was Massachusetts governor that would have paid for kosher meals for seniors in nursing homes on Medicaid, the New York Post reported last week.”

In Gingrich we have someone who professes to champion limited, constitutional government. At the same time, he attacks his opponent because of that opponent’s failure to approve a welfare program. Newt’s attacks, moreover, are almost intuitive and without second thought.

This tells you how foreign the idea of limited government is to Newt Gingrich.

Statism is second nature to Newt.

Other than that, Gingrich happens to be a particularly smug gas bag.

While Romney should not be upbraided for refusing to fleece taxpayers for a special constituency, Romney’s background is replete with similar unkosher statist instincts. For example, “a decision Romney made in 2005 that said all hospitals in the state were required to provide the Plan B birth control pill under Medicaid. At the time, Romney said the decision was made based on legal advice from a state attorney, according to Globe coverage of the issue.”

Although, the above does sound like a legal decision, driven perhaps by fears of courts challenges and law-suits.

It’s possible that Mitt was mortified at the likely possibility that Massachusetts women would “spontaneously” “contract” Tourettes and other twitches should the state deign to deprive them of their God-given right to contraceptives.

UPADTE III: The Jew Who Prosecuted Mandela: Percy Yutar Said He Was A South African Patriot

Democracy, Elections, History, Judaism & Jews, South-Africa

“Persecutor” is how my father—once a leading South African anti-Apartheid activist—used to refer to the man who “prosecuted Nelson Mandela for sabotage and conspiracy against the state in 1963 and sent him to jail for life (in the event, he served 27 years).” (The Guardian)

But Percy Yutar was his real name. And “some Jewish leaders hailed him as a ‘credit to the community’ and a symbol of the Jews’ contribution to South Africa.”

“Yutar went on to become attorney general of the Orange Free State and then of the Transvaal. He was elected president of Johannesburg’s largest orthodox synagogue.”

In the opinion of my father (Rabbi Isaacson), recent attempts to portray South Africa’s Jewish community at large as having a record of resistance to Apartheid are pure fiction. My father himself was censured many times by the Board of Deputies and other Jewish leaders—told to quit his anti-establishment activities or risk the loss of the rabbinate. Decamping to Israel, as our family did, was prompted as much by ideals as by the constant threats over the loss of a living.

While the leadership of the then-banned African National Congress was festooned with radical Jews, the truth is that most South African Jews (who have a proud and celebrated history in South Africa,) were not behind this noisy minority. If anything, I suspect them of supporting the Nasionale Party, which governed from 1948 until 1994, by the overwhelming consent of the white minority. Like it or not, white South Africans had a functioning democracy (with popular referenda conducted on most important national questions).

I came from a liberal family. Yet other than my father and my cousin (a Black-Sash activist), I hardly knew a Jew who did not vote National Party (NAT). American paloeconservatives have kibitzed about the South African Jewry’s liberalism. Where from? What do they know? Did they ever survey the community back in those days?

Online sources such as Wikipedia and The Virtual Jewish Library assert the community’s liberal voting patterns. They do not argue it. As far as I can see, they do not provide statistical support for this alleged liberal voting record. I’d like to see some substantiation of these so-called “enlightened” voting patterns.

I am convinced that these depictions are cunning, after the-fact attempts to portray the Jews as more liberal than they in fact were. Yes, Jews have always been socially altruistic, but not to the point of self-immolation. This was a community with vast wealth. Risking the riches they so richly deserved is what Goyim do; Jews not so much. UPDATED II: Risking the future of The Children: that’s not what Jews do. I bet you that, if they preached Progressive Party in public, the same Jews probably voted NAT.

Again, father and cousin aside, I did not know a Jew who did not support the Nasionale Party.

Some members of my family were business tycoons. The same family spawned pig farmers, Jews who lived on the land starting in the early 1900s. (Yeah, funny, I know; they farmed pigs, but didn’t eat ’em.) We’d get together for dinners, during which not even young, outspoken family members (invariably attending medical or law school) ever expressed dismay at the undemocratic nature of South African politics.

I recall vividly when my cousin, a land developer and a pig farmer, decided to emigrate to England after the son of his most loyal farmhand burgled the family homestead and attempted an attack on the family. My cousin was outraged. How could this young black man betray him so? (I could see a few reasons, not least of them the squalor in which farmhands and their families were housed. Free “housing,” yes, but not pretty. I would never have argued this in his company. It was just not done.)

The Jews I knew were what we called verkrampte. (Hard core)

Chris McGreal of The Guardian confirms my suspicions:

“The apartheid regime had a demographic problem and it could not afford the luxury of isolating a section of the white population, even if it was Jewish. Within a few years many South African Jews not only came to feel secure under the new order but comfortable with it. Some found echoes of Israel’s struggle in the revival of Afrikaner nationalism. … The Jew in South Africa sided with the Afrikaners, not so much out of sympathy, but out of fear sided against the blacks. I came to this country in 1946 and all you could hear from Jews was ‘the blacks this and the blacks that.'”

UPDATED I (Jan. 31): THOSE OF YOU who’ve read “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” know that the book speak favorably about the strong Afrikaner-Israel connection, and that the book thinks Percy Yutar did just fine by putting the Marxist Mandela away for his crimes against civilians (for the most).

UPDATE (Feb. 1): Percy Yutar died age 90, in 2002. As this New York Times report tells it,

“According to many South African historians and writers, Mr. Yutar’s vigorous persecution of blacks in the 1960’s was linked to his Jewish background. Glenn Frankel, the author of ‘Rivonia’s Children: Three Families and the Cost of Conscience in White South Africa,’ said that Mr. Yutar saw the trial as a patriotic opportunity, especially because some of Mr. Mandela’s co-defendants were Jews. … ‘Who better to prosecute Jewish traitors than a loyal Jew?’ Mr. Frankel wrote, describing Mr. Yutar’s thinking. ‘Who better than he to put things right and prove that not all Jews were radicals hell-bent upon overthrowing the government?'”

Mr. Yutar, one of eight children in a family of Lithuanian immigrants, was born in Cape Town on July 29, 1911. As a young man, his left hand was caught in an electric mincing machine when he was working in his father’s butcher shop, leaving his hand badly mangled.
He attended the University of Cape Town on a scholarship and was awarded a doctorate in law. Jews, however, were not welcome in the higher echelons of South Africa’s civil service, and Mr. Yutar settled for a job tracing defaulting telephone subscribers for the postal service. Still he persisted in his legal career and slowly moved up the ladder to junior law clerk and junior prosecutor. Eventually, he became deputy attorney general for the Transvaal Province and gained a reputation as an especially ambitious and energetic prosecutor.