Posted on 12/22/2003 12:30:04 PM PST by SJackson
Of all the Jewish holidays, the one that I think best captures the contemporary Jewish zeitgeist, the one that is the most relevant to the current (and, if certain trends are not reversed, the last?) chapter in Jewish history, is Hannuka.
Hannuka is, of course, the story of Jewish national liberation. It is the story of the military victory of the few against the many, of the champions of Judaism against the pagan barbarians.
But it is more than this. It is the saga of the heroic struggle of Jewish survivalists (those one would today label "Zionists") against the assimilationists and self-hating Hellenists of the second century BCE. Hannuka is less a story about the battle against the Greeks, than it is about the battle against the predominant assimilationist paradigm at the time among the Jews. It is about the battle against the anti-survivalists, those who hated themselves for being Jews, those who seek to be "progressive", "modern", and "in", through rejecting, disgracing and degrading themselves and their people. The Hellenists who fought the Hasmoneans were struggling against Jewish survival. Sound familiar?
In the United States, the main movement of Hellenistic assimilationism has been the school of "Political Liberalism as Judaism", the pseudo-religion that holds that all of Judaism can be reduced to the pursuit of this week's liberal political fads. But the global avante garde of Jewish self-hatred these days is the Israeli Left.
The Israeli Left is the main manifestation today of Jewish anti-Semitism. It not only promotes "plans" and policies designed to end Israel's existence, increasingly endorsing the one-state, bi-national Rwanda solution to the "problem" of Israeli national existence, but it also regularly attacks every symbol and concept of traditional Judaism.
You think I am exaggerating? Well just consider the Op-Ed last year in the Israeli daily Haaretz, penned by one Yehiam Shorek, a "historian" who teaches at the Beit Berl College in Israel. Beit Berl is a college run by the kibbutz movement and financed by the Israeli taxpayer.
The "historian" Shorek devoted his Haaretz column to proving that the Maccabees were fascist and racist hooligans, bloodthirsty zealots, and downright Likudniks. His column was entitled "Bloodthirsty Zealots". His thesis was that Jews should stop celebrating Hannuka and the exploits of the Maccabees, and should instead feel sympathy for the poor occupied and mistreated Greeks and Hellenists.
His article was not a spoof.
The evil Maccabees were plotting to perpetrate population "transfer", wrote Shorek, that most evil of all crimes in the "minds" of Israel's fundamentalist Leftists. Population "transfer" is far worse than, say, mass murdering 1,300 Jews after signing with them a series of peace accords, or turning the West Bank and Gaza over to barbarian Nazis to allow them to carry out such mass murders. Shorek is a member of that same Fundamentalist Left that will not rest until all Jews have been expelled from the West Bank and Gaza in an act of ethnic cleansing, and until no Israeli armed forces are left behind to interfere with the terrorist activities of the Palestinians.
Matityahu, the father of Judah Maccabee and his brothers, was a lunatic, wrote Shorek. He was a warmonger who dragged his country into an unnecessary "war of choice", one that was not a legitimate "war of self-defense". (Never mind that there is nothing at all in Judaism that says Jews should refrain from conquering their lands unless it is part of a war of self-defense.) The Maccabees were the aggressors, insisted Shorek. And they suppressed the free speech of those who supported the Greeks; how undemocratic of them!
Judah Maccabee was guilty of causing many families to lose their loved ones by leading people to war, wrote Shorek, instead of pursuing some sort of Hellenistic Oslo appeasement and capitulation, the sort the "enlightened Left" seeks today to impose upon Israel. All Judah Maccabee really wanted to do was to Occupy, Occupy, Occupy, insisted Shorek. No better than the West Bank settlers today! And not only that, but Judah and his hooligans were Orthodox Jews, which every leftist knows must make them primitive and barbaric; unlike the enlightened Marxist historians who live on nice kibbutzim or teach at the Beit Berl college.
(If you would like to tell the management of Beit Berl what you think they should do with Shorek, write daliabk@beitberl.ac.il or Beit Berl College, Doar Beit Berl, 44905, Israel; Telephone: 972-9-7476333; Fax: 972-9-7454104. You could also write or send an email to the Minister of Education and demand that all funding for Beit Berl be frozen until Shorek is dismissed at sar@education.gov.il.)
Unfortunately, Shorek is hardly a lone phenomenon. Israel's anti-Jewish leftists have been launching similar jihads against every other symbol of Jewish valor. Masada was a cesspool of non-tolerant fanatics, according to them. The Bible is a backward document full of fabrications. Schools should stop teaching it altogether, they demand, and instead teach something really useful like the works of Palestinian "poets". Archeology proves the Bible is nothing but lies and fantasy, they insist. One wag labeled such people Pentateuch Deniers (intended as a play on "Holocaust Deniers").
In Israel, the country's politics - particularly its cultural/educational elite and its chattering classes - are now largely dominated by those motivated by the desire for their country to commit national suicide. They scorn themselves, their own country and their own people, the same way that the Hellenized Jews did at the time of the Maccabees. Many endorse boycotts of Israel by anti-Semites abroad. Like the Hellenized Jews, they are convinced that traditionalist Jews are reactionary and primitive, and that the greatest national priority should be renunciation of Jewish peculiarity and the striving to assimilate amongst the cosmopolitan progressive "Greeks" of the world. They are ashamed of their Jewishness and convinced that the only path to peace is to renounce it. They insist that a Seleucid "narrative" should replace the Jews' own reactionary national one.
Israel's universities are by and large the Occupied Territories of these Hellenists. The Israeli media is to almost the same extent. Hellenists dominate much of the Israeli military and, somewhat incredibly, the intelligence services. (It is doubtful the country could have undergone the Oslo debacle had these intelligence services not operated as lap dogs for the Beilinized Israeli Left.)
Hellenists have attempted to rewrite the Israeli school curriculum, to teach Israeli Jewish children to despise themselves. Their message is that Jews must feel ashamed, because they are mean, selfish, evil and immoral people. Surely, there would be no anti-Semitism on the planet were not the Jews such awful, insensitive people.
Their aim is to convince the Jews that the only way they may become accepted in the world is to adapt to paganism, to stop seeking to exist as a separate national entity, to commit national suicide. Moreover, their campaign is aimed at challenging the moral existence of the Jews. They realize this is the weakest chink in the armor of the Jews. If Jews can be convinced that they are morally in the wrong, then no Maccabees will arise. The aim of the Jewish Hellenists is the delegitimization of the Jews as a nation, discrediting the moral position of Jewish survivalism.
The message of the contemporary Hellenists is unambiguous: Those who wish to purify the Temple, who seek pure oil for the Temple lamp, who wish to evict the barbarians from Jerusalem, are the enemies of peace. The Maccabees must be arrested for incitement. The Jews must provide Antiochus with concessions and arms and funds and a Road Map. Under no circumstances should the Jews seek to defend themselves militarily against the Seleucids, for there is no military solution to the problem of Seleucid persecution. If the barbarians murder the Jews, it is because the Jews are evil, selfish people and because they have been too reluctant to abandon their primitive survivalism.
If the Israeli anti-Jewish Left has its way, the Post-Hasmonean, post-survivalist era will be upon us. Dip the latkes in lard.
The left - both Jewish and Gentile - in both Israel and America actively seek the destruction of Western Civilization. Their conspicuous self-hatred oozes like poison from their pores.
Anyone who believes this drivel should also necessarily believe that Jews, and most importantly himself, has no legitimate place on the "Arabian" peninsula.
So why don't they leave?
Dip the latkes in lard
I'm not so sure about that, but they are good with bacon.
So9
However, when he got up he had not made snow angels but a Menorrah.
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