Posted on 10/27/2018 6:37:59 PM PDT by Rummyfan
The synagogue in Pittsburgh is called the Tree of Life. The name is a translation into English of the Hebrew phrase etz chaim. We sing those words as the Torah is put away on every Shabbat. They are words from the Book of Proverbs: “She is a tree of life for those that cling to her and all who do are happy.” The “she” in that sentence is “wisdom,” and the verse that precedes it is especially poignant in light of what has happened: “Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” Today the paths of peace were befouled by a monstrous anti-Semite who stormed the Tree of Life shouting something about Jews needing to die as he murdered and injured and then shot at some cops for good measure.
In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. In a classic act of anti-Semitic violence, which is what this is, Jews hear the echoes of every violent anti-Semitic act that has preceded it in history. And we hear those echoes because they are there. That which motivates Jew-hatred today is what has motivated it from time immemorial—the poisonously attractive idea that Jews need to be extirpated because our existence is an offense or a threat to an existing larger order. The blessing of Jewish life in America is that this notion has largely been consigned to the dregs from which today’s human malignancy rose. Despite the fact that most hate crimes in America are aimed at Jews, the actual number is vanishingly small—especially compared to France, from which Jews are now fleeing, and England, whose Labour Party is in the hands of an actual Jew-hater.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
Why do Jews find themselves hated?
God has blessed them, which provokes envy. This has been complicated during A.D. times by a Christian church which ought to be showing love to the Jewish people but which got caught up in worldly politics until recent years.
2004 was a bad induction year in FR.
Podhoretz is okay with killing, as long as the “right people” in his view are being killed (see Syria, Iraq, Libya & Yemen). Millions of people.
Ecclesiastes 7:20:
For there is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.
Romans 3:9-13:
9. What then? are we better than they? No, in no wise: for we have before proved both Jews and Gentiles, that they are all under sin;
10. As it is written, There is none righteous, no, not one:
11. There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God.
12. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
13. Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips:
Over 600 shot in Vegas, but nobody talks about it and we’ve seen NONE of the casino security films.
#10 and 11 (Lurking Lib) and McGavin 999
Ok, here it goes, again!
Pres. Trump had nothing to do with the actions of an anti-Semitic (and anti-other people/things) madman. The guy would have shoot up an animal shelter if he felt that they were euthanizing injured animals instead of saving them.
A mentally ill person doesn’t need a logical reason to do something to act out their fantasies and hatreds/fears, but in a political or religious setting, they can find “internal justification” for doing something horrible against them, to stop them from doing some imaged evil deed, even if, in the case of Jews/Gypsies/Homosexuals, and “kaffirs/infidels”, etc., for just “existing”.
I’ve met insane people before, including one in high school who, while a little strange then (but not violent or anything like that), went on to become a religious fanatic and killer. I’ve also meet an Ustashi supporter, if not mass murderer (Croatia, WW2 fascistic movement), Hanoi/VC atrocities deniers, Holocaust deniers, and KKK/American Nazis (very weird and often dangerous wackjobs).
A twisted mind is a twisted mind, whether it is over someone’s race, religion, eating habits (vegans), sexual orientation, political views/affiliations or ideological affiliations.
Some people see faces and take axes to their parents or strangers. Other shoot up and murder on trains because they hate white people (Ferguson, NY) or torture and kill people because of the color of their skin (esp. against blacks in the old South). INSANITY has its own warped world of justifications and it is a world few sane people can ever enter to try and understand it.
The man who murdered 11 people in the Pittsburgh synagogue today hated Jews and finally acted out his hatred. I’m Jewish and have lived with that fear all my life, though my white and black and Vietnamese, Indian, etc. neighbors and friends were never a threat to me.
It is the stranger who is the threat, and despite modern psychiatric analysis methods and profiling, you still can’t stop the deadly few who actually carry out these acts.
My synagogue has some security procedures in place yet they have ignored some glaring weak spots in their defense systems, which I will point out to them today.
I’m also getting a concealed carry permit (other members of my family have them, one being a former police officer/combat veteran, another being a two-war combat veteran, and a third working in national security).
I’ve been involved in actions against Organized Crime and concerning national security but never though I would need a CCP, but the Democrats have riled up the psychotics hornet nest with their hatred and bile, starting back at least as far as the Judge Bork nomination, the attacks on Judge Clarence Thomas and Condaleeza Rice, attacks on honest journalists, conservative speakers, esp. on university campuses (largely unopposed by leftist administrations/administrators/campus newspapers, and TV), as well as the vitriolic anti-Israel, anti-Semitic campaigns known as the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction) campaigns, esp. on college campuses that often lead to anti-Jewish violence (again unopposed by the administration there).
Now conservatives can no longer enjoy a dinner out in peace (something like the Jews of Paris and Israel face every day of their lives), and what do the Democrats do about these raging insane mobs of leftist crazies, NOTHING, just like much of the world in the 1930’s did NOTHING to stop Hitler and his Fascism, subversion and aggression until 1939.
Pres. Trump, despite some rough spots in his personality and speeches, is one of the best friends American Jews, Israeli Jews (and Christians and Moslems), and Jews worldwide has had in many years.
I once heard Pres. Reagan speak at a major Jewish gathering in Wash. DC, and it was one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard from a US official in support of the right of the Jewish people to life a live unthreatened by those who want to finish what the Nazis started.
I also saw Pres. Carter, Israeli PM Menachem Begin, and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat sign a “peace agreement” on the lawn of the White House, while several thousands Palestinians, American-Palestinians, and other Moslem fanatics, cursed them and threatened the destruction of Israel and Jews in general.
I give Pres. Carter a lot of kudos for his sincere efforts to bring about some peace in the Middle East.
However, it was Comrade Obama who signed the “Agreement” with Iran, gave them $150 BILLION-Plus to arm Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, some Iraqis (who killed American soldiers and civilians in Iraq), and even are interfering in Afghanistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, and possibly Somalia and the Philippines.
And the damned Democrats, led by a Jewish senator named Schumer (D-NY), the old fool Barbara Boxer (D-Cal), and Diane Feinstein, among others, who supported this agreement and bribery money for the Mad Mullahs of Teheran. Add in fools and reds like Schiff, Cardin, Nadler, etc., and you can see why things have gone to hell in the past 10 years (2 of which have been spent by the Trump Administration in Triage Treatments to stem the bleeding of America’s very existence).
The Dems never condemned the mass violence and even some anti-Israel protests in Ferguson, MO, in Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Wash, and even in Wash. D.C. from the Alt-Left - Antifa, Black Lives Matters, International Socialists, Workers World Party/ANSWER/IAC, and now some members of the very large and influential Marxist “Democratic Socialists of America”, not to mention some really far-left Marxist feminists groups such as Code Pink (Medea Benjamin, the avowed supporter of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Maduro, etc).
Pres. Trump has brought about a badly needed attempt to unite the “deplorables”, the forgotten American workers, the religious, the legal immigrants, the often ignored American Indians, and those black Americans who have been kept on the mental and physical Democrat welfare/drugs/and crime plantations in the urban cities for scores of years.
If he is rough in his rhetoric, so be it. He didn’t get his degree in “Oratory” or “Speech”. He got it in economics which means “JOBS, JOBS, AND MORE JOBS” for more Americans who have needed them during Obama’s bungled, failed Marxist experiments of his 8 years of incompetent, corrupt reign.
We American Jews and other American deplorables want a leader who will take action to repair (Tikkum Olam) America, first, and then help the rest of the world, though our fine young men and women of the US military, diplomatic corps, Peace Corps, etc. are doing that worldwide, be it against terrorism, aiding the victims of tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquakes, as well as treating and curing Ebola, Nile Virus, etc.
Trump, warts and all, is a far better man for the job, and as a friend of both Jews and other minorities, than any Democrat has been since the 1960’s (and even then they failed to stay the course of freedom in Southeast Asia), a lesson not lost on Israel.
We will bury our honored dead, say prayers over them and for their souls, strengthen our own defenses, and thank the American voters for putting Donald Trump in as President instead of another Marxist, racist, corrupt Obama/Holder/Lynch and the corrupt leadership of our key law enforcement agencies from the FBI to the CIA to the DNI and even NSA.
Shalom to all!
(snip) ---
We knew it could happen here — any here, anywhere — when we learned that nine people were killed three years ago in the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C. We knew it could happen here – any here, anywhere — when we learned that six were killed in the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City last year.
Now we know it can happen here, as anywhere, because it has.
Here, this weekend, is Squirrel Hill, home of a dozen synagogues and for more than a century and a half not only the spiritual center of Pittsburgh Judaism but also a vital landmark in the history of Jews in America, along with New York’s Lower East Side and Boston’s Blue Hill Avenue, one of the vital centers of Jewish identity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
And here — amid the kosher grocery and the kosher restaurant and the kosher-style deli, and where the knotted fringes of tzitzit are familiar features at the corners of the garments of the Orthodox who walk through the area just before sundown Friday evenings -- it didn’t require social media for the news of the shooting at the Tree of Life to spread.
________
(snip) ---
The news was in the air, along with the shock and the sadness, the grief and the gruesome details, the worst of which were confirmed within hours.
You could hear it in the sirens that broke the stillness of the morning and shattered the serenity of the Saturday routines at the cleaners, at the shoe store, at the hotcake house. No need, of course, in a place like this to identify the name of the cleaners, the shoe store, the hotcake house. Everyone knows them, just as they know the names of almost everyone along Forbes Avenue at any time of the day.
And precisely because everyone knows everyone around here — the one immutable Squirrel Hill truth that is at once irritating and comforting -- the news that raced down the street as noon approached Saturday was about a rare stranger in this peaceful place: dread.
Dread that someone you knew was in morning prayers marking the beginning of a baby’s new life.
_________
(snip) ---
In our grief — shared across all faiths — we need something to lean on, to steady us. We might reflect on the passage from Proverbs that lent its name to this place of tragedy, a reference to the metaphor describing Judaism’s most sacred text, the Torah, as a tree of life, or, in transliterated Hebrew, Etz hayyim:
It is a tree of life to all who hold fast to it; its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace.
“Our society has lost its morality.”
You can’t say society has lost its morality due to the action of one demon.
Society has lost morality but it is due to many decades of effort by the Left.
The rats and the ghoul media spin this week will be gun activists and the jewish vote
Amen and may they Rest In Peace.
You feel kind of helpless. One man felt such hatred that he not only took the lives of eleven people, he forever changed the lives of those who loved them.
We can only hope that somehow they can feel the love and caring that this country feels for them and that somehow that will bring some comfort.
God gave us free will, and one person used that gift to bring darkness. I’m a couple thousand miles away, I knew none of them, yet my heart breaks for the families.
I just heard on Fox News that the shooter said that he wanted all Jews to die because they were committing genocide against his people.
“Crazy” finds a Scapegoat,,,
But “it’s” Still Crazy.
Podhoretz is Not a nice man,
Or very smart.
A spiritual evil that
inhabits unregenerative souls.
Good post,,
Thanks.
Armor Up , People!
Good Stuff ,”Mad Max”
We have a death penalty and it has not been enforced since Governor Wolf took office.
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