The Redefiners of Judaism Take Insult as Usual

 

Education Minister Rabbi Rafi Peretz stated in a cabinet meeting that the rate of assimilation among the Jewish community in the United States is “like a second Holocaust.” His reference was in respect of the facts known that over fifty-percent of Jews in the United States, Canada and Europe are intermarrying with Christians and secular humanists leaving their Judaism behind ignored and in tatters. Immediately after his comments were leaked, a problem in Israel just as it is in the United States and other Western governments, many Conservative and Reform Jews in the United States. Their insistence is that Rabbi Peretz is ignorant and insensitive to Jews in the Diaspora. This is far from the first time that an Israeli has been accused with lacking the proper attitudes and totally misunderstanding the true reality of what it means to be a Jew in the modern age. This is always how the condemnation of the insistence by Israeli Jews, largely the Orthodox community, for their insensitivity and lack of knowledge of what modern Judaism has evolved into. Their claims are simple, they should define what is a Jew and what Judaism actually believes and means as they call it, in this modern age.

 

We thought that perhaps as av graduate of this United States Diaspora Jews inculcations by which Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and other non-Orthodox branches of Judaism have redefined the Halacha to fit their social constructs making them estranged from Torah. The main terminology one would hear from these New Age Jews is Tikkun Olam which they define as repair the world. They take this idea and instead of it meaning that they need to perfect and improve themselves in order to make the world right, they think that they need to make everyone else come around and believe as they do in order to repair the world. They have redefined the Commandments of Torah bending them in order to align them with the platform of the Democrat Party and the beliefs of Secular Humanists. Their reactions to anybody who does not fall in line with their beliefs and definitions are immediately considered to be any of any number of stock names, racist, homophobic, sexist or any other of the plethora of labels thrown around to slam their opponents making them easily discarded as ignorant and uninformed boors. So, how is it that things changed to the point that I not only support Rabbi Rafi Peretz and most of what he has stated, all of which has perturbed the Diaspora Jews and their Tikkun Olam warping of the Commandments of Torah and Judaism.

 

The first thing which probably made my transition to Traditional Orthodoxy since making Aliyah returning home to Eretz Yisroel was our coming home with absolutely no preconceived notions of what to expect of Israel, the societal means or almost anything at all. We came with a wait and see what it is we had come into and exactly what the effects were going to be. It took about six months before finding out that it is far easier to be a practicing Jew in Israel than it was in most places in the United States, especially since I often resided in places like north-central Wyoming where the closest Synagogue was over four-hundred-miles distant and Kosher foods were next to impossible outside of Hebrew National salamis. Then began regular attendance to services, joining classes about Talmud, Torah, Haftorah and other things which covered Judaism and the Commandments giving it straight and without bending, twisting, spindling and otherwise mutilating these writings. This led to noting that most of Judaism was very different from what had been instructed and far more self-centered with the intent for self-improvement. Judaism also had no desire to change other people from outside of Judaism but to improve ourselves to such a degree that others will desire to strive for self-improvement. Judaism, as it has been explained, provides Commandments by which Jews can improve their interaction with others and make of themselves people living an enviable life while not proselytizing others and never even attempting to make converts of others. Judaism is to be practiced by the Jewish People and also converts, despite Judaism making conversion fairly difficult. Often, true conversion takes at a minimum two years of intense studying, and then passing queries posed by a panel of Rabbis.

 

The Ten Commandments

 

Conversion brings us to another point which we will utilize to show the difficulty facing the Jews of the Diaspora and the Jews within Israel. The Chief Rabbinate set the rules for which one is considered Jewish, including how to convert to Judaism. Needless to point out, conversion to Judaism has strict rules before it is accepted by the Chief Rabbinate. This has brought great amounts of condemnation from largely leftist Jewish groups and the leadership of the Conservative, Reform and other non-Orthodox folds of Judaism. Their complaint is that many conversions they have performed are unacceptable within Israel and one who converts to Judaism under many of their systems are not acceptable as being a Jew unless they again convert in Israel under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate. The Chief Rabbinate is often labeled as being overly strict, restrictive and narrow-minded in their recognition of conversions and they need to become more liberal allowing for these New-Age Judaism and their open-mindedness allowing for an open definition as to who is Jewish as after all, there should be little difference between conversion to Judaism and conversion to any other religion. They are totally aware that their critics are based on falsehoods as the Israeli Chief Rabbinate accepts conversions conducted by the RCA (Rabbinical Council of America), the Orthodox Union (OU) and here is a list of approved conversion performed outside Israel. The list is relatively extensive and approved conversions can be readily found by any desiring to convert and ready for a minimum of two years of intense learning.

 

But those Jewish groups and other non-Orthodox branches of Judaism refuse to accept that the Israeli Chief Rabbinate uses identical rules and requirements to those used by every of those listed as approved which in the United States include the RCA and OU conversions. Again, those in the Diaspora insist that Israel bend their rules and accept their definition of Judaism simply because they are more enlightened, open-minded free-thinking and tolerant. That is partly the problem as Judaism must remain strictly defined and steeped in traditions as well as kept honoring, respecting and following the exact rules of Torah given by Moses during the Exodus. Judaism is not to conform to the ideas of the Justice Democrats, the New Israel Fund, IfNotNow and numerous other Jewish leftist groups who all demand Israel accept their unarguable perfect and correct definitions of Judaism and what it means to be a good person. Their vision is an Israel as a subordinate to the Democrat Party platform and the leftist agenda based on their concepts of justice, LGBTQ rights, human rights, and demanding that Israel sacrifice whatever it takes to reach peace with the Palestinian Authority. Basically, these Diaspora Jews refuse to accept Torah Judaism as it has been defined for over three-thousand-years and instead supplant Torah with their LGBTQ, international justice, human tights and numerous other leftist central beliefs replacing Torah. Having lived in both communities, it can honestly be stated that Torah Judaism is centered and planted firmly in Jewish history and practice while the leftist justice warriors who insist that they can make and define a batter Judaism would not be planted and continue into the future with anywhere near the practicality of Torah which has steadies and defined Judaism for three-thousand-years plus. Judaism must remain centered on Torah which has been its anchor and the rock upon which it was founded. This does not mean that Judaism should ignore modernity, Judaism just need remain set in Torah while moderating these other new liberal and leftist concepts and ideas which Diaspora Jews are so enamored. We in Israel need not fear these Jews redefining Israel as the odds for their ever-making Aliyah, if what has been experienced when we decided to make Aliyah, the number of Conservative Jews from our congregation dumbfounded asking why would we ever desire to go to such a forbidding place. After moving here, we can inform these Jews, though they will not believe us, but they are the ones residing in what is rapidly becoming a forbidding place and Israel is the little wonder of the world.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

So American Jews Believe You Are Safe

 

Most Jewish neighborhoods are somewhat insular and protected from the general world. We know this from the Synagogues we have belonged and the people I met. Almost all would always react the same way when they heard where we lived. The same question was the first thing they would ask, always, they responded with, “There are Jews out there in, ‘where ever it was we were living’?” Our answer was always the same, no; we’re about it or not within ten, fifteen or even sometimes as much as forty or fifty miles. Everyone wanted to know why we lived so far from the community and we explained that there really are a few of us Jews who are actually relatively poor. Some shunned us but the real friends were still found and appreciated, but we had an advantage over the others, we got to feel the pulse of the other America, the one where they do not know Jews but still think they know all about Jews. What advantage did that give me, well, I did get to educate some and I know that the dislike and distrust of Jews in America has been steadily growing and not where the Jews always look and claim it exists. This is where we will explore in this article and we have to make a disclaimer that for the past five years we have had to rely on our friends, both Jewish and gentile, and through them, we have seen the unfortunate trends continuing and the acknowledging of the growing reality. The one conclusion we can share at the fore is we are safer here in Israel and know this as a fact, honestly.

 

Some of the themes I heard from the gentiles which I heard were the usual things which Jews have been accused of throughout the ages. I almost had fun as when I would hear any of the adages against Jews, simple suppositions such as, “All those Jews,” always those Jews as if Jews were some distant and unrelated form of life, all those Jews are wealthy, have most of the money, control the government, run the banks, control the media and then the ones whereby one can tell a Jew by their appearance, they all have big noses, dark eyes, curled black hair, short, shifty eyed, lousy at sports and so on. I stand, when I was younger and stood straight, at six feet two inches and around two-hundred-twenty-five pounds and was rather athletic. I always met these insane generalizations by asking them a simple question, “How do you explain me, then?” They would look at me confused and ask what do you mean explain you? Then would come the shocker to people when I would announce that I was Jewish which was always met with a combination of shock and disbelief. I often had to tell them my Hebrew name and as I could say it with no difficulty, that would then lead to honest questions. In many cases, I was the first Jew many of these people had ever knowingly met as if they had met Jews earlier; they were the silent Jews who never risk speaking out and aloud that they were Jews. I have never been quiet about my being a Jew even in the infantry where some of my platoon members were proud neo-Nazis and between myself and them there was a quiet respect as I carried my load and they realized I was their equal and as such not one to be challenged. Needless to point out, but I have met many an anti-Semite in our dealings and when friends, actually friend-acquaintances, there was a fair number who distanced themselves once they realized I were Jewish.

 

The ugly truth is that there has always been an undercurrent of anti-Jewish sentiment which was simply the baseline which never changes in the world and America was not an exception. It was not so much hatred as it was a form of distrust and a complete lack of knowledge about who and what is a Jew. They, as we stated, often had the same mistrust and misunderstandings which has been used as the undertow of anti-Semitism which drove the mistrust. But the majority of these people harbored no designs or desire to harm the Jews, they simply were uninformed and only had the fears which Jews themselves have stated they found distressing because that was all they had ever heard or been told by parents, peers and just the social circles in which they roamed. What was always amusing is whenever you mentioned Israel, these were people who backed Israel completely and yet believed that the reason that the United States backed Israel so completely was because the Jews controlled the government. This was probably the easiest misconception to disabuse these people from continuing. I would point out that at two percent of the population and the Jews rather solidly supporting the Democrats, that as the support for Israel was bipartisan, or more recently more a Republican position, how did that work? Then I would explain that the majority of people, just like them, supported Israel and that it was the Christian supporters of Israel that drove the United States to fully back Israel. It, more often than not, did not take very much time for them to understand that they were the ones driving the Congress and most Presidents to support Israel to the extent that they did. That settled, we could move on to the media, banks and so on and with the Hearst family run media empire and the Mellon banks along with Carnegie and the Rockefellers, it was easy to show that the Jews did not control all these things which they had thought. What I did claim the Jews controlled was the trades and retail sales because we were often forbidden from owning land so we had an extra two-hundred or more years of experience in running businesses and performing the trades. The areas where we resided were often left better informed and less suspicious of the Jews but still we did see growing anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism.

 

Far-Left Anti-Semitism

 

The shock to Jews is where the new and overt anti-Semitism and anti-everything-Jewish, which of course included Israel and the concept of Zionism, came from. The growing anti-Semitism does not desire to forbid the Jews from professions or residing in any place they choose or any of the traditional former anti-Semitism which people in the United States had previously witnessed. The new anti-Semitism wants the Jews dead, period. They want Israel destroyed and the Jews executed or simply murdered wholesale. This growing hatred is not on the right of the political spectrum but at the far-left. These are the cohorts of Bernie Sanders. What is nice about Bernie Sanders is here you have somebody who admits his parents were Jews and he was born into Judaism but he has absolutely no use for being Jewish and was no friend of Israel. Then there is Linda Sarsour whose position on Israel is easily researched, but don’t take our word for this. Then there are the past liaisons and associations and possible continuing anti-Semitism and ties to Hamas related groups. We could likely bother to look for links to more people on the far-left but that would prove little. We can simply allow the far-left to continue to talk and pull the Democrat Party down the primrose path followed by so many other political movements throughout Jewish history. There have been attempts to be either converted to idolatry, Islam or Christianity by the Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Caliphate, Inquisition and a list of others. We have had efforts to completely exterminate us by some of the former and most recently by the Nazis. I remember one notable professor from one of the colleges which I had attended who taught sociology who taught that when the United States would finally turn and become evil that it would be the most evil of societies in the history of the world far surpassing the Nazis and Rome under Caligula or the Spanish Inquisition. He was young enough that he is probably warning students to avoid the path he saw back in the 1970’s as he had even stated that it would not be the right which in the past has always been convicted of being the spawning of anti-Semitism in society, especially back in that time. Even Bob Dylan wrote a song about Israel called “Neighborhood Bully” which is below.

 

 

Another measure of the growing anti-Semitism is the numbers of attacks on Jews and hate crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions and buildings. Schools are another place where the harbinger of the coming future for Jews who will be threatened as shown by the rising anti-Semitism in many state schools systems such as this report from Massachusetts. With a rise of anti-Semitism in schools amongst the children is troublesome and presents a dangerous look into the future for Jews. The fact that the main rise in anti-Semitic acts was in Boston schools which is a city with a large Jewish population makes this an even more sober and somber prediction of a future fraught with hate and increasing acts against Jews in the future. People might ask what spurned us to write this article is something very disturbing. We thought that perhaps there might be a place where Jews would be safe and if there was such a place, one such would be Brooklyn, New York, in particular, Boro Park, at 46th Street and 13th Avenue in the largely Jewish Shomrim neighborhood. Yet a Sixty-two-year-old Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted while walking to Synagogue at approximately 7:30 a.m. The assailant drove up at speed and came to a quick stop, bolted from his car and assaulted his victim. He reportedly punched the man repeatedly in the face and head and then attempted to attack another Jewish man who came to assist the victim and took off chasing this second person who fortunately escaped harm. We have the video below from Yeshiva World News where you can watch the entire attack from a number of security cameras which caught the attack from different angles.

 

 

The attack is being considered to have been a hate crime. An arrest has been made of Farrukh Afzal, aged thirty-seven, who was also charged with assault as a hate crime as well as criminal mischief and harassment, according to police reports. The victim was treated at Maimonides Hospital where he was reported to be in stable condition with cuts, pain and bruises to his head. If a Jew is attacked in the center of a Jewish neighborhood while walking to Synagogue for morning prayers in broad daylight, then how can a Jew feel safe anywhere? That is the question which, should things progress and continue getting worse, every Jew need confront and decide what they might do with such threats. Fortunately, this time if things become dangerous to the point that the threat becomes something threatening Jews everywhere across the United States, the Jews have a home where they will be taken in and accepted without question. That was not available to Jews throughout most of history. This is the reason above and beyond all other considerations that Israel must continue to exist. This is also why, with the United States possibly pulling their support from Israel in the future, something which need be planned especially for Israel to become militarily self-sufficient with an emphasis on aircraft and munitions. The future will not be a simple continuation of the present and Israel, if she is to be a proper and solid homeland and a safe place for all the Jews in the world, must be self-sufficient in almost all means and ways from militarily, food production and everything else necessary to support her population including should it almost double when Jews from Europe and North America require a safe haven. Attacks like this one in New York should be regarded as a forewarning of a potential future which they will be required to decide how they would act. That is a piece of reality which is not an imaginary threat despite the attempts to ignore the signs.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

How Will the Arab-Israeli Conflict Finally End?

 

There has never been a conflict which ended while both parties were still capable of continuing the fight, neither side has achieved their ultimate goal and neither side has decided the fight is no longer viable militarily, monetarily, politically or publically supported. The Arab-Israeli conflict will not be any different. There will not be any peace agreement no matter the publicity about how it solves the differences in a means which is amicable for both sides. The reason for this comes down to the basic and mutually opposed, antithetical and the sides are inimical. The root of the problem is not territorial which has been how all attempts have been based for settling the differences. The differences are religious as well as political and social. The Arab side is based partially on the Quran and further on their self-conceived belief that they are undefeatable. The Israeli side is based on the Biblical promise that there would come a time when the Jewish People would be gathered by Hashem returning to the lands promised to Avraham in Genesis. What the central problem boils down to is the Jews believe that they are to return to their biblical homeland while the Arabs believe that they are superior in all things military and cannot be defeated and thus no lands which they have held be permitted to be occupied by another people. So the Jews have this Zionist belief that their return to Israel is a promise from Hashem and thus cannot be prevented and once returned will last through the coming of the Moshiach while the Arabs believe that the existence of Israel is an affront to them as a people and against the Quranic promise that they will never lose lands once they have implanted Islam on that land. The simplest explanation is the Jews believe in Israel as permanent and the Arabs believe Israel must be destroyed and obviously, these are incompatible and mutually opposed.

 

What needs to be understood is that these same Arab nations forced out their Jews between 1948 and 1972, most before 1960 (see map below). This is the problem as it exists and will continue to exist until one side proves victorious in their desire and the other side accepts that reality. If the Arabs permit peace with the existence of Israel, then peace is possible. As the Arabs have already made very clear, that will never happen and they will continue to pursue the destruction of Israel and the death of the Jews until the end of time. That brings us to the Arab version of peace where Israel has been exterminated and millions of Jews have fallen before the marauding victorious Arab armies, charred remains of a nuclear holocaust or corralled into camps to be exterminated or converted to Islam. Israel will simply take whatever measures she needs to keep Israelis alive and protected which means that there is no solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the world should simply walk away and leave us to one another. Obviously, only one side will get their way when all is said and done. The next question is one which requires some thought and hopefully the world can find an answer. Why is the outcome of this conflict seemingly so important to the world that a nation about the size of the state of New Jersey, a rather small nation as far as square kilometers are concerned, yet Israel is an obsession for the United Nations, European Union, and much of the rest of the world and, lastly, the United States. Does anybody have any ideas as to why this little nation of Israel takes center stage for so much of the world? There is a simple reason which the leaders of the world understand and some are taking what would appear to be a counterintuitive position. According to doctrines written in numerous societies’ compendiums from ancient histories from the beginning of writing including stories even older which were passed down through oral rote memory up to some of the most recent philosophical political theorems have equated the existence of the Jewish People and their final permanence in the Promised Lands with the survival of human civilization. The Jewish Bible told of the eventual return of the Jews to their lands as was also reported in other ancient histories. In the Bible, the return of the Jews would be a permanent return and within a short period of time, all the Jews would return to their promised lands.

 

Jews forced from Arab World Between 1948 and 1972

 

Many have claimed that this is impossible as such a complete return would virtually double the population of Israel. Well, if that were true it would be wonderful. First a little bit of Jewish history in relation to their former returns, the exodus from Egypt and their return after Cyrus the great freed the Jewish People from Babylonian occupation and granted them semiautonomous rule. Historians have estimated that somewhere from twenty to thirty-five percent of the Jews left Egypt with the remainder deciding that a life under Egyptian rule to be preferable to the responsibilities of freedom and these Jews disappeared into the stretching of time. The end of the Babylonian Exile resulted in twenty to thirty-five percent of the Jews returning to the Promised Lands to build the Second Temple while the remainder were dazzled by the advance Persian civilization and remained with the Persians and these Jews disappeared into the stretching of time. The current return to the Promised Lands will result in double the response of the former returns from exile thus the Jewish People can expect forty to seventy percent of the total numbers of Jews returning. This would result in a mere twenty percent to a maximum of forty to forty-five percent of the European and American Jews returning to Israel with the rest disappearing into the stretching of time. Disappearing into the stretching of time can also be used to describe what happened to the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel which were the Northern Kingdom of Israel which fell first with the Kingdom of Judea which included the tribes of Judah and Benjamin. Basically we are using that phrase to describe the tribes and peoples of the Jews who disappeared from the known collection of the Jewish People. What has been amazing has been that numbers of these tribes have reemerged and proven their lineage and have been reincorporated into modern Israel. The return of these lost tribes has added much variety of peoples to the population which will serve the Jewish People as we face our future.

 

There are those who continue to claim that soon there will be thousands, possibly tens or hundreds of thousands of Jews returning to Israel very soon placing an economic strain as well as making the housing situation dire until sufficient housing can be built. Many claim that such an influx will require extensive use of lands in the south in the Negev Desert. Currently there are approximately seven and three-quarter million Jews outside of Israel. Almost five and three-quarter million reside in the United States, another half million in France, just over a third million in Canada and just over a quarter million in Britain. Currently the majority of the Jews coming to Israel are from France, the Ukraine and Russia. Looking at this and one will notice that of the three nations from which the majority of Jews making Aliyah, only one is amongst the four largest populations of Jews outside of Israel. The Jewish population in the United States, as well as Canada to some extent, lives in insular communities where much of their neighborhoods all belong the same synagogue or ones of similar denomination, Reform, Conservative and Orthodox. The Orthodox Jews are probably in the most tightly knit communities.

 

World Religious Population Distributions

 

Due to their tightly knit communities and their use of private Yeshiva schooling, their children marry within the community. With Conservative and Reform, and other smaller offshoots of Judaism outside the Orthodox communities, often use the public schools and reside in more mixed neighborhoods, there is a higher rate of their children marrying outside their community. The Conservative and Reform Jews make up the majority of Jews in the United States and with the intermarriage rate reaching almost seventy percent of their children, how much longer will their children and grandchildren continue to follow Judaism? Many of these intermarried children choose to try to raise their children in both Judaism and Christianity. This leads to confusion and due to peer pressure and the basic Christian dominance in American society, the Christianity wins out in most cases and these children are even more likely to intermarry and simply leave the Jewish faith completely. There is something which could alter the adopted non-Jewish identity some of these Jews will adopt. It is the same thing which has occurred to Jews over history many of the times when they become overly assimilated. It happened in Persia with Hamas, it happened in Germany with Hitler and the Nazis and it could even happen in the United States. What happens is the steep rise in anti-Semitism which looks at the grandparents or even further back and decide who is Jewish by this determination. This makes many Jews who had adopted to leave Judaism suddenly returned to their Jewish roots not by any choice of their own.

 

The more recent of the historical examples is the easier one to describe. The German Jews were well accepted in their society and it was in Germany where Reform Judaism was born. This led to a split of the Jewish population with the Reform Jews often being the most assimilated amongst the Jewish population. There were Jews teaching in Universities and schools, as judges and lawyers, as doctors, technicians, physicists, chemists, tailors, actors, directors, writers and every other field of endeavor. They lived in mixed neighborhoods and some lived in neighborhoods apart (mostly the Orthodox). When the Nazis began to rise to power, the most assimilated Jews felt safe as they were proper Germans and Hitler meant those other Jews, the ones who lived apart and dressed in peculiar clothing and practiced a different life than the average German. Many claimed that the statements and anti-Semitism was simply an election ploy to garner votes, not something the government of Germany would ever allow to happen, after all, the Jews were amongst the highest percentage of those who fought for Germany in the Big War (World War I) and were proven real Germans. They were very much as the modern Jews in the United States are today; they denied the rise in anti-Semitism and continued on with their denial right onto the trains to the Concentration Camps.

 

Before we made Aliyah, we belonged to a Conservative Synagogue and these Jews mostly resided in an oval of our city which was anchored by our Conservative Synagogue at one pole and the reform Synagogue at the other pole. One could almost apply the formula for drawing an oval and they would incorporate well over ninety percent of the Jews in our little city. We were outliers as we resided miles outside these neighborhoods where our house was probably the only Jewish house within five to ten miles. Where we did not witness much if any outright anti-Semitism, we did hear some anti-Semitic thoughts which were part of the general beliefs and came out in idle conversations. As the area was predominantly Christian, the majority supported Israel but there were some very wrongheaded beliefs about whom and what Jews were. If you had asked these people if they were anti-Semitic they would deny even the wisp of a possibility, yet there were things they believed about Jews which were less than honest. One example was that Jews were wealthy and stuck to living with their own. Where we could not refute the living amongst their own, we easily refuted the wealth canard, as we would ask that they explain why we lived in their moderately priced neighborhood which was far from upper-middle-class, but was comfortable with older homes and white picket fences everywhere. Could these people be turned against the Jews of America, not all or even many of them but the Nazis were a minority with all the guns.

 

It does not take a majority of the people to turn an entire society into darkness, it just takes an overtly active minority of a mere fifteen to twenty-five percent with weapons and willingness to use violence and fifty percent who would start being complacent and before they could realize that things had become beyond their control, it would be too late to prevent the inevitable. The actual vote received by the Nazi Party received was thirty-seven and two-fifths percent of the popular votes. We can figure that some of these votes were made by people who were not hardcore Nazis but voted for them to remain safe as their neighborhood had so many Nazi flags in their lawns that to vote otherwise might prove to make them suspect. We need to remember that the Nazis were not exactly adverse to the use of violence, and that can persuade people to vote differently. For those who will claim that such things could never happen in the United States, then how would they explain the Philadelphia Black Panther intimidation at a voting station intimidation threats (see video below). Then there has been the use of the FBI and Justice Department as weapons against the Trump campaign during the last election which included a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrant sought and received using knowingly tainted evidence. The misconduct and weaponizing of the government is still being pealed back and who knows how many layers this onion will end up having and who else will tumble out before everything is done including possible foreign intervention against Trump from Russia and even some European allies. America is not a sacred and saintly as our sanitized school history taught us back in school, so never say that it cannot happen here.

 

 

We hope the United States continued in perpetuity as the protector of liberty and freedom for the world. We have seen one item which Israel should take to heart, that the United States is not and should never be believed to be the protector for the nation of Israel. President Obama allowing the passage of a Security Council resolution which placed almost everything beyond the Green Line as forbidden for Israelis to reside should have served as a wake-up call to the leaders of Israel from this time into the future. This would make the Palestinian Authority demand that no Jews be permitted on the lands they claim enforced by the United Nations under a Security Council resolution. This introduced a new day where support of Israel has become a partisan position where much, if not a large majority, of the Democrat Party will refuse to protect Israel without Israel meeting demands for sacrificing to the Arabs, something which would become such a threat that Israel would become difficult to defend. This is the new reality as things now appear. And the majority of non-Orthodox Jews support the Democrat Party blindly believing that it supports everything they support, and that may be valid as a measurable number of these same Jews do not actively support or care about Israel.

 

Beyond the Cusp