When a Rabbi Like Me Hears About an Attack on Jews - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
When a Rabbi Like Me Hears About an Attack on Jews
by

First off, let’s recognize and understand — in full disclosure — that I am not necessarily a typical rabbi. I bring with me only the following credentials over the years: six years on the executive committee of the Rabbinical Council of America and twenty years an RCA member, twenty-five years as congregational rabbi of synagogues affiliated with the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America and National Council of Young Israel, Vice President of Zionist Organization of America, rabbinic faculty at two yeshiva high schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at Coalition for Jewish Values, and other résumé lines.

I am a humanitarian, but I am no liberal. When I encounter someone who is needy, I donate generously to their upkeep. I feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Certainly, charity begins at home, and I have a special love for Jewish people. Alas, I also attract an especial intensity of hate from Jews on the Left. However, as so many pastors and Catholic priests know, my sense of caring for all knows few boundaries. My law students of sixteen years know that, too. I am a true humanitarian: I don’t want the government taking my money to care for others. I want to accept that personal responsibility. First, that way I know the money is going where I want it to go. Second, I know it is not being wasted. The most charitable people in America include church-going Christians and shul-attending Orthodox Jews, the conservatives and Republicans and libertarians who accept personal responsibility and who act outside the media glare. We do not virtue-signal. We do the deed.

But don’t ever mistake my compassion and caring for liberalism or, G-d forbid, “progressivism.” That is not “caring.” Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren became multi-millionaires by such “caring.” Ocasio kills great-paying Amazon jobs in her district but wears designer dresses now that she is on the public payroll. Thus, ninety percent of Black voters rely on Democrat liberal charity — and look how that pays. (“Entitlements” is a dishonest word. No one is “entitled” to food stamps, welfare, or anything else paid from my money.) And the result is that, from the moment that Black America placed itself 90 percent in the pocket of Democrat liberals and progressives, Black America consigned itself to a new form of slavery. Democrats are the most persistent hate group in American history. In the meantime, Japanese newcomers have leap-frogged Blacks. Koreans leap-frogged. Vietnamese leap-frogged. Immigrants from India leap-frogged. Now Hispanics are beginning to leap-frog. America does not hold back “persons of color” whether Yellow, Red, Brown, Blue, Black, Chartreuse, White, Magenta, or Terra Cotta.

All it takes to succeed in America is determination, accepting personal responsibility, and working hard. You want proof? Look at one sub-group of successful Blacks in America: the basketball and football athletes. LeBron James may demand reparations and be prepared to sell out the persecuted and oppressed in China in return for Nike endorsement contracts, but he works hard, night and day, to be a great basketball player. He never sought “affirmative action” to get into the National Basketball Association — and they won’t give it. He alternately will sell his skills to a Cleveland buyer, then to a Miami buyer, then back to a Cleveland buyer, then to a Los Angeles buyer — and always to a Chinese Communist buyer. If you want loyalty, you do not look to LeBron James. He may virtue-signal, but he is at bottom always looking out for Number One.

So “compassion” is not synonymous with Democrat or other virtue-signaling. When a Rabbi like me hears about an attack on Jews, my first reaction is not that I hope the police get there right away to protect Jews. My first reaction is that I hope there are Jews on scene with guns and rifles and machetes and knives to kill the guy and filet him. I am no liberal. I want him dead — on the spot. If perchance he survives his initial attack and gets arrested, I am not the liberal who writes the government and asks that his life be spared. Rather, I am the one who volunteers: If execution by electric chair, may I throw the switch? If by hanging, may I push the floor lever? If by firing squad, my I have the rifle with the live ammo? I want him dead. Would I lose sleep if I were the one to execute? Heck, no.

After the Pittsburgh temple shooting several years ago, the usual liberal Jewish suspects reacted in knee-jerk liberal predictability: they begged for mercy for their attacker. Such people are not normal. They are sick. They actually suffer from a mental illness. It is not normal to seek mercy for Nazis of the Left or Right who have shot at you. In such sick minds, there is a sense that virtue-signaling trumps all. Yet consider the scene at the end of Hitchcock’s Psycho, where the mentally psychotic Anthony Perkins character now has become subsumed completely by Mother Bates and imagines that, by not swatting at the buzzing fly on her nose and face, others will see how kind and gentle she really is. The movie’s point — completely devoid of any politics — is that, rather, she and he both are psycho. If a fly bothers you, you swat it or spray it with Raid.

It is the fate of Jews that some people always will hate us. This phenomenon never will end. A tenant who falls months behind in rent will have landlord problems, but if the landlord is a Jew suddenly that becomes the gripe. A landlord whose tenant will not pay will evict, but if that tenant is a Jew suddenly that supersedes. Karl Marx and all the leading Soviet Communists who followed — chief among them Stalin — blamed Jews for capitalism and, as Stalin manifested during his Show Trials and Purges, set about to destroy and utterly eradicate the Jewish people. Yet the Right equally obsessively and blindly blame “the Jews” for such vicious life-long anti-Semites as Karl Marx and Stalin, and for other apostate Leftist Jews like George Soros and Bernie Sanders who affiliate hand-in-hand almost exclusively with Jew-haters like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and the Black Supremacist crowd. One points to Rothschild and the other to Trotsky as the quintessential Jew. So Alisa Rosenbaum changed her name to Ayn Rand, Jacob Cohen to Rodney Dangerfield, and Bernie Schwartz to Tony Curtis — just to get an even break.

For American Jews today, our best friends are found among deeply conservative Protestant Christians and devout Catholics. Our worst enemies enjoy their own equal top billing: haters among White supremacists, Black supremacists like Black Lives Matter founders, and Islamists who hate and murder everyone including other Islamists in competing factions. Historically, Jews encountered centuries of hate from the Right (Tsars, Kaisers, Sultans, Theological Clerics), so Jews became especially wary of the Right. They simply never had encountered the other political expression, so the non-Orthodox imagined that the Left would be better. Orthodox Jews always knew better. Yet, from the very moment that Leninist-Stalinist Communism appeared, it became equally clear that Left ideology also has no room for Jews. A half century of Soviet Jewish experience so testifies, and that is why a million of them fled to Israel the moment Mother Russia’s walls came down. We Jews who actually understand authentic Judaism do not identify as bourgeoisie or proletarians. Here in America, we do not fit in with the Intersectionalism of the Left — Blacks, Muslims, LGBTQIAs. We are Jews, despised by them all. The leaders of the Women’s March had no room for Jews. “Dyke” parades ban Jewish symbols. When the Left speaks their lies about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness, they “include” Jews out and “diversify” Jews out. We know that. You show me a college whose student government has voted for BDS Jew-hatred, and I’ll show you a college with a full-time highly salaried Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness.

So it is hardly surprising that, even as the media lie about a supposed prevalence of “Islamophobia” and the Democrats adopt policies to “combat Islamophobia,” it all is one more Russia Hoax and January 6 Insurrection Hoax. FBI data are clear: the only overriding form of religious hatred that remains viable in our country is Jew-hatred. Hundreds of millions of non-Jews in America either love us or simply do not pay us special attention. Both approaches are appreciated equally. But the sick minds of haters fixate on us. Black haters, like the ones who dominate so much contemporary anti-Semitism, like the ones who shot Jews in Jersey City and Monsey, New York, and who beat up Jews on the Brooklyn streets of Williamsburg and Crown Heights, fixate on us just as do the mentally ill White supremacists like those who shot up Pittsburgh and Poway. And both those groups are in league with the sort of Muslims like the urine sample who just caused grief in Austin, reminiscent of his fellow “workplace violence” Muslim extremist who murdered 13 American soldiers and wounded 31 others at Fort Hood during the Obama years.

Do the haters blame White Protestant Christians in the Deep South for 125 consecutive years of electing nothing but Democrat U.S. Senators (see this partial list) to dominate the judicial selection process that ruined so much of our country’s moral fiber? No. Do they blame Catholics for Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and the long litany who humiliate and mortify devout Catholics and who would destroy America’s fiber? No. Even the mentally ill among haters can make those distinctions.

If only someone would let me pull the switch.

Dov Fischer
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Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before practicing complex civil litigation for a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms: Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national Jewish organizations, including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Federalist, National Review, the Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
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