My readers know that I am, uh, Jewish. (For those who did not know, please dial “2” for Spanish.)
On first blush, one would expect that I would have major insoluble problems with Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Bless her soul, she has uttered and tweeted some doozies. The Rothschilds. The Holocaust.
But I simply cannot join the easy chorus that she is an anti-Semite. I refuse to be bullied by the media mob. I actually am convinced that she is a friend and great supporter of Israel and that, if only — if only! — there would be a way to pipe her in to a bit more information about Jews and the Holocaust and yet even some more about Jews, she would respond positively.
I don’t know how much she knows about Jews. That tank gauge’s arrow seems to point towards empty. Rep. Greene is a small-town Southern Bible Belt Christian, and Judaism is not her forte. That’s fair. Compounding the confusion, so much of the dishonest left-wing media picks whom to quote and whom to coronate as “American Jewish Leaders,” so most Americans have no way even to gauge what honestly is Jewish. Thus, unsurprisingly, a great many Americans erroneously think that the ADL speaks for Jews or HIAS speaks for Jews. What rot! The Anti-Defamation League abandoned its Jewish roots that traced to 1913 a decade ago when it hired unemployed Obama staffers to take the organization into Progressiveland. And the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which helped Jews like my and my wife’s ancestors come to Ellis Island a century ago, and even helped other Jews arrive here immediately after the Holocaust, and then helped them resettle here as proud Jews and equally proud New Americans, now is so un-Jewish that they do not even use the word “Hebrew” in their name, just the old-time acronym. Today’s HIAS instead is focused on bringing in more Ilhan Omars from Somalia. Could there be anything more inimical to Jewish values? HIAS is particularly despicable.
It really is crazy when you think of it. I was ordained at Yeshiva University as a rabbi in March 1981. These days, 40 years later, as a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at Coalition for Jewish Values and CJV’s West Coast vice president, I am positioned as one among the voices who reflect much of the thinking of 1,500 ordained Orthodox rabbis in America. We are, hands down, the largest public policy rabbinical organization in America, possibly in the world. But we never have been quoted even once in the New York Times or the Washington Post (though often on radio, Fox News, in Newsweek, the Daily Wire, PJ Media, the Jerusalem Post, Jewish News Syndicate, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Newsmax, EWTN, the Hill, and so many others throughout the country). So our message gets out, but the left media do their best to suppress such conservative Jewish voices in favor of left-wing Jewish groups, rabbis, and content.
So how in the world can a Marjorie Taylor Greene know that there are so many deeply conservative populist Orthodox rabbis in America — rabbis who actually believe in the Bible, the Word of G-d, the Torah, the legal rulings of the Talmud as to observing the Sabbath, kosher food laws, and so much else? No one ever would know from ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post that more than 90 percent of all American Orthodox Jews in America and almost 100 percent of their rabbis are Republican conservatives (except for the one outlier guy, a colleague of mine, who voted for Biden and a few others). There are Orthodox rabbinical seminaries all over America, some remarkably gigantic: Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), the Lakewood Yeshiva of New Jersey, the Chofetz Chaim Rabbinical Seminary of America, the Mir in Brooklyn, Torah Vodaath, Yeshiva Chaim Berlin, Hebrew Theological College in Chicago, Telz Yeshiva in Cleveland, Ner Yisroel in Baltimore, the Philadelphia Yeshiva, all the Lubavitcher Hasidic seminaries like the one in Morristown, New Jersey.
No one ever would know. We Orthodox Jews get more blacked out than Liberty University, which only “merits” left-media coverage when a seminarian’s personal family tragedy rises to juicy scandal for left-wing secular “journalists” — many of whom encounter the same tragedies in their own families.
There are so many more ordained Orthodox rabbis than there are non-Orthodox rabbis like those who identify as “reform” or “reconstructionist” or “humanist.” But the left media love the non-Orthodox rabbis who eat pork and marry out of the faith and make a complete mockery of the very core and essence of Judaic practice. Imagine: you can be a Christian who knows nothing — nada, zilch, gornisht, zippo — about Judaism, like Dear Marjorie of Georgia, and still you can just imagine how my 1,500 Orthodox rabbinic colleagues in CJV feel when we see this desecration of all that is holy in Judaism. That’s right, on our holiest day, two absolute rubes dressed up in their reform rabbi uniforms and arrogated the holy melody reserved for the traditional intoning of the Biblical Haftarah, replacing the sacred words of the Holy Bible with a compilation of quotes from Ruth Ginsburg. (Okay if I leave out the “Bader”?)
Or how we feel when we see an outright apostate like Bernie Sanders lead the U.S. Senate as the No. 1 Israel-hater in the country. Of course America’s worst anti-Semites — Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, the Queens AOC (Anti-Semite of Color), Ayanna Pressley, and Linda Sarsour — endorsed him for president! And of course he endorses them. Like the Jew-hating apostates Trotsky and Karl Marx before him, that almost-octogenarian communist hates everything dear to Judaism. Or the Judaic ignoramus who married Kamala Harris and knows so little about Judaism that he still does not realize to this day how much a fool he made of himself last winter when he filmed a brief YouTube clip with her about the “meaning of Chanukah.”
We thank you for your pandering. This punchinello would not know the meaning of Chanukah if a Menorah with eight candles, a shamash, and a dreydl showed up in his next pork chop or inside his next shucked oyster. No wonder his daughter has her personal spokesman upbraid the media when they suggest she is Jewish.
So, just as devout American Catholics must suffer terribly through the way they present themselves and the left media elevate Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and that gang as synonymous with true Catholicism, so it is that we Jews put up with the frustration of the lies and ignorance of who and what we are. Hint: If the person eats pork or cheeseburgers, attacks Israel for things he or she does not attack any other country for, including Arab and communist dictatorships, or eats bread on Passover or anything on Yom Kippur — that ain’t gonna be your resource. So it is not shocking that Rep. Greene just does not know.
Which brings me back to Marjorie and Ilhan.
I truly believe that, in her heart, Marjorie Taylor Greene is only one knowledgeable adviser away (or maybe two) from being a friend of Israel and a friend of the kinds of Jews whom the media never covers — those 1,500 Orthodox rabbis and more … and their million or more congregants in Orthodox synagogues throughout America. We despise Sanders and Soros. We retch at the sound of people chanting the melody of the Haftarah to the words of Ginsburg. (Okay if I leave out the “Ruth,” too, because such sacrilege is so ruthless?) And we hate that the left media bastardize and corrupt Judaism in the same way that they do to real Catholicism and real Protestantism. We hate that almost every movie with a religion angle depicts religious actors and players — pastors, priests, rabbis — as hypocritical, cruel, and phony. Only Islam and its muftis and ayatollahs get a pass. There is so much falsification and misinformation that Marjorie cannot be blamed fully for her ignorance.
An example of journalistic absolute ignorance about things Judaic or even Biblical: When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu mentioned at a press conference that Moses drew forth water from a rock (Numbers 20:1-13), the Wall Street Journal “broke the news” the next day that Moses had gotten water from … Iraq. Although I often pun on these pages, I cannot claim credit for that one. It took a complete ignoramus to hear that Moses drew “water from a rock” and to convert that to “water from Iraq.”
I understand why House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whom I personally have praised and defended publicly from phony accusations of anti-Semitism, has felt obliged meanwhile to acquiesce to Rep. Greene being without a committee assignment. Frankly, as she correctly has noted, she does far more good for her Georgia constituents and other fans by having all that time freed up. The other day she acknowledged the difference between blue-state gubernatorial mask mandates, on the one hand, and Adolf Hitler forcing Jews to wear yellow stars, on the other. So she eventually apologizes. That is a big thing. None of this “If” I have offended “someone,” with which politicians preface whatever apologies get squeezed out of them.
But Ilhan Omar is a horse of a different … ideology. She is a vicious hater at her core. She hates our country, an America that somehow took her in from the Muslim hellhole of Somalia. We graciously allowed her into our country. We allowed other Somalian Muslim haters into our country. A whole bunch of them ended up somehow in quasi-Nordic Minnesota and help shore up that Rust Belt state’s disappearing Democrat majority. As a result, they help elect her to Congress, where she has the limelight to hate America in public and to play to her Jew-hating peanut gallery by giving them all the anti-Semitism they can lap up. In her Minnesota Fifth Congressional District, the Democrat primary decides the winner, not the November election. In 2020, she won the primary by 35,000 votes among 178,000 cast. In 2018, she won by 24,000 of 135,000 cast. There are nearly 30,000 Somali Muslim immigrants in her district. So it would be absolutely wrong to say that they unilaterally elect her. Just as with the married White public-relations guy with whom she carried on an adulterous affair while in Congress, breaking up his marriage and then marrying him, and to whom her campaigns have paid nearly $600,000, so it is that this religious hypocrite appeals to other extreme-radical non-Somalis in her district. But the Somali Muslim immigrant community comprise her critical base of anti-Jewish support from which she then expands her appeal to other Jew-haters and America-haters.
She refers to 9/11 as that “something.” She calls Jews names (“Benjamins”) and epithets, while she accuses the United States of America as being akin to Hamas and the Taliban, who enabled Osama bin Laden to perpetrate 9/11 with 19 Arab Muslim murderers.
She is not redeemable. Why?
Because she is a Democrat, not a Republican?
No. Not for that reason.
Rather, she is unredeemable because she has spouted America-hatred and Jew-hatred from the day she entered Congress as the duly elected representative of Hamas. Each time she ignites a firestorm, she then tries to “explain” it away. Nancy Pelosi absolutely knows that Ilhan Omar is a vile blight on Congress. But Pelosi is afraid to mess with her because it might cost the Democrats Minnesota. It is the same reason that Pelosi will not call out the other main Jew-hater in Congress, Rashida Tlaib: it might cost the Democrats Michigan. Meanwhile, most Jews in Congress — many of whom seem like Anne Franks who have fled into hiding — are terrified to call her out because they are scared that the New York AOC — Anti-Semite of Color — will primary them into political oblivion and force them to start earning their livings honorably. So Omar just does it again and again — each time even worse. Now she compares America to the Taliban and Hamas. Does America forcibly circumcise women’s sensitive private organs and murder women who are raped so as to spare their families from “shame”? Does America ban women from voting? I do not conduct gay marriages — never will — but I am extreme on defending LGBTQIA+ civil rights. Does America punish homosexuality by forcing gays up to top floors of high-rise buildings and then defenestrating them? Does America burn down churches left and right, and even desecrate Christian and Jewish holy places of Biblical antiquity and sanctity, to replace them with mosques?
The entire “Squad,” who always speak about being “of color,” have shown their own true colors these past few years. Their true color is not black or brown. Their true color is green — deep green with envy — capped stylishly by a KKK white hood. They deeply envy America and its Judeo-Christian heritage because their Muslim Arab Somalias and their other vaunted Critical Studies societies never created anything proximate to what our Founding Fathers created here and never will. They envy Israel for accomplishing more in 73 years than Somalia and its ilk ever have and ever will. Israel did it and does it despite being surrounded from the day of its birth by more than 20 Arab Muslim countries that have aimed to destroy it and despite having been created in its first six years by an utter hodge-podge of some 400,000 emaciated Holocaust survivors speaking German, Russian, Rumanian, Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and another 800,000 displaced Jews expelled overnight from Arab lands speaking a host of incompatible Arabic dialects. And yet, without those Jews even understanding each other (or maybe because of that … ), they recreated a language that lay dormant for 2,000 years and never looked back. That is how they became the “start-up nation.” How many CT scan machines have been produced in Somalia, much less invented there? GPS devices? Medical hardware, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical breakthroughs? Compare this list of Israeli inventions and discoveries with this list of Somali inventions. Or this list of Israeli Nobel Prize winners over the past half century with this list of Somali Nobel Prize winners. (It’s between Slovenia and South Africa.)
So those are the two: (i) Marjorie Taylor Greene and (ii) Ilhan Omar: colored Green with an “e” at the end for Envy. And that’s how and why they differ.
