AMERICAN JEW, REARED IN RACISM
By Harmony Grant
17 Oct 06
Those who criticize Israel and leftist Jewish activism can plan
on being called lunatic anti-Semites.
But militant Jews regularly admit to actions and intentions as
bad as or worse than what their critics charge. Many such admissions
can be found in the revealing autobiography, Memoirs
of a Jewish Extremist (1995, Little, Brown & Co.) by Yossi Klein Halevi.
As a zealous young Brooklynite Jew, Halevi became an activist for
Israel, even working with extremist rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of
the terrorist Jewish Defense League.
Halevi’s extremism was tempered by passing years and marriage
to a Gentile girl. Halevi dropped out of Judaic right-wing activism,
but he sports a skull cap for the flyleaf photo of his book and his
writing often slips into outright agit-prop for the Jewish victim
complex.
Between the paragraphs of propaganda there are peeks into the upbringing
of a young American Jew—an upbringing that would shock and
alarm the millions of unenlightened evangelical Christians who think
of Jews as religious brethren who deserve unquestioning moral and
monetary support.
Halevi writes of being raised to see non-Jews as the perpetual
enemy, to despise Christ, and to revere the Talmud, a book that actually
advocates racist violence against Gentiles. The synagogues of Halevi’s
Jewish childhood contain much more than the scrolls and side-curls
imagined by naïve Christians. They are absent of God, containing
instead a cult of ancestor worship, racial supremacism and bigotry.
Halevi remembers:
[My father] made certain I learned the wisdom of the Jewish exile:
Halakhah, it is law, Esav sone l’Ya’akov, Esau the Goy
hates Jacob the Jew. The Goy. Not merely one or another group, not
even an entire nation, but the whole non-Jewish world. Every country
had shut its doors to Europe’s Jews. (6) My father…never
called them, as I did, “goyim,” but Gentiles, non-Jewish
people, a formal respect… (201)
Imagine if white people out of "formal respect" referred
to everyone else as “non-whites." Would that be respect
or racism?
Halevi writes of the European immigrants who lived in his boyhood
Brooklyn:
They evoked no curiosity in us, only fear. We saw them all as
members of the same ethnic group: Jew-haters. Goyim, we called
them, a Hebrew word that literally means “the nations” but that we understood
to mean the enemy. The more polite word we sometimes used was “non-Jews,” defining
them by what they were not. (13)
Halevi’s words reveal the way anti-Semitism (especially the “Holocaust”)
has been exploited by Zionists and leftist Jewish activists as a
way to unite Jews against Gentiles. The constant imagery of Jew-as-martyr
has served to silence criticism of Israel and Jewish activism, to
energize Jews with self-righteous superiority, and to force Gentile
bystanders into guilt-ridden moral compromises they would never otherwise
permit.
If Jewish suffering hadn’t been so massively exploited and
misused, Americans would probably look more closely at the most powerful
ethnic group in America and their activities. American evangelicals
might be able to perceive the tremendous injustice suffered by Palestinians
who continue to languish in refugee camps, decades after being forced
from their homes by Zionist terror. And they might also wonder why
they should support a religious state in the Middle East that is
committed to opposing Christ, the God of Christianity.
According to Israeli writer Israel Shahak, Jews in Israel spit
when they pass a church, relentlessly persecute Messianic Jews, and
have even removed the plus signs from their childrens’ math
books since they resemble the cross of Christ.
Halevi reveals that you don’t have to go to Jerusalem to
encounter Jewish hatred of Jesus. In NYC, he writes,
Hasidic children called Jesus “Yoshke,” a mocking name
meant for a village idiot; some grown-ups called him the Yimach
Sh’moinik,
the one whose name should be blotted out, the traitorous Jew who’d
brought disaster on his people…Some Borough park children
said it was a mitzvah, a religious commandment, to spit when you
passed a church. (17)
Wouldn’t American evangelicals be surprised to learn that
their Jewish “brethren” are calling Christ such blasphemous
names, and in the USA at that?
Hasidic American children learn to hate Christ at the feet of their
religious leaders, who learn it from the Talmud. In this book—the
most revered authority for religious Jews—Christ is described
as a bastard and Mary as a whore. Jews are given permission to deceive
Gentiles, to indirectly cause their death, and are actually encouraged
to kill Christians. The Talmud teaches that the human race will ultimately
be redeemed only when Jews dominate Gentiles in worldwide control.
Is such a racist, supremacist book condemned by modern Jews? Hardly.
It remains their most treasured authority. Halevi is explicit about
the role of the Talmud in his NYC Jewish upbringing. At his high
school, the Brooklyn Talmudic Academy, Halevi says,
Subjects like the Bible, Jewish history, and rabbinic philosophy
were taught, but grudgingly: our only real religious education was
the Talmud. (65)
As a young man, Halevi experienced the radical extremism of Rabbi
Meir Kahane. In middle age, he looks back on Kahane’s rabid
hatred of Gentiles and admits that Kahane’s racism was rooted
in the Talmud itself.
I tried to convince myself that Kahane’s hatred was an understandable
if crazed response to the Holocaust and the isolation of Israel.
And yet Kahane was drawing not only on emotion but on theology. He
gathered the anti-Gentile quotes scattered through Jewish religious
writings and the rabbinic laws meant to keep Jews and Gentiles apart,
and placed those at the heart of Judaism—for Kahane, a religion
of Jewish superiority and Gentile subservience. Although hardly mainstream,
Kahane’s theology was recognizable enough to be, in his words, “authentically
Jewish.” As always, Kahane was confronting us with an unbearable
truth about ourselves. (182)
As Halevi concedes, Judaism's most sacred writings sanction the
violent terrorism that Kahane practiced against innocent Gentiles.
The Talmud and other rabbinic scriptures incite the hatred of Gentiles
that permits Jews to mercilessly slaughter Arabs, betray America
through espionage, and subvert Christian American civilization at
every opportunity. Jewish hatred of Christian values and influence
is a root cause of anti-Christ secularism in the USA. Leftist Jews
flock to support the religious state of Israel while simultaneously
denouncing the right of an American child to pray over her lunch
in public school.
There may no greater tool of Zionist and leftist Jews than the
Holocaust. Halevi returns to this exaggeration again and again as
the source of his deepest Jewish emotions.
The Holocaust took the place in my mind that for other children
God held, a place at once awesome and intimate. (19)
Halevi writes of sitting with his tefilim as a young man in the
mornings; his sacred religious moments were dedicated not to prayer
to God, but to imagined communion with “Jewish souls,” those
who had perished in the Holocaust and those who wore tefilim throughout
the centuries.
Halevi’s book almost never mentions God, proving with silence
that Judaism is not about God but about the Jewish people. This has
never been more true than in the era of the Holocaust industry, when
Jewish Hollywood cranks out another dirge every few months.
Of the synagogue-goers of his childhood, Halevi writes that
God had nothing to do with their Judaism: they were preserving the
rituals of the kedoshim, the martyrs who had died in the Holocaust.
If their prayers were holy, it was only because the kedoshim had
said them. (27)
As an interesting side note, Halevi says the Holocaust was pretty
much unspoken in films or schools until “In 1961, the Holocaust
suddenly appeared on TV” (21) with the Eichmann trial.
It was in the sixties that Israel’s military power was also
showing up on TV, as the religious state shoved its borders farther
out into Arab lands and demonstrated its military muscle in the landslide
6-Day War. The Holocaust industry really kicked into gear at this
point, providing necessary propaganda to justify Israeli military
aggression. Suffering Jewish lambs were led to slaughter in dozens
of disingenuous books and films that helped the world forget the
daily ravaging of the Palestinians by the Jewish military wolf.
It worked. It’s still working today.
Halevi may have outgrown his extremism, but the same corrupted
sources that inspired his youthful activism remain the guides of
worldwide Jewry.
