And Now For Something Completely Revealing
by: Schvach Yid

At: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3369102968312745410

and at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/125728,

And from Atlas Shrugs at http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/03/islam-and-the-n.html

The Rightful Place of Sarcasm
by: Schvach Yid

‘Wipe the blue off the flag and talk to Hamas’, Jonathan Mark urges the Israeli leadership in a piece he wrote for the March 14^th edition of The New York Jewish Week, at:
http://www.thejewishweek.com/viewArticle/c40_a4861/News/Israel.html

He, like so many other Jews, is evidently sick and tired of spectating Israel’s ineptitude and impotence at dealing with its foremost problem – Moslem hatred of Jews and Judaism, acted out as maniacal homicide.

No, the ‘pc’ Liberals among you might say? Just consider the machinations of the Arab national leadership in the years leading up to the Second World War to bar Europe’s Jews from immigrating to what at the time constituted the British Mandate of Palestine. That’s Jew hatred!!!

Mark is right in this piece. The Israeli habit of emulating the old British Mandatory Authority’s practice of blowing up the homes of ‘Palestinian Jews’ suspected of activities that countered Britain’s interests in the area, by blowing up the homes of Arab terrorists, achieves nothing for Israel but bad press.

And don’t be concerned with public outrage voiced as accusations of apartheid and Nazism pointed at Israel for its management of the problems foisted the Jewish State by the Moslem Arabs. The Palestinian Arabs are anything but innocent; they’re waging murderous war against the Jews of Israel. By contrast, the Jews of Germany, and of elsewhere in Europe, waged no war against the Christians of Europe in the decades prior to World War Two. No political spiel by Germany’s Jews advocated freeing the land of Germany and replacing German rule with Jewish governance.

No Jew advocated running the Christians out of Europe or ever blew up Christian civilians in a trolley car in Vienna, Austria.

Quite the contrary, Yiddin were busy jumping onto the bandwagon. It’s called assimilation. Wissenschaft des Judentums was the fodder for this mass egress of Jews from the life of frumkeit. We never sought to overthrow or destroy Christian Europe and replace it with a Jewish government. The Jews of Germany were German patriots until they were informed in no uncertain terms their fealty was no longer welcome.

My paternal grandfather served in the German coastal artillery in the First World War; my maternal grandfather simultaneously served as a cavalry officer in Austria. No assertion of a separate nationalism was ever made.

This is in utter contrast to the Arab Palestinian ‘plight’ invented by the Arab Palestinian leadership (remember Yasser Arafat?) and the mass media. They have only one problem, and they’ve foisted it onto Israel – Jew hatred.

Jonathan Mark is right. Ariel Sharon needs to be reinvigorated and made young again so that his former strength on behalf of the Jewish State could now be applied to Israel’s present predicament. So too with the former leadership provided by R’ Meir Kahane. It’s a sad day when one has to invoke fantasy in defense of a country and one’s self interest. Fantasy is no substitute for substance; the current administration in Israel is no substitute for Israel’s former leaders.

Hitler’s aggression was directed at victimizing and annihilating innocent people; people who were otherwise eager and productive participants in the health and welfare of the European countries of their births. The smear of comparing Israel with the Nazis is pure imposture – and it’s vile. It’s right up the Arabs’ alley. It was the Arabs who courted the Nazis and who leveraged the British against us.

In honor of Ariel Sharon’s former self, and to properly memorialize Rabbi Meir Kahane, perhaps Israel should found yet another political party, to be named Zachor!. Perhaps its leadership would do something tangible in defense of the Jewish State of Israel.

Putting On The Bris
by: Schvach Yid

One of my favorite topics is up and running, or at least was, in the March 21^st edition of The New York Jewish Week. Yesiree jadies and jents, it’s the topic of Jewish circumcision, better known to us members of the Tribe as Brit Milah.

George Robinson reviews a new (?) documentary on this subject by film maker Eliyahu Unger-Sargon titled, ‘Cut: Slicing Through the Myth of Circumcision’ (sorry, the review is not listed on The New York Jewish Week web site).

Here is my very personal admission concerning this ‘controversial’ subject. I’m circumcised. I should know – I was there when it happened (and not by coincidence) although I don’t remember a thing about the event (in that case perhaps I shouldn’t know!). It’s not that I have to ask about the matter to be certain of the fact; it’s just that I should, and do, know.

My circumcision was not a religious ritual, but medical. If I recall correctly, back then the New York City Department of Health (I’m a native New Yorker) required circumcisions of all newborn males. Despite this fact, my mother informed her obstetrician that she wanted me circumcised, and according to my mother’s account, she (that’s right, a female obstetrician in 1953) answered ‘well, I’m not a rabbi, but I’ll do it’. Voilà!

Thanks to my mother’s acceptance of this important mitzvah, I’ve spent my life to date with the ability to sit at a Pesach seder with a clear conscience.

Have I ever been self-conscious about my circumcision? Not at all! I surely wouldn’t want my you-know-what to look like some wűrst in the display case at Schaller & Weber.

Personally, I love being circumcised. It’s one of many facts of my life that lets me know in no uncertain terms that I’m a Jew – of the male variety. Sorry jadies, but you can’t have one – you have nothing to circumcise (and the Aybischter never commanded bris milah for females).

This brings my spiel to the point of the matter. George Robinson’s review reveals that Unger-Sargon’s flick serves, at least in part, as an apologetic. The various introspective and social/political issues seem to have been covered (I haven’t seen this documentary), but less we forget, we Jews should all be reminded that we circumcise our infant sons, hopefully on the child’s eighth day post-partum, in compliance with HaShem’s mitzvah to do so, and not for reasons of health promotion, politics, social confrontation, marital isolation, or any other ‘pc’ concern.

It’s a part of Judaism – we do it because Gd has commanded us to do it.

And I thank my parents, as well as HaShem, for my medical, as opposed to religious, bris. A bissele wine for an eight day old is okay, but in the matter of circumcision, Betadine beats the pants off saliva, every time.

Recently there have appeared in print several Schreie about circumcision. The first, as I recall, was a book written by a Moslem author who suffered through a Moslem circumcision at the prescribed age of thirteen years (in emulation of Ishmail in the Chumash).

Now two Yiddin have deemed appropriate to jump onto the bris-bitch bandwagon. The second of these, who’s publication pre-dates the first, is Shalom Auslander with his book ‘Foreskin’s Lament’; I haven’t read this ditty, but here’s a website by and for the author: http://www.shalomauslander.com/book_foreskins_lament.php; there’s even a video on this site.

Here’s the URL to a review of the book, complete with a brief bio:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/14/RV2QSB9D0.DTL

Auslander just happens to live in Woodstock, NY, situated just off Route 28 out of Kingston (NYS Thruway exit 19). Woodstock is an old childhood summer haunt of mine; back then, it was the hippie hangout of the Northern Catskills.

What can I say? I’m satisfied.

The World of ‘Jews By Choice’ According to Schvach
by: Schvach Yid

I’ve recently taken up the habit of reading blogs by self-labelled ‘Jews by Choice’. I enjoy their accounts of discovery and self-fulfillment realized through the aegis of religious conversion to Judaism, which they relate through their writings.

First, I want to extend a hearty mazel tov to them all. Secondly, I wish to invite each and every one of them to stop sweating over their decisions to convert to Judaism. Lastly, I encourage these Jews to once and for all accept themselves as Jews. Evidently, some of them don’t; I do!

We Jews come in a great variety of sizes, shapes, complexions, nationalities, races, etc. You get the point. Some of us have succeeded in tracing our Jewish genealogies back many generations. A Simple Jew has posted one such account at http://asimplejew.blogspot.com/2008/01/guest-posting-by-rabbi-shlomo-slatkin.html; it’s a beautiful story told by Rabbi Shlomo Slatkin.

If you’re like me, then the account of one’s Jewish roots can only be traced for four generations or so, yet we are taught by our rabbis that we are Jews by virtue of our matrilineal descent from Sarah. The Kabbalistic account deals with ‘misplaced’ neshamot and their rediscovery. Frankly, I have no idea if my family’s Jewish identity extends back to Sarah, but my ‘Jewishness’ has never been called into question. It could be that my claim as a so-called ‘Jew by birth’ is an unintentional fraud – how can I knowledgably and accurately account for my maternal lineage from a Jewish Biblical origin?

Despite this very real possibility, I have never questioned my Jewish identity; I’m a Jew – the genuine article, and so too I accept converts to Judaism, without proviso.

For the purpose of highlighting our varied forms (I hate using the term ‘diverse’ – it’s become so politically charged, clichéd, and trite), here are some bits from YouTube. Again, the message is clear.

Some Birthday
by: Schvach Yid

Today is my father’s birthday. He’s 86 years old, and I mean old. He doesn’t know it’s his birthday; in fact, he no longer seems to know anything. Four years ago he suffered a stroke, superimposed on an already evident yet incomplete senility. Then, perhaps a year following his stroke, his caretaker, in a moment of unintended(?) negligence, allowed him to fall, crashing his noggin against the concrete patio. Back he went into the hospital, and upon discharge, was little more than a vegetable.

So my father has suffered three cerebral insults. There’s not much left to him. He sits in a wheelchair clad in a diaper, fully dressed and fully nonfunctional.

My mother feeds him, dessert included. Just put some food in front of his mouth and down it goes. He has a hemiparesis, so he regularly chokes on his food, but so far he’s managed to avoid aspirating the stuff.

The brain department was never my father’s strong point. Oh what the hell, he was always a dumb ass. I know I shouldn’t say such things about one of my parents, but it’s true. He grew up as the pee-on of his family, eclipsed by his older-by-one-year brother, who didn’t amount to a hill of beans but was nevertheless his mommy’s favorite, so my father paid. Regrettably, this family collusion followed him into, and has remained throughout, my father’s adulthood. He never learned how to manage the situation. Learning wasn’t one of his talents.

I shouldn’t eulogize my father – he’s still alive. His birthday is not the occasion for his obituary. This is no time to recite Kaddish, but his brain is dead, or mostly so, so perhaps a Kaddish for my father might be appropriate. He can no longer think, ergo, he isn’t, but thinking was never one of his talents, so just what’s the loss?

He was never a nice guy. He was never a bad person. He was always angry, and always vulgar, specializing in dishing out ridicule and belittlement. I was always ‘you schmuck’, ‘the biggest schmuck in the family’, a ‘schmuck mit zwei Ohren’ (a penis with two ears). My mother was ‘that f*cking woman’. There were lots of insults. Can you say primitive? He no longer can.

Okay, okay, life hit him in the face with a shit pie. He grew up in Germany under the rise of the Nazis. He was marched to the front of one of his classes, as a child, and used as an object lesson on the physical characteristics of a member of a genetically inferior race - after all, he’s Jewish, so link that experience to his family’s lack of savvy in raising their children, and voilá.

When things got too hot in his home town of Bremerhaven his parents sent him off to Berlin to attend a vocational school for carpentry run by Beitar and the Jewish Agency. The goal was to train Jewish German youth for export to British Palestine. During one of their classes the Brown Shirts strolled in and trashed the place, then set it on fire. What a joyous childhood experience.

Off they went to America – by the hairs on their chiny-chin chins. No English. Ah, New York; no school. My father found work with a furrier, pushing ‘Jewish airplanes’ (racks of fur coats) from one building to the next. That’s the way to go through adolescence.

The he was drafted. The Army and the Pacific; Guadalcanal and Guam, as a medic. Well, at least the Army made him an American citizen, but not before he successfully completed basic training – citizenship was conditional. Decades ago I got a peek at the letters he wrote to his parents from the Pacific – in German. I asked him why in German. Simple – at that point he still couldn’t manage much English. His lousy brother, and their lousy cousin, neither of whom was ever nice to my father and who both would gang up and insult him in the presence of the rest of the family – I was there – both got to stay in the US for their Army service.

Isn’t life grand? Well, at least he got out of Germany and away from the Nazis. Good thing we won the war, eh?

So today is Dad’s birthday. Happy birthday Dad, and with whatever remains of your brain, why don’t you tell life to go f*ck itself!

The Deception of Christian Zionism
by: Schvach Yid

It’s nothing new. President Bush is presumed to be something of a Gospels totter, yet his support for Israel has been lax, to say the very least.

Take ‘the West Bank’, properly termed Judea/Samaria – YESHA. The Moslems refuse to share this Jewish turf with Jews, so too for the Temple Mount. According to the Western (read Christian) world, if the Moslems want Jewish turf, it’s theirs, and we Jews have nothing to say about it.

Of course, the whole argument is couched behind platitudes about human rights (for the Palestinian Arabs, not for Jews), the need for understanding and accommodation (on behalf of Palestinian Arabs, not Jews), the obligation of the ‘well off’ to condescend to and provide for the less fortunate – you know, the standard politically Liberal line for the benefit of Palestinian Arabs at the expense of Jews, as though Israeli Jews are wealthy and Middle East Arab Moslems are poor, and lastly, that great icon of secular Western Jewish existence, education. We are well educated compared to the Palestinian Moslem Arabs, therefore we pay.

At the heart of this conflict over Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland is the conflict that under rides Western religious existence, namely, the assertion that each one of the three Western religions trumps the other two – the ‘true faith’ assertion.

Never mind the fact that Western religions numbers 2 and 3 are both knockoff attempts at emulating and surpassing Judaism. This, of course, will never be admitted by adherents to either of those two other faiths.

No, the admission of a Jewish right to sovereignty in the Holy Land by Christianity would of course negate Christianity’s claim of legitimacy, even if that Christian support of a Jewish State were made to counter the Moslem claim. Islam’s acknowledgement of an inherent Jewish right to the land would likewise serve as an admission by Islam of its own illegitimacy.

The claims of religious efficacy rest entirely on the claim of Gd’s revelation. Each of the three Western religions invokes its scripture in support of this. The Jewish claim to the Land of Israel is based on HaShem’s revelation to us, given in Torah. Acknowledge that, and the rest follows, because Gd’s word is Gd’s word.

The Christian Zionists are well informed about this. So too are the Moslems. The British ‘promise’ of a Homeland for the Jews in the old Mandate of Palestine, and beyond, was, and continues to be, slowly and gradually eroded to virtually nothing. Britain was a Christian nation; its leaders were Christian and understood very well the need to negate the claims of Judaism as a requisite of their own claims of religious legitimacy. So too for the dynamic duo of Bush and Rice. So too will it be for their successors.

The eagerness, or alternatively the complacency, of Israel’s leadership to fall in line with the demands in support of the religious claims of Christianity and Islam serves only to negate Torah. In an apparent paradox, the century-old scam of disguising religion as politics by the Christian world has been met by Israel’s refusal to recognize the identity of the beast. There is no peace on the horizon for Israel, at least not until the Israeli populace finds its brain and uses it.

I Didn’t Know He’s Jewish, Either
by: Schvach Yid

That’s Bernard Lewis jadies and jents, the famed and very oratory British chochom on the subject of Islam, now an elder gentleman and Professor Emeritus of Princeton University.

I first heard him – a real treat, and I mean it – on an edition of C-SPAN’s Book TV years ago, and I’ve been a fan of his ever since.

I, being a self-professed chochom of sorts, suspected that Prof. Lewis might be Jewish, but I didn’t know. Now, thanks to Ruthie Blum of the on-line edition of The Jerusalem Post, I do. Mazel tov Schvach! Here’s the link: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1204546415778&pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull

In the C-SPAN interview, the interviewer innocently asked Prof. Lewis which translation of the Koran he uses as his source material. He gave bit of a start and answered, ‘the original Koranic Arabic, of course’ (he didn't add 'you dummy', but it was implied).

On the flip side is our very own Yiddishe mama of meteorology and weather reporting, Stephanie Abrams, of The Weather Channel (if you think I’m a Jewish chauvinist, how right you are!). Recently I’ve taken to watching The Weather Channel, and Ms. Abrams appears to have ramped up her entertainment gig a bit, complete with views of her trousseau and décolletage.

Surely, someone can cue her into derech hatznius, but I’m proud of her anyway.

During one report, she blurted ‘oy vey!’ – emes. Such nachas I get from her, and I don’t even know her; I wonder if The Weather Channel management put words on her afterward. I am sure.

The Bestiality of Islam
by: Schvach Yid

Thanks to the obsession the various cable news channels have with the current presidential primary race, I didn’t learn about the latest tragedy in J’lem until today, since regrettably I don’t have a computer of my own. I hope they’ll revert to reporting the news, rather than pursuing their habit of turning the current bid for the presidency into a knockoff sports event. Until then, I think I’ll cancel my TV cable subscription.

According to the ‘Protocols of Political Correctness’, there are Moslems, and then there are ‘Islamists’. ‘Islamists’ are supposed to be the extremist minority within the world’s general Moslem population. Baloney! ‘Islamist’ are nothing other than the military wing of the world’s general Moslem population, and like all military forces, they constitute a small percentage of the total population of their society. They don’t have formal uniforms, you may counter? They

don’t indulge in ritual pomp and ceremony, you may protest? Schmonses; they constitute a citizens’ militia, but unlike the Minutemen of the American Revolution (in whose honor a class of America’s ICBM’s are named) the ‘Moslem Citizens’ Militia’ commit murder in the ‘cause’ of Jew-hatred.

This past week, eight Jewish kinder – yeshiva bochurim all, were murdered in cold blood as sacrifices in Islam’s hatred against Jews, Judaism, and the Jewish homeland. These eight Jewish youngsters were all made of ‘The Right Stuff’ – proud Jewish youths who loved their people, Torah, and Israel.

And to what end was this atrocity committed? The arabist throwbacks to T. E. Lawrence’s day might inveigh Arab nationalism. The UN, in its long established convoluted way, would assert ‘humanitarianism and world peace’. The current administration in the US would figure out something – anything – supportive of ‘Palestinian rights’, and Olmert and his crew?

Who can successfully decipher the ways of Olmert and the Israeli Left? I don’t know if that bunch really means what they do in their endless pursuit of capitulation, or if their backs are truly against the wall. Olmert, after all, is not only the Prime Minister, but also a prime assassination target. I imagine that not too much is needed to position a Palestinian Arab assassin to do the dirty deed.

What is clear is that the proud days of Israeli chutzpah, at least in terms of national defense, are over, replaced by luxury high rise condominiums in J’lem and the expulsion of Jews from Judea/Samaria. Ah, the legacy of the Olmert administration. ‘World peace’ might as well be ‘whirled peas’.

By comparison to this past week's tragedy, 'only' seven people were murdered in the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre of 1929:
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Valentine's_Day_Massacre). The ‘Moslem Citizens’ Militia’ has been out-doing Al Capone for a very long time – just count the Jewish corpses.

And here, courtesy of A Simple Jew is a lesson to be learned from Gemara, at:
http://asimplejew.blogspot.com/2008/03/sderot-tel-aviv-lesson-from-gemara.html

photo credits: top-Arutz Sheva; bottom-Wikipedia

A Great Find Has Been Found

by: Schvach Yid

At the Atlas Shrugs blog site at: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/02/jerusalem-is-je.html

According to Pamela Geller, author and founder of the Atlas Shrugs blog site, this past Thursday Israeli archeologists announced the unearthing of a 10 centuries-old artifact that proves the Hebrew biblical claim over ancient Jerusalem.

An ancient seal bearing an archaic Hebrew inscription dating back to the 8th century BCE has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem's City of David, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Thursday.

Geller then provides a list of responses to offer any individual who might take issue with our rightful Jewish claims over Jerusalem.

Perhaps to counter our assertion, the Waqf of Jerusalem would like to provide some archeological evidence that Islam’s prophet ascended to heaven from the Temple Mount.