And They Say That Sacrifice is Immoral

AND THEY SAY THAT SACRIFICE IS IMMORAL

by Asher Keren

‘They’, of course, are the enlightened, the practical, the pluralists, the seekers of peace. Kadima, Labor, Peace Now, Seeds for Peace, the New Israel Fund, the Israeli Supreme Court, and even the Likud. These people claim to live by the highest of human ideals, such as modern education, globalized commerce, freedom and peace. They pursue these ideals according to the finest of Western humanitarian traditions, or at least how they understand these traditions. They are the Jews that hold Torah to their own light and interpret it according to their own worldview. So, for instance, the animal sacrifices performed in our Temples and by our priests were, perhaps, something acceptable then – but not now.

Today, sacrifice will not do. Not at all. Man should go above his instincts and needs without the need to sacrifice, to kill innocent animals, the claim being that mankind has evolved morally to a level whereby sacrifice is immoral – totally and completely. Sounds great, except that upon closer scrutiny, it seems that our enlightened and peace loving culture has replaced animal sacrifice with human sacrifice. And the first to applaud these sacrifices are these very same enlightened Jews who eschew the Torah and its seemingly primitive practices and messages.

You will find these enlightened at the ball games, paying good money for our modern gladiators to destroy their bodies by the age of thirty in return for fortune and fame. You will find them at the music festivals and the movie festivals hobnobbing with the lucky few that have given up almost every semblance of personal life for the accolades and fortunes heaped upon our cultural icons. You will find them accepting the Nobel Peace Prize together with a Palestinian tyrant that sent his people’s children off to suicide bombings. Over the last year, however, their appetite for human sacrifice has turned mightily as never before to one major group, the Jewish settlers in Judea and Samaria.

Let’s be honest. In the long run nobody will really do a thing to stop the Hamas takeover of the Palestinian governmental apparatus. Nothing. Maybe the enlightened will say a few harsh things about Hamas terrorism, but they all justify to themselves that the human sacrifice of the Hamas is really all about Israeli tyranny and therefore although not acceptable, it still is understandable. While the Hamas goes around sacrificing Israelis and Palestinians the enlightened will turn their sights to the appeasement sacrifice, the settlers. They will kick them out of their homes, destroy their families, livelihood and even lives because this is all part of the bigger agenda.

Appeasement in this case is another word for human sacrifice. The settlers are about to be pushed into oblivion by an enlightened agenda that is really an excuse for exhaustion and a lack of coming to terms with the reality of being a Jew. Their battle cry is as follows: ‘Let us sacrifice those Jews that bother us and them – those Jews that are strangers to the Western ideals we so dearly hold onto’. Of course, in the long run peace will not come through their sacrifices – only tragedy and the splitting of the Jewish people into a thousand little splinter groups.

The human sacrifice of the settlers is the only way for the enlightened to stay in power, to meet the cultural and political leaders of the world, to remain amongst those invited to the orgy like parties of the famous and rich. It is, after all, a small price to pay. But be warned, oh you enlightened! One day, yes one day in the not too distant future, you will not be invited as welcome guests to their parties anymore, although you will still be present. You will be at center stage, as are all sacrifices. And as you are carved up and served, remember those that you served up before…………..

http://www.worldofjewish.com

Imagine This, John Lennon

IMAGINE THIS, JOHN LENNON

by Asher Keren

It is now over a quarter of a century since you were gunned down, but hardly a day goes by that I do not hear one of your songs of genius on the radio. Hardly a week goes by that I do not hear what has become perhaps your most famous ballad, Imagine. And despite my deep admiration for your works, your creativity and sensitivity, your courage and your sincerity, I cannot abide to hear Imagine ever again.

Imagine now, Mr. Lennon, and the myriad of your followers and the false peace culture that you helped to create, driving in a car that you know will explode any second. Imagine yourself a twenty year old young woman sitting next to a Palestinian terrorist carrying a bag full of explosives. Better yet, imagine yourself a sixteen year old lad just saying goodbye for the last time to your mother on your cellular seconds before that same terrorist decides to push the murderous button. Imagine, if you can from your place in heaven which you imagined didn’t exist, the fear and trembling of the children of the couple blown to bits and pieces, together with the two others, when news of the explosion gets out and rumor rules the early night, along with blood and body parts strewn across the entrance to Kedumim. Imagine how the families of the murdered are praying for their loved ones that there is a heaven.

Would it not have been more productive, more helpful, Mr. Lennon, to try to understand the warped, deranged and sickened mind of a twenty four year old man (if he can be called a man) deciding to end his life by killing and defiling as much as he possibly can. No doubt this Palestinian, as almost every other person in our world, has heard your song Imagine much more than just once and you know what, it just didn’t matter to him. Not because HE didn’t get it, but because YOU didn’t get it. Your dream of peace has no doubt touched the hearts and souls and minds of countless millions across the globe over the years. But that did not stop 9/11, it didn’t stop the bombings in London and Madrid, Indonesia and Pakistan. Imagine didn’t stop the war in Kosovo or in Chechnya, nor did it stop Iraq from invading Kuwait nor America from invading Iraq. The Iranians seem to pay no heed to your message as they continue developing the bomb, and the thousands in Africa suffering slavery, poverty and degradation can hardly thank you for changing their lives.

You see, Mr. Lennon, dreams have value, but they must be fought for in the gutter of life for them to be achieved. You and the others that sang of peace did not know that gutter and you were not part of the effort to make dreams real and practical. Neither are the vacuous dreamers of the New Israel Fund or Meretz or Peace Now or any of the others that imagine a life without anything of value, like religion or possessions or yes, even countries. Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream, Mr. Lennon, no less worthy than yours, and his followers got bloodied up in pursuing it and even achieving it to a great, albeit not final, degree. Theodore Herzl had a dream and it took an army to see it come to life, with guns, tanks and war planes. That is just how it works. It is terribly sad, Mr. Lennon, but it is true.

We Israelis have our pseudo-Lennons singing songs of peace that imagine an end to all hostilities and we Jews have our share of false poets, philanthropists and politicians that would rather talk of peace and paint pictures of doves and donate great amounts of money to establish joint Palestinian – Jewish summer camps and schools and get Nobel Peace Prizes along with terrorists as if this entire world and even its evil did not exist. The problem is, can you imagine it, that EVIL DOES EXIST! And it is not going to go away by strumming a guitar or by appeasing murderers with deranged values and bloodthirsty cultures. The Palestinian people still kill their own daughters for looking the wrong way at a man and they still abuse their children in the most dehumanizing of ways, as any sociologist that has studied their culture will tell you. Can you really imagine that they will one day act with grace towards the Jews?

Imagine the horror engulfing now the village of Kedumim, as the townspeople bury their mutilated dead. Perhaps instead of imagining making peace with terrorists, it is time to avenge our blood. I imagine that if we did so we would at least get a refrain from the violence. I know this because I know the Arabs. I do not know peace. Do you?

http://www.jewishinternetsites.com

I Admire Palestinian Clarity and Honesty

I ADMIRE PALESTINIAN CLARITY AND HONESTY

Asher Keren

I write these words as the flames engulf the last remnants of the synagogues that served the former residents of Morag, Neve Dekalim, Kfar Darom and the other evicted Jewish settlements of the Gaza Strip. It seems that the first thing the Palestinians did after the I.D.F. ethnic cleansing was completed was to burn the synagogues, straight and to the point. Morality is relative in the Western world, but not so amongst the Arabs, at least when confronting their enemies. They know what they must do, without mumbling or apologetics.

But Jewish morality today is Western and unfortunately not in any way related to Torah morality, and our mumbling and hypocrisy end in the burning of our synagogues. While the entire rabbinical world, in Israel and in the Exile, managed to maneuver the Israeli politicians into going against the Israeli Supreme Court order to demolish the synagogues before the Palestinians do, they were unable to speak with one voice in order to avoid the eviction of the Jewish settlements in the first place. And the politicians, while stating that they must heed now this call from the world’s Rabbis against our fervent destruction of synagogues, were deaf to the thousands of Rabbis that stated that the eviction itself must not happen. The moral corruption of our Rabbis and politicians is the issue at hand, not the Palestinian burning of the synagogues.

To completely and totally destroy flourishing Jewish communities for no reason, with no peace agreement in hand, without even a glimmer of hope that Israel’s security situation will improve, was not reason enough for the rabbinical world to stand together hand in hand and to shout. There were those that considered it politics and therefore something to be decided by the secular Israeli politicians and those that decided that even if wrong, the first obligation is to the State and that therefore to loudly protest is to destroy the state apparatus. And, there are even those Rabbis that agreed with the forcible eviction of Jews from their homes and farms, the most successful agricultural enterprise in all of Israel. But the now empty synagogues, yes, that is something that the Rabbis could agree upon.

The cynical politicians are no better. Thousands of the world’s leading Rabbis did state clearly and without hesitation that the eviction was morally wrong, from both a Torah viewpoint as well as a basic humanitarian viewpoint. But the politicians latched on to their own personal and political calculations. Yet now, all of a sudden, they listen. The Jews have been kicked out and the political system has defeated the great majority of Rabbis. It is no skin off their collective nose to now state that our burning of synagogues is wrong from the standpoint of Jewish law, especially if all the world’s Rabbis can finally unite around something.

And so, our synagogues now burn at the hands of the Palestinians whose message is clear and unambiguous. ‘We are the enemy of the Jewish state and indeed of Judaism. Thank you for giving us your Land, and we will now destroy your synagogues.’ They know that the world will not really protest, because they understand the world’s hypocrisy concerning the Jews. And they know Jewish hypocritical morality as well. They know that the Jews often choose symbols over life, Holocaust museums over the settlement of the Land, nice words and moving ceremonies and shouts of horror at Palestinian terrorism over fighting the devil itself. They know that the Jews will beat their breasts at the destruction of the abandoned synagogues, but that Jews also prefer assuaging their pain through moving prayers and gatherings, not by securing Jewish settlement.

I respect Palestinian clarity and honesty and I loathe Jewish mumbling. If I am part of a people that put abandoned synagogues above Jewish life then I will not be silent until our priorities have been reestablished. If our Rabbis can only unite around synagogues of the past and if our politicians can only listen to Jewish values once their political agenda has been served, then I will scream at the top of my lungs until moral clarity is again the call of the day. I will watch the synagogues burn, admiring the Palestinians at least for their sense of unabashed purpose, and being simultaneously sickened by the insane circumstance that brings on this admiration.

http://www.worldofjewish.com