A Jew Who Says Merry Christmas

Note:

This will be the third time I have edited and posted this little essay. I feel the need to change it a little every year but this one is changed a bit more than usual. I am posting it before Thanksgiving this year and you'll have to read it to find out why:

A Jew for "Merry Christmas"

I am a Jew and I have to tell you, no one is going to discourage me from celebrating Thanksgiving and Christmas this year. No, I am not loosing my Jewish identity; on the contrary, I am very sure that it is stronger than ever.

I grew up in an observant Jewish home ( I am observant still) in which we greeted Christmas with a mixture of fascination, respect and a little irritation. At some point I became fond of expressing my ambivalence by quoting Jackie Mason, who once said:

“I don’t understand something about Christmas; maybe you can explain this to me? Why is it that this time of year you Christian people bring all of the trees inside the house and take all the lights and put them outside”

That line, for many years summed up the bemusement that I affected about the whole public Christmas celebration.

My feelings were mixed for a variety of reasons. My Dad had a retail store so the weeks leading up to Christmas were always a time of tension and brutally long hours of work. The traffic on the roads, crowds in the stores, and the saturation of television (especially in those pre- cable times) and radio airwaves with Christmas programs and music were overwhelming. I found the frenzy mentally punishing, the free-floating goodwill unsettling and the talk about Jesus (in whose divinity I was not supposed to believe) uncomfortable.

It left me very glad to have it over on December 26th.

And I was always just a little unsure of how to respond when some well meaning person would wish me a Merry Christmas. I was often caught between wanting to thank him noncomittaly, try to summon a convincing Merry Christmas in return or to say,” Thanks Very much but I don’t celebrate Christmas and then have to deal with the uncomfortable silence or explanations and apologies.

I am ashamed to admit it today but I was, at first, pleased when I saw, over the years, the ACLU and Multi-culti types pushing “Merry Christmas” out of the vocabulary of cultural discourse in favor of the more generic “Happy Holidays”.

I’ve grownup, though, and I’ve grown into a new perspective on this whole question and, today, when someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, I have a new response. It’s really simple-

I stop what I am doing

I don’t have any hesitation or second thoughts.

I wish them a great big “Merry Christmas” in return.

I would like to encourage all my fellow Jews to join me in this. Here’s why:

I have come to see quite clearly that even if there are politically correct, multi-cultural, morally relativistic, post modern progressive busybodies who would like us to believe that our Christian friends’ and Neighbors’ spontaneous Christmas wishes are somehow injurious to us and our culture, they are nothing of the kind. A sincere “Merry Christmas is more American and better for the republic and her people than the blandest, most guarded “Happy Holidays”

You see, the U.S. was founded by Christians. Not just any Christians. The early colonists were both devout and independent. They were fervent Protestants whose purpose in coming here was to leave the Kings, Priests, state religions and archaic laws of the Old World behind.

Even if some of them were supersessionists and dogmatic, they were also egalitarian and self-reliant. They came here to build a country where every man could read scripture for himself and be his own priest- where he could be free to elect political leadership that he could follow gladly. Ultimately, that experiment gave rise to the constitution and form of government we have today. At over two hundred years old, it is still the one in the entire world that best honors the individual and guarantees most rights to any individual who accepts the constitutional responsibilities of a citizen.

It was those fiercely independent Protestants who set the tone for the nation in which we now live. Their fierce spiritual presumption of the liberty of the human soul is, still today, the great central mast that lifts the canopy of democracy and holds it above us as a sanctuary from the despotism and effete decay that afflicts most of the rest of the world.

Crystallized in the constitution, the devotion of deeply religious people and spiritually awakened souls like Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams are what have made it the highest standard of self rule and freedom in the history of the human race.

Among all their other unique achievements the fact that they decided that there could be no Official Religion in a country that aimed not just at physical or intellectual freedom shows that they understood that full human freedom means spiritual freedom too- Freedom of Religion.

To honor their genius fully we have to understand that Freedom of Religion must never be allowed to be a mandate for Freedom from Religion. As a Jew, I am exquisitely aware that freedom to practice my form of religion exists in this country because of those Christians and their vision of what a Christian country should stand for.

This uniquely Christian openness is why America has become the destination of choice for any one wishing to escape repression or lack of opportunity elsewhere in the world. That's why Jews have gravitated here for two hundred years. But we all (Christians, Jews, Muslims and Atheists) are in danger of forgetting how this all works and I think this whole “anti-Merry Christmas” thing is a symptom of that amnesia.

Fortunately, though, Jews do have a collective memory of stories if we just listen to them. My grandfather told me stories about life in turn-of-the(last)–century Eastern Europe so I have some idea of what he escaped by coming here. And its not just that he was not in Zhitomir, his Ukrainian home town, thirty years after he left for America, when the Waffen SS slaughtered thirty six thousand Jews there in one day! That is a gift indeed but it is in and of the past. No, it is the gift of equality and the opportunity to prosper that still lives on. It is that continuing gift that sustains the American dream and should call upon our constant love and loyalty.

The United States of America, as conceived by her Protestant founders, has been a miracle and a blessing to the entire human race. It has been especially important to the Jewish people.

We Jews are barely over one percent of the population here. We (a lot of us anyway) take pride in our contribution to America’s dynamism. We point with satisfaction to the fact that the founding fathers of this country were inspired and informed by our holy book which they called The Old Testament. Many of them read it in the original Hebrew, something few of us “modern” Jews can do.

But why do I need to explain this? Why don’t we all understand the centrality of the Protestant ethic to the goodness of America? Partly, it’s because of a lack in the educational program. But it’s also because our media, whose responsibility it should be to make us aware of the important ideas, events and issues has other agendas. Our “Mainstream” media is often found to be doing just the opposite.

In the media, America is assailed daily for her imperfections; and if not assailed, then damned by the faintest of praise. The media emphasizes the imperfections instead of the achievements- the discords not the harmony.

Historical revisionism has been used by the joyless progressives, secular humanists and multiculturalists to sap the joy and meaning out of Thanksgiving and the goodwill out of Christmas.

It has even come to pass that our President goes abroad and cannot seem to visit another country without some pathetic apology for America’s past- as if there is any country on earth whose history is so pristine that they are in a position to judge.

I am only one Jew- not a Rabbi and not a spokesman for a community organization, just a simple Jew. Nevertheless, I would like to call on all Jews, indeed, all Christians, Muslims and whoever else will standup with me and celebrate the blessing that The United States of America is to us and to the human family. Let us bow our heads together this Thanksgiving and resolve that instead of fretting about how saying “Merry Christmas” might make us an overly Christian country, we will thank our own, private God that we live in this country where “Happy Thanksgiving” and “Merry Christmas” mean what they mean here.

We need to loosen up and get a perspective on this “Merry Christmas” thing. It is not the people who say “Merry Christmas” and mean it that we need to be discouraging in America at this time. It is the people who find something wrong and suspect in the energy, enthusiasm and good-will that animates that “Merry Christmas” that we need to discourage.

We must side with our fellow Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom are warm-hearted friends with morals and ethics or we will have become unwitting dupes to heartless enemies with no moral compass who think they can rationalize almost anything and undermine our great civilization with reasonable sounding, non-judgmental sophistry. Do you need a moment to think about that?

By saying “Merry Christmas” in public we are not necessarily agreeing that Jesus was the son of God, we are just acknowledging that some very good people believe it. When we say it, that does not constitute accepting Jesus as our personal savior; it does show his followers that we see them as fellow countrymen, friends and brothers-in-arms in the defense of the highest ideals of our civil society and Judeo-Christian culture. What is the problem with that?

The first four words of this essay “I am a Jew”, are exactly the words that Daniel Pearl was forced to say on camera just before he was pinned down and his head was sawn off. I'd like you to try a little thought experiment simulating a better world here- Pretend that the next sentence that I write followed that first one and I had no need for the rest of the explanation in between...

"Have a Merry Christmas"

Progressives for Breast Cancer: A Preview of the Medical Gulag

Here is a little thought experiment for you. The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force has made a new set of recommendations for the diagnosis of breast cancer that have implied that breast self-examinations are of limited value and that women should begin getting a regular mammography at 50 years of age (rather than the old recommendation of 40) and then only every two years instead of every year.

Their report states that screenings between 40 and 49 years of age only turn up one cancer for every 1900 or so women. They express concern that “false positives” and unnecessary tests are a cruel source of anxiety and mental suffering for many women and that women would be much better off if they waited another ten years before they put themselves through all that turmoil. Oh, yes, they added that hat a great deal of money would be saved along with the angst of all those hysterical ladies.

Well, ok, false positives are a problem when you do screenings but what about the non-false positives that don’t get diagnosed? If you take their number of 1900 to 1 it doesn’t sound so bad, really. Until you think a little more about it…

Just consider that detected early, the five year survival rate for breast cancer victims is in the neighborhood of 98%. Detected late, that rate falls to about 26% a decrease in survival of 72%. And that doesn’t begin to cover the additional suffering from the treatments and dislocation of families when diagnosis is delayed.

But how bad is the problem? Let’s take Gillette Stadium for an example.

Gillette is where the New England Patriots play. Like a lot of stadiums, it has been used as a venue for all kinds of events, soccer games, rock concerts- all kinds of things. So let’s make up a hypothetical event to fill the stadium. Let’s just say that in the run-up to the last presidential election, candidate Obama wanted to solidify his support among one of his best “demographics”, younger women. His staff planed a big rally to which only women 49 and under are invited.

Now, Gillette’s official capacity is 68,756 people. So at a diagnosis rate of 1900 to 1 that means that 36 women there at the rally already have breast cancer. President Obama was a great draw in 2008 lets assume he would have filled the whole stadium so we can assume that there are 68,756 women in the seats.

Ok now picture a stage in the middle of the field. As the lights dim and the applause fades, a spotlight beam centers on the thin, serious figure of the future President of the United States and he lifts the microphone and pronounces his words very carefully.

“Ok, now, I have something to tell you that is very upsetting and I don’t want you to panic or get hysterical. Thirty-six of you women here tonight, and we don’t know who you are yet, are going to agree to reduce your chance of living for another five years by 72%. That means instead of 33 of you living at least five more years, only 9 of you will live. Not only that, you are going to give your consent to putting your self through a comparable amount more suffering and pain than you would otherwise have to endure. Also you will be saddling your husbands, parents, friends and children with infinitely more sorrow and desolation than they would have had to bear if you had not come to support my presidency tonight.”

In his usual style, the President is actually understating the case by a factor of ten. An astute friend of mine has pointed out that the 1900 to one ratio is a "yearly" crop of diagnoses based on yearly screening. so the actual loss of early diagnosis will be multiplied by the ten years of delay in receiving mammograms. This makes the actual death toll from that fateful rally more like 270 women.

It sounds like a non-starter doesn’t it? Do you think he would have gotten any of those women's votes that night? But the fact is that those 68,756 women (including the 36 doomed ones) have already been hoodwinked in to agreeing to that deal. Because, if Obama has his way and forces the single payer system down our throats, government then recommendations like these will assume the force of law for all but those are so wealthy that they can pay for medical services out of pocket.

These new recommendations are draconian, not just because it reminds us of how cold and callous a bureaucracy can be in its disregard for medical prudence and the value of an individual’s life but (even more) because it has given us an ominous forewarning of what the Medical Gulag of single payer, government run health care system would look like if the Blue Dogs and Republicans in congress don’t come to their senses soon and stop Obama’s high-pressure sales blitz for his “health care reform package”. It is tragic to consider the consequences of this push for cheap health insurance.

Just to put a human face on it, I have Googled "died of breast cancer", clicked on "Images" and selected a somewhat random sampling of the resulting pictures. I have posted 27 of them below to represent the first year's (remember there are another nine years worth of death, sorrow and suffering involved!) 27 extra deaths among the 68,756 rally attendee at that imaginary rally. Imagine that they are the ones upon whose bodies and families, Obama's health care reform would save all that money.

They are all kinds of women who have one infinitely sad thing in common:

Some are mysterious and exotic.
A Daughter who Died before her mother...
Sisters who lost a mother and a sister to breast cancer
A Champion marathon runner
A newscaster
A sister who inspired a movement
A coach
Some you might think you recognize
All will be missed

They will not see their children grow
They are remembered for all kinds of things
They leave holes that cannot be filled
Some were accomplished and famous
Others never got to fulfill their dreams
Some changed whole industries
Some inspired good works in their names
Their music is stilled forever...
..never to be heard again

They are fading into memory

If only we had taken more pictures...

Their laughter still echoes

Their courage still inspires
We still smile when we remember
They are gone
No matter how alive they once seemed
They live now only for those who remember
Reminder: this represents the first year's "beneficiaries" of the Obama "adjustment" to the mammogram regime. What other horrors will they come up with to make their takeover seem affordable?

And what is the money being saved for?

Incredibly, this is little more than part of a naked attempt to make it look "budget neutral" to take some of the excellent health care away from citizens who work, pay taxes and earn the right to have their own insurance and choose their own doctors and redistribute it to people many of whom are not even legal residents of our country. It is intended to rationalize the degradation of medical service for families that struggle to pay their own way in order to give an inferior but equal care to people who don't even value enough to work for it. It has even been proposed in the Health reform bill that the savings be used to increase the linguistic and cultural "sensitivity" of health care delivery in border regions to ease the lives of illegal aliens as they resist acculturation and assimilation.

If you are a woman, or care about women at all, picture that pro-Obama rally in Gillette stadium. Look at these pictures above and imagine these wonderful, unique, and irreplaceable people sitting side by side. They would occupy a little more that one row in an average section. Imagine them all dead within five years just because they voted for Obama. Then imagine ten more deadly swaths just like that over the next ten years. And that is just from the rally In Foxboro, Massachusetts. Fill all the football stadiums in the country and imagine eleven rows of breast cancer victims whose life is unnecessarily shortened because they invited government bureaucrats to decide on their cancer screening schedule. And even that would not approximate the real toll. Whose picture do you want in that group?

Important Update:

The reader who corrected my numbers on the toll from the rally also stated this in relation to cutting the screenings down from every year to every two years:

It gets worse than that.

Half of all screenings post-age-50 would be eliminated, meaning that half of all cancers discovered post-age-50 would have been incubating one extra year (and half of all cancers would post-age-50 would be detected as early as before).

How many women post-age-50 get breast cancer and by how much would the death rate increase for that half of them with one extra year of incubation pre-treatment?

Please correct your post accordingly.

Best,

(I do not have permission to use his name yet)

Iain Levine and HRW, In Deep and Still Digging

Apparently, no one ever told Iain Levine at Human Rights watch that when you are in a hole that you are having a hard time getting out of, the first thing you must do is to stop digging and he is doing his best to bring The Goldstone Report down the mine with him. It is the hallmark of poor salesmen and those who feel superior to other people that they do not know when to Shut Up. Levine, keen to discredit the storm of criticism of HRM that has been gathering force for years is running off at the mouth.

He is is trying to paint criticism of HRW as a new and sinister coordinated attack even though it has been building up for years as they have published report after prejudicial report damning Israel not just with sly, morally corrupt but superficially “even-handed” equivocation of Israeli self defense with Arabian genocidal aggression, but with the simply inaccurate and patently sloppy work of the now suspended Military “expert” Marc Garlasco. (You may remember that it was Garlasco who, back in 2006 stated publicly that it was an Israeli artillery shell that killed a family on an outing on a beach in Gaza. The accusation was picked up and touted by Israel’s detractors world wide before it was finally proven wrong- with nary a retraction or apology from HRW) .

Not content to let make arguments and try to prove his points, Levine has talked to The Guardian newspaper in England and is quoted as alleging that there is a coordinated attack being orchestrated by NGO Monitor, right wing bloggers and others, named and unnamed. He whines that those bad people are saying mean things “personally” about HRW. Here is an excerpt from the article”

Iain Levine, HRW's programme director, said that while the organisation had long attracted criticism, in recent months there had been significant attempts to intimidate and discredit it.

"I really hesitate to use words like conspiracy, but there is a feeling that there is an organised campaign, and we're seeing from different places what would appear to be co-ordinated attacks ... from some of the language and arguments used it would seem as if there has been discussion," he said."We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation."

He goes on to say that he believes that the purpose of the attacks is to distract attention from the Goldstone report:

Levine said he believes many of the attacks were aimed at distracting attention from the report of the UN investigator, Richard Goldstone, which was highly critical of Israel's killing of civilians in its three-week attack on Gaza that started last December. Goldstone is a former member of the HRW board and the group has strongly backed his report.

"We have been under enormous pressure and tremendous attacks, some of them very personal, as have been the attacks against Richard Goldstone with really vituperative language used to describe him: obsequious Jew, self-loathing Jew and all the rest of it," said Levine.

Poor thing, its odd that a guy who works for an organization that has made quite a good living out of trying to tie Israel’s hands behind her back while she is being attacked by other nations, professional terrorists, permanent refugees and proxy armies all of whom have publicly and unequivocally stated their intention to annihilate, destroy or “push her into the sea” might have a thicker skin than that. But, then, that is not the really pathetic thing about Levine.

Nor is the most pathetic thing about him that he says that because people are making similar arguments and using the same words about him and HRW that he thinks they all must be in cahoots in an organized way to attack them. Yes, it makes him sound like a kid who feels picked on by the math teachers in school because every year a different one tells him the “same thing” when he says that “one and one is three” but there is worse here.

No, the most pathetic thing is that he thinks that the fact that a number of people are alarmed enough about the damage that he and his fellow “holier than thou” protectors of the weak and defenseless at HRW have been doing to talk with each other and amass evidence and formulate logical arguments against them that that invalidates that evidence and those arguments.

Interestingly, Goldstone (don’t blame me, Levine brought him up!) has responded in much the same way, he has alleged that those who impugn his report have only attacked him personally and not made factual or logical arguments to the substance of the report. Apparently, neither Mr, Levine nor Judge Goldstone know about Google because if you google “Goldstone Report” you come up with lots of results with two of the first three being this and this, both compendiously factual, highly logical and almost strictly "not personal" in nature.

Yes, this is all quite pathetic in many ways but when Levine is quoted as saying, ."We are having to spend a lot of time repudiating the lies, the falsehoods, the misinformation." It is so very telling.

A word to Iain Levine: Think about it, Iain, your own words betray you. Facts and logic cannot be “repudiated” by honest men. To repudiate is to deny the validity or the reality of something. It may seem a small slip of the tongue but it reveals a truth. When you call what right-wing bloggers say about you, “lies, falsehoods and misinformation” it does not to prove that they are not true- Actually it is exactly what you call it- a repudiation.

“Repudiation” is empty. It is done by those who cannot refute or disprove. Much as you would like to repudiate what is being said about HRW and Goldstone, the desire to repudiate and the inability to refute is proof that a lot of it is accurate and deserved.

Heros and Civilization

Kate at Small Dead Animals has posted an extraordinary piece of writing. I will only excerpt it here and you should read the whole thing. I’ll provide the link at the bottom of this post.

It is a terrifyingly real, plainly truthful and starkly beautiful account by a friend of Kate’s who was in the first wave of emergency personnel to arrive at the the scene of the Fort Hood Jihad. Here is the piece of it that hit me the hardest:

A young man walked up to me and asked if I could help him, I asked him, "where are you shot?", he told me in the chest...I directed him to go sit in my ambulance and an army medic sat with him and started oxygen and bandaging on him; in the mist of the madness I was trying to determine who would be the first to be transported still waiting on the helicopters to land so I could fly out the worst.

While getting more bandaging material off my ambulance several bystanders carried a soldier to my truck that had been shot in the head, he was conscious and breathing, he kept asking me "am I gonna die?", I told him I was doing the best I could, knowing from experience his situation appeared bleak.

Behind my ambulance several bystanders were doing CPR on a lady that had obviously been fatally shot, in a mas-cal situation you do "the most good for the most people"...that means save the ones you can and black tag the un-salvageable...it's a harsh truth but effective in this type of situation.

Amidst the horror spawned by Jihad, Kate’s friend was able to use her training, rely on her experience, maintain her presence of mind and contain her emotional response in order to play her part in the miracle of Western Civilization.

Her cool-headedness and bravery (along, of course, with that of Officer Munley and all of the bystanders whom she also praises) is the very kind of expression of the Western style of thought and values in action that has brought us to the pinnacle of human achievement. It is not the phony "selflessness" of the progressive left. It is a world removed from the human cog-in-the-machine of communism. And it is from an entirely different universe from the self-surrendered slave of Allah whom she so pointedly refers to as “the shooter”.

If the woman who wrote this account seems like a normal, everyday person to you, it is because we share with her the prototypical Western values of human life, empirical utility and intellectual honesty that she unselfconsciously embodies. If she seems like a heroine, it is because she is.

If only our leaders could summon the courage, intelligence and common sense to meet the threats of creeping socialism and the aggressively expanding Caliphate with such a cool head and clear vision.

Read the whole thing!

An Horrific Outbreak of Stupidity

When it happened yesterday, we all thought the same thing. Many of us could not (or would not) speak it. Some could not even admit it to themselves that they thought it.

Hello, world, his name is Nidal Malik Hasan.

Today, in the aftermath, the news media is avoiding saying it with affected contortions of logic, pompous intentional ignorance of recent history and a bland stupidity that make “Sir Arthur” in this classic Beyond the Fringe sketch look like a forensic genius.

(There is a better, full motion version of this at YouTube that does not allow embedding)

How stupid do the media and our leaders think we are? If you are not simultaneously laughing at them and choking in outrage, you are pretty damned stupid…

Well, here, compare and contrast:

Today’s Boston Globe Headlines about the Fort Hood Sudden Jihad (FHSJ)

“Soldier kills 12, hurts 31 in Fort Hood rampage -

Military psychiatrist facing deployment abroad is accused”

Sir Arthur about the Great Train Robbery

“We believe this to be the work of thieves”

Barak Hussein Obama’s take on FHSJ,

“A horrific outbreak of violence"

Sir Arthur,

“There is the telltale disappearance of property, the snatching away of money substances. It all points to thieves.”

And why don’t they talk about Jihad and Islam and the fact that we all had, whether we admit it or not, the same thought when we heard about Fort Hood? Well no one talks about what they will not talk about but sir Arthur is not so constrained, when asked what a mindermast is, he admits,

"We don’t like to use the word Mastermind- it depresses the men."

We don’t want to think about the fact that the billions of Muslims all over the world belong to a religion and a culture that harbors and in many cases nurtures the seeds of blind hatred and coldblooded murder. We can't contemplate the implications of a guy that is described by his cousin as "a good American", a mental health professional, a physician who has taken the Hippocratic Oath could end up shouting Allah Akbar with guns blazing at unarmed by-standers. It might dishearten us. Think then, of Israel, who only wants to live in peace and is faced on all sides with the Muslim world that only wants to annihilate her.

Sir Arthur has one last caution for us, when asked by his interviewer

"Who do you think is behind the criminals?"

He answers:

"We are - considerably."

At least he knows he is losing and perhaps doomed by his ignorance. If we do not wake up and stop pretending that we are not facing a threat that we refuse to understand, we will be just as lost and possibly even more doomed.

History is NOT Religious Fanaticism

Post Removed at author's request

Jews are Always Settlers

There is yet another example of an ordinarily pretty good news organization (The Washington Times) going brain dead and printing verbatim a terrible, biased, anti-Zionist slur from the AP. I wasn’t going to bother posting about it because I am so tired of having to exhaust myself on this stuff and I have come to the conclusion that the newspapers are just too short-handed to read this stuff carefully before they call is “content” and give it space. As I posted a comment on the article and began to move on, though, I could not get over the use of the words “settler”. It is a pejorative now, used to paint Jews as aliens and outsiders, but I have a different emotional attachment to the word.

Whether he was placidly agreeing with my mother during one of her extended tirades (he called them lectures) or concluding a business deal, my dad would often say, “I’ll settle for that. I’m one of the early settlers.” He was a very gentle but effective negotiator. He always did his best to make every situation a “win-win”. I have always thought that this was not just his way but the Jewish way. After all, when the Romans destroyed our temple and we began our two millennia of wanderings, expulsions and holocausts, we had to get into the habit of settling. In all that time there was only one place on earth we were not settlers, Jerusalem. We were beleaguered there, by the Romans Arabs and Turks, persecuted and often murdered but it was always our home. That is why the use of the word “settler” bothered me so much. The Washington Times article is here.

Here is my comment as I posted it at the Washington Times web site:

This is so obviously badly slanted as to be almost unbelievable. Even so, there is enough information in the article to get to the truth. Key Phrase: "Mr. Grenimann said 29 members of the al-Kurd family lived in the house evicted on Tuesday. Some of them had settled there after they were evicted from another house in the same neighborhood, following the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to uphold the settlers' claim to the ownership of that building." Translation: They are illegal squatters that the Israeli government is unable to screw up the nerve to deal with directly, nearly forcing the legal owners to do stupid stuff like this. The pathetic case went all they way to the SUPREME COURT OF THE LAND and the so called journalist who wrote the article still calls it a "claim." The truth is that the Israeli courts bend over backwards to uphold "Palestinian rights". Would a squatter case ever get argued in front of the US Supreme Court? When the Jordanians overran West Jerusalem in the 1948 war for independence, they massacred a Jewish population that had inhabited the Jewish quarter continuously for more than three thousand years and blew up ancient Synagogues and community buildings in order to expunge all trace of Jewish life there. Now Jewish people are referred to as "settlers" and Arab squatters are portrayed as "Palestinians". They are not "Palestinians", they are Arabs. They are of the same Arab tribes that compose a majority of Jordan. There was never such a thing as a "Palestinian" until 1968 - the name is the single biggest triumphant lie foisted by Arafat on the conscience of the world. When Israel left Gaza, all Jewish "settlers" had to leave because to stay would have been a death sentence. If East Jerusalem ever does become the capital of a previously fictitious state, all Jews will be forced out by violence and/or death. The Arabs living in Israel are the most secure, wealthiest and healthiest in the world and all the Washington Times can do is run obviously scurrilous trash like this. The great injustice here is not that the Jewish people who did this are not being “nice people”, it is that the very fact that they stand up for their property rights makes them villains.

It goes on and on. German Jews in the 1930’s refused to believe that they were not Germans, just as the Spanish Jews before them they learned that they were all too easily turned on as “settlers”. But, it is always easy to call Jews settlers. We are. We lived in Germany for four hundred years among settled Germanic tribes that had lived there for a thousand years- making them the early settlers. In that sense, very human being on earth is a settler. But in Jerusalem, in Judea, Samaria, Tel Aviv and Sderot we are the Early Settlers. This was recognized in modern times by the creation of the modern state of Israel. If we allow the world to forget our place and our rights, if we allow the newly invented Palestine to squat on our property, who will find a place for us?

Israel has proved time and time again that she will “settle” for peace with a Palestinian state that does not pose a mortal threat. Israel is, in that sense too, an early settler. Over and over the so-called “Palestinains” have proven (Fatah, Hizballah and Hamas even publish it in their charters) that they are not going to settle for anything less than the annihilation of Israel. That makes them very late settlers indeed- maybe even squatters.