Daily Broadside | “First the Saturday People, Then the Sunday People.” Why Israel Must Defeat Hamas

Circling back to the issue of Israel and Hamas, Bibi Netanyahu announced that Israel, after three weeks of preparation, has entered the “second stage” of their plan to wipe out Hamas.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday announced that his forces have entered the “second stage” of its war with the terrorist group Hamas, calling the fight a “second War of Independence.” 

“The war inside the Gaza Strip will be long and difficult, and we are prepared for it,” Netanyahu said during a press conference in the evening, local time. “This is our second War of Independence.”

“We will fight for the defense of the homeland,” he continued. “We will fight and not retreat. We will fight on land, sea and in the air. We will destroy the enemy above ground, and underground. We will fight and win.”

I, for one, am glad to hear his resolve. There can be no waffling on whether or not to destroy Hamas. They are a recognized terrorist organization. They committed unspeakable atrocities on October 7 against innocent, civilians.

Hamas is inhuman, bestial, barbaric, cruel, brutish, primative, unrestrained, unrepentant, savage, sadistic. There can be no quarter taken, and none can be given.

Of course the usual suspects are calling for a cease-fire.

Netanyahu spoke at the end of a difficult week for Israel, with more discussion and frustration on both sides of the conflict as some world leaders called for a humanitarian pause or a ceasefire. The United Nations voted on several motions and passed one calling for a ceasefire, which Israel outright rejected and labeled “despicable.” 

The UN was founded in the wake of the Holocaust. If I had my way, the U.S. would withdraw from the UN and kick them out of our country. They’ve outlived their usefulness.

Fortunately, Bibi stood firm.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu flatly rejected calls for a cease-fire in comments to the press on Monday.

Netanyahu compared the October 7 massacre by Hamas to the Pearl Harbor and 9-11 attacks on the U.S., saying Israel is equally justified in retaliating against Hamas terrorists in Gaza. He went on to say that Israel will continue its war against Hamas “until victory.”

“Calls for a cease-fire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen,” Netanyahu said.

“Ladies and gentlement, the Bible says that there is a time for peace and a time for war. This is a time for war. A war for our common future,” he continued. “Today we draw a line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism. It is a time for everyone to decide where they stand. Israel will stand against the forces of barbarism until victory. I hope and pray that civilized nations everywhere will back this fight.”

Israeli forces entered the second stage of their conflict with Hamas this week, greatly expanding ground operations within the Gaza strip. Military officials have warned that the war will be long and difficult.

I agree with him that this is a time for war — against a savage, primative death cult that wants no less than the eradication of the Jews and of Israel as a nation. You can’t reason with fanatical, irrational, ideologically-blinded hatred.

Hamas and some portion of their civilian population hate Israel so much that they won’t let their own people out of Gaza. Israel has been warning the people in the north of Gaza to leave, to move south. But Hamas wants to make “martyrs” of them all: young, old, men, women, children. All for the glory of dying in service to Allah. When I say it’s a death cult, I mean it.

And if you think this is just a “Jewish” problem, you might want to think again. An Islamist slogan is “First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people.” First they destroy the Jews, then they destroy all the Christians. Israel is the “Little Satan” (Jews) but the United States is the “Great Satan” (the Christians).

They are coming for us. As the last three weeks have demonstrated, there are plenty of them in our country due to our insane immigration policies and our open southern border. Don’t think there isn’t great hatred just waiting for its moment to strike.

After the Holocaust, the world declared “Never Again.” Unbelievably, we are at a moment when that declaration is being stress-tested.

The intent of the Islamic jihadists is clear and Hamas is the most high-profile expression of it at the moment, just as ISIS was a decade ago. If you stand for “never again,” as I do, you understand why Isreal can’t dialogue with people like this. You must take the fight to them, destroy them and make sure that any survivors never forget “never again.”

Daily Broadside | Denying the Holocaust Does Not Get You Sent to Hell

Daily Verse | 2 Thessalonians 3:13
And as for you, brothers, never tire of doing what is right.

Thursday’s Reading: 1 Timothy 1-6

In Dennis Prager’s provocatively-titled column this week (If Holocaust Deniers Don’t Go to Hell, There Is No God) he addresses the topic of Holocaust denialism. I think he was provoked by the recent news that Nick Fuentes had dined with Donald J. Trump, along with Ye (Kanye West) and Milo Yiannopoulos.

Fuentes “aggressively” denies that the Holocaust happened.

After laying out the effort of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and other Allied generals to document the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, Prager writes that there may not be “a more documented single event in history than the Holocaust.”

He then gives three reasons why denying the Holocaust “is evil”: 1) it’s a Big Lie that can cause more violence, 2) “it is pure Jew-hatred, i.e., antisemitism,” and 3) it’s a “slap in the face of all the Americans who died fighting the Nazis.”

Prager closes his essay with this:

As a college student, I dated a woman whose parents were Holocaust survivors. She told me on a number of occasions how often she would hear her father scream in the middle of the night as he dreamed about watching his family be murdered. Unable to live with these memories, one night, her father hanged himself.

That man is one of millions of reasons Fuentes — and those who ally themselves with him — will go to hell. If there is a just God.

Dennis Prager supports evangelical Christians even though he is not one himself. He also recognizes that Christianity is the key to Western civilization and to the value of liberty (see his article here, for example). Prager is a strong defender of America and of evangelicals against the liberal Left.

I greatly admire Prager and his thinking. However, both his column’s title and his concluding paragraphs are wrong. Denying the Holocaust does not send someone to hell and I’m surprised Prager insists that it must be so — or there is no (just) God.

Prager writes,

It is a central tenet of moral theology that there are gradations of sin. To argue that God views stealing a towel from a hotel and raping a child as moral equivalents renders God a moral fool. And doing that to God is a sin. If we mortals perceive the universe of difference between such actions, it goes without question that God does, too. The idea that we have greater moral clarity than God is logically and theologically untenable.

In the pantheon of evils, among the worst is Holocaust denial.

God, he says, grades on a curve. And because Holocaust denial is among the very worst evils in this world, God will punish such sin with a one-way ticket to hell.

Leaving aside the question of how Prager knows that Holocaust denial is among the very worst sins, it’s clear that he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of sin and redemption. I’m not denying that some evils are worse than others (sometimes exponentially so) since they clearly are. Stealing a towel from a hotel and raping a child are not moral equivalents. One is worse than the other.

But the mistake Prager seems to make is thinking that one of those acts (raping a child) is worthy of hell while the other one (stealing a towel) isn’t. Surely the rapist will go to hell, won’t he? Surely God wouldn’t send a guy who pilfered a hotel towel to hell for such a minor infraction, right?

Wrong. We say, “this sin is worse than that sin.” God says, “They’re both sin.”

The truth is that they both evidence a sinful soul in rebellion against God’s moral standard of perfect holiness.

Jesus said,

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.” (John 3:16-18)

Our default condition apart from Christ is living under condemnation. Jesus didn’t come to condemn us because we were already condemned. That’s what sends someone to hell.

The fundamental problem we all face is that we stand condemned “already” apart from Christ, not that we’ve sunk to new lows of sinfulness. What matters is not the gravity of the sin, but whether a person has put their trust in God or not.

Jesus said that not everyone who calls him “Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21). Hell will welcome a lot of “nice” people who didn’t sin much according to the standards of this world. Conversely, heaven will welcome at least a few notorious sinners who repented and acknowledged that Jesus is Lord.

Denying the Holocaust is vile. It is extremely hurtful to Jewish people who have been affected by it. Denying that it happened is to deny the immense violence done against the Jewish people. It is to pass without a care by a man mauled by a lion and to emphatically deny the mauling while standing in front of him.

It is irrational and viciously unkind. But it does not, by itself, condemn a person to hell. It is the condition of the soul from whence comes the vile denial that does.

Daily Broadside | Whistling Past the Graveyard With Eyes Wide Shut

Daily Verse | Leviticus 5:5
When anyone is guilty in any of these ways, he must confess in what way he has sinned.

Friday’s Reading: 8-10
Saturday’s Reading: 11-15

It’s Friday and the end of the week, leaving January in the rearview mirror with February already plowing ahead. We dodged the threat of heavy snow in the Midwest this week, but I’m in the Northeast and it’s getting hammered by the same system. Have I mentioned that I hate snow?

Following on the heels of the post I shared yesterday comes this commentary about Whoopsie-Daisy Goldberg, née Caryn Elaine Johnson, who demonstrated last Monday either an appalling lack of knowledge or an appalling indoctrination to CRT in which there can be no racism unless it involves white on black oppression.

She said on The View that the Holocaust “isn’t about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man. That’s what it’s about.” She later doubled-down, saying, “But these are two white groups of people,” implying again that Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews wasn’t about “race.”

She later apologized and was suspended for two weeks to give her time to think it over.

Seth Grossman picks it up here:

However, Whoopi’s statements perfectly reflect the narrative of the “woke” black history and Critical Race Theory that saturates our public schools, colleges, media, and Hollywood/TV entertainment.

That narrative goes like this: until about 600 years ago, most people in the world lived peaceful, comfortable, and environmentally sustainable lives.

Then, in the 1400s, a bunch of white men in Europe went crazy.  While abusing their women, they built ships and weapons to attack and exploit the rest of the world.  These crazy white men exterminated Native Americans, enslaved black Africans, and impoverished Asians.  They also started wars and polluted the planet to cause the catastrophic “climate crisis” we have today.

That summary is true about what’s happened in the West and in the U.S. in particular. But here’s where Grossman ties the incident to what happened in Nazi Germany prior to Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the entire Jewish race off the European continent.

According to TIK History, Marxism is but one of many varieties of socialism.   However, all socialists to some degree blame a small “unsocialized” group for the problems of their society.  They all weaken or eliminate them and steal some or all of their stuff.  Some socialists are more extreme than others.  Revolutionary France killed its priests and aristocrats in 1792 and took their stuff.  Communists in Russia did that to land and business owners in 1919.  The Communist regime in China did it after World War II.

According to TIK History, it was politically easier for German “National Socialists” (Nazis) to select Jews rather than all rich businessmen and landowners, as their “unsocialized” group to attack and rob.

What he’s saying is that socialism, which is the dominant philosophy being taught in our universities under the guise of social justice and being woke, is also preparing the ground for a Nazi-like takeover. He writes, “There are many similarities between what Germans believed in the years before Hitler and what ‘woke’ culture is teaching black Americans today.” He goes on to list what blacks are being taught:

  1. Every problem and failure in their communities is caused by somebody else, namely past or present “racist” whites.
  2. Skin color makes every black American a special person who cannot be understood or represented by anyone with a different skin color.
  3. Only black Americans suffered from slavery years ago and only whites were slaveowners.  Only black Americans suffer from rude or unfair treatment and insults. Therefore, black Americans can never be guilty of racism or bigotry.
  4. Political power, not education, training, planning, or discipline is the only way black Americans can succeed.  Since elections have replaced wars, the Democratic Party is today’s black army.  “Ballot harvesters” are today’s soldiers. 
  5. Black Americans are entitled to use political power, violence, or “any means necessary” to take what they “need” from those with a different skin color who have more.  That can be through looting, higher minimum wages, “redistribution” or “reparations.”

The net effect of such a toxic narrative? A division of our country into competing tribes where one is the “oppressed” and the other is the “oppressor.” Jews were demonized in the same way during the run-up to 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland.

This thinking caused millions of Germans to embrace National Socialism in the 1920s and 1930s.  Once National Socialists had absolute political power in Germany, there was no peaceful way to stop them.  While this was happening in Germany, very similar events were happening in Italy and Japan.  This thinking caused 14 years of world war and the deaths of some 85 million people — roughly 3% of the world’s population.  Sadly, this will happen again unless most Americans quickly understand and reject the lies and evil of this “woke” culture.

It’s too easy to dismiss this as fear-mongering and alarmist. But history proves that the pattern we see in the U.S. these days has led to catastrophic results. To dismiss such thinking out of hand or to ignore it because it seems like just a temporary tantrum being thrown by one segment of our society is to leave ourselves vulnerable.

The better question to ask is whether or not there’s an historical example of such a pattern being recognized and stopped. If not, what makes us so sure that our own case will be different?

Have a good weekend.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is Yom HaShoah or “The Holocaust Remembrance Day,” a day for the Jewish community to mourn the loss of those slaughtered in the Holocaust during World War II. While I’m not Jewish, in recent years I’ve taken to posting an image or an article to commemorate the grim affair.

My primary motivation is the biblical account of the Hebrew people, which teaches in the Old Testament that “Abram the Hebrew” (Gen. 14:13) was the father of the Israelites (through Isaac and Jacob [or “Israel,” see Gen. 32:28]), the ancestors of the Jewish people we read about in the New Testament and whose descendants are still with us today.

The Jewish people hold a special place in God’s heart. They were, after all, his “chosen people,” about whom it is written, “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession” (Deut. 7:6).

I believe, even after the new covenant that came with the advent of Christ, that the Jewish people’s chosenness remains in effect, for the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 11:

“As far as the gospel is concerned, [the people of Israel] are enemies for your sake; but as far as election is concerned, they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God’s gifts and his call are irrevocable” (vv. 28-29).

Therefore, as the only ethnic group in history selected by God, the Jewish people are due special consideration. “Touch not God’s anointed”—the phrase sometimes used by Christian ministers to humorously shield themselves from congregational criticism—is actually a reference to the Israelites, i.e. the Jewish people (1 Chronicles 16:15-22).

The Jewish people are also my spiritual ancestors. The Christian faith was founded by a Jewish Messiah. Jesus was a Jew, the Christian church following his resurrection was made up of Jews, those who first preached the gospel to Gentiles were Jews, and the truth is that Gentiles, i.e. anyone not a Jew, are being grafted into Israel, not the other way around (see Eph. 2:11-13).

I’m also motivated to stand with the Jewish people for the simple reason that they have been subject to abuse across the centuries, sometimes perpetrated by purported members of my own faith, much to our shame.

None in recent memory was worse than the Holocaust. We owe it to those who died and to succeeding generations of humanity not to forget what was done.

Holocaust survivors are slowly dying off, leaving less than half-a-million with first-hand memories of the atrocities. Holocaust denial is an insidious and contemporary effort to deny the Nazi regime’s systematic mass murder.

In his blog post today, Jeremy Kalmanofsky writes that even ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva students in New York City are not learning about the Holocaust.

“Graduates of many Hasidic schools tell YAFFED they received no formal Holocaust education, either. In their exclusive focus on Jewish sacred texts, these schools do nothing to convey to students the importance and significance of the destruction of European Jewry.”

As George Santayana (1863-1952) said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But, as we all know, memories fade with time, as the Israelites in Egypt found out: “Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8).

To keep a memory alive takes effort. The International Holocaust Remembrance Day (every January 27) and The Holocaust Remembrance Day are opportunities to contribute to keeping this particular memory alive.

I consider keeping the Holocaust from being memory-holed a duty. May we never forget and may it never happen again.