Tag Archives: jewishpeople

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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.

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Daily Broadside | More Violence Between Palestinians and Jews, This Time in New York

Daily Verse | Esther 2:12
Before a girl’s turn came to go into King Xerxes, she had to complete twelve months of beauty treatments prescribed for the women, six months with oil of myrrh and six with perfumes and cosmetics.

Happy Friday my friends. Are we still allowed to say “Black Swan event”?

I posted yesterday on the hostilities in LA the other night, as a pro-Palestinian gang hunted for Jews to beat up. Turns out that open confrontation on the streets of a major city is also happening clear across the country in New York City. There are a number of videos here documenting the incidents, and I embed a couple of them below just to give you a flavor of what’s going on.

The first is of a rather large firework that is thrown at Jews in Manhattan by, as they say, “Palestinian protestors.”

Surely that has to be illegal, doesn’t it? I didn’t find any mention of charges being filed against anyone.

Over in Times Square, pro-Palestinian marchers and Jewish demonstrators clashed in counter-demonstrations.

The open hostility—the hatred, if we’re being honest—really bothers me. It’s been a little challenging for me to put my finger on why, but here’s a few thoughts.

First, I feel like I’m watching something that could easily have been filmed on the streets of Jerusalem. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been there a few times, and I’ve seen the uneasy tensions between the Jews and the Palestinians in the streets. I never saw it devolve into fisticuffs, but the impression I got was that a fight was always just under the surface.

Second, this isn’t an “American” problem, like the “Hatfields and the McCoys” are an American problem. These people, whoever they are, have just lifted and shifted their national identities from the Middle East to Middle America. The Hatfields and the McCoys were Americans; these people aren’t “Americans” in the true sense of the word, but foreigners who have brought their tribal feuds to the streets of our nation.

It’s clear that they identify first as Jews and as Palestinians; otherwise, why the flags for each people? This also underscores the problem of non-assimilation, as each group rages against the other over ancient hatreds and land that lies 6,000 miles away from here.

Politically, I unequivocally support Israel’s right to not only exist, but to defend itself from any and all enemies and acts of war. When the Palestinians get violent and begin firing missiles indiscriminately into civilian areas of Israel, they have not only the right, but the duty to counter with overwhelming force to neutralize the threat.

This is true for any nation, but especially a nation that was set up by legal authorities in the wake of World War II to be a place of safety and security for one of the most brutalized people groups in all of history.

Finally, both the Palestinians and the Jews need to come to Jesus Christ. That’s where unity will ultimately be found. Both sides in this conflict need our prayers, including the innocent men, women and children who are victims of the violence.

I just wish that they left their existential struggle overseas, where it belongs.

Have a good weekend.

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Daily Broadside | If I Wanted to Live in the Middle East I’d Move There

Daily Verse | Nehemiah 12:27
At the dedication of the wall of Jerusalem, the Levites were sought out from where they lived and were brought to Jerusalem to celebrate joyfully the dedication with songs of thanksgiving and with the music of cymbals, harps and lyres.

It’s already Thursday, my friends, and I’m glad you are able to join me this morning. I think we’ve yet to tap the full potential of the Fluba.

As if the good ship America hasn’t taken enough of a pounding on the progressive seas, we learned yesterday that pro-Palestinian thugs in Los Angeles were out hunting the night before for Jews to beat up.

According to The Hill:

The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating a Tuesday night incident in which diners at a California restaurant were attacked as a possible Jewish hate crime.

According to a local CBS affiliate news outlet, a group of Jewish men who were dining at a restaurant in Los Angeles’ Beverly Grove neighborhood when they were allegedly attacked by multiple people waving pro-Palestinian flags.

The attackers reportedly arrived at the restaurant in a car and began to yell racial slurs at the men and throw bottles at them as they exited the vehicle.

One man, who was dining with the Jewish group, but is not Jewish, told CBSLA that he is a photographer who had met the group that night to plan a wedding.

Super. It’s like the United States has an inferiority complex and wants to look more like the rest of the world. Let’s just keep importing more of these third world barbarians and their tribal hatreds to America because “diversity” or something.

This is the kind of behavior you’d expect in the Middle East or in Europe, not North America. But our so-called “leaders” prioritize other peoples over Americans and think they’re doing something noble by allowing terrorist sympathizers to live here.

It will get worse — much worse — before it gets better.

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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.