Tag Archives: jews

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Daily Broadside | Anti-Semitism Raises Its Ugly Head in The US and Kills A Jewish Man

On Sunday Michael Brown wrote at The Stream:

I am urging you. I am pleading with you. I am imploring you. Wake up! The irrational hatred of the Jewish people and the demonizing of Israel is reaching proportions so dangerous that if people of conscience do not stand up, speak out, and push back, Jewish blood will start flowing in America, England, and many other countries around the world. Wake up!

When Muslims in Sydney Australia are chanting, “Gas the Jews” you know that violence is near.

When Jewish students at a university here in America have to hide in a library in fear for their lives, you know that violence is near.

When Jewish children in Germany are afraid to go to school and parents warn their children not to wear the Star of David in public you know that violence is near.

When I post an image of the Israeli flag on Facebook and draw comments like, “Children killer. Hospital bombers” you know that violence is near.

When a BBC headline reads, “British Jews are ‘full of fear, like I’ve never seen before’,” you know that violence is near.

When Rep. Rashida Tlaib can post a 2024 election warning to President Biden, featuring crowds chanting “From the river to the sea” – meaning, no more State of Israel – you know that violence is near.

Wake up!

What I think he was referring to is the possibility of full-on worldwide Jewish persecution like the Holocaust under Adolph Hitler in World War II. I don’t think he was thinking his prophetic words would be fulfilled that very day—in America, of all places.

A 69-year-old man demonstrating in support of Israel died Nov. 6 after sustaining a head injury during a fight with a pro-Palestinian protester at a weekend rally in Thousand Oaks, about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles.

This is the only report I’ve found that says Mr. Kessler’s injuries were the result of “a fight.”

The Ventura County medical examiner has ruled Paul Kessler’s death a homicide, and the county sheriff’s office has not ruled out a hate crime. Mr. Kessler was Jewish, according to the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

Officials say Mr. Kessler was attending the rally Sunday afternoon when he became involved in an altercation with a counter-protester who was demonstrating nearby at a pro-Palestinian event.

Below I link to a post from Red State reporting that the pro-Palestinian protestor who assaulted Kessler was led to the corner where Kessler was counter-protesting on behalf of Israel. in other words, this wasn’t the chance encounter of two groups meshing in the same spot.

The incident happened at the intersection of Westlake Boulevard and Thousand Oaks Boulevard in Ventura County.

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Office responded to the altercation after several citizens called 9-1-1 to report a battery at about 3:20 p.m.

Deputies arrived to find Mr. Kessler suffering from a head injury. Witnesses told police he fell backwards during the fight and struck his head on the ground. He was taken to an area hospital for treatment but succumbed to his injuries Monday, the sheriff’s office reported.

The Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office determined Mr. Kessler died from blunt-force head injury, according to the sheriff’s office.

Here’s a clip of Mr. Kessler lying on the ground after the assault and LE had arrived.

Over at Red State there’s a more in-depth report with several videos.

During the November 5 protest, eyewitnesses say that [a known agitator] led an older gentleman over to the corner with the Shell station (across from where the bulk of the pro-Hamas faction were located), to where Mr. Kessler was, as if he was pointing Kessler out to the older gentleman.

The pro-Hamas faction were located on the southwest corner of the intersection, in front of Paul Martin’s American Grill.

Eyewitnesses, who have shared this information and their photos and videos, say the attack happened within five minutes of the time the agitators went to the corner where Kessler was. The eyewitness doesn’t have video of the moment the attack occurred, but says that the gray-haired, bearded man in khaki pants is the man who confronted Kessler then hit him in the head with the bullhorn.

The man who allegedly assaulted Mr. Kessler is the heavyset guy in the blue-ish shirt below. He apparently called 9-1-1 and was cooperative with authorities. And while there’s no video of the incident made public (yet) the report in Robby Starbuck’s post says police have seized his phone.

In the screengrab the alleged assailant stands with an officer as Mr. Kessler is prepped inside the ambulance for transport to the hospital. The man is reportedly “a college professor and ardent Muslim.”

Mr. Kessler’s death has been ruled a homicide, which means it was caused by another person. Whether or not it will become a “murder” has yet to be determined. In ultra-liberal California, it’s anybody’s guess.

So now we have the death of a Jewish man in the streets of America. It’s happened before, but not in an environment as hostile as this one. We’ve imported thousands of Middle Eastern Muslim Arabs and Palestinians who are doing what they do in every country they inhabit: agitate and protest in a mob that demands the death of the ultimate Out-Group: the Jews.

#DiversityIsOurStrength

And don’t forget that after the Jews, it’s the Christians. You may want to heed Dr. Brown’s warning:

In light of all this, and with tremendous urgency in my spirit, I urge every person of conscience, every lover of justice, everyone who fears and honors God.

Please, today, speak out against the demonization of Israel and the Jewish people.

Categorically denounce Hamas and distance yourself from those who support Hamas (and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah and the rest of these terrorist groups).

[…]

But without hesitation and without shame, you must raise your voice in support of Israel and the Jewish people now, letting the haters know that when they come against Israel, they are coming against you. It really is a matter of life and death.

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem—and for peace here in the United States.

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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 | If You Refuse the Mask or the Shot, You’re Not Wanted

Daily Verse | Joel 2:12
“Even now,” declares the Lord,
    “return to me with all your heart,
    with fasting and weeping and mourning.”

Happy Monday my friends. Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But here we are on Monday — again.

Yesterday I went to a restaurant that we’ve frequented over the last 18 months and by “frequented” I mean that we’ve gone there more often than any other eating establishment, which may or may not mean “occasionally.” The last few times we’ve been there no mask has been required. This time we walked in expecting the same, but the (masked) Karen server behind the counter immediately asked us if we had masks.

“No,” I said. “Do you have any?,” knowing that some establishments would provide them for their guests.

“No,” she replied, “we don’t stock them. And there’s a sign on the door when you come in.”

I confess to seeing the “sign,” which was written in small type as part of a paragraph of small type on an 8½ x 11 sheet of paper taped to the glass door, which I didn’t fully read because we were all going in and it was an interruption and it was hot out and we were hungry and I assumed they only partly meant the word “must” and they didn’t require them before and, besides, who’s enforcing mask mandates anyway?

To be fair, the masked woman behind the counter was probably only enforcing the company policy, so I can’t really fault her, but she wasn’t particularly nice about it. My immediate reaction to her telling us that masks were required and, without saying so, implying that we would not receive service without one, was to turn around and walk out and find a place that would serve us without masks.

But my wife had a mask for me and for her and she put hers on and started her order, while our two guests retrieved theirs, so we stayed. But I was not happy about it.

As I walked to my table I grumbled about how the Beijing Bat Flu was certainly deadly as we stood and ordered but that it very obviously weakened on the way to the table and by the time I sat down it was safe to de-mask because reasons. And how stupid this whole thing is.

I got to thinking about it and, for the first time, I truly understand the observation that being required to wear a mask creates a two-tiered society, with non-maskers being “second-class citizens.” I’ve read that before in the commentariat in a variety of opinion pieces, but it really hadn’t penetrated like it did yesterday.

Many of the authors say that masks are just a first step in dehumanizing the citizenry. Think about it. What is the difference between someone without a mask not getting service and someone with a yellow star not getting service? One concerns medical purity, the other racial purity. In both cases people are classified negatively.

While it’s true that one is contagious and the other isn’t, they both result in the same thing: ostracization from society.

In both situations, the ruling authorities mandate the conditions: not complying with masking denies you service today, wearing a star denied you service then. While we are all ostensibly free to choose whether or not to wear the mask and the Jews were not free to reject wearing the star, the result is the same: complying with the star or not complying with the mask results in a denial of service.

Not wearing a mask and wearing a star both telegraph a negative association to the rest of society. And while non-maskers and those refusing to get the vaccine are not being shipped off to concentration camps (yet), they are subjected to tyrannical language and treatment from those who decree the conditions and their supporters in government and business.

The Resident pointedly blamed one-third of Americans for the rise in the Delta variant.

“We’ve been patient. But our patience is wearing thin, and your refusal has cost all of us,” he said, all but biting off his words. The unvaccinated minority “can cause a lot of damage, and they are.”

[…]

After months of using promotions to drive the vaccination rate, Biden is taking a much firmer hand, as he blames people who have not yet received shots for the sharp rise in cases killing more than 1,000 people per day and imperiling a fragile economic rebound.

Shock jock and noted medical expert Howard Stern used similarly strong language about the unvaccinated.

Radio host Howard Stern said people who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19 are “idiots” and called for vaccinations to be mandatory.

“When are we gonna stop putting up with the idiots in this country and just say it’s mandatory to get vaccinated? F— ’em. F— their freedom. I want my freedom to live,” Stern said on his SiriusXM program on Tuesday. “I want to get out of the house already. I want to go next door and play chess. I want to go take some pictures. This is bull—-.”

In another rant, he said,

“We have no time for idiots in this country anymore. We don’t want you,” Stern said. “We want you to all either go to the hospital, stay home, die there with your COVID, don’t take the cure but don’t clog up our hospitals with your COVID when you finally get it.

“Stay home, don’t bother with science, it’s too late. … We want you to go away,” he continued. “We want you to leave the country. Go somewhere where they have ultimate freedom, wherever that is, some bizarro world where you don’t have to take the vaccine. … I don’t know when nonsense became such a thing.”

Here’s Jimmy Kimmel, the very unfunny late night host.

“Dr. Fauci said that if hospitals get any more overcrowded, they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed. That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me.

Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.”

Add one more for good measure. Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, David Plouffe, called MAGA supporters a “sick, perverted one-third of the country.”

He added, “I think these governors, legislative leaders who have stood in the way of vaccinations, who belittled COVID, who don’t want masks in school — here’s the thing, we’re basically two-thirds of the country in support of mask mandates in schools. So again, they’re speaking to their sick, perverted one-third of the country, you know that gets injected by Fox News and Sinclair and Breitbart, all the stuff.”

Jews forced to wear the yellow Star of David in 1941 Nazis Germany were subject to segregation and discrimination. We can’t deny that something similar is happening. Our freedom is being restricted if we are being demonized as “idiots” and “sick and perverted,” told we’re not wanted, that our freedom is meaningless, that we should essentially f*** off and die, and we’re not allowed to conduct transactions and travel in public unless we wear a mask.

Feel the love?

Right now we have the opportunity to push back and refuse to comply with the tyrannical edicts from our rulers. But how long will that opportunity last?