Looking at a Moslem's View of Israel

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This is taken from an article at Pajamas Media by David Hornik complaining about Israel being bashed in the media. What I'm publishing here is not the article itself but a comment by a person who is obviously a Muslim, expressing his view as a Muslim, a view colored by his religion, not by the hatred the Wahhabi spill continuously against us.  It is worth reading, and worth struggling with, even with his bad English, because it expresses a view that many Moslems hold: that we Jews, if we are to be entitled to our land, must behave in a manner befitting a holy people.   In other words, if we expect to be accepted by Muslims here, we have to behave as our Torah tells us to.  Read on and see what I mean.

 information:

I think the only solution for jewish
just do not deny the big facts

1) jesus is prophet of god who came after moses
and really celberated jesus birth day in christmas time with all of us

and
2) prophet Mohammad is prophet came after jesus
by order of same god jewish beliving

when you deny big two facts
the consequences come to you

or you tell
us 100 years ago certain land belong to you and now you immigrant to palstine and then force to take certain land with a ll army and say this is yours not other people

while if you see moses never fight over land
moses fight over god’s order of and His comments

Moses told you other prophet will come after him

then if you stay with moses’s order

and if we belive ok give jewish land call it
jewish land call it Israel or what ever

most jewish are live outiside of Israel then what we must expect to take those land seperated too

or can we agree if Israel is real god’s order land for jewish
then why you allow gays and homosexual lesbian to have right to live there

then that land is not used for jewish law this is use for land rubbery and other power pull

I do not believe israel as jewish land
ONLY because you respect gays in that country

that is all above is not hate or fashion
this is fact you try to deny

nobody hate jewish people hate ingorant and denier of god’s order

In this man's view, we should recognize Jesus as a prophet (not as a god), and acknowlege that Muhammad is a prophet of G-d, even if he is not our prophet.  Then he asks that we come home. What right do we have to seize this land if we stay away from it?  Finally, he raises the issue of the tolerance here of homosexual behavior, which appears in his eyes to be against Jewish law. And for him, this is the straw that breaks the camel's back.  But at bottom, what this man really demands from us Jews is that we follow our law.  This is his price for us to occupy this land.

This is is a common Muslim view.  It's alright for us to have our land so long as we act as if we deserve that land.  My, how that view coincides with Leviticus 18 and 19!

Bad News at My Doorstep - Analysis of Israel's "Situation"

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Originally Published at Blogcritics Magazine on 25 November 2009.
Copyright ©, R. Kossover, 2009

The bad news started coming to my doorstep about three weeks ago. On Thursday afternoon, a young lady knocked on our door asking for charity. She was staying at the girls high school in Ma’alé Levoná after being ejected from her home in Ramat Migron the day before. I did not know where her family is staying, or what they were to do, but I did what I could to help her out. It was a pitiable sum of money – but it was a good part of what we had at the moment.

The next night, eating Sabbath dinner at a neighbor’s house, my wife was complaining about the pains she was enduring because a bus driver had stopped so fast that she fell and suffered from whiplash, and our hostess wanted to help put things in perspective for her by getting her to see that things could be worse. She told us of a neighbor of ours – let’s call him Barry – who was driving home past Sínjil, the Arab village at very the bottom of Levoná, the hill/mountain where we live. Arabs threw rocks through his windshield, spraying him with shattered glass, and they threw another rock through the back windshield, injuring his wife, Lee. He managed to bring the car to a halt, and then to drive up the hill home – where an ambulance promptly took the two of them to a hospital in Jerusalem. This was similar to rock throwing incidents that had occurred over the last couple of months or so, hundreds of them, at Shiló, Elí, Shuafát, Ma’alé Adumím, and other places as well. But this time, we knew the victims. Had it been me and had I Barry’s pistol, I would have also stopped the car – and fired at the Arab attackers, attempting to kill them if I could. But it wasn’t me. I sat and listened to our hostess, and kept my anger to myself.

This may sound like a lot of news, a lot of events occurring here – as though there were a great deal to write about. Truth be told though, overall, not too much has happened newswise in the last twenty years since this interview with the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, z”l, hy”d. Note that this C-Span interview was in February, 1989. If you watch it, and change a few names, you will see the same problems facing the region then as face the region today. An Arab state in Judea and Samaria would be a dagger in the heart of our country. That was true in February 1989, and it is true today as well.

Let’s look at the events that have occurred in the last twenty years to make the situation different.

The Israeli army evacuated south Lebanon

Nine years ago, under the “leadership”, if one wishes to call it that, of Ehud Barak, the IDF “evacuated” south Lebanon. Actually, the evacuation was a rout, and Israeli forces, having signaled that they were leaving, were attacked by HizbAllah, which crowed like drunken braggarts in an back alley that they had “driven” the Zionists from Lebanon. Leaving aside all the talk and endless talk over this hill or that hill the bottom line was this. The cushion that Israel had from missile attack from the north was gone, and HizbAllah was in due course armed by its Shi’a sponsor, Iran. By 2005, tens of thousands of rockets sat in south Lebanon, a new dagger, now aimed at the Galilee.

Arabs launch a terror war in September 2000

Having walked out of “talks” at Camp David in July 2000, the PLO leader and pedophile, Yasser Arafat, orchestrated a rebellion similar to the 1936 rebellion his uncle orchestrated. Over 1,000 Israelis died in terror attacks, many similar to the suicide bombing at the Dophinarium Disco on 1 June 2001. This horrific attack devastated hundreds of lives in Israel, killing 21 young people and wounding over 160. There were shootings in French Hill in Jerusalem – four of them; there was a suicide bombing at the Park Hotel at a Passover Seder, there were attacks in Be’ér Sheva. It took over two years of sustained Arab terror before the Israeli government was even willing to conduct an organized campaign to attempt to stop it. Through all this, through even the seizure and looting of the Christian Church of the Sepulchre in Bethlehem, the government refused to abandon a “peace accord” with the Arab murderers. One has to wonder if these fools belonged in the halls of an insane asylum rather than in the halls of government.

P.S. The Christians blamed Israel for the Arab attack on their church. In my opinion our forces should have blown up the damned church with all the terrorists in it. Then the Christians would have at least had something to whine over with justification.

The Israeli army evacuates Gaza and expels Israeli residents

In an act of treason and cowardice that shall stain this nation until it is corrected, the government of Israel, under heavy American pressure, expelled the Jewish residents of Gush Qatif, 8,000 people who had built a thriving vegetable industry. It uprooted hundreds of families from their homes, destroyed many profitable businesses, and ruined the lives of loyal Israelis – all for the illusory promise of peace from an enemy that only delivers death and war. And all that Israel received for this expulsion of its citizens was the criticism of the world for not destroying itself faster – and thousands of Qassam rockets attacking S’derót, Ashqelón and the kibbutzim surrounding the Gaza Strip. The year after the expulsion, Hamas, the governing terror force there, kidnapped Gil’ád Shalít, who is still held hostage, and began a war against us – a war which spread rapidly into an event that became the defining event of the first decade of the 21st Century for us in Israel.

HizbAllah subjects Israel to rocket attacks from Lebanon

On 12 July 2006, HizbAllah began massive rocket attacks on the Galilee. All things considered, these rocket attacks were very mild. The Katyusha (Katie) rocket only damages when it hits something. It killed a woman drinking coffee on her balcony because it hit the balcony and the woman. But otherwise, if it hit something inanimate, it destroyed it – or if it hit a road, for example, it just sat in the road, having created a small crater. Only 40 people were killed in the bombardment of 4,000 rockets that lasted about a month.

But the rockets sowed terror. Nearly the entire population of the Galilee fled, with the government officials fleeing first, like rats running from a sinking ship. Israel responded to this bombardment, and the response was to go to war. But the tactics used were inefficient, the forward bases were not supplied, the force used was far greater than the force needed because of the way the United States government handcuffed the Israeli “leadership”. The American government would not countenance this tactic or that tactic and the IDF wound up attacking along the “line of expectation” – the place where the enemy expected us to hit. There was no element of surprise at all. It was brute force used, and the brute force was not sufficient to effectively dislodge the enemy. When finally victory was in sight – then and only then did the United States step in and demand a cease-fire.

The corrupted flunkies in Jerusalem who ruin this nation on America’s and Europe’s behalf followed orders like good dogs – proving not only that all we have is falafel, but all we have is a falafel republic as well, a pathetic puppet of American and European imperialists. So, over 100 soldiers sacrificed their lives for absolutely nothing. A neighbor of mine, Eli, explained what he felt our position to be this way. “The Americans have us strangled with the arms, and the Europeans have us strangled with the economy.” He then shrugged his shoulders – a very Gallic shrug (Eli is originally from Marseilles) – as if to say, “there is nothing to be done about it all.” This whole mess became known as the Second Lebanon War – a worse disaster than the First Lebanon War 27 years ago.

In the last three years, HizbAllah has been re-supplied by their Persian masters, and now, they sit on our northern border with more and better rockets than they had in 2006. It is likely that they can hit Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv and possibly even Be’ér Sheva in the northern Negev.

About a year ago, the Hamas terror regime stepped up its rocket attacks on southern Israel, occasionally suffering “work accidents” as careless handling of the rockets caused the Arabs working on them to die. Finally, the IDF attacked Gaza and pretended that they would silence the Qassams from Gaza. The military operation was more designed to get votes for the Kadima and Labor parties than anything else, and while all sorts of idiots and moralists have whined over Operation Cast Lead, the bottom line was that Labor and Kadima got more votes in the February 2009 election; and Jews and Arabs died for nothing. The terrorists still control Gaza, still fire Qassam rockets at Israel, and now are testing missiles that will be able to hit Tel Aviv.

Further, we face renewed war in Lebanon. But the likely intiators of that war, HizbAllah, are presently busy helping the Persians in Yemen, as the Houthi Shi’a face off against the Wahhabi savages (allies/sponsors of the Yemeni regime) there. So, unless we attack Persia, we will have to wait in line to be attacked, while HizbAllah attends to affairs in Yemen. But when this war does come it will be far worse than what we faced in 2006. Michael Totten, writing for Commentary Magazine, confirms my view that HizbAllah will strike the whole country, and that we will see, in this war, the sky scrapers of Tel Aviv go up in flames. According to Totten, “if Hezbollah manages to turn all of Israel into a kill zone where there is no place to run, Israelis will panic like they haven't since the 1973 Yom Kippur War when it briefly appeared the Egyptian army might overrun the whole country. I wouldn't want to be anywhere in Lebanon while Israelis are actively fending off that kind of assault. No country can afford to be restrained while fighting for its survival.” This is not a whole lot different from my own assessment. The streets will run with Arab blood, as Israelis who are basically just Jews come home, sick and tired of restraining themselves, unleash an anger 17 centuries in the making.

It may seem that we in Israel are a “generation lost in space – with no time to start again”. It may seem that all we can do is “clench our fists in rage” as forces of evil and puppets of foreign powers put this land on a sacrificial altar to foreign gods of “peace” and death. But I do not believe so. It has gotten considerably worse than it was in 1989 when Rabbi Meir Kahane, may his memory be a blessing, and may G-d avenge his blood, sat pessimistically estimating the future of the region on C-Span. But he had faith in the G-d of Israel and I “have faith in G-d above” and in His Prophets.

In his forthcoming book, Cracking the Qur’an Code (Root & Branch Association, Ltd), my friend and colleague, Lowell Gallin writes,

In the not-too-distant future, I believe that the world will hear Muslims chanting Allahu Akbar (‘God is great’) and Jews chanting Am Yisrael Chai (‘The People of Israel lives’) - Together.

In the not-too-distant past, two brothers, Ishmael the elder and Isaac the younger, buried Abraham their father – Together.

In the not-too-distant future, I believe that the Children of Ishmael and the Children of Israel (Abraham’s grandson and Isaac’s younger son) will replant and rebuild the Lands of Arabia and Israel, as part of a truly new Middle East – Together.

In the not-too-distant future, I believe that the Lost Ten Tribes of Israel will wake up and return to the Land of Israel – Together.

In the not-too-distant future, I believe that the Kingdom of David and Solomon will be reestablished in the Land of Israel, and the Twelve Tribes of Israel will ratify selection of the King. Together.

In the not-too-distant future, I believe that two brothers, Nebaioth and Kedar, Ishmael’s first and second born sons, will bring offerings to the rebuilt Third and Final Temple of Jerusalem – Together.

A few years ago, I found myself on a Jerusalem construction site together with an Arab foreman and his two young co-workers. The foreman spoke of the problems plaguing Arabs and Jews in the Promised Land. I said that a descendant of David, the King Messiah, would arise to sit on the throne of his fathers, and that he would bring peace between Arabs and Jews in the Promised Land.

‘When?’ the foreman quietly asked.

‘Soon’, I answered.

No one spoke or moved. Though we were alone on a construction site, and I could easily have had an ‘accident’, I felt no fear of them.

At that moment we were united by our shared fear of God and respect for His servant David, whom the Qur’an describes as a king, a prophet and the author of the Psalms.

When all this transpires – and it will transpire – the trouble will no longer be at my doorstep – it will be at yours.

Persia Delenda Est! Israel's Case for a Pre-Emptive Nuclear Strike on Tehran

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This article was originally published at Blogcritics Magazine on 11 May, 2009.                 Copyright © R. Kossover, 2009

Author's note:  This article was written before the elections in the Islamic Republic that exposed the fundamental instability of this régime.  If régime change can be accomplished from within to remove the existential threat to the Jewish State, then thoughts of destroying the nuclear plants or of the cities where the leaders who would execute plans to run a war against the People of Israel reside or have their bases, can be set aside.  This writer views the nuclear destruction of Tehran, or any other place on the planet, as a repulsive act to be pursued only as a last solution to securing the security of the Jewish People.  But in a hostile world, our willingness to use such brutal solutions must be clear to all of our enemies - and to our few friends. 

Introduction

This article is not yet another screed on the necessity for attacking the nuclear facilities in Iran, facilities which, if allowed to grow unchecked, will pose a deadly existential threat to the State and to the People of Israel. Such articles have become a cottage industry of sorts and the more they are turned out, the cheesier they get. Nearly all of these articles posit that if we in Israel attack the Persian nuclear facilities, we will retard their drive for nuclear weaponry and thereby win the (eventual) gratitude of the "civilized" world. Leaving aside the obvious military problems this nation faces in executing such an attack, it assumes that the rest of the world is civilized at all, and that with time, will have the intelligence to show gratitude to us. Considering how so many in the world continue to call for us to die, such assumptions are premature at the least.

Let's look at one of the least cheesy articles on the subject, one from 8 May's Jerusalem Post authored by Caroline Glick, "Obama's Green Light to Attack Iran." She points out that 

As a consequence, the operational significance of the administration's anti-Israel positions is that Israel will not be well served by adopting a more accommodating posture toward the Palestinians and Iran. Indeed, perversely, what the Obama administration's treatment of Israel should be making clear to the Netanyahu government is that Israel should no longer take Washington's views into account as it makes its decisions about how to advance Israel's national security interests. This is particularly true with regard to Iran's nuclear weapons program. 

Rationally speaking, the only way the Obama administration could reasonably expect to deter Israel from attacking Iran's nuclear installations would be if it could make the cost for Israel of attacking higher than the cost for Israel of not attacking. But what the behavior of the Obama administration is demonstrating is that there is no significant difference in the costs of the two options. 

By blaming Israel for the absence of peace in the Middle East while ignoring the Palestinians' refusal to accept Israel's right to exist; by seeking to build an international coalition with Europe and the Arabs against Israel while glossing over the fact that at least the Arabs share Israel's concerns about Iran; by exposing Israel's nuclear arsenal and pressuring Israel to disarm while in the meantime courting the ayatollahs like an overeager bridegroom, the Obama administration is telling Israel that regardless of what it does, and what objective reality is, as far as the White House is concerned, Israel is to blame.

Unlike Ms. Glick, who cannot afford to say these things from her perch at the Jerusalem Post, the article that follows calls for a preemptive nuclear strike on Tehran and such other targets in Persia that will destroy the command and control systems holding together Persian offensive military capability. Even if this attack never comes about, it is incumbent for an Israeli to lay on the table and make clear to the world the necessity for such a strike, if only to make clear to our mortal enemies that we possess the will to exterminate them as they would exterminate us.

I. Carthago Delenda Est!

The title of this article is taken from the words of the Roman senator Cato the Elder, who ended each of his speeches before the Roman Senate with this declaration: Cathago delenda est!, "Carthage must be destroyed!"

According to an article from Boise State University in Idaho on the Third Punic War, the destruction of Carthage by Rome was more an act of greed than an act of necessity. Here the opposite applies. There is no greed at issue at all here. Israeli carpet weavers are not threatened by their Persian counterparts, Israel's fishing industry or shepherds are not threatened by anything Persia could do; if Israeli poets are less known than Khalil Ghibran, it is not the fault of Ghibran's superior verses but of our own insufficient verse-making.

No.

Modern day Persia, once the home of Zoroastrian emperors friendly to our people, under its present guise of the "Islamic Republic of Iran" has decided that we must be wiped from the map, and that the world must accustom itself to a world without Israel. This speech linked to, calling for the annihilation of Israel, was made in 2005.

In 2006, HizbAllah, the Shi'ite proxy and puppet of Iran in Lebanon, began a rocket bombardment that successfully caused the inhabitants of the north of the country to flee. The Israeli government in the north collapsed, and the land was filled with internal refugees. Our brave army, which fought hard to defeat HizbAllah using the worst of military tactics, tactics largely dictated by the whims of then American Secretary of State Rice, was robbed of its victory in the north by the cowardice of the "prime minister," Olmert, who cowered before the Americans and sued for peace instead of prosecuting war. In late 2008, a different proxy of Persia, Hamas, began a steady bombardment of the country from the south in Gaza. Israeli troops again took to the battlefield, going into harm's way unnecessarily, only to be robbed of victory by the demands of the 'Blessed of Hussein," the new American president, who demanded that there be a ceasefire in place before he was inaugurated so as not to mess up his moment in the sun. Again, our leaders cowered like dogs before the American regime which, bit by bit is making itself an open enemy of the State of Israel, where previously it twisted its knife in our backs under the glove of "friendship" and "support."

So, we see clearly, that the Persians will prosecute war against us. They have already done so — twice. Those fools who say that the words of the Persian leader are just loud talk refuse to look the facts in the face. Usually, this is because the facts are far away from them, and they themselves need not look the ugly truth in the face. Having looked in the faces of internal refugees fleeing rocket attacks in the north myself, however, I am forced to face facts. The most essential fact is this: Persia, under its present guise, presents an existential threat to the State of and the People of Israel.

II. Persia's Drive for Nuclear Weaponry

There are some points that should be made clear here. The possession of nuclear weapons is the modern day version of the big swinging phallus of macho types who would pound their chests proclaiming their manhood to the world. In this respect, Persia is no different from India, Pakistan, France or Britain. The Persians all see themselves as the inheritors of a great empire, and in fact they are. For this reason, any nationalistic Persian will want that big swinging phallus of a nuclear banana for his nation. In other words, it matters little which regime one speaks of. The Persians could have an emperor, as they did until 1979, a democratic republic, as they had for very brief periods of time, or the present Shi'a mullahcracy — all would want nuclear defensive and offensive capabilities simply because they all feel that Persia deserves it. In that sense, there is no real reason to oppose the Persians obtaining nuclear weapons.

The problem comes when one sees just how belligerent the Persians, under this present regime, are concerning Israel. Since they have twice gone to war against us, even if only by proxy, and continually they call for the destruction of the Jewish State, we are fools to ignore them or the real threats they pose to this country.

III. Problems Executing This Plan

What about Pakistan's nuclear weaponry? Couldn't Pakistan be the real threat Persia is dealing with, while using hostility to this country as a cover?

As late as September 2001, one could have said that and been accurate. Israelis did not raise serious alarums about Persian nuclear efforts before then for the precise reason that our own intelligence assessed the Persians to be worried about the "Moslem Bomb" to the east. But the emergence of the Wahhabi terror network (the Taliban is heavily influenced by the Wahhabi and has close ties with them) reshuffled the whole deck of cards in South and Southwest Asia. After 9/11, the Pakistani government and military started to take on a Jekyll and Hyde nature.

The Taliban was largely the creation of the Pakistani intelligence agency, at the behest of the United States, the idea being to create a native Afghani presence that would cripple the Soviets, who had invaded Afghanistan. Until 1989 or 1990 this worked just fine. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Taliban moved in to collect its reward, control of Afghanistan. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, the Wahhabi, in the form of al-Qaeda, turned on the United States and other western powers, and when American planes came to pursue and kill Osama bin-Laden, the Pakistanis were in a bind. This bind has slowly torn Pakistan apart since, as the government and military had to more and more compete with each other, and now with the Taliban madrassas as well.

In the last eight years, Pakistan has lost its coherence as a country. The military holds the whip hand, the civilian government sort of knows what's going on, but doesn't want to, and the intelligence agency runs its own game. In the meantime, the Taliban grows stronger and stronger within Pakistan. The point for this excursion off to South Asian politics? The point is that Pakistan is no longer a threat to Persia. As for the Taliban, they are a branch of the Deobandi school, and worship in the style of the Sufi, but have beliefs that mirror the Wahhabi. Whatever they are, they are not Sunni Moslems.

So, hostility to and hatred of Israel is not a cover for something else. It is the real thing — just like Coca Cola. 

What about lopping off the head of the pimple and letting it ooze? In other words, assassinating a number of top leaders? Isn't that a lot better than a nuclear strike?

Actually, this is preferable to a nuclear strike — far more preferable. But getting the squad in to do the job, and to kill enough of the right people is a very tricky business. The Persians know who would be targeted. And unless these folks have had a falling out with the establishment, they will be guarded day and night. And the Israelis will only get one shot at this effort. So, for practical purposes, this idea of assassination, good as it is, is not workable.

IV. Justifying the Killing of Millions of People in a Bombing Attack

By now, some of you reading this are wondering how I could possibly justify killing millions of people to accomplish a military goal. Isn't that genocide? Wouldn't that make us as bad as the Nazis we protest we aren't? Actually, what is proposed is not genocide, what is proposed is mass murder. Both are despicable, but there is a difference between one and the other.

Genocide is murdering off a people because of who they are. The Turks committed genocide in Armenia in 1915. The Americans committed genocide in exterminating the Indians, though their action was not systematic, and was a lot more like what the Romans did to us Jews for 600 years. To give a different example, if one were, for argument's sake, (G-d forbid such a thing were to actually be decided upon) to decide to kill off all the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island in the Pacific Ocean because of who they were, this would be genocide, even though it would involve killing perhaps a couple of hundred people at most. One would have to stretch awful hard to call such an evil undertaking "mass murder".

Mass murder, by contrast, is the murder of masses of people, without necessarily distinguishing who they are. The key element to mass murder is the number of people being killed, whereas the key element to genocide is the reason for the killings.

The Americans, in bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima have legitimized mass murder as a weapon of war. Similarly the British, in fire-bombing German cities in WWII, legitimized mass murder as a weapon of war. We Jews have to live in a brutal world where the British and the Americans write the rules. If we expect to survive, we have to be willing to use the brutal weapons of the Americans and the British as weapons of war ourselves. We, in a savage world, must be willing to be as savage as the most vicious savages on the planet. That is the way of the World of Lies and Falsehood, and until the World of Truth overtakes this awful world with Full Redemption, we must be willing to be the meanest bastards on the planet. Since the Persians are willing to see us exterminated like so many unwanted insects, we must be willing to exterminate them the same way.

Is this pleasant to consider? No. Is this a matter of vengeance? No. Is this a matter of being angry? No.

This is a matter of survival.

The Persians have threatened our existence, and no matter how they qualify those threats in the face of "world opinion" or some other load of garbage, they have gone to war against us twice to show they mean business. For us to fail to mean business, for us to fail to insure they cannot ever threaten us again is simply suicidal on our part. For too long, governments in Israel have chosen suicidal paths of action in a vain attempt to please "world opinion" or alleged "allies" like the United States. This is why it is not sufficient to merely attack nuclear facilities in an attempt to retard the development of the Persian bomb. It is the command and control centers that must be destroyed. Since we do not know where those centers are, we must destroy the widest possible range of areas to make sure that commanders and controllers do not escape to again seek to threaten our existence. This means that Tehran cannot be the only target of a first strike.

V. What about the Fallout?

By fallout, I do not mean the radioactive particles that will poison the air or water. I mean the results of such an attack. Persia itself has always been held together somewhat loosely from the center. If one were to do away with the center, Tehran, the control would be gone and the country would drift apart, falling under the control of local warlords, or under foreign powers. Israel would still face other existential threats — like America and Russia — but the most immediate existential threat would be gone. The chief means of support for HizbAllah, Syria/Lebanon and Hamas would be gone, and they would have to seek other overlords - who would have different requirements. And they would not necessarily go as a group.

Destroying the command and control centers of Persian society would not end Israel's problems. One is a fool to pretend that. There would be issues of who would control Persia, and there would be Moslem rage against Israel. But the Moslem rage would be tempered with the knowledge that Israel was willing to destroy completely cities and nations. Egypt, for example, has its own Achilles Heel, the Aswan High Dam. Destroy it and Lake Nasser floods the Nile, and the floods would be murderous to Egyptians who mostly live a few miles from the now tame Nile River.

VI. But the Persians are Innocent! Kill Them and You'll be Pariahs!

Are they innocent?

They chose the leaders they have. These leaders they have led them down a path of disaster. The Persian people are responsible for the evil they have chosen, and for failing to overthrow it. Their leaders have chosen to threaten us with extermination - a problem we have had to face as a people before - several times. This time, our reaction to those who would exterminate us must be one to educate. The world must learn at long last that exterminating Jews is a terribly expensive business, with consequences that will last for generations. We'll be pariahs, you say? Jews have usually been pariahs in most parts of the world. So, being a pariah is nothing new, and if the world hates us, fine. Let them hate us. We should really give a shit?

It's nice to be liked. But when it comes to us Jews, the world appears to like us most — dead. Our leaders may be waking up to the fact that Israel is indeed alone, as the Torah indicates it will be. It's time for us to stop begging to be liked, to stop whining that we aren't. Our responsibility is to Living G-d of Israel and to ourselves and ourselves alone. A world that wants us dead is best ignored and allowed to stew in its own destructive juices until it destroys itself. Better to be hated and despised alive than eulogized by a world glad to see the backs of us.

Persia delenda est! Persia must be destroyed!

Israeli Government Sinks into the Sewer - Welcomes "Nazi" Pope

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Originally published at Blogcritics Magazine on 10 May, 2009
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2009

In a couple of days, traffic will be jammed in Jerusalem and the life of the average Jerusalemite will be totally miserable. Why? The sitting Bishop of Rome will make his presence known in our land. Like other bishops of Rome, he will do all he can NOT to recognize Jewish sovereignty over this nation, particularly Jerusalem. Like other Bishops of Rome, he will be catered to by the idiots who form the secular government of this country.

Why?

Because just like the wheedling ghetto Jews of the previous centuries, these idiots will consider it an utter honor that the Big Goy himself is coming to visit.

Boy oh boy! The Pope himself! Wow!

Of course, like the wheedling Jews of previous centuries, they will ask and beg and bow — well, all right, they won't bow, they have a bit more dignity than B. Hussein Obama, though not much. The attitude shown by Israeli government officials and rabbis alike is shameful! But this is the attitude they take. President Shim'on Peres will escort this man to Yad Vashem, our memorial to those who were murdered by the Nazis. And this man, Joseph Ratzinger, a former Nazi himself, will desecrate that memorial with his mere presence.

Like all foreigners who come here wagging their hypocritical fingers about "peace", this man has an agenda for controlling this nation. Ratzinger's is to see that Jerusalem is removed from Jewish control, internationalized (this was the Vatican proposal in 1948 and has remained its "solution" ever since) and to get control for the Vatican of the buildings immediately adjacent to the Dormition Abbey, built early in the last Christian century as the place where the crown prince of the German Empire was to be crowned, as though he were to be the new Holy Roman Emperor.

The Dormition Abbey was built to resemble almost exactly a similar chapel in Aix-la-Chapelle where Charlemagne was crowned 1209 years ago.

Unfortunately, Crown Prince Louis never got the chance to do this because his daddy, Wilhelm II of Germany, took his country into a general European war - and facing defeat, fled to Holland tossing his crown to the Kingdom of Prussia and the Empire of Germany into the trash. But the Vatican did not forget the chapel at all. There is a Catholic prophecy of sorts that the next bishop of Rome will be the last. Why would the Vatican be applying so much of its muscle to get control of the Diaspora Yeshiva and the Sephardi Synagogue of Mount Zion which are both adjacent to the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion?

Rumor has it that the Vatican wants to present this last Bishop of Rome, who is supposed to go under the name "Peter the Roman," from the Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion.

Get it? The law shall go forth from Zion! Mount Zion!

Catholics view themselves as the "real" Israel, the Chosen of G-d, and that we Jews, ever since Judas betrayed Jesus to the Romans for 30 pieces of silver, lost that place of primacy of being the Chosen People. So all this scheming and back-room haggling to get control of prime pieces of Jerusalem real estate, all the resentment over Jewish control of Jerusalem, all the efforts to kick us out of OUR capital, are all about the Vatican's designs to push their theology down everyone's throat and reverse the "damage" done by Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem.

In that sense, the Catholic Vatican is no different from the Persian's Shi'a Moslem little Hiter — Ahmadinejad — who wants to use the Temple Mount to present the Mahdi, the Moslem version of the messiah, to the world as its ruler.

The Israeli government has the sense to treat Ahmadinejad as the enemy he is. But they do not have the sense to treat the bishop of Rome as the enemy that he is. If the bishop of Rome was as open and honest and straightforward with his plans as is Ahmadinejad, maybe the idiots on Government Hill in Jerusalem would understand. But these idiots are so used to seeing the bishop of Rome as the Big Goy, that they cannot see the evil designs of the Vatican that Ratzinger heads. And the Vatican is always in the habit of being secretive, of saying nothing as though all must bend their knees to the bishop of Rome. And the Israeli leaders (and loads of rabbis as well) act as if they must bend the knee also, even though they would not be caught dead actually bowing - like Obama was.

Only one group of people have the sense to welcome Ratzinger as what he is - a criminal.

According to Arutz Sheva "Pro-Land of Israel activists Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben-Gvir will roll out the red carpet for Pope Benedict XVI’s arrival – by pressing criminal charges against him." According to Arutz Sheva, the criminal complaint details a record of treasures and possessions that belong to the Jewish People that are allegedly being held in the Vatican in Rome. Among the treasures claimed are vessels plundered from the Temple by the Romans under the command of then-general Titus, including the seven-branched golden Menorah.

While I'm not sure of all the legalities, it would appear that the Vatican is the closest one can get to a "successor in interest" to the Roman Empire. And claims have been made over the centuries that the Vatican sits on the Temple treasure. Whether those claims are true are for a court — armed with sub-poena power and the right to force the Vatican to open its doors, at gunpoint if necessary — to decide.

Otherwise, we do not know.

But even if it isn't true, the Bishop of Rome will at least be met as a criminal, which is what faces Israeli leaders in Europe for truly fictional crimes. Their only crime, where they may have actually done it, was to defend the Jewish nation against genocidal Arab savages bent on massacring it. It's important that Europeans get a taste of what they are dishing out, and Karl Ratzinger is a European. The Europeans have hated us for centuries because of their "religion of love," Christianity. They have actualized that hatred into rapes, massacres, murders, discrimination, and finally a holocaust of a third of our people. In the last two decades, these scum have done all they can to de-legitimize our country, and to ban our religious customs from being practiced in their own countries. Turning Europe into a Jewish graveyard was not enough for them, apparently.

So, let the warrants be served - and let the European scum understand how lowly we truly hold them. Now, let the bastards have a real reason to hate us.

New Kid on the Jewish Street - Z Street!

בס''ד

כג' תמוז תשס''ט
14 July, 2009
Copyright 2009, R. Kossover

Earlier today at Arutz Sheva, I saw an article introducing a brand new organization, which hopes to pump some new energy into the moribund Zionist movement. Since they were nice enough to list Ruvy's Roost on their blogroll, I thought I would write a few words of Welcome to Z Street!

Z Street is an organization that believes in

No more appeasement, no more negotiating with terrorists, no more enabling cowards who fear offending more than they fear another Holocaust. Z STREET is for those who are willing not only to support – but to defend – Israel, the Jewish State.

I have written elsewhere that I believe that Zionism is dying, having accomplished its basic goal, establishing a Jewish Entity in the Land of Israel. The Holy Zohar predicted that in the second half of the sixth millenium (that's according to our rabbinic calendar, folks) this would occur, and here I am, living here, in the second half of the sixth millenium, writing you all from a Jewish village in the re-established Jewish Entity in the Land of Israel. I stand with what I have said elsewhere. However, and this is the important point, if the courageous young women who have established Z Street have trouble relinquishing a term like Zionism, I'll not quibble with them. We are on the same side, they and I, and we stand for basically the same things - no more appeasing the goyim who want to kill us, no more negotiating with terrorists, no more enabling Jewish cowards who fear offending the goyim. And finally, they stand for something else, something that gives me a warm spot for them in my heart, no matter what they call themselves.

They support whole-heartedly keeping and settling ALL of the Land of Israel, from the Jordan to the High Sea.

We are living in an age of prophecy coming true. The State was declared just 6 days after we read haftarat aHarei [Amos 1:9], declaring that G-d would restore the fallen sukka of David. Jerusalem is the center of the Jewish world, and has expanded as prophecy predicted it would, to the north and the south. We have withstood the enmity of the entire world, and we yet stand; we are leaders in technology, medicine and weapons of war; our children have returned from the four corners of the Earth, and we continue to return; our "lost tribes" are bit by bit becoming unlost; science proves the concepts of the priesthood and the age of our nation. Wonders have occurred in our generations.

But we also face dire prophecies as well. So, rather than argue over silly things, we must build unity within our people, particularly unity within that group of us who are believers. We must build strength and trust, both in G-d and in each other, so that when the hard days of testing come, we will be able to withstand them. So let us welcome these brave newcomers to the world of political battle, the women and men of Z-Street and grasp their hands and cry out together Hazak! Hazak, v'nitHazek!

Strength! Strength! And let us be strengthened!

And This Little Piggy Flu All the Way Home: An Analysis of the Swine Flu

נס''ד

Originally published in Blogcritics Magazine, 30 April 2009
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2009

This is a developing story, and from the standpoint of news, the who, what and where of what I write here will be outdated by the time it is published.

I learned about the swine flu while sitting in the doctor's office on Monday, 27 April 2009, looking at a commuter paper called yisraél hayóm, Israel Today. The front page displayed a headline in Hebrew, "Security [Defense] Minister: 'We will handle the swine flu!'" This is the typical bragging style of Security Minister Ehud Barak.

Inside the newspaper was a map of the world showing where cases of swine flu had broken out as well as the locations of suspicious cases, the ones in Europe which have since proved to be swine flu.

Mexico, where pork is an important food, led the list with over 60 dead (this was Monday's paper) and at that time there were cases in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and -- wouldn't you know it -- one case here in Israel, in Netanya, where the pork-eating Russian immigrants abound. Apparently there is a price to be paid when you have an achin' for bacon, one that goes beyond heart attacks and high cholesterol. Another case was reported Monday on the 12:00 Voice of Israel radio news and was confirmed to be swine flu by health officials here.

According to Alex Jones reporting on Saturday, a doctor at a Mexican hospital sent an e-mail to the BBC, telling them that the real number of deaths from the pig flu was over 200 (as opposed to the then-reported 60). It wouldn't be a surprise to discover that the Mexican government was massaging the numbers in reporting the number of dead. The Egyptians and Pakistanis did the same when the bird flu was killing their people a while back.

But the really interesting data came at the Recombinomics website, which reports that this is evidently a human-to-human variation of the H1N1 virus, mixed with the H1N1 swine flu virus; very similar, in other words, to the 1918 Spanish Flu.

On YouTube there were also various video updates from the BBC, from stations in the States and elsewhere, all talking about the severity of the swine flu in Mexico (over 150 deaths reported) and how the swine flu is attacking young and healthy people.

In addition, there was a conspiracy type "video" -- actually a podcast with no pictures that could be seen. The narrator explains in some detail about viruses and flu virus generally, and how it his belief (reflected on the Alex Jones video as well) that this virus is being released slowly into the population by the government, and that what is going on right now is really a "pre-pandemic" situation, a test, in other words. The narrator notes a key bit of data: that the flu season is over, and yet this flu is spreading. He observes that when the flu season, October until April, hits, this flu will hit as a pandemic.

Taking the "conspiracy" angle out of this podcast and treating this as a natural event, the information reflects this raw footage from WPXI, a TV station in Pittsburgh, PA, of an interview with Dr. Henry Niman of Recombinomics. This is a video I strongly suggest you watch.

There are some essential points to be understood here. The first is that the World Health Organization (WHO) has a rating system for pandemics, running from Levels 1 to 6, with Level 6 being a sustained pandemic. According to Dr. Niman, the WHO reworked the definitions of these levels a year or two ago, saying they would not go upwards from Level 3 unless they saw a sustained pandemic with human-to-human transmission. In effect, the WHO eliminated Levels 4 and 5, but did not discard them publicly. According to the video, the WHO raised the alert level from 3 to 4 on Monday, 27 April 2009, meaning that they believed that there was a sustained pandemic going on.

The second point to understand is that this virus is traveling quickly through transit hubs and it is a waste of time to shut national borders - although according to an Alex Jones caller located in northern Mexico, just such a thing was being attempted in that country, with the northern states closing their borders to the southern and central states, where infections were highest. The reporter doing the interview with Dr. Niman expressed the thought that what was going on was the barn door being shut after the horse had gone.

The third point, related to the second one, which needs to be clearly understood is that the tracking of this swine flu is trailing the actual infections. By the time someone is tested for any of this, it is probably a month or so too late.

Dr. Niman cited the fact that the first infections showed up in Mexico in March, but the deaths didn't start to come until mid to late April. This means that while there have been no fatalities yet in the United States or Europe, as time progresses, there will be. When asked by the reporter from WPXI if this wasn't an alarmist view, Dr. Niman replied that if one reads the reports of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and WHO carefully, one sees the same facts presented, but packaged in such a way as not to cause a general panic. Indeed, when looking at this report from WPXI, we learn that Dr. Donald Burke, Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh, is spearheading the formation of a group to deal with the flu when it does show up in the Pittsburgh area. According to Dr. Burke, the threat the swine flu poses is “big enough that we’re going into emergency mode and putting together a task force.”

According to the report at the WPXI website, the swine flu task force held its first meeting on Tuesday afternoon, 28 April 2009, and Burke is now planning a public meeting of city officials to which residents can come and address any concerns they may have.

According to Dr. Niman, what we are seeing is a replay of the 1918 flu pandemic with an early breakout in spring and summer, and a severe return during flu season, starting in October. The CDC website has an article, "The 1918 Influenza: the Mother of All Pandemics" From the article:

In the 1918–1919 pandemic, a first or spring wave began in March 1918 and spread unevenly through the United States, Europe, and possibly Asia over the next 6 months[...]Illness rates were high, but death rates in most locales were not appreciably above normal. A second or fall wave spread globally from September to November 1918 and was highly fatal. In many nations, a third wave occurred in early 1919. Clinical similarities led contemporary observers to conclude initially that they were observing the same disease in the successive waves. The milder forms of illness in all 3 waves were identical and typical of influenza seen in the 1889 pandemic and in prior interpandemic years.

n retrospect, even the rapid progressions from uncomplicated influenza infections to fatal pneumonia, a hallmark of the 1918–1919 fall and winter waves, had been noted in the relatively few severe spring wave cases. The differences between the waves thus seemed to be primarily in the much higher frequency of complicated, severe, and fatal cases in the last 2 waves.

So, put simply, the big question here is "will the swine flu return in October?"

According to Dr. Niman, the swine flu strikes at those whose immune systems are strongest, appears as a typical case of the flu and then turns into what he termed "atypical pneumonia;" this is what has been killing those who have died from the swine flu. Tamiflu, the vaunted drug of choice against this disease, will not work according to Dr. Niman. A new vaccine will have to be found. The good news is that if there are a lot of cases of swine flu, there will be lots of samples to look at to see how the virus mutates, evolves and recombines. The bad news is that in emergency conditions, governments will enact triage conditions, and deal only with the serious cases.

As for surviving this flu, according to medical authorities, there are certain basic precautions to be taken:

1. Frequent hand-washing. This most basic tool of hygiene can save your life.
2. Stay away from crowds and places where this flu can be transmitted.
3. Stock up on medicine, canned goods and water to
reduce the need to be where you can catch the flu.
4. Stay away from pork, particularly raw uncooked meat. If you do eat pork (or any meat for that matter) make sure it is cooked to a kill temperature of at least 175 degrees Fahrenheit or 85 degrees Celsius.

And last, but certainly not least, if you have religious belief, pray.

Stay safe - stay alive.

Reflections of Remembrance Day in Israel while Waiting in the Doctor's Office

בס''ד

Originally published at Blogcritics Magazine, 27 April 2009
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2009

We still go to a doctor in Jerusalem, even though we live in the mountains to the north in Ma'ale Levona. It's a 2½ hour trip and a pain in the neck, but being the old codgers we are, we stick with folks we know and trust.

In spite of having gone to the same family doctors for nearly eight years, it still took me a while to realize that the male half of this practice likes good music from the '40s and '50's. The female doctor comes in and there is silence.

Behind the round, seemingly placid face of the Frenchman who is our doctor on duty today lies a painful tale. Like any good parent, he poured his love into his daughter. But one day, she was in downtown Jerusalem and a terrorist bomb ripped her to shreds. I'm not sure of the exact attack where she was killed. He never mentions this and we only found this out from (now former) neighbors who use him as a family doctor as well. But no matter which particular Arab bastard murdered his daughter, she is still just as dead, just as lost to her father and mother.

I only thought about this because today is Remembrance Day in Israel. We remember the soldiers who fell defending this country — and we remember the innocents blown to bits by our bloodthirsty neighbors.

I don't know if my doctor will go to a public ceremony — or merely visit his daughter's grave-site tomorrow. But I can bet my bottom dollar (we still have five of them, in fact) that he'll burn a memorial candle for the girl he lost eight years ago.

Twenty two thousand, five hundred and seventy souls sacrificed themselves for this land. And this young girl, cut dead in her youth, was one of them. May G-d comfort all those who grieve in Israel, the sons and the daughters, the brothers and the sisters, and the mothers and the fathers.

ברוך דיין האמת
barúkh dayán ha'emét - Blessed is the True Judge

We Do Not Forget - We Do Not Forgive: These are Luxuries No Jew Has

בס''ד

Originally published on 23 April 2009 in Blogcritics Magazine.

Copyright © R. Kossover, 2009

In March 1933, Adolf Hitler took power in Germany after a rigged election where his thugs had burned down the German parliament building and had blamed the main opposition, the Communists, in order to gain more votes. He instituted a dictatorship in Germany and tried to bring his country out of the economic depression that the collapsed stock market in New York in 1929 had led to.

Dictatorships occur from time to time in the history of all peoples — had Hitler been primarily interested in using a dictatorship to bring Germany out of an economic depression, I suppose he would be a national hero today. He succeeded in bringing his adopted homeland to a certain level of prosperity, as well as restoring Germans' pride in being Germans.

But, this was not Hitler's only goal. He had a vision for the world, one where Germans, styled Aryans, would rule the planet and all other peoples would be subject to their rule. And in his vision, certain people were to die. Gypsies, now called Roma, were regarded as a criminal class to be executed. Homosexuals were regarded as deviants to be executed. People who in one way or another did not come up to snuff were to be executed. But the most important group of people who had to die were Jews. In the eyes of the racist Nazi philosophy and religion, Jews were a race who stood against all that was good, and had to be exterminated, the way one exterminates cockroaches. Hitler was very clear about all this. His book Mein Kampf (My Struggle) detailed what he felt had to be done.

He proceeded to have laws passed that progressively impoverished the relatively prosperous German Jewish population. At first Jews thought they could ride it out in Germany, that this was just another of the many many Jew-hating Germans to rule Germany — that this too would pass. But by 1935, they realized the problem was not going away, and this man and his party were intent on destroying their community. They began to flee Germany, seeking desperately first to preserve their money, and then when they realized the mortal threat, their lives. Neighboring European nations began to see more and more German Jewish refugees and decided, at a conference at Evian, France, that the doors to these refugees would largely be closed.

At last, German Jews, desperate for a place to run to, began to run to Mandate Palestine; a few short years previous they never would have considered deserting the civilized Berlin for Mandate Palestine. But now they were happy to get out. Thousands of Jews settled in Tel Aviv and Haifa, giving a distinct flavor to the buildings they had erected.

However, while the Jewish Agency in Mandate Palestine was welcoming the new arrivals, happy to see the Jewish population of the country grow, Arabs under the leadership of the so-called "mufti of Jerusalem", Amin el-Husseini, first protested against the new arrivals, and then began a violent rebellion. From 1936 to 1939, the Arabs ran an intifada against the British and the Jews both, killing Jewish civilians and British soldiers and functionaries. The Jewish Agency, which had formed a territorial defense force to protect the kibbutzím, the collective farms, from Arab attack, found the British seeking to "legalize" this territorial defense force, known as the haganá, so that they could have police and soldiers to defend against Arab terrorism. Today, in Beit Agrón in Jerusalem, you can see photos of Jewish kids from the haganá training to serve as police for the British.

This was not the only British response. They called together a commission from the House of Lords, popularly known as the "Peel Commission" to investigate the situation and in 1937 it met and came up with a solution - partitioning the Mandate into Jewish, Arab and British cantons. This solution was rejected by the cabinet in London, and a decision was made instead to restrict and to finally end Jewish immigration to the Mandate. According to the terms of the "White Paper" of 1939, each year 15,000 Jews would be allowed into Mandate Palestine for a period of five years. Afterwards, Jewish immigration to the Jewish homeland was to stop entirely. One can go into long histrionics about how this was a betrayal of the British Mandate - a Mandate of the League of Nations to erect a Jewish National Home - indeed, the British did betray their Mandate. But that is not for this article.

Between 1936 and 1939, at the same time the Arabs were rioting and committing terrorist acts in Mandate Palestine, the German state had re-occupied the Saarland, had annexed Austria, and had occupied and annexed Czechoslovakia, along with all the Jews that lived there. By 1939, thousands of Jews were extremely anxious to get into Mandate Palestine, and when the British effectively shut the door to Jewish immigration to the Jewish homeland, the vast majority of these Jews had nowhere to go. This inconvenienced the Nazis, whose original plan was to expel Jews to one central place (after robbing them of all their property), the Land of Israel, and exterminate them there. This is why when the Nazis took over Austria, they gave quite a number of Jews one way tickets to Mandate Palestine. I know a tailor in Jerusalem who received such a ticket from the SS.

Amin el-Husseini, originally a sort of protogé of the British, decided in 1939 that he had enough of them and fled, eventually turning up in Berlin, trying to curry favor with his spiritual hero, Hitler. He tried to make himself useful to Hitler, organizing a pro-Nazi coup d'état in Iraq in 1940, and after the British suppressed that, el-Husseini trained Albanian Moslems in a division of the German army. In addition, he lobbied Hitler hard to exterminate the Jews in Europe, not in the Land of Israel. This was a major factor in the construction of death camps in Poland, rather than mere slave-labor camps to hold Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and other Slavs. We can reasonably state that the death camps arose from, among other things, an Arab desire not to see dead Jews littering up what they felt was to be their homeland. It is worthwhile to note that whatever excuses Egyptians and other Arabs gave later, they too, were fans and admirers of Hitler. This is especially true of Gamal Abd-el Nasser and Anwar el-Sadat. Amin el-Husseini, for his part, gave Hitler an honorary nom de guerre, Abu Amar. Yasser Arafat, the protogé of el-Husseini, took that exact nom de guerre, Abu Amar, for himself, indicating to his own followers that he would follow in Hitler's footsteps — and exterminate the Jews.

In spite of this Arab betrayal, the British were true to the Arabs, and kept the doors of Mandate Palestine closed — or as closed as they could manage. It is not that Tommy Atkins actually shut the gas chamber door and tossed in the Zyklon B himself — but by shutting the door to the best refuge that millions of Jews could get to, the British condemned many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Jews, to a terrible death. If it were merely the British, one could say, well, the British don't count for much in the world, dependent as they are on the Americans. So, let's look at the Americans.

The Americans went to war because the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in the Territory of Hawaii, and because the Germans declared a state of war between the United States and Germany. The Americans had already effectively allied themselves with the British and when they finally got war production up to a sufficient degree, they supplied the British with armaments and flew huge air-raids over Germany and eventually Poland. They fire-bombed German cities, leaving them in ruins, and eventually invaded France via Normandy. It was after the invasion of Normandy that the Germans could have deduced that the Americans had broken their Enigma Code (protecting this secret — that they had broken the German Enigma Code — was the excuse the USAAF used for not bombing the concentration camps). But the bottom line is that neither the British nor the Americans ever bombed a concentration camp, or even the train tracks to concentration camps. So between the British locking Jews out of Mandate Palestine, and Americans and British refusing to bomb either the concentration camps or the track leading to them, the Nazis had a relatively free hand in their determined attempt to exterminate my people.

So, in other words, for me now, it is not a matter of merely visiting Yad Vashem or another such memorial and seeing thousands of childrens' shoes and condemning the Nazis who snuffed out the lives of these children. There are also the Americans and the British, who by their omissions in refusing to bomb concentration camps, and by the commission of preventing Jews from reaching the best possible refuge, who contributed mightily to those deaths. The term "un-indicted co-conspirator" almost fits.

So in addition to remembering those who were heroes in attempting to save Jews' lives, the Schindlers and the Wallensteins, we must also remember those who by their actions contributed to their deaths.

Forgetting or forgiving is not a luxury the Jewish nation can afford when one third of its members have been exterminated. So, we cannot forget or forgive the Nazis; we cannot forget or forgive the millions of European collaborators in Nazi-occupied Europe; we cannot forget or forgive those who shut the doors of Mandate Palestine and who thereby condemned untold numbers of Jews to the most horrible of deaths; we cannot forget or forgive those who refused to bomb the Nazi death camps, or even the tracks leading to those death camps. Finally, we cannot forget or forgive the Arabs who lobbied so hard for the building of death camps in Europe - they are the true inheritors of the satanic Nazi cult today, and they carry it on today in cooperation with the new Jew-haters of Europe, Canada and America.

We cannot forget — we cannot forgive; and we Jews must do all we can to see to it that our enemies who rise against us today are killed so that we may live.

Flash Comes of Age

בס''ד

Originally published at Desicritics.org on 2 April, 2009
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2009

My youngest son was on the computer, working on the layout of a book I'm editing. His older brother was already asleep, hugging the wall as is his wont. I watched Avi as he manipulated boxes from one end of the page to the other, fitting the text I had edited in them. He was impatient, like his father is, muttering curses in Arabic and Hebrew to vent his frustration.

Flash, our cat, was laying in his bed, a small round piece of fabric with a furry piece of cloth inside. Whenever our kids are home, Flash follows them as though they were demi-gods. You can almost see the anticipation on his face. "What's next, you big hairless cats?", he seems to be asking. And whenever it is evening, and when our kids are in their room, he sleeps in his special bed in the corner. I was looking at him, thinking of how we had dragged him a third of the world away from where he was born to be with us. He is not a pet, he is our friend. Every day, I get, among my other e-mails, e-mails seeking homes for wonderful cats. This will never happen to Flash; he is part of the family.

As I dwelt on that thought, my mind drifted back to St. Paul, to a winter Sunday morning about 12½ years ago.....

Flash came of age this morning.

Flash has been our living-room lion. He is light tan with barely noticeable stripes on his body and rings on his tail. We got him 28 months ago at the county Humane Society when he was 10 weeks old. He purred in my wife's arms like he'd always belonged there.

We brought him home and the little thing ran all over the house as fast as lightning. That's how he got his name. Since then, he has grown to a respectable fifteen pounds and his lightning has slowed a bit.

We were reading the paper in bed when we heard our sons' screams from downstairs. "There's a dead mouse in the dining room! Mommy! Daddy! You gotta come see! Flash killed a mouse!" I didn't quite believe the last part about Flash actually having made the kill.

Just under two years ago, a month after we had him de-clawed, we noticed Flash stalking the kitchen appliances. Our stove, refrigerator and spice cabinet all stand cheek by jowl on one side of the kitchen, with cracks only small enough for a mouse to crawl out of. Flash's attention was focused on the spice rack - two revolving shelves enclosed in a cabinet.

After finally recognizing the feral stillness of a hunter, I opened the cabinet and turned the rack. There was a leap. Fur raced past me. The paprika can was knocked over and Flash had a grey brown mouse in his mouth.

He deposited it on the kitchen linoleum. Then he growled at it, and hissed and spat. When the mouse started to move, he stopped it with his paw, and tested it in his teeth.

Then Flash picked up the mouse, which struggled with its tiny legs, and carried it into the dining room. There he put it down once again, growled at it some more, hissed at it and played with it with his teeth and his paws. Again the mouse tried escape. Flash caught it in his mouth and brought it into the living-room near the phonograph which sits diagonally in the corner of the room. But instead of beginning to feast on his prey, he dropped it on the carpet and walked a foot away to watch. This time, when the mouse ran, he got under the phonograph where Flash's paws couldn't reach. Flash sat by the phonograph, waiting. The mouse made a run for it under the coffee table toward the sofa. Flash leapt at it and missed. The mouse fled toward the other corner of the room and got behind the sofa. I tried moving the sofa, so that Flash could get behind it and chase it down, but Flash just meowed with discouragement at the phonograph. When I picked up Flash and brought him to the sofa, he returned to the phonograph to look for the mouse. He looked so puzzled and disappointed. Meanwhile, the mouse had made its way back to the kitchen and the safety of our fortress of appliances where it disappeared. Later, traps we set caught two mice.

It was then that I concluded that Flash was just a living-room lion, the feline equivalent of a nebbish.

My sons continued to yell about the dead mouse in the dining room. My wife went downstairs to see what the commotion was all about. I was putting on my robe when she returned. The mouse was in a Dixie cup. One arm and one leg was missing. This mouse, with reddish brown fur on top and white fur beneath, looked very dead.

Then my youngest started in about the mouse turds. "The mouse pooped on the carpet, Mommy!" he yelled. "Come and take a look!"

I examined the mouse in the cup while my wife went down to examine my son's claims. She yelled up to me. "It is mouse poop, Ruvy! There's a pile of it and it's soft. Ooh, it stinks! Yecchh! Now, I have to wash the carpet off."

I continued getting dressed, grateful to be upstairs. "How's the cat?" I yelled down.

"He looks very content," my wife answered. She sounded frustrated "He's licking himself and sitting on his chair. Why don't you come down here and help me?"

I'll never know exactly what happened because Flash is too modest to tell me. A walk through the kitchen when I got downstairs revealed the probable tale of events. The trap for the mouse was set inadvertently by my oldest son, who hungrily munched on peanut butter cereal and left a mess on the floor. After leaving the mess, he came upstairs to lay down with us in bed. Then the mouse came out to check the cereal.

Bad move.

Flash caught the mouse, scared it into an upsetting intestinal episode, and gobbled up an arm and a leg.

Flash got more than just the pleasure of his first kill this morning. For a reward, he got some gourmet cat food in a can, which is something he craves.

He is more than just the living-room lion who relaxes on a chair that matches his fur. Now, when he walks, he holds his head up high. He's a mouser who's earned his keep. There is almost a swagger in his step; he has come of age.

Avi stopped manipulating the keys in the computer. Merely sensing that cessation of action ripped my thoughts back to the present. Feeling the vibration of his cell-phone, he answered before it rang, as is his wont. The conversation was in English. It ended with, "I love you, honey."

I worry for Flash. As much as he can, my son wants to be with his girlfriend. I can't blame him - and it sounds serious. Not only that, but Avi will be in the army, home only on weekends - if that. My wife will be worried sick - I'll be lonely for him. But what about the tan ring-tailed cat who views him as a big brother?

When Avi's brother gets a job in a couple of years, who will be Flash's companion then? It will be just my wife and I. We both love him dearly, but it just isn't the same. When the boys aren't home, he wanders the house, lost and lonely. We're not "his big hairless cat-brothers".

Flash came of age 12½ years ago. Now, our sons are coming of age. If Flash doesn't die of loneliness for them, at least it won't be an empty nest altogether.

A Pre-Passover Analysis on Events in Israel From the Samarian Mountains

בס''ד

Originally published at Blogcritics Magazine on 5 April, 2009
Copyright © R. Kossover, 2009

This writer has been relatively quiet on events occurring here in Israel. The new Netanyahu government installed here a few days ago did not seem very different from the old one that just left. Terms like "right-wing" or "hard-line" found in the mass media are just not accurate in describing the new Netanyahu regime. The Likud party that Bibi Netanyahu wants to head is really "Labor Lite", a point underlined by the fact that Netanyahu aggressively courted Ehud Barak of the real Labor Party to join the government. The real Jewish nationalists in the new Knesset - members of the National Union Party of Ya'acov Katz - were carefully excluded.

There are serious differences between Netanyahu and Barak. Netanyahu is indeed a "right-winger" when it comes to economic policy. In attempting to run Israel according to this "right-wing" economic philosophy, Netanyahu will encounter real opposition not only from Labor, but from SHAS, the political party that seeks to represent MizraHi Jews in Israel. But these upcoming clashes are not that important just yet, though they will dominate the Hebrew press after the Passover holiday.

The pressure points that the opposition might have levied on Netanyahu immediately, motions of no-confidence, and stalling the budget, are being thwarted by two measures.

One is a bill that will push off for 45 days the final deadline for the adoption of a national budget, a budget that was not adopted because of the elections leading up to Netanyahu's accession to the prime minister's chair. Adoption of the budget (or rather failure to adopt a budget) is a government-busting event. If the Knesset fails to adopt a budget on time the prime minister can be forced to resign. By pushing off the deadline for 45 days, Netanyahu gets time to try to re-rig the budget to fit his right-wing views. In addition, the Netanyahu cabinet will attempt to pass a budget for two years, Fiscal 2009, and Fiscal 2010, and thus remove this possible "killer arrow" from the opposition's quiver for a while.

The second measure is a series of electoral reforms that will make it harder to unseat a sitting regime with motions of no-confidence. Some explanation is needed here for those who do not live under parliamentary type regimes. The Germans were the first to adopt a "positive vote of no-confidence" which requires those seeking to replace the Bundeskanzler the federal prime minister, with an absolute majority of the votes in the Bundestag the German equivalent of the British House of Commons. In addition, those seeking to replace the Bundeskanzler had to have another candidate in mind, named in the motion of no-confidence. The Israelis copied this German technique for ensuring greater stability of a cabinet. Netanyahu wants to strengthen these copycat measures by requiring a majority of 80 members to overthrow a government (there are 120 Knesset members, and so 80 votes amounts to a ⅔ majority - something very difficult to attain in any legislative chamber). In addition, he wants to raise the bar for parties seeking entry into the Knesset from the present 2½% of the votes cast - effectively kicking out the National Union Party from the Knesset next time round unless it can double its vote totals. Theoretically, these measures can be seen as "good governance" - but in reality, they reduce the possible choices the Israeli voter faces to "the lesser of a few evils", effectively shutting out the voices of many Israelis from government. The technique is different but the end result is the same. Look familiar?

As I point out, these issues are not the immediate ones that need to be looked at. The immediate issues that need to be looked at are found at Debkafiles. In today's (5 April 2009) lead article, US, Japan, S. Korea, Russia fail to intercept North Korean ballistic rocket launch, we find this money line: "And North Korea showed Israel that it was dangerous to rely on Washington and the rest of the international community and their diplomacy to put a stop to Iran's drive for a nuclear weapon."

It's important to remember the real source of this information - the Israeli Mossad. Debkafiles is the back door of the Israeli Mossad, and they almost brag about this at their site. These are spies or former spies who want very much to believe that America is an ally of Israel. They are admitting that this belief - the wet dream of nearly every Israeli leader - just ain't so. So, as this writer has been telling you and everyone else who could read his words, Israel is on its own. We are alone, and if we want to prevent Iran from attacking us, we will have to do it alone. End of discussion.

The second important issue found at Debkafiles is the result of a poll of Arabs living in Judea and Samaria. According to an Independent Norwegian poll: Palestinian majority opposes two states. Here's the money line: Its main discovery was that a majority, 53 percent, of Palestinians (like Israelis), is against two states. Both Jews and Arabs living here oppose this two-state solution garbage pushed by the great powers and the establishment media here and throughout the world. So, to put it bluntly, it is time to abandon a bad solution that will never pass muster with the 10 million inhabitants of the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. It is time to finally listen to what they have both been saying for quite some time - "we want one country here!"

I speak for the majority of the population here in saying that we do not want any Arab state here. Given that we are the majority, and we have the overwhelming military ability to enforce that statement - NO ARAB STATE HERE - then there should be one State from the Jordan to the sea - ISRAEL. The solution? Judea, Samaria and Gaza must be annexed to the State. End of conflict. Those Arabs who insist on dismantling the Jewish entity must be expelled, and if they actively rebel, they must be killed. But the details of living together can be worked out.

There is no reason to kick Arabs or Jews out of their homes here. If the king of Jordan hasn't got the foresight to give Arabs in Judea and Samaria citizenship in his kingdom, they will have to become citizens of an autonomous Arab entity in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, a self governing district that will effectively control most aspects of governance in the territory it controls. But the present "rulers" of the territory, el-FataH and Hamas, terrorist organizations both, must go. In addition all the copycat organizations, PFLP, Islamic Jihad, HizbAllah, etc. etc. etc. must also go. In short, they must leave or die. If that takes a war to establish finally who rules in Israel, then so be it. We have had wars before. But any Arab willing to live in peace in this country should be welcomed and his security on his land guaranteed. At the national level there should be several commissioners to represent this Arab entity, commissioners chosen by the Arab government of the autonomous entity. There must be in place a program to develop Gaza, Judea and Samaria, with an emphasis on expelling the UN and all of its representatives and a program to establish micro-loans to small Arab enterpreneurs, and macro loans to larger ones, a program similar to MATI, which helps Jews establish businesses here in Israel. With this kind of a mechanism, Arab refugees can be repatriated from Lebanon, which actively discriminates against them. There is no reason for Jews or Arabs whose ancestry traces to this land, to live where they are not wanted.

Would the Egyptians be happy with this? No. Would the Syrians be happy with this? No. Would the Saudis be happy with this? No Would the Iranians be happy with this? No. Would the Americans, Europeans and other imperialist powers in the world be happy with this? No. But frankly, their wishes do not matter. We live here, and we must make the best of what we have here - the rest of the world be damned.

And now a reminder for all Americans reading this article. Your president, the alleged leader of the free world Barak Hussein Obama, bowed to an Arab king at the G20 meeting a couple of days ago. So we know who is really boss, don't we? It is not your president

To my Jewish co-religionists who think they are getting the best of things by staying in Exile, remember that Passover, the holiday upon which our Redemption will be based, is coming in a day or so. There are four words at the end of the Passover Seder that can save your lives if you do what they say:

NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM!