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Rabbi Meir Kahane remains a target for those who do not understand him - 31-years after assassination by NYC's W.T.C.-bombing crew

Op-ed by Meir Jolovitz in Israel National News

He was a radical. And anti-establishment And he hated to see the Jew as victim after the bitter memory of a Holocaust when too few acted.

As part of the prepublicity for the most recent of a series of books that have been written during the past thirty-five years about Rabbi Meir Kahane, Internet sites dedicated to Israeli or Jewish affairs offered their readers a new invective, a preview of what I consider an academic diatribe. Three decades after the murder of the controversial rabbi, it seems transparent that the intent was to disparage and disgrace the man and his memory. In doing so, the truth fell victim. The truth about Kahane. And “Kahanism.”

The most recent manifestation of several previous studies of this type was the release of Shaul Magid’s Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. The Dartmouth College professor, who is also affiliated with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, presents us with a 296-page assault on a man whose place in modern Jewish history will long outlive all the attempts at armchair psychiatry.


Magid targets a reading audience which knows neither the real history of radical Jewish politics of the 1960s, 70s and 80s America, nor of the nationalist politics in Israel from 1970 through 1990. His study – of a man and his impact – offers a portrait that works only if one is unaware of the political, social, and psychological dynamics that fueled that generation of political activists – and their movement.

This work, to my mind, contains historical mistakes, non-facts written as facts. Space prohibits a detailed cross-examination which would expose research whose conclusion was already know, but the author describes what he sees as historic facts in such a manner that any reasonable reader will see how they corroborate his thesis.

Rabbi Meir Kahane was a radical. He was anti-establishment. But he also hated to see the Jew as victim. And he employed the bitter memory of a Holocaust that raged when too few acted. He too-often saw the world as black and white, and he responded accordingly, and angrily. He became the resident militant rabbi against an American backdrop whose landscape had become politically-charged. True, True, And true. In the face of societal and political issues affecting Jews, if Rabbi Meir Kahane did not exist – someone needed to invent him.

And, it seems, if one couldn’t find an author to castigate him – someone needed to invent one. Every number of years. Now, we have the most recent iteration with the publication of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical.

Rabbi Meir Kahane was indeed controversial. Because he needed to be. Because no other American Jewish spokesman gave a damn about the growing anti-Semitism that targeted so many Jews in the streets of New York. And because too few others had addressed the issue of the persecution of Soviet Jewry for fear that they would upset those establishment people who preferred quiet diplomacy. The same diplomacy exercised by Franklin Roosevelt’s court Jews.

The problem that the rabbi confronted then – more than fifty years ago when he established the Jewish Defense League – was the trouble he caused when his actions made noise. But it was a noise that needed to be heard.

Of course Rabbi Meir Kahane wasn’t the only innovator among Jews who stood up, historically, to rebel against anti-Semitism. But he was a voice representing a small minority – of another minority. As others before him had been. His heroes were Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yosef Trumpledor, Menachem Begin, Shlomo Ben Yosef, Dov Gruner, Meir Feinstein, and their compatriots of the Irgun and Lehi in Eretz Yisrael.

It was their memory that motivated him – this too-small select group of modern Jewish warriors whose names were sadly unknown, or unspoken, in too-many Jewish homes. Certainly not in America. It was not, as Magid’s book would intimate, some psychobabble about the Black Panthers in New York or Chicago. For the rabbi – not yet a radical – it was about Jews standing up to be counted. However few.

But establishment Jewish leadership attacked him – vilified him – because if he was right, then they were wrong.

We recall that Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in the pre-State days, had denounced Ze’ev Jabotinsky as 'Vladimir Hitler'. Not because Jabotinsky was, as others had argued, history's most misunderstood Zionist. It was because his methods were considered extreme (read: unpopular, and sometimes militarist) by the Jewish establishment. And of course, tragically, history proved him right. Yes, Jabotinsky was right.

In Israel – during this period, the exploits of Rabbi Kahane in America were viewed, in the circles that mattered, as brazen. And heroic.

In the Soviet Union – the exploits of Rabbi Kahane and his JDL “hoodlums” were seen as brazen. And heroic.

In the poor sections of New York – where the ADL was not found – JDL leader Rabbi Kahane was seen by the frightened and forgotten senior citizens who his JDL members protected, as brazen, and heroic.

But, in the opulent offices of the American Jewish leaders – he was seen as brazen; and the enemy.

"The baleful consequences of failing to deal with Islamist extremism" by Melanie Phillips

by Melanie Phillips in JNS 21 Oct '21

Sir David Amess and alleged stabber, Ali Harbi Ali, a Moslem of Somali descent

On both sides of the English Channel, the failure to grasp the nettle of Islamist extremism and the frightening consequences of that failure are sounding an urgent alarm for the whole of Western society.

Last weekend, a British Conservative Member of Parliament, Sir David Amess, was stabbed to death in his regular constituency meeting. The man accused of murdering the MP, Ali Harbi Ali, is a British man of Somalian descent who had been referred to Britain’s anti-extremism program but had not been considered a threat.

Although the police are treating this as an Islamist terror attack, virtually all the anguished public debate since the murder has been instead about the culture of incivility on social media and the resulting threats to MPs from violent people of every stripe. Islamic extremism has been all but ignored.

This surreal reaction reflects a perverse development in British political culture. This is an exaggeration of the risk from far-right terrorism while the much greater threat from Islamist terrorism, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the 43,000 suspects on MI5’s watch list and the overwhelming majority of recent terror convictions, has been underplayed.

A report by the Henry Jackson Society think tank says that since 2015, when a Labour MP, Jo Cox, was murdered by a white supremacist, referrals of Islamist extremists to the anti-extremism program have been down by 80 percent while right-wing referrals have been rising.

Yet as an intelligence source told The Telegraph, right-wing extremists “do not present the same risk as Islamists by any distance, by a factor of four or five to one. More time has been spent than appropriate on right-wing extremism and not Islamism.”

Many British Jews also have their heads firmly in the sand. Surveys show that Muslims are three to four times more likely to hold anti-Semitic views, and from anecdotal evidence are disproportionately involved in anti-Jewish attacks. Yet the Jewish community leadership smears those who call attention to this as “Islamophobes.”

The Director of L.A.'s Sephardic (Jewish) Educational Center, Rabbi Buskila, describes how much anti-Israel hostile, Islamo-Marxists filled Los Angeles' streets during Israel's defense to Hamas offensive rocket attacks. Thousands of  Muslims & Leftist protesters marched - under-opposed by patriotic Americans and supporters of the Judeo-Christian Holy Land (as well as the (dis)organized Jewish communal leadership). Recorded June 10, 2021.

In France, this situation is far worse. France has a largely unassimilated, violent and anti-Semitic Muslim community that presents a deep threat to Jews and non-Jews alike. Islamist terrorist attacks there over the past six years have left more than 250 killed and 900 wounded.

There has been a steady stream of Islamist murders and other violence committed against Jews, a situation worsened by the reluctance of the French authorities to deal appropriately with anti-Semitic attacks.

The last of many such last straws for French Jews was the court ruling in May that a Muslim who murdered Sarah Halimi, an elderly Jewish teacher in 2017—by beating and pushing her out of the window of her Paris flat after a series of anti-Jewish comments and shouting Allahu Akhbar!—wasn’t responsible for his actions because he had been high on marijuana.

Many French Jews have been moving to Israel, deciding there’s no future for the Jewish community in France and even that Europe as a whole is finished. That fear is also gripping wider French society, and accounts for the extraordinary rise and rise of Éric Zemmour.

Zemmour is a nationalist provocateur who, although he hasn’t even declared himself a candidate for the French presidential election next year, now dominates France’s political debate. A poll last week put him on 17 percent, ahead of all other rivals to President Emmanuel Macron.

Zemmour, the Jewish son of Algerian immigrants, calls himself a Gaullist and says that unless immigration is checked, France will become an Islamic republic.

Unlike former U.S. President Donald Trump, with whom he is often compared, Zemmour is highly intelligent and intellectual. But just like Trump, he has bust the political scene wide open.

This is because he has put on the table the key issue that no other politicians dare discuss: French national identity, and whether France will survive in the face of Islamization.

Zemmour says it won’t. Many agree, which is why he’s packing them into his rallies across France with fans in “Zemmour 2022” T-shirts chanting: “Zemmour! Président!”

In Britain, Western Europe and America, those who dissent from liberal dogma hostile to fundamental Western values, the nation-state or the existence of Israel are intimidated, smeared and canceled.

Britain, where an epic revolt by the people against liberal universalism delivered Brexit and thus restored the United Kingdom as an independent sovereign nation, is nevertheless run by a political class that continues to refuse even to identify the Islamic holy war being waged against it. Britain therefore cannot defend itself against that attack.

America is well on the way to destroying itself through the hatred of its identity and values with which it has indoctrinated so many of its citizens. The resulting moral and cultural vacuum is being exploited by an alliance between radical Islamists and black, anti-white extremists intent on bringing down America and the West.

Most American Jews, having bought into the intersectional ideologies fueling this onslaught to some extent at least, are incapable of acknowledging the threat these pose to Jewish life.

In Britain, Jewish community leaders promote the fantasy that if they line up alongside intersectionality’s purported “victims,” the Jews will be afforded protection.

The West is like the apocryphal frog being uncomprehendingly boiled in the pot. In Britain, the pot is being heated very slowly; in France, it has reached boiling point; and in America, it has boiled over with many Jews actually helping turn up the heat.

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Watch top Jewish and Israeli experts at The Jerusalem Post Annual Conference - Live-streamed from Israel

At the Annual Jerusalem Post Conference, speakers and panelists discuss the health, economic and security challenges plaguing Israel, and the growing gap between Israelis and Diaspora Jews. They also celebrate the country’s innovation and successes, and tell the story of how Israel went from Start-up Nation to Vaccination Nation.

 

 

Program Schedule (Israeli Time - London+2; New York +7; Pacific +10)

  • 8:40 a.m. - Opening Addresses. M.C: JPost editor-in-chief Yaakov Katz

    Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion

    President Isaac Herzog

    Prime Minister Naftali Bennett
     
    Ron Lauder, President, World Jewish Congress

    Larry Mizel, Chairman, Simon Wiesenthal Center


    9:30 a.m. - When Innovation Meets Your Bank Account
    Bank Discount CEO Uri Levin


    9:50 a.m. - The Future is Now
    Israeli Philanthropist Sylvan Adams in conversation with Yaakov Katz


    10:05 a.m. - Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman in conversation with Yaakov Katz


    10:15 p.m. - Financial Trends in 2021 and Beyond
    Eitan Neishlos, Fintech Innovator, Investor & Philanthropist (speech)
    Chief Investment Officer of Clarity Capital Eran Peleg in conversation wtih Gwen Ackerman, Senior Writer, Bloomberg


    10:35 a.m. - Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar in conversation with Yaakov Katz


    10:50 a.m. - Cybersecurity: Staying Safe in a Dangerous World
    A series of one-on-one interviews between Seth Frantzman and:

    Gil Shwed, CEO, Check Point

    Yevgeny Dibrov, Co-founder and CEO, Armis Security

    Shirona Partem, VP of Corp Devel & Strategy, KAPE Technologies

    Rubi Aronashvili, Founder and CEO, CYE

    Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk, General Manager, Microsoft Israel Development Center


    11:25 a.m. - FIFA President Gianni Infantino in conversation with Sharon Davidovitch


    11:35 a.m. - Former US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in conversation with Steve Linde, editor-in-chief, The Jerusalem Report