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September 3, 2001

Do Jewish "leaders" want us all to be victims?

By Aaron Zelman
Executive Director of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO).

Are self-anointed Jewish political "leaders" trying to turn America into the kind of hell from which our people have repeatedly been forced to escape for the last two millennia? Are they going out of their way to prove the truth of the old Yiddish adage, "Our own Jews will destroy us"?

And do they aim -- through ignorance or ambition -- to destroy this nation not only for Jews, but for the other 97 percent of Americans, as well?

Yes. If they have their way, they will.

But it hasn’t always been this way. Jews and America have been good for each other.

Jews have enriched this country through achievements in science, law, business, arts, and culture. Our contributions range from the sublime to the ridiculous. Although we are less than three percent of the population, we constitute 21 percent of all Nobel Prize winners. We’ve kept America laughing by producing 80 percent of its comedians from Groucho Marx to Jerry Seinfeld. In every war since the War Between the States, Jews have fought for freedom in disproportionate numbers, often with great distinction.

America, in turn, has blessed the Jews. Our forebears came here to enjoy the freedom of a nation whose government -- unlike those from which they fled -- was bound within strict limits. The Bill of Rights, our chief protector, has stood against the savagery that might otherwise be perpetrated by prejudiced individuals, institutions, and governments.

But judging by the mewling of many self-anointed leaders you’d think the blessings of freedom counted for nothing. In their minds and in their mouths, it’s "victim" this and "victim" that.

These "leaders" depict the U.S. as a nation where helplessness, mindless violence, and bigotry prevail. They tell us we are under siege from extremist organizations and hate groups -- often choosing "enemies" so unlikely that a knowledgeable person is struck with bemusement. For example, one of the latest groups defamed by the Anti-Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith is the peaceful but confrontational protest group, the Tyranny Response Team. Founded by a Jew, Bob Glass, the TRT has fought harmful legislation by wearing yellow Stars of David and handing out flyers showing victims of genocide. But because the legislation they oppose is "gun control," which the ADL supports, the ADL assigned "hate group" researchers to investigate them. ADL representatives then reported to the media that they need to "watch" the group because of the "kind of people it might attract."

Professional Jewish leaders demand obeisance to a vision of Jews as helpless and passive by nature -- childlike victims toward whom the entire world, not just the perpetrators of the Holocaust, owes groveling remorse. They preach that our entire nation is populated by similar victims whose sufferings give them an unquestionable moral claim -- victims of poverty, disease, racism, government funding cuts, ignorance, sexism, violence, and a whole host of newly discovered inequities and inequalities.

And they invariably propose one balm to heal all miseries: government. And more government. Government unbound, unlimited, unhindered.

In speeches and votes, Jewish legislators cry for an expansion of government power so limitless it makes the carnivorous alien plant in "Little Shop of Horrors" look like a rose in spring. Politicians are joined in their socialist cry by other Jewish leaders like Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League and Nobel-Prize-winning scholar Elie Wiesel and media voices like Ed Asner and Barbra Streisand.

In their utopian vision, government is a godlike, all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, force for good. That is -- for whatever "good" politically powerful groups can impose by force.

One of the "benefits" Jewish leaders want to impose is disarmament. Not trusting ordinary men and women to own guns, they work toward the day when uniformed soldiers, police, and other agents of the state will hold a monopoly on the legal use of lethal force.

Have these Jews forgotten their own history?

Have they forgotten that, from Pharoah to Stalin and Hitler, powerful governments have been their worst tormentors, their slave masters, their ghettoizers, their inquisitors, their slaughterers?

They certainly have forgotten that, throughout history, the "benevolent" government that courts Jews one day turns on us the next and sends us into exile, suffering, and death. For two millennia, that’s been the reality of Jewish existence.

Do they want Jews to be victims? And worse, do they want us to become, in reality, the nation of victims that populates their imaginations?

A history of Jewish heroes

Jews who nowadays crusade for the omni-benevolent, but omni- controlling Nanny State have forgotten the proud Jewish traditions of self defense, self reliance, and armed opposition to tyranny. Thankfully, earlier American Jews had a better grasp of their history.[1]

Before the U.S. was a nation, Jews like Asser Levy and Jacob Barsimon demanded their right to bear arms and patrol with the local militiamen in New Amsterdam colony. They had to overcome the resistance of Pieter Stuyvesant, the colony’s anti-Semitic governor, who didn’t trust them with guns and wanted them to pay a tax so a Christian could bear arms in their stead.

Haym Salomon, friend to Washington and Lafayette, was an American for just 13 years, from his immigration to his death. But in that time, he was the major financier of the Revolution. He also gave interest-free loans to Madison, Jefferson, and several generals of the Continental Army -- then died broke when both public and private debtors defaulted on $638,000 owed him.

While most Christian colonists remained neutral or turned Tory, the majority of the Jewish community supported freedom from oppressive government.

And so it has gone through U.S. history. In the War Between the States, the Union Army had eight Jewish generals and six Jewish Medal of Honor winners. Confederate Jews fought valiantly for the states that had respected their individual rights when the North rejected them. Isadore Busch of St. Louis was one of the most prominent abolitionists in the Midwest, while Judah P. Benjamin -- the first practicing Jew ever elected to the U.S. Senate -- became Secretary of War, Attorney General, then Secretary of State in the cabinet of Jefferson Davis. He was known as "the brains of the Confederacy."

Jews rode with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. In World War I, Sgt. Ben Kaufman was threatened with a court martial when he refused to stay in a hospital after being wounded in a gas attack. Shortly after, in the Argonne forest, he charged a German machine gun nest, despite his shattered right arm hanging at his side. Lobbing grenades with his left hand, he ultimately captured the machine gun by menacing its crew with an empty pistol. Then he took a German prisoner and went back to reveal the location of German lines to his commanders.

From Admiral Hyman Rickover, Father of the Nuclear Navy, to the merest grunt slogging ashore on an embattled beach, Jews have fought and died -- bearing arms.

They preserved the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights in turn protected their liberties by binding government -- the most potentially oppressive, murderous human force on earth -- in the chains of law.

Jewish law and armed defense

By taking up arms, these heroes followed Jewish law and tradition: A Jew may choose to defend against aggressors, but when the threat is ominous, a Jew must fight back.

The Talmud, the code of Jewish law, states: "If someone comes to kill you, arise quickly and kill him."[2] The Sixth Commandment, poorly translated as "Thou shalt not kill," is more properly translated from the Hebrew as, "You shall not commit murder." It does not forbid the righteous taking of life. The Book of Exodus (22:1)[3] further confirms this, assuring us that "If a burglar is caught in the act of breaking in, and is struck and killed, it is not considered an act of murder" (assuming the intruder is breaking into our home at night, when it is hardest to judge his intent).

In Genesis 14:11-24, Abraham (Abram), rescues his nephew Lot, held captive by four kings, by arming 318 servants and hunting down, violently attacking, and dispersing Lot’s royal captors.

Because earlier American Jews followed these traditions of righteous defense, they enjoyed life and freedom while their cousins died by the millions at the hands of Hitler and suffered under Stalin.

How things have changed

Jews have benefited so greatly from America’s limited government that the epithet "statist Jew" should be as unbelievable as "kosher ham."

Jews have fought so well that when modern Jews sneer at arms and those who bear them they dishonor the memory of their own ancestors. What would Judah Maccabee -- the brilliant warrior who captured Jerusalem from the Greeks and rededicated the Temple (a man once described as "Arnold Schwartzenegger wearing a yarmulke")[4] -- think of today’s weapon prohibitionists, who wouldn’t have allowed him to bear a sword?

Jews have suffered so grotesquely for their modern inability to defend themselves that their "leaders’" moral repugnance toward firearms constitutes suicidal self hatred.

Nevertheless seriously misguided zealots -- "useful idiots" in communist argot -- continue to lead the charge to strip all but an elite few Americans of the right to protect themselves and their loved ones.

Sen. Charles Schumer sponsors or co-sponsors every major victim disarmament bill. He’s followed closely by Sens. Boxer, Lieberman, Levin, Feingold, and Kohl.

There’s almost no expansion of state power that these and other politically influential Jews don’t consistently support: nationalization of health care; thought-crime laws ("hate speech"); federal control of education; foreign adventurism; rent control; tax-paid child care; institutional education for toddlers; federal management of family life; subsidies for business; wage-price controls; surveillance and databasing of the population; subsidy or censorship of art; draconian law enforcement; and greater spending on any program that creates more government dependents or partisans.

But to the drive for citizen disarmament, they bring religious fervor.

Charles Schumer praised prominent anti-gun activist Sarah Brady, telling her at a Congressional hearing, "You are doing G-d’s work."[5]

But who exactly is Chuck Schumer’s god? Certainly not the G-d of Judeo-Christian teachings -- the G-d who championed righteous self-defense in the name of life. Does Schumer worship the golden calf? Or perhaps he was referring to Anubis, the Egyptian god of death who conducted souls into the underworld. Or Set, the Egyptian god of chaos who personified evil. For evil and death will reign in a world where thugs are armed and disarmed victims bow helpless before them.

Consider the Religious Action Center of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (AHC), a Washington, D.C.-based group that bills itself as the "hub of Jewish social justice and legislative activity in the nation’s capital." This group has built an anti-gun curriculum for children and adults that makes hatred for self-defense a religious issue. Its first goal: "To see the issue of gun control not only as a political issue, but as a moral obligation."

The AHC adopted a disarmament resolution in 1999 that called for members to make gun-control one of their highest priorities. That resolution cited "the biblical injunction that we must not stand idly by the blood of our neighbor." The bible cite is ironic, given that the AHC urges policies that ensure that good people will have no means to defend their neighbors from bloody- minded thugs.

In ignorance of Jewish law, Rosanne Selfon, vice president of Women of Reform Judaism, joined the 2000 Million Mom March, telling the media. "We have a moral obligation that emanates from Torah and G-d." Ms. Selfon should brush up on authentic Jewish teachings by consulting Rabbi R. Mermelstein via his online "Ask the Rabbi" column.[6]

Rabbi Eric M. Lankin, executive director for the New Jersey Region of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, cites the Jewish tradition of actively doing good and bettering the world as the reason why gun-control "resonates with the Jewish community."

Indeed, Jewish tradition says, "Destroy a life, you destroy the world; save a life and you save the world." Yet these leaders, in the name of religion, would turn the world over to destroyers and render life savers powerless to protect their neighbors, friends, families, or nations.

Some Jewish religious leaders make sincere and thoughtful, though tragically wrong, arguments. Others often sound as though they’re merely parroting clichés they’ve heard on TV -- "gun violence," "for the children," and the well-debunked canard "43 times more likely to be killed by a gun in your own home." But it’s not until you enter the realm of the secular Jewish leadership that you encounter the most unthinking prejudices.

Several years ago, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership compiled evidence that demonstrated how, in nation after nation, gun-control laws have preceded mass slaughters of civilian populations. When JPFO presented these findings to Elie Wiesel, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he refused even to consider its evidence. Wiesel, who has said, "To remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all," wrote a two-sentence response: "I received your recent letter linking ’gun control’ laws with genocide in the twentieth century. Sorry, but I am for gun control. "Under Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has departed from its mission of defense against bigotry. Adopting a political party-line agenda, the ADL itself spews bigotry against gun owners. The ADL calls for tolerance, but turns around and smears those who oppose its disarmament goals as "extremists," "paranoiacs," "bigots," "gun-nuts," and "haters." Thus the Anti-Defamation League becomes the Defamation League.

And the toll of freedom-hating Jewish "leaders" goes on.

One step leads to another

In nine major genocides of the twentieth century, at least 74 million people were slaughtered by their own governments.

• 1915 - 1917 Ottoman Turkey, 1 - 1.5 million Armenians murdered.
• 1929 - 1945 Soviet Union, 20 million people opponents (or perceived opponents) of Stalin murdered.
• 1933 - 1945 Nazi-occupied Europe, 20 million Jews, Gypsies, disabled people, homosexuals and political opponents of Hitler murdered.
• 1927-1949 Nationalist China, 10 million political opponents, army conscripts and others murdered.
• 1949 - 1976 Communist China, 20 million political opponents, rural people or "enemies of the state" murdered.
• 1960 - 1981 Guatemala, 100,000 Mayan Indians Murdered.
• 1971 - 1979 Uganda, 300,000 Christians and political rivals of Idi Amin murdered.
• 1975 - 1979 Cambodia, 1 million educated people murdered.
• 1994 Rwanda, 800,000 Tutsi people murdered.

Each mass murder was preceded by enactment of gun-control laws. Each murdered population was first disarmed. Leaders of each murderous government were looking for an unpopular group on which to pin the blame for persistent problems. The newly published book Death By Gun Control [7] by Aaron Zelman and Richard W. Stevens has the details.

What will happen if the U.S. allows itself to fall into that vicious spiral?

Don’t believe "It can’t happen here." It can. When powerful people, seeking to impose perfect solutions from above, find that every road to Utopia fails, they’re all too willing to take the path that lies over the bodies of the dead or the enslaved.

Efforts to legislate sweeping, top-down solutions to human problems always fail, and for two good reasons. First, not all human problems can be solved. Second, any attempt to impose universal, one-size-fits-all solutions from above not only fails but generates a new set of "crises" and abuses.

Try to halt violence by restricting gun ownership and you won’t halt violence. But you will create entire classes of new criminals -- people who make paperwork errors, violate technical specifications of law, or rebel against the new restrictions. And you’ll create new bureaus, new enforcement arms, new prisons to punish them. You’ll make hordes of lawyers and bureaucrats very happy. Organized criminals will be grateful to the naive moral crusaders ("useful idiots") as they profit by selling an illegal product. And ordinary street criminals will bless fools, legislators, and "leaders" for making their job so much safer.

Look around the world. In the UK, criminal use of handguns increased 40 percent in the three years after that country decreed a near-total ban on those weapons. Between March 1999 and March 2000 alone, crimes committed in Britain with handguns rose by nearly one-third.[8] These are handguns that, according to the law of wishful thinking, don’t exist. A similar ban enacted in Australia resulted in a 3.2 percent increase in homicides, 8.6 percent more assaults (especially on the elderly), and an astonishing 45 percent increase in burglaries, with the undefended elderly once again the prime victims.[9]

"Gun-control" advocates scoff when we call their aim "victim disarmament." But unlike their "gun control" -- which controls nothing except law-abiding people -- victim disarmament is an accurate term. Deadly reality demonstrates that when the Schumers of the world say they want our guns, what they’re really saying is, "We don’t care if some woman gets raped. We don’t care if old folks are helpless in their own homes. We don’t care if children die from pitchfork-wielding madmen because we’ve prevented children from accessing guns. We just care about having control."

If your goal is gang violence and the deaths of women, the elderly, and the helpless, get in line behind Chuck Schumer, Abraham Foxman, and the god Anubis on the road to death.

Today’s "reasonable gun-control" becomes tomorrow’s catastrophic failure. But the answer, for those who love control, is never to say, "That didn’t work; let’s get rid of it." Instead, when one restriction on firearms possession doesn’t miraculously end all violence, proponents cry for another and yet another. The result is an endless escalation. True believers demand ever-greater harshness in enforcement and seethe with ever-greater desire to punish those who break the burgeoning laws. Sometimes, as their desperation mounts, they merely strike out against conveniently identified "troublemakers."

Jewish leaders forget that, once this kind of mindless spiral of blame and punishment seizes a society, the Jews often become its victims.

I say to you self-enthroned Jewish "leaders," you don’t lead me, as you lead your followers down this path to destruction. You don’t represent me in any way, nor do you represent many fine Jews who value all of the Bill of Rights for all citizens.

But I’m afraid someday I’ll have to pay -- as both a Jew and a freedom-loving American -- for your folly, you Jews who have sight but no vision.

Now I ask Jewish leaders:

Why, if guns are so evil that their mere possession drives otherwise peaceful people to violence, do you want police and military forces to be better armed than you? Have you forgotten the glowing death’s heads, the silver lightning, the sleek black boots and tailored uniforms of the Nazis who rousted your parents and grandparents from hiding and drove them like farm animals to slaughter?

Have you forgotten one of America’s open secrets -- that until recently the upper echelons of the U.S. military were virulently anti-Semitic? That while Jews were dying in Europe U.S. Army officers and intelligence agents were (as Joseph Bendersky documented in The Jewish Threat) convinced that Jews were dangerous, subversive, and malign?

And these are the people to whom you want to grant a monopoly on the use of armed force?

If your vigilance fails and a genuine hate group really does take over America, how will you fight them, once you’ve disarmed yourself and your countrymen?

Why?

Why is the Shoah, the Holocaust, glorified above the memories of the heroic deeds of Jews? Why not glorify the memories of unflinching heroes: the Maccabees, and the bold young men and women of the ghettos of Warsaw and Vilna who took a stand for life, not death?

Why do Jewish leaders ignore the indisputable fact that Jews who took up arms against Hitler survived in larger numbers than their passive brethren?

Why do they ignore accounts like that of Harold Werner, a Polish Jew who took to the woods with other partisans rather than submit to the ghettos and camps? In Fighting Back, Werner told not only how he and his fellows bedeviled Hitler, but how, as Hitler’s minions retreated, Jewish partisans used arms to protect other Jews from beatings and murders by anti-Semitic civilians.

Is it mere ignorance of history when Jewish leaders disregard these facts? Is it slavish, propagandistic devotion to police state policies? Or is it a death wish?

Is it some macabre sense of irony that causes them only to remember passive death on Holocaust Remembrance Day -- when the very date was chosen because it fell within the weeks of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion, an act of courageous self- and community-defense that should live in our memory for millennia?

Most Jews in America are just like most other Americans. They mow their lawns. They pay their taxes. And many of them send money to groups like the ADL, telling themselves, "It’s all taken care of. The experts know what they’re doing."

In their passivity, they make the same mistake ghetto Jews made when relying on the wisdom of the Judenrat, the Jewish Councils, who in the name of "reason" and civility, betrayed them to Hitler and the death camps.

Some Socialist-leaning, anti-gun leaders may be passionate but wrong-headed; a few may be venal, with their main goal to keep the golden goose laying eggs. Many worship power and value "connections" and the ability to "get things done in Washington."

Their desire to curry favor with political establishment is reminiscent of Jews of the Weimar Republic, who believed themselves to be assimilated ("more German than Jewish," so the saying went), but found out how tragically they’d deceived themselves when Hitler came to power.

Most members of Europe’s Community Jewish Councils (called Jewish Federations in the U.S.) never learned -- even after they had been shut into ghettos, even after they’d helped select thousands of fellow Jews to be marched to death camps -- that appeasers, in the end, share the same fate as those whom they betray.

American Jewish leaders are naive if they believe they can evade the consequences of history. They are evil if they knowingly lead us all toward that familiar fate.

How can professional victims like Elie Weisel walk through death camps, yet deny the need for self defense?

History shows that the biggest murderer of Jews and of other minorities has not been hate groups but governments that have become drunk with power.

If you believe "It can’t happen here," ask the survivors of the Branch Dravidian church whose family members were gassed and cremated. Ask members of the Bonus Army, peacefully protesting veterans of World War I who, in 1932, were gassed and burned out of their Washington, D.C., tent city by a military force led by those all-American heroes Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and George S. Patton. Ask the students at Kent State, the WTO protestors in Seattle, or the veterans of WWII who had to form an independent army and recapture their Tennessee county by force of arms from a brutal and corrupt government in 1946.

Ask the Japanese Americans who were forced into what the New York Times accurately called concentration camps, their possessions looted, their lands stolen.

Even as they cry remembrance, Jewish leaders have forgotten these things -- just as they have forgotten the underlying causes of Hitler’s Holocaust.

As Dr. Sarah B. Thompson wrote in "Raging Against Self Defense,"[10] many who hate guns and believe they can end violence by banning a tool are suffering a kind of mental instability. They project their own fears and aggressions onto others. They imagine threats from inanimate objects, disregarding the intentions of the possessors of those objects. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, they deny that criminals will still get arms and menace innocent people, no matter how many laws are passed. They identify themselves as victims and boil with unstated rage against anyone they imagine has the strength to victimize them. The same amorphous anxiety that gives an edge to the humor of Jewish comedians shows itself in Jewish leaders’ desperate fear of guns. They feel threatened, and it’s easy to point to firearms and say, "If those just go away, I’ll feel better."

When that false hope of inner peace and security fails, as it inevitably will, what -- or who -- will political zealots turn on next?

The challenge

Jews have a reputation for being intelligent. But it’s stupid to destroy the Bill of Rights, the one document that has created a historic haven for Jews when all the rest of the world has been against us. If the guardian of the Bill of Rights -- the uninfringed right of individuals to keep and bear arms -- is destroyed, how will we defend ourselves when tyrants come to take our freedom of speech, religion, or trial-by-jury or our protections against self-incrimination, unwarranted searches, or cruel and unusual punishment?

I challenge true Jewish leaders to promote Bill of Rights Day on December 15 instead of giving all their energy to the self- perpetuating Holocaust industry. Promote that special day and mean it. Learn the significance of every amendment and support every shining one of our 10 protectors.

Pursue justice -- by getting off the backs of peaceful people. Put restrictions only on those who do harm.

Promote self-reliance instead of perennial victimhood. Support the right of all Americans to make our own decisions, including the decision to buy, own, and use firearms responsibly.

"Choose life," as our traditions bid us, by living peacefully but developing the skill to protect your family, friends, neighbors, and nation from those who choose death and destruction. You can’t choose life by throwing Holocaust literature at those who wish you evil.

When you cry, "Never again!" tell me how you’ll enforce that cry. Because make no mistake, there are people who will be happy to push us all into gas chambers again. And if we don’t stop them, then our disarmed and demoralized neighbors certainly won’t -- especially not if they perceive that we were instrumental in disarming them and destroying their liberties.

I challenge you, Jewish leaders, to do what’s best for all America. Warmly embrace all of the Bill of Rights for all citizens, In the long run, that’s what’s best for Jews and Judaism -- and for the world.

NOTES

[1] For more information on Jews in the U.S. from colonial days onward, read A History of the Jews in America by Howard M. Sachar (Vintage Books, 1992).
[2] Tractate Barachot, pages 58A and 62B.
[3] In some translations, this passage appears as Exodus 22:2.
[4] "Judah Maccabee!" http://aish.com/a/chanukah60/judahmaccabee.asp. (Sorry, links appears to have expired).
[5] By tradition, most religious Jews do not spell out or speak the name of the Almighty outside of religious settings. Therefore, we use "G-d" in this article to designate the G-d of the scriptures, but we spell out references to a pagan "god" or "gods.".
[6] "Ask the Rabbi" is no longer on the JPFO web site.
[7] Death by Gun Control, Aaron Zelman and Richard W. Stevens, Mazel Freedom Press, 2001; distributed by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.
[8] Gunter, Lorne. "Gun Laws Spur More Crime." Edmonton Journal, February 17, 2001.
[9] Dougherty, Jon E. "Crime Up Down Under." WorldNetDaily, Friday, March 3, 2000, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=15304.
[10] "Raging Against Self Defense: A Psychiatrist Examines the Anti-Gun Mentality" by Sarah Thompson, M.D. can be read online at http://jpfo.org/filegen-n-z/ragingagainstselfdefense.htm.

Copyright © Aaron Zelman 2001. Permission is granted to distribute this article in its entirety, so long as full copyright information and full contact information is given for JPFO.

May 5th 2008 ......... we received the following comment from a new member ..........

 

 

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