To Make Or Break A Community?

Photo credit - D. Getsug

Today, our beloved Grand Avenue in Saint Paul was papered over with signs. Not the signs we are used to seeing these days, but pictures of Gaza children with the label MURDERED by Israel. The text on the flyers is very interesting and bears closer scrutiny:

Since its creation in 1948, Israel has committed the most atrocious crimes on the Palestinian population. Murders and brutalities that extend far beyond October 7th. 

As the world silently watches a systematic genocide, we will continue to raise our voices and our stories - of murder,

mutilation, targeted attacks of civilians, and the grim reality of a

ruthless and bloody apartheid 

Spread the truth. Change the narrative. Take a photo.

Palestinians have every right to their land.

Palestinians have every right to resist.

Spread the truth? Change the narrative? 

What narrative would you like? One that buries the history of the region? Instead, how about facing historically verified the truth and confronting your own historically inaccurate narrative?

Israel was created in 1948? They left off the BCE part. 

Apartheid? Genocide? 

How about ethnic cleansing? 

They'll never mention the removal of Jews from Arab lands in 1948. Nope. They conveniently forgot about that housecleaning part. 

Sure, let's forget that since 1948 CE, the Arab countries en masse have been attacking our own indigenous population that is a tiny fraction of the population of the Levant....and can't manage to win.  

A calendar that provides an emerging population with events to be celebrated as a unified community is the first step in creating a unified culture. The Hebrew calendar as set down in the Torah gives us our framework to be unified as a community. From shabbat to the biggies like Rosh HaShannah and the harvest trio, we observe momentous events together. This is true for any unified culture. Christians have Christmas and Easter, and a raft of smaller holy days. Islam has Ramadan, Hindus have a whole raft of holy days, the French have Bastille Day, the Welsh have St. David's Day, and the US has Thanksgiving and July 4th. Every country has a calendar. 

In his novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera wrote:

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Isn't that exactly what that poster is doing? The creators deny the history of Israel, refuse to acknowledge that Judaism predates Islam by more than two thousand years, and take no responsibility for their part in keeping a government that uses their own people as human shields, denies humanitarian aid to the population, and openly robs their own population of a working economy that would bring stability...and quite probably statehood...to their own land. 

I would present a very different version of truth: the Eben family of Ba'eri, Israel:

Chen and his wife Rinat and their four children - Alon (16), Idan (14), Tomer (12) and Nir (8) - began to suffocate from the smoke, ran outside and hid in the bushes. They decided to lie in a pile to protect the children. Little Tomer and Nir laying down, with Alon and Ido on top of them and the parents on top of them.

They were found and shot - Chen, Rinat, Ido and Alon were killed on the spot, while Tomer and Nir were saved. They hid quietly under the bodies of their family members, and in a moment of silence they ran to the window of a neighbor’s apartment and knocked on it. The neighbor opened it and pulled them both in, thus saving their lives.

Comparisons, as Miss Pease, our civics teacher, used to say, are odious, and comparing the tragedy of October 7th to the tragedy of Gaza probably is certainly odious. The genesis of one is really not comparable to the genesis of the other. People asleep in their beds and dancing at a music festival were hunted down, shot, tortured, raped, murdered. 

The war came to Gaza with the hostages. Return the hostages, the war stops.

Still, one cannot dismiss the ponderous sadness and disconsolation of both. The children and civilians of Gaza did not ask to be human shields. They were unwitting participants in a battle they may have known little about. I'm certain had they known their leaders were living the high life safely in Qatar and some of the other states while their homes, school, and hospitals sat over miles of weaponized tunnels and armament command centers, they might have been concerned about their own safety. They expected UNRWA and other UN agencies to provide promised humanitarian aid, completely unaware that it was diverted to support Hamas operatives in a grand style. One can hardly blame them for swallowing and digesting all the propaganda fed to them and to their kids in school, blaming Israel and the West for their abhorrent conditions. Never mind that when they went to Israel for medical care, they were cared for just as any Israeli was cared for. But the poison was already in their veins, fed to them by Hamas. All those dead kids and civilians are a tragedy because they didn't have to die. Their leaders chose that fate for them. 

Keep in mind that when Hamas held that fateful election in 2006, they ran on a platform of cleaning up corruption and establishing an economy. The exit poll for that election is a fascinating study of expectation vs reality. No sooner than Hamas had wrested control, they threw out the rest of the existing government to establish an Islamic state.There have been no real elections since; hence, no opportunity for Gaza to replace them. And beginning a new campaign to replace Hamas is the same as volunteering for a death sentence. 

But the reality right now is Hamas controls Gaza and views its only objective to be the dismantling of Israel and the removal of Jews from their own homeland. On the other side of the fence, Israelis are working to get aid into Gaza. They are protesting the actions of their own government on behalf of the people of Gaza. They are NOT celebrating the deaths of Muslims caught in this horrendous war. And therein lies the biggest difference of all.

Only one group wants this war....and it ain't Jews. 

Meanwhile, back in Minnesota, 2 cops and a fireman/EMT were killed by a crazy barricaded in his house very early Sunday morning. The two cops were from the Burnsville Police Department, and the fireman/EMT guy was a member of the SWAT first responder team. The EMT guy was killed while tending to one of the fallen cops. You can read about it in the link above. Try not to vomit. 

The shooter had 7 kids in the house, 5 of them were his. In fact, he had been awarded 2/3 custody because he had a "stable, high paying" job. He had priors, as well as an injunction forbidding him to have guns. Like that mattered. According to his ex, the kids adored their dad yet he "invited" them to go with him when he killed himself. 

Burnsville isn't far from me. I have friends who live there. It's a suburb like any other, full of just regular people going about their business....while having unfettered access to guns. How is that even possible? I just don't know. This town is shattered. But like everywhere else, nothing will come if it. 

Yeah, we don't have a gun problem in this country. People kill people.

But here's the thing, We, the People are proving ourselves to be completely delusional when it comes to politics and politicians. No one is willing to stand up against the epidemic of people killing people. No one wants to confront a seditious old man who lies non-stop every time he's handed a mike. This is something so disturbing about this and I don't know which disgusts me more: the refusal of We, the People, to admit our lawmakers aren't doing their jobs, or that We, the People, keep re-electing them. 

You tell me.

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

My Aunty Gladknit turns 95 this week

and to celebrate

she became a first time great-grandmother!

Mazel tov, Aunty G!

The woman is a total rock star!