When Punctuation Is An Excuse. Not.

            The Nova Massacre Scene

     (photo : Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)

October 7th is on Wednesday. For most of my life, October 7th meant Andrea's birthday, but for the last 3 years, that observance has been overshadowed by the Hamas massacre. It began with a barrage of 4,300 rockets launched into Israel. Followed by para-glider and vehicle incursions. An estimated 6,000 terrorists took part in the attack. Approximately 1,200 people were murdered that day, including 364 who were dancing at a music festival. Many were murdered in their pajamas when their homes were invaded.  Hamas recorded what they did and proudly showed the world the rapes, the murders, the kidnappings as they occurred. Some used the phones of their victims to show their families how they cowered and died. 

But you know all  this, don't you? And you're probably tired of hearing about it. I know I'm tired of writing about it. But that fatigue doesn't do shit for the reality on the ground, does it? In fact, I would guess that the fatigue is exactly what the Hamas PR machine wants: people so tired of hearing about Israel that they can manipulate the narrative away from the reality of a massive attack on sleeping kibbutzniks to turn it into something else entirely.

Jew hatred isn't new nor is it news. There is always someone willing to align anything with a reason to hate Jews. Most recently, it's punctuation. Yeah. You read that right. Did you know that punctuation turned Hebrew from a written to a spoken language developed to colonize and oppress people? I kid you not. A new book by Florence Hazrat, On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, claims exactly that. I cannot improve on Peter Himmelman's brilliant column about this, hence, I shan't even try: 

Hazrat’s book is a history of punctuation—or some punctuation, since it barely mentions the apostrophe, the serial comma, or quotation marks. “On the Mark” is a “the X that changed the world” book, which is a popular genre. Its claim is that “the history of punctuation is the history of humanity.”

This ambition inevitably leads to overreach. If punctuation played a role in everything, what about, say, the war in Gaza? Hazrat finds a link. “Punctuation marks in Hebrew,” she explains, “are relics of a brutal colonial system that is far from over.” Adding punctuation turned Hebrew into a spoken language, “paving the way for an artificial sense of unity among Jewish people from all over the globe, encouraging them to move to the land that already had people—a people made to suffer and bear the brunt of European anti-Semitism in the most horrendous ways for generations.”

Excuse me? Is this woman on crack? Despite having an entire alphabet soup of degrees, she apparently had some cosmic event where she forgot that the original language of Torah is Hebrew and has been since the beginning. Is she thinking Hebrew is only to be admired and never spoken? Clearly, she never been to services on Shabbat or any other morning. 

All things considered, using punctuation to demonize a language is ridiculous overreach. And claiming punctuation moved Hebrew to be a spoken language is even more ridiculous since our liturgy and commentary texts are all in Hebrew.  And how she concluded Jews were not indigenous to that land is beyond comprehension.  What isn't beyond comprehension is the new wave of antisemitism that is promulgated by disseminators of news like The New Yorker, the BBC, The New York Times, and a myriad of others who claim to be reporting the facts when, in fact, they're not even checking the facts. The New York Times' long history of bogus and bullhockey headlines where Israel is automatically villainized is indictment enough. One would think the people of New York would be entitled to journalists actually doing their jobs, but apparently not. 

So, once again, let me explain this so everyone can understand it:

We are not leaving our homeland.
We are not defenseless any more. 

We're not going anywhere.

Why don't you go tell the French to give France back to the Gaul?

How about you all return Scotland to the Scottish people who have been asking for their land back even recently?

Maybe give North Africa back to the Amazigh people who are still living there?
I bet the Kurds would like their country back, too.

How about New York returns land to the Shinnecock, Algonquins, Senecas, Mohawks, and the rest of the tribes from whom they stole it? 

Shall I go on?

Every one of those examples has a much shorter history of land theft than Jews have in modern Israel. Look at the graves. Stones in Hebrew that can still be read. More than 3000 years of conquests and exiles, but we always come back home. 

Ergo, get off our case. Stop trying to tell us we don't deserve to live in our own land. 

Oh, yeah: Happy birthday, Andrea. Now you're as old as me. (Big Giant Grin)

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

If you really wanna free something,

free Palestine from Hamas.

Give them a chance to be a real country.