Mattot: A Warning From the Past

I try not to post on Friday and I have never posted anything about my religious feelings before so this is a bit of a departure for Breath of the Beast but I think this is an important exception to make. I have been asked to deliver this week's gloss on the Bible portion in my synagogue and It relates directly to the usual subject matter on this blog. So here is the draft of what I will be saying on Saturday morning.

This is a difficult time of year for D’var Torahs. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the parshas at this time of year are particularly troublesome. Last week was Pinchas the week before was Balak and now this- Mattot. Here is a rough outline:



Moses is near the end of his life. He has led the people out of slavery and been their shepherd for forty years of transitional wandering. They are on the threshold of the promised land and are in the final stages of preparation to go forward and claim their right to that promise. It is not clear if they know that Moses will no longer lead them but Moses knows. The parsha begins with a detailed treatment of the importance and legal implications of vows and oaths. It goes into fine distinctions about the vows and oaths of women and how they are subject to intervention, under certain circumstances, by the men folk (husbands and fathers) in the woman’s life. This is an irritant too- it certainly does not reflect modern Jewish practice. Then there is an abrupt switch to a narrative in which God commands Moses that the people must take vengeance on the Midianites and tells him explicitly that after that is done, that he (Moses) will “tayasafe al-ha-amecha” “be gathered to his kinspeople”. The Israelites go out into battle, return victorious only to find that the slaughter of the Midianites was not complete enough they- have killed only the Midianite men. The Midianite women and children have been spared. Moses then orders them to kill all the women “who have known men” and all of the male children. This done, the parsha closes with the story of how the tribes of Ruvane, Menashe and Gad begin to settle down on the eastern bank of the Jordan, showing a reluctance to continue on to help settle the rest of the people in “the Land” proper. Moses gets angry with them and insists that if they want the right to settle east of the Jordan river, the men of those tribes must agree to first go with the rest of the people and, in fact, become the “shock troops” (the word used is Chalootz also used as “pioneer” and, today, as “conscript”) of the battles to come. They agree to this and the parsha ends with them consolidating their positions and the stage set for the momentous crossing of the river.



I am going to talk about the war on the Midianites first. The vows section and the agreement with Reuvan, Menashe and Gad, can only be fully appreciated in the light of this major event. As it often happens, sections that seem unrelated, when you study them together, often reveal new and deeper ways of looking at things. There is always something sublime and laden with meaning about the way that sections that seem disjointed at first, the way these do, elucidate and clarify each other. 



So, God commanded the massacre of the Midianites and Moses orders it done. It seems irredeemably ugly and cruel to us but there is, no way to ignore it. Many, much wiser readers and interpreters than I, have tried to gloss over, minimize, rationalize or even evade it, because it is so harsh. Plaut, Alter and others say that it is “a story”, hinting that the completion of the murder is just as much of an exaggeration as the claim that not a single Israelite was lost in the initial battle. Plaut makes the point that the Midianites reappear as a people in the book of Joshua and while that might just be a people who have resettled the original land of Midian, it certainly gives an opening for those who would like to believe that there is a more “complex” event here than simple annihilation of innocents. 



Even so, the text is clear. When the battle is over and the killing is not as thorough as required, there is a frank and detailed discussion of who shall be killed. While the killing is never confirmed explicitly, it is never denied either. So, we are left having to accommodate this ancient savagery to our modern sensibility.


I struggled with this too; eventually it came to me, I was not looking at the story in context. Those Jews are not the Jews of today. They are not a group of educated professional people who have grown up in the peace and security of an American childhood. They live in an ancient world where the only way to insure that a defeated enemy’s sons and kin would not continue the cycle of revenge after a battle was to render them permanently incapable of it. The parents of these Jews were brutalized as slaves in Egypt. In Forty years of homeless wandering, they have been under constant threat of attack by every group around them. It was so bad that their movements and encampments in the wilderness had to be organized and carried out as military maneuvers with armed guards on all sides- with orders of march enforced. 

This was the ancient world where there were only three kinds of people- the conquered, the too tough to be conquered and the conquerors. There was no such thing as the UN or World Court- no higher authority- no concept of conflict resolution, there was only the struggle for survival. It is true that you could starve to death easily enough in a famine but the struggle against nature was nothing compared to the need to protect yourself against the depredations of other people.



And what other people! The context on this is even tougher. The vengeance we are talking about here is in response to the Midianite participation in the Baal Pe’or attempt to destroy the Jewish people from within. You will remember that in the parsha Balak, two weeks ago, the Midianites and Moabites conspired to use their own women - to literally prostitute their wives, sisters and daughters in an attempt to subvert and destroy the vitality, cohesion and morality of Israelite culture. 



The attempt had some initial success- many Israelites succumbed to temptation and made sacrifices to Baal. Then there came a plague and internal strife that resulted, we are told, in 24,000 Israelite deaths. 

What a contrast there is between Israel and her neighbors. Given that, in the ancient world, women were not the equals of men and were often treated as chattel, how can there be any comparison between these two cultures? And this is where the relationship between the section on vows and oaths takes on a deeper significance. Here we have Israel, on the one hand, which gives careful consideration and legal respect to the independent vows and oaths of women, compared to Midian, so degraded and underhanded that they use the bodies and souls of their own women as weapons of war. It is abuse of the vilest kind. Midian sacrifices the most intimate relationships and highly charged devotions of the human heart and soul as objects as tools of destruction.
In the history of the Jewish people, we have had to survive all kinds of threats. We have sometimes been able to repel them. At other times we have not. If you are dead, if your culture is conquered by a foreign one, there is no court of higher appeal; moral outrage will buy you nothing at all. I prefer to be able to repel the threat and that is what we see happening in this story; and it is what is happening in Israel today.
Israel the Jewish people (and the Western Judeo-Christian culture which we helped found) face a continuing (a spiraling!) campaign of terror in which the most vulnerable members of both our’s and our enemy’s society are being used as weapons against us. Pre-school children in Gaza, the West Bank and in Madrassas all over the world (even in places in the U.S.) are being taught that it is a sacred duty to kill infidels- especially Jews. Children, women, easily duped young men- even the clinically mentally challenged are turned into walking bombs. Innocent Jewish civilians, women, children the elderly, whose only crime is that they are on the streets of Jerusalem, in a synagogue in Turkey, on an airplane, on a cruise ship, an Olympic athlete or just working in a Jewish Community building in Buenos Aires or Seattle are targeted because they are Jews. Excuse me, let me correct that, Because We Are Jews. 


As the stewards and guardians of the Torah and the progenitors of the Judeo-Christian civilization of the west, we Jews have preserved this Torah- kernel of the most positive and moral culture that has ever existed. The things we have had to do have not always been pretty- or even easily defended but they have brought us to this point. 

The fact remains, though, that we have always done our best to make it as decent as possible. When faced with two very close enemies, Midian and Moab who used their closeness against us; and who, moreover, were willing to prostitute their wives and daughters in order to dissipate and defeat us, the instincts of our people were actually merciful in the context. That ancient army, with the firebrand Pinchas in command, initially reacted, not by total annihilation as is often the custom in modern and ancient wars but by killing only the guilty- the men who had perverted their own lives and those of their women in order to destroy us. Only when the army returned victorious, did Moses in his anger inform them that the women who had allowed themselves to be so used and their sons would have to be killed also. The female children were still to be spared.

With all the trouble and sacrifice our forefathers have had to keep this book and to preserve its teachings, we owe it to ourselves to get over our trepidations and look honestly and openly at this story which has such a relevance for us today.

We need to realize that context works in both directions. If Pinchas and Moses were to come back to life today, they would have as great a problem understanding why Israel does not, today, end the Palestinian problem the same way as they ended the Midianite problem back then as we do understanding how they did what they did to the Midianites.

The times are different. We have evolved but, we are still faced with an enemy who dehumanizes his children, abuses his women and has declared his intention to destroy us- to kill us wherever he finds us. We must stop trying to fit the conflict into our preconceived modern notions of how a conflict “should” be fought. We have to fight the war that is being thrust upon us by an enemy who still lives and fights by ancient rules.
We must stop bewailing or denying the perversion of the other side as Golda Meir famously did when she said, “Peace will come to the Middle East when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us” and protect ourselves from it with positive action. Otherwise, every Israeli child whose leg is blown off by a qassam in Sderot or whose head is bashed in on the beach only to have her killer set free to become a hero to those who want us dead is on your conscience; as is every Palestinian child who is used as a suicide bomber, human shield or just taught to idealize hatred and killing.

If we pay attention to the lessons of this parsha we will see that peace will not come easily when our enemies learn to love their children- they must first be taught that hate and violence is absolutely not going to work. Only Israel and Jews can teach them this and we are failing in our responsibility and as a result violence and hatred are working.

We here in America, like the tribes of Reuvane, Menashe and Gad are settled outside the land and this is where that part of today’s parsha comes in. Mattot means tribes and it means we have to participate. We need to renew the pledge to be in the vanguard of the battle line for our people. Not just for Israel but for ourselves and our children and for America. The Jihadis are not kidding when they chant “Death to the Jews!” and “Death to America!” and our first responsibility is to figure out how to stop the killing- not to understand why they feel so strongly. Midian and Moab had their “reasons” for hating and fearing too. It has always been there.

This parsha has been read every year in every synagogue for thousands of years but it has never been more important for us to really look at it and confront the reality it is showing us. That is the first step- just look at it and recognize what it is- and what is at stake. Then commit to some kind of action, at least learn about what is going on and be an outspoken defender of Israel’s right to exist in security.

For now, there is good news- We still have the power and the opportunity to exercise as much mercy as they allow us to. If we show resolve and willingness to assert our right to safety and security and they make an effort to act in their own best interest, it won’t be so bad. But the window will not stay open forever- Our two millennia of diaspora should have taught us that.

UPDATE
Because of the mixing of religion and politics and because I am fortunate to have a number of people of real depth and intelligence whom I respect and trust to fall back on when I feel I am on the edge, I sent the draft of this post to a few of those people as I was rushing to get it ready before sundown on Friday. It was a last minute cry for help and I got three very helpful responses. Here is a quote from my most Seraphic Friend screenwriter, and blogger Robert Avrech who's blog Seraphic Secret is smart, touching, interesting, informative and witty- any one of which would be enough for most people to achieve. Robert has given me permission to use this from his reply to my SOS email:

I have pondered the Midian slaughter, learned the glosses, and always came to the most simple conclusion—which you do too, in a manner—that this was the way warfare was conducted in the ancient world. If it was not carried out in this manner, you could be sure that the clan survivors would eventually return to extract savage vengeance.

There you have it- I took 2200 words and he says it in 60.

Case In Point- The Abuser Hits and Deflects- The Abused Says "He didn't mean it"

My last post points out how closely the behavior of the terrorists resembles that of abusive domestic partners. Even as I was putting the post up they were busy proving my point. Richard Landes has forwarded me these incredible pictures, taken by his daughter Noa Landes in the immediate aftermath of today's so called "bulldozer attack" in Jerusalem.

With every sly attempt, as today’s, to kill more jews without breaching the “ceasefire” so obviously that we have to admit it- it becomes more apparent that they only want to kill. Then, if the Israeli government has the spine to take measures to prevent murderers from East Jerusalem from getting jobs where they can get equipment like this to kill innocent people with, the helpful advice givers will say, "You are oppressing them and depriving them of their livelihood". Just like the fools who condemn a battered woman by telling her to go back to her husband rather than "tear apart the family" or "deprive the children of their father."

Some Father. Some Livelihood.

Even as the pusillanimous Israeli government began to try to put off any action by floating the theory that it was "an isolated act, the Palestinian Leader, Abbas, in the most cynical of ironic deceptions, called the attack an attempt to derail the peace process. So much deception and denial- you need a bulldozer to clear it away.

We have to stop the madness and suffering now. If you can see that it is fruitless to dialog and negotiate with a domestic abuser why can't you see that the Jihadis will never stop finding ways to do this.

For the good of Western Civilization and of the Palestinian people who suffer because of their ruthless leaders, defeat them!

Indian Guilt and the American View of Islam Part I

Thirty years ago, in a lecture hall at Boston University, I first began to gain an insight into the impenetrable wall of ambiguity that we face when we try to understand other cultures. I was an undergraduate majoring in Anthropology. Our professor had just completed a lecture for the American Indian (I seem to recall they were still called Indians back then) survey course. In that day’s lecture he had made a comment to the effect that it was not possible for an Indian woman of a certain tribe (I can’t remember which one) to leave her husband. A feminist student took exception and approached him after the lecture and I happened to be a bystander as the professor patiently tried a number of ways of explaining to her that there was simply nowhere for a woman to go- no matter what her reason for leaving. In the lives of nomadic peoples there are no homeless shelters and the only survivable economic unit is a traditional family in which every individual played a very specific and confined role. This was clearly not acceptable to my classmate. She put up a vigorous protest, “surely she could go to a friend’s tepee- or set out for another village- even, in a dire circumstance, go back to her parents.” The more the professor smiled and tried to explain that there were simply no resources in such a society to allow for such life choices and that it was a survival issue not a gender-bias one, the more incensed she became. It wasn’t clear to me whether she was arguing in order to get him to admit that he was wrong about his observation or because she somehow felt that putting up a fight about it now could effect some sort of retroactive change for her Indian sisters that lived over a century ago. Then I realized that she was so incensed because like so many students in class she had a finely detailed and impossibly utopian imaginary picture in her mind of what Indian life was like and she simply didn’t want to give up that rosy, personally relevant preconception. This made a very strong impression on me. She was speechless with rage that the professor was accusing her innocent, noble Indians, the people she was convinced were so much closer to truly enlightened and pure beings of being chauvinist, Neanderthal dorks. I was filled with a new appreciation of how prejudiced, ignorant and agenda-driven my fellow intellectuals-in-training were.

Some time later, perhaps as a response, that same professor used the following quote from D.H. Lawrence’s book, Mornings in Mexico. I think it conveys very well the problem of understanding a culture so different from one’s own and it offers an insight into the clash of cultures that is difficult for a westerner to grasp.

“It is impossible for white people to approach the Indian without either sentimentality or dislike. The common, healthy, vulgar white usually feels a certain native dislike of those drumming aboriginals. The highbrow invariably lapses into sentimentalism like the smell of bad eggs. Why? – Both reactions are due to the same feeling in the white man. The Indian is not in line with us. He’s not coming our way. His whole being is going a different way from ours. And the minute you set eyes on him you know it. And then, there are only two things you can do. You can detest the insidious devil for having an utterly different way from our own great way. Or, you can perform the mental trick, and fool yourself and others into believing that the befeathered and bedaubed darling is nearer to the true ideal gods than we are. The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of connection. The sooner we realize this, and accept this, the better, and leave off trying with fulsome sentimentalism, to render the Indian in our own terms.”

I want to be clear, I am in no way saying (and Lawrence wasn’t either) that there is anything wrong, defective or inferior about the Native American. I am saying two things:
1. Once exposed to Western Civilization the Indian way of life was doomed.
2. The life and culture of Indians was so vastly different from ours that it is simply impossible for us to understand the magnitude of the difference.

That being understood, Lawrence had it exactly right and his perception is equally valid when applied to the modern confrontation with Arabian Caliphate Islam. The “highbrows” he was referring to correspond precisely to today’s modern liberals and the rest of the progressive left wing. That fulsome sentimentality he identified in the highbrows is more than matched by the guilty/romantic response of today’s left to the idiotic, provocative accusations of humiliation, cultural degradation and imperialism leveled at all of the west by the Caliphatists.

ShrinkWrapped has a true story on his blog of a client of his who had a particularly bad case of this contradiction. ShrinkWrapped generalizes from this patient’s pathology- “New York liberalism consists largely of sympathy for the deprived, guilt over one's affluence and advantages, and anxiety over aggression and competition. It is a political philosophy that rests on a deep well of emotion and a small dollop of rationality.” ShrinkWrapped is exactly right- what he says goes right to the core of the matter.

Guilt is indeed a powerful force and, in America. Liberal illogic and guilt are inextricably tangeled up together in the history of our relationship with the American Indian. The American Indian is the essential starting point (every bit as much as the colonial past and the holocaust are for Europe) for an American discussion of how to understand Islam in the modern world. There are two main strands in that tangle:

1. For many Americans our historic and emotional relationship with the “native” population is our emotional template for our reaction to the Israeli/Arabic drama If we respond only emotionally to it we miss the very real differences between the two situations.
2. The cultural confrontation with the American Indian and the change it effected between two unequal and very different cultures is a very powerful paradigm that can help us to understand the clash with Islam- if we read it carefully.

The mistake of, to paraphrase Lawrence, “rendering the Islamic Arab in their own terms” has caused many a true, reasonable liberal to become a dupe of the Caliphate and an unwitting dhimmi. Because the liberal mind-set predisposes a left-them to view all other cultures through that self-centered prism of guilt and primitivist love, they are almost powerless to see the danger. How else to explain the left’s blindness to the endless, gory catalogue of atrocities that have been committed in the name of Jihad? It makes understandable (if still unforgivable) how fervent feminists and devoted gay rights activists remain blind to the horrors gays and women face in Islamic countries across North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

As we face an opponent, who captures unarmed civilians workers and journalists, humiliates them in front of a camera and then hacks their heads off with a butcher knife for a public relations stunt; the cowed and guilt-ridden left can do no better than to find fault with our professional armed forces (that are bound by and enforce an internationally sanctioned code of conduct). The beheaders become cultural heroes while the American prison guards at Abu Ghraib are viewed as getting off with a slap on the wrist even after being tried and punished for their behavior. Notwithstanding Abu Ghraib (where is the comparison?) is there any logic or moral responsibility in that preference?

No- it is entirely based on emotion. That emotional combination of sympathy, guilt, unsupported opinion and dreamy primitivism that lead my classmate so long ago to idealize the less complex culture of the American Indians is very common and disturbing. Among liberals there is a nearly fanatical desire to see other cultures as “nicer, freer and more desirable than ours”. This primitivism is a key feature of the personality of the modern left. It is amplified in practice by the tendency of many on the left to rely too much on emotion and opinion and too little on understanding and fact. The combination of good intentions, sympathy and intellectual laziness is the most dangerous geopolitical force the world has ever seen.

Karl Marx spun his fantastic intellectual web of class warfare and communism from it, basing his proposed paradise of the worker on a kind of pass/fail society where no one is allowed to suffer any more or less than anyone else. It has taken a century and untold millions of lost and shattered lives for the real world to prove that this egalitarian dream was a sham destined to evolve into an unworkable nightmare.

Nevertheless, it keeps popping up and causing the left to take the wrong side in just about any conflict you can name. It causes many feminists and activist gays to speak out in blind support of the Palestinians and Islamic countries where women are little more than abused chattel; and homosexuals, if they are allowed to live at all, are brutalized outcasts. It is threatening Israel’s existence today and it has weakened many western democracies to the point that their survival as true democracies, ruled by law and vote, is in doubt.

The west only has one option; we have to start talking honestly and openly about subjects like the American Indian and learning how to handle the guilt and other raw emotions in a rational way. My next post will expand on the painful subject of the Indians and their fate and how it reflects on our response to Caliphate Islam.

The Media - Like Stink on Gaza

Once again Richard Landes finds the story no one in the mainstream media will tell and few in the west have the courage to hear. A huge, open cesspool, part of an immense network of festering waste products has burst this past week and swept away an entire village of 25 houses. At least four people were killed and an unspecified number are still missing. Here’s the BBC story about it.

Note that, in the article cited, the Palestinian leaders immediately attempted to blame Israel and the west for the problem but were cut off at the knees when, “Stuart Shepherd, the UN's humanitarian aid officer in Gaza, said the Umm al-Naser plant had not been affected by the aid boycott, noting there had long been warnings about the plant.” This is especially damning as most UN officials are quick to unfairly accuse Israel and excuse Palestinian incompetence.

This is not anything to gloat or make smug about, this is a tragedy but it is also a crucial opportunity to learn a lesson about the Palestinian plight and the reasons for it. It is the very epitome of the problem with the Arab world.

My Father served in the Merchant Marine during WWII. He told me that at every North African or Eastern Mediterranean port he sailed into, he could smell it from 25 miles out at sea. That smell was the palpable odor of a people trying to live in the modern world with a governmental organization that was not up to the task of providing the services required. The stink that must be emanating from Gaza now is just more of the same.

As Landes puts it:
”The Palestinians still have an insane war to conduct, so they continue to do what little damage they can, while in an Israeli headlock. But rather than say uncle and get on with their (potentially, powerful lives as the cutting edge of an Arab/Muslim entry into the world of modern productivity), they prefer to struggle till they sprain their muscles, as in this sewage spill."

My only Quibble with Landes is that this is much more than a “muscle sprain”. If they thought they felt humiliated by Israel and the west before this, how must they feel now? Unable to make the rational choice of taking some small part of their assets and energy that they continually put into acquiring, stockpiling and discharging weapons toward Israel, they have created a colossal mess. They have ignored the third (food, shelter, sanitation, etc…)most basic need of human life to such a degree that they are now literally awash in their own excrement.

It seems insane, and it is. Here is a people who, along with the Lebanese, once were thought of as the most modern, secular and sophisticated Arabs in the world. The Caliphists and the despotic Palestinian ruling class have them and much of the western media and left wing convinced that they are reduced to wallowing in their own excrement because of Israel. Israel is no more the cause of Palestinian misery than it is the Syrian-led destruction of Lebanese civil society. How much longer can their leaders divert their attention from this insanity by blaming Israel and America? How much longer will they allow the dark forces of Caliphist Islam and the ruling elite of the Arab world to use those excuses for their venality and incompetence? How could this people have allowed their leaders to stunt the growing financial prosperity, social progress and modernization?

Once upon a time, Beirut was known as the Paris of the Middle East. Then Syria moved in and for the past thirty years it has been a terrorist haven and a place of religious intolerance, sectarian violence and fear. It is a terrible irony that now that tired old metaphor has been turned inside out under the same Caliphist pressure. These days, Paris is fast becoming the Beirut of Europe.

The leadership of the Caliphate movement and the presidents and dictators of the despot states of Arabia knew that they would not stay in power long if they allowed the freedom and modernity that was growing in Lebanon to survive. This is why they forced the Palestinian refugees to remain in camps in Lebanon and fed them guns and Islamic mind control. They knew if they kept the Palestinians in poverty and strife and pitted them against the free Lebanese state, there would be trouble.

It was no accident that the nephew of the Mufti of Jerusalem (that infamous ally of Hitler and the man who, more than anyone else, succeeded in encouraging the Arabs living in the land when Israel was created to rise and flee, creating the refugee problem to begin with) rose to become the leader of the Palestinian people. That unprepossessing, grimy little man with his receding chin and irritating speaking voice rose to power not on charisma but on power-broking, outside financing and murder. The Arabs put him in place and set up the Palestinians to be eternal refugees because they knew that this formerly secular, better educated people, like their neighbors the Lebanese, left alone to find better leaders on their own, would settle in (as the Lebanese did after WWII and the “Nakba“) and create a new, more modern and greater Arab entity than the oil-rich, culture poor majority can even dream of.

The despots, ruling families and clerical elites of the Arab world would sacrifice anything to maintain their positions of power. They foment eternal war, poison the minds of their children, starve their people to buy weapons, murder millions of innocents - their own and ours, they would even see their people literally drown in excrement rather than help them to live better lives.

This is why they raped and ruined Lebanon.

And it is also why they backed and financed the terror stooge Arafat to keep the war against the Israelis alive. Arafat knew nothing about making a state work; he didn’t even know how to stop making war when he had an opportunity to make a state, but he certainly know how to secure arms and siphon billions off for his own fortune. This is his legacy, a people helplessly awash in their own excrement- not because they are stupid or dirty but because their leaders have been both for too long.

Even now, our media does not inform us about the stench of mismanagement, repression and corruption. Could it be that they are so dumb they can't even identify the smell of shit? No, they smell it all right and when they encounter any whiff of it here in the U.S. they revel in it. They roast the Mayors, Governors, Representatives, Senators and Presidents responsible. They blow the small ones out of proportion and the make careers out of the big ones. Look at the two years of bathos in aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. As bad as Katrina was, it is not a hair on a flea in comparison with the ongoing, rolling human tragedy that is the entire Arab world. Oh, but it would be racist and ethnocentric to mention that- wouldn’t it?

By exaggerating the peccadilloes of the open, self-policing west on one hand and not reporting the utter catastrophe that is life in the Arab/Islamic world, our own western media is playing a critical role in excusing and enabling the Caliphists. Only holding the responsible people to account will make the situation better. The media has to stop shrinking from reminding the “Poor Palestinians” (and us) that their leaders have betrayed them and that the priority they place on struggle is not just unsanitary but suicidal as well. They need to understand that their behavior does nothing but deepen their humiliation.

Shame on the Arab leadership, shame on the Arab people for suffering such leaders and, most of all, shame on the western media, for failing to inform us of the stink.

The Hammy Awards- A Proposal

Here is an idea I have been toying with for some time- I posted as a comment at Augean Stables yesterday. What do you think?

The “Hammy” Awards

The name of the awards derives from MoHAMed the first name of the 9-year-old boy whose faked death scene was the defining image that led up to the "Al Aqsa" intifada. It also has the added implication that comes along with the practice of calling hack actors "Hams".

It is high time we step back and admit that we have to hand it to the the Islamists, the left and, in particular, the Palestinians. When the staged film clip of Mohamed al-Dura’s faked death was allowed to burn itself into the consciousness of the world, it was the crowning triumph of many long years of an increasingly bold-faced effort that uses the mainstream news media to slander and libel the Jewish State. It should have then been apparent to Jews all over the world that we are losing the media war. The more we are confronted with lies and rage from the “Arab Street” the more we stiffen up and try to be reasonable. The result is that we look like the poor dumb kid in the schoolyard whose only answers are “I didn’t do it” or “He hit me first”. It doesn’t matter that we are telling the truth- those answers don’t fly in the schoolyard and they don’t fly in the mass media either.

As American Jews and Israelis we have to admit that we are not “good copy. We Jews in general and Israelis in particular, grimly pursue ethics and truthfulness. We are dogged researchers and careful about our language. We have a touching but boring faith that being right and dignified will “win out”. We have been repeatedly dumbfounded that we are ignored and even ridiculed.

Its not just Jews who don’t get it. Michael Moore has been able to get away with all kinds of fraud disguised as documentary for decades. He is just beginning to get a little of his own treatment.

We just don’t get it. Most westerners and, especially, Jews don’t think intimidation and deception are the way to win arguments. We despise those who threaten people’s lives (let alone kill them) or riot in the streets when someone says something we don’t like, we answer them with reason, logic and a sincere expectation that if we do a good enough job at investigating and explaining the situation, the truth will win out. Dull, dull, dull. It just doesn’t play well for the news cameras. Apparently, while we weren’t paying attention, the court of world opinion has become the equivalent of the audience of the Jerry Springer Show where the crowd cheers most for the loudest, most obscene threats, the most violent lunges and the wildest haymakers.

That’s why we need to take a moment to recognize how out-classed we have been in the battle for world opinion. It’s not that we are going to abandon our love of truth and the pursuit of justice, it’s just that we have to find a way to make our side of the story both appealing and understandable. We need to repackage it in a “sound bite”.

By acknowledging the success of the other side’s tactics by instituting the Hammy Awards we:

1. Condense our message into a bumper sticker that is more attractive and eloquent than “they are liars and fakers”.

2. Put them on the defensive- for once the will not be “taking credit” for attacks on civilians or accusing anybody of anything.

3. Put aside our serious faces and our dogged pursuit of justice aside for one day and showcase the Jewish sense of humor that the world has loved in so many Jewish comedians, artists and writers. This is a lot more appealing than the usual humorless Israeli generals and politicians who are the traditional spokespeople. It would be great if we could get some well-known Jewish comedians to host the presentations- that would assure media coverage.

4. Embarrass the News Agencies and Media outlets and put them on notice that we can do more than just complain. We can convincingly impugn their reputations in a way the world will pay attention to if they allow the propaganda machine to use them.
5. Raise the indignation of the intelligent News Consumer who will, no matter what their feelings about Israel will be angry at having been fooled by the media’s carelessness and propagation of such transparent fakery.

The awards could be given in various categories of false news. Possible categories might include: Spurious Massacres, Faked Civilian Target Damage, Photoshop Tampering and “Trick Photography”, Untrue War Crime Accusations and Stage Managed Media Events.

Each award could be given to recipients in two divisions one for the originators (be they Islamic agents or biased Nongovernmental Agencies) and one for the complicit media stooges. So, for instance, in the Spurious Massacre category there will be two recipients, one for the fabricator or Non-Governmental Organization official who did the most to create the impression that it existed and the other for the Mainstream Media stooge who was most responsible for it becoming a reality in the eyes of World Opinion.

How about it? Anybody out there have any muscle or lucre to put behind this idea?