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Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada: Killed Not for the Color of His Skin but for His Jewish Faith (Judean Rose)



Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada died of his wounds three days after an Arab terrorist set off a bomb at the bus stop where Ben Ma’ada stood, awaiting his bus. Ben Ma’ada was murdered because he was a Jew, and he was buried as a Jew. But you might not have read about him in your newspaper. That’s because Ben Ma’ada doesn’t fit the CRT narrative of the Jew as white and privileged.  Privileged he was, as a Jew who “came home” to Israel from Ethiopia 21 years ago, but white he was, of a certainty, not. 

Not that it matters even one little bit. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew. It’s not that we “don’t see color.” It’s that we don’t care. Ben Ma’ada died al Kiddush Hashem, in sanctification of God’s name, because he was murdered precisely for belonging to the Jewish nation. That makes him holy. In Hebrew, in fact, martyrs are referred to as kedoshim, holy ones.

Ben Ma’ada wasn’t one of those “we are the real Jews” like Kyrie Irving, Ye West, or the Black Hebrew Israelites, but an actual real Jew who had zero interest in a trinity, or even Malcolm X.

Ben Ma’ada, after undergoing the Jewish purification ceremony, was buried in his tallit, his Jewish prayer shawl, like every other Israeli Jew. Those who paid their final respects, wore kippot, yarmulkes. 


The Black Hebrew Israelites, on the other hand, during their recent march on New York in support of Kyrie Irving distributed leaflets that left no doubt as to their religious affiliations, reading in part:

“The biblical Israelites are targeted and accused of hate day and night without rest. Our knowledge of our heritage and laws has been systematically removed from us through the monstrous holocaust known as the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They may lie to the world and deny us of our birthright, yet Jesus the Christ, our Black Messiah, confirms the truth of who we are. We are not antisemitic, we are Semitic.”

To the Black Hebrew Israelites, it is Black Christians who are the real Jews, a nonsensical idea. Because the Jewish belief in one God, a belief certainly shared by the Jewish martyr Ben Ma’ada, is the diametric opposite of a belief in a trinity. For a Jew, it’s simple: God cannot be both dead and alive, nor is he a son of himself, while somehow a father, all at one and the same time. These ideas are not consonant with Jewish thought and practice, and would not have resonated with Ben Ma’ada, because he was a Jew like any other Jew.

Ben Ma’ada’s belief system blows a gargantuan hole into the theory of African American/Arab intersectionality. From Eunice G. Pollack, a retired U. of North Texas professor of history and Jewish studies:

Decades before the current embrace of “intersectionality,” Black political and cultural militants promoted the narrative of the commonality of the oppression of African Americans and Arabs—both colonized by White/racist Jews. Convinced by the Arab League and the Organization of Arab Students, its army on the campus, that in contrast to Israel, which discriminated against people of color, the Arab states were racially egalitarian and that supporters of Israel were “accomplices of colonialism and imperialism,” they sought to forge an alliance with their brown brothers.

The Black Hebrew Israelites are not alone in speaking of Jews as “white” and “racist,” and Arabs as people of color. A foundational belief of the Nation of Islam, founded in the 1930s and associated today with Louis Farrakhan, is according to Pollack, “the delegitimization of Judaism—and the denigration of ‘white Jews.’” Meanwhile, the Black Lives Matter Movement speaks of the “racist” Jewish State, and the “struggle for freedom” of the “Palestinian” people of color.

Several Women’s March co-chairs were not only tied to Farrakhan but endorsed and amplified his antisemitic views. In 2016 and again in 2017, the co-chairs informed Jewish organizers that “You people hold all the wealth,” and that “Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people” (McSweeney & Siegel, 2018; Pollack, 2019). It must be said that Tamika Mallory later clarified that they only meant “white Jews.”

Would Mallory have given Ben Ma’ada a pass as the “right kind” of Jew being that he was the “right kind” of color? Or would she have seen him as an accomplice “of colonialism and imperialism?” It certainly is confusing. You can see why it was just easier for the mainstream media not to say all that much about the murder of Tadasa Ben Ma’ada, who was not white, and could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as oppressing people of color, being that he was, himself, a person of color AND a Jew. Not the fake kind of “Jew as Christian” Jew, but the real deal, born into the Mosaic faith.

But of course, these things are all in the eyes of the beholder. White supremacists hate Jews just as much, if not more than any BLM or NOI activist. Pamela Paresky notes this fact with some irony: “In the critical social justice paradigm, Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil.”

Paresky continues:

The subtlety is that, instead of targeting Jews directly, the target of critical social justice is “whiteness.” But this does nothing to protect Jews. In 2018, when Hasidic Jews were victims of a wave of violent attacks — a precursor to another cluster of bloody attacks to come a year later — Mark Winston Griffith, the executive director of the Black Movement Center in Crown Heights, told The Forward that some black Americans see Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness.”

You could have fooled the white nationalists who gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee from a city park. “Jews will not replace us,” they chanted, looking like nothing so much as gleeful, blood-lusting Nazis at a Hitler rally. Here the word “replace” refers to the Great Replacement, known also as the white replacement or white genocide theory. In this conspiracy theory, in which white supremacist ideology is rooted, Jews promote mass immigration, intermarriage, and other phenomena that could lead to the “extinction of whites.”

And of course, Caryn Elaine Johnson, who adopted the insulting stage name “Whoopi Goldberg” called Jews and Nazis, “two white groups of people.” “If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it . . . these [Jews and Nazis] are two white groups of people.”

Would Goldberg Johnson have referred to the bombing that took Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada’s life as two brown groups of people fighting it out? Likely not. In fact, it is more than likely that Goldberg Johnson has never had the chance to meet a “real Jew” like Israeli Jew Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada, may Hashem avenge his blood. Which may be the real lesson in all of this, which is that, as Paresky says, “Jews should never again accede to being defined and divided in racial terms.”

Nor should we ever again be driven off our land by people who pretend to inherit what God gave to the Jews—real Jews like Tadasa Tashume Ben Ma’ada, killed not for the color of his skin, but for his Jewish faith.

Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!
 

 



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