Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: 07Oct23

Showing posts with label 07Oct23. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 01, 2024

Screams Before Silence: The Proof the Evil will still deny (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

I watched Screams Before Silence* just before the final leg of the Passover holiday. I didn’t know whether I should. After all, I totally believe my recent cardiac arrest was due to the extended anguish of hearing about the atrocities of this war, and due also to thinking about what is still happening, right now, to our hostages. It has been unbearable for months, thinking these thoughts, and then chiding one’s self: ‘You think the thought is unbearable??’

Then you feel guilty for imagining that you suffer at all, for what is only in your mind, in light of what happened, is happening to them, still.

I reason with myself: ‘You shouldn’t watch—it’s almost candle-lighting time. Do you really want to go into the holiday with such darkness in your mind and heart?’

I knew the answer. That I shouldn’t watch Screams Before Silence right then, at that time. It would definitely be completely inappropriate to do so, as one is meant to be happy on a holiday. But I couldn’t help myself—I felt compelled to watch this documentary. It was a need, but also something to dread. I knew it would be bad, hard-to-watch bad.

There was time to watch all but maybe the final fourteen minutes of the documentary, so I reasoned some more: ‘I have an obligation to know, to bear witness, to internalize what happened—happens still. For me as a Jew. They are my people, a part of me.’

So I anyway watch what I can before the sun goes down. It is hard to watch and listen. I cry out, “Oh, God!” several times.

You can’t help it if you’re human.

Did watching Screams Before Silence color my yontif, my holiday? Of course it did. But I managed. By now these terrors, as well as expecting to hear of new terrors every day, are a part of life. Holiday happiness is, at any rate, for the time being, muted.

From time to time, my mind flitted back to what Dr. Cochav Elyakam-Levy, Head of the Civil Commission on Oct. 7th Crimes by Hamas against Women and Children, had to say about the sexual violence of October 7:

This is a kind of pattern we’re seeing, that it’s not just sexual abuse, but it’s sexual abuse in its worst form. It’s like they wanted to inflict pain, in the cruelest manner possible. I think they have redefined evil and in ways that we will need to redefine international criminal law.

Then I would think back to somber recitation of the ZAKA volunteer, of how again and again, they saw the same thing. Hundreds of times. Perhaps more.

When you see one woman, then another and another, all with signs of abuse in the groin area, you understand that this wasn't a random thing. You can't reach that area unless you mean to. It's someone who has come to do different kinds of things to you.

If he doesn't have time, he'll just kill you. If he has a little time, he'll slit your throat. If he has more time, he'll cut off body parts. And if he has even more time, he'll also cause pain and defile, especially if it's a woman. He'll defile her body, not for pleasure but for humiliation. And that's what we saw.

ZAKA volunteer, screenshot from Screams Before Silence

After the holiday, and after I did my share of post-Passover tasks, I watched the last 14 minutes of Screams Before Silence. Then I thanked Sheryl Sandberg—on youtube, on X—we had all been waiting for this film, we needed this film, but she went and actually did it. She made the film.

We need this film to make the world understand. We need it to educate college protesters who don’t even know why they are protesting. After seeing Screams Before Silence, could these same young women continue to ally themselves with who yell, “We are Hamas!”?

🚨VIDEO: A REAL interview we had at NYU:

QUESTION: "Why are you protesting?"

PROTESTER #1: "I don't know. I'm pretty sure there's something about Israel [turns to other person] Why are we protesting?"

PROTESTER #2: "I wish I was more educated."

PROTESTER #1: "I'm not either." pic.twitter.com/8aB2ZoTCCk
— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) April 24, 2024

We needed the film for the people who say it didn’t happen. For the people who say there were no rapes.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Keren Picker (@keren_picker)

And yet, it doesn’t help. Films, photos, testimony, proof of all sorts. None of it matters. They want to believe—choose to believe—whatever fits the narrative they, the haters, prefer to, want to believe.

Some believe the atrocities happened and are exhilarated by them.

They feel Israel/Zionists/Jews deserve atrocities and genocide—they can justify it however they like. They can say we are white Europeans who should go back to Poland or Russia, even though so many of us in Israel in particular, are dark.

Erasing both history and archaeology, they say we stole land from people who were here before us. The truth inversion continues when the liars claim that Jews do to Arabs what Arabs do to Jews, only worse. They will show you a 15-year-old photo of a dead Syrian child and curse the “criminal” Zionist soldiers, implying that to love your country is a crime. If you’re a Jew.

And when you say, “They burned a baby in an oven,” they will smugly smile and say, “That was disproven.”

You can try saying, “It was NOT disproven. It happened,” but all they will do is laugh at you.

“Where’s the proof?” they will say, and you can do nothing, can show them no proof, because that would be wrong.

There are photos, I always tell them, but you can’t see them. And that’s out of respect for the victims. For goodness sake, what have they left if not for their privacy? Do they have to forever be imagined in the world’s collective mind as naked and defiled? Like Shani Louk?

They gave that photo an award. The world lapped it up like a cat with a bowl of cream. They love it when the Jew gets it. They don’t care how.

They don’t even care that they contradict themselves. There are no photos. Give the photo an award. Which of those two statements is true?? Of the widely shared photo of Shani Louk, the antisemites make excuses, because it suits their narrative. “One rape, pffft.” they will say. “That’s your proof of systematic mass rape? One rape?? One rape is nothing compared to what Zionist soldiers do to Palestinian women in Gaza every day.”

They know that’s a lie, a convenient lie. It’s so ridiculous it makes you shake your head in disbelief. It takes your breath away by its sheer, evil chutzpah. The lie serves their purpose. It allows them to look the other way when Arabs rape and deface Jewish women. They twist the truth back on you and tell you the opposite is true.

It’s not just a boldfaced lie about soldiers (who are moral, that you care about)—it’s an aggression. They are raising you one—raising the stakes as if in a game of poker, lying right in your face/computer screen that it is Israel who is the criminal, while Hamas terrorists and their sympathizers are sweet angels, having a “justifiable” moment of rage.

Now some of these people—these liars—are truly evil. Others, we must acknowledge, are merely stupid.

So we needed this movie, and we didn’t need it. Because the film purposely does not display the really graphic images. “Out of respect for the victims and their families,” reads the text at the end of the film, in plain white letters on a stark black background, “we chose not to show explicit images in this film.”

Instead we see Sheryl Sandberg reacting to such images as they are shown to her on the phone screens of ZAKA volunteers. We watch her face as she looks at each photo and hears the volunteers describe she is seeing, what happened to each woman, all that was done to her. If you’ve got a heart and a soul, you don’t need more than you are shown in Screams Before Silence to visualize what happened, and believe it to your core. It is awful. It is the truth.

The Jew-haters on the other hand, will not be persuaded. They will keep on saying, “Screenshot or it didn’t happen.”

Those are the haters. But what about the stupid, the sheep like students caught up in the spirit of the thing, which they confuse with a spirit of justice? Perhaps they have a chance, the stupid, could be educated, if they watch this documentary.

Because the documentary rings true. You know it’s true when the women say they fear rape more than death, and when a grown man, a man big and burly, says “No one can see those kinds of things,” and then breaks into sobs.

Sometimes I think that if I could, I would show the ugly-hearted, Jew-hating campus protesters October 7^th footage on a loop. Such footage, after all, abounds. The terrorists themselves used their go-pros to document their own horrors. This footage is not hard to find. So I was excited when I read just this morning that an anonymous someone had done just that.

Played October 7^th footage to protesters. In a loop. On a big, outdoor screen.

An anonymous group has funded and constructed a giant screen with loudspeakers outside the @UCLA Pro-Hamas Encampments showing footage of the October 7 Massacre on loop.

Bravo to these geniuses. #StandWithIsrael pic.twitter.com/t6bl12gvxl
— The Persian Jewess (@persianjewess) April 29, 2024

Awesome!

Or is it? If the crowd prefers to jeer over allowing tragedy to move them, will it even matter—will it matter what you show them? No. They’ll invert the truth. Laugh at you. Say the footage is “heavily edited” or a photo is “obviously photoshopped”. Whatever lies they can throw at you, they will. That’s the game.

But we’re not playing. For us, it’s not a game. We have a duty to bear witness to the systematic torture of, and sexual violence against Jewish women by Hamas deviants, and so I remain grateful to Sheryl Sandberg. Screams Before Silence is a film that helps us to recognize Hamas for what it is, be firm in our resolve to eradicate this evil, once and for all, from our world. October 7^th was a concerted, premeditated attack against the Jewish people via its women.

As we watch and listen to protesters deny the obvious truth of Screams Before Silence, it will become easier and easier to see that they out themselves, and for us to distinguish between the humans and everyone else.

Humans will care. The evil will not. And should be eliminated from God’s green earth.

*Elder of Ziyon beat me to the punch with his excellent and concise take on the subject, Screams Before Silence, the documentary with select quotes from journalist Brett Stephens.

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!

The Longest Pause: My Cardiac Arrest and Me (Judean Rose, Part III)

I slid off the chair to the floor, but I know nothing of this. I am gone. Only later do I ask Dov, my husband, how it happened. “Slid” was his word. “You slid off the chair onto the floor,” said Dov.

“Did I hit my head?”

“No, the medics kind of caught you and eased you down to the floor.”

“Then what happened?”

“The MDA guy immediately started compressions,” says Dov, with some awe in his voice. He is obviously impressed with the grace and speed with which this impromptu team of medics sprang into action.

I chew this over for a few days, this scenario, as described to me by my husband.

Slowly more questions occur. “What did I look like?”

“You were white,” his voice catches.

I hear that it is too difficult for him to speak about it—he had watched me die. Still, I have to ask. “Like all-over white? Were my lips white?”

“You were completely white,” he says.

I take mercy on him and table my questions. For now.

As for what I remember, it was this. I knew nothing. Not a thing. And then I was aware of blackness, and slowly color came, pixelated at first, and stole over the blackness and I heard, “Varda, Varda!” my husband’s voice, and the medics’ voices, and someone was slapping my face, and the MDA guy said. “Varda, your heart stopped for two seconds. You are going to the hospital.”

“No, no. I don’t want to go.”

Basically, at this point, I was not compos mentis. I think I hadn’t been for much of the time the medics were with me, because if it had really been a money thing—my mind would have long been at rest. The medics called MDA in spite of me, which already meant I was off the hook for payment. And now that my heart had stopped, there was no way I would not be admitted, which meant I would not have to pay for an ER visit. It is therefore impossible for me to explain the true reasons for why I continued to protest. “Is it about the money, or something else?” asked the MDA guy as I continued to protest.

“It’s the money . . .” I said.

“Ah ha! Varda,” said the MDA guy,” you are not going to have to pay. Your heart stopped.”

“. . . and my husband,” I said, in a feeble voice. “He needs me to take care of him,” but no one heard me. They were too busy strapping me onto a stretcher in preparation to take me out of our apartment for transport in the ambulance.

“I’m sorry. I’m so heavy,” I said, embarrassed.

“You’re not so heavy,” said the MDA guy.

As they take me out of the apartment, I see the sky is no longer dark, as it had been when I awoke that morning. More embarrassment, thinking of the neighbors on our quiet street, waking up to the ruckus of medics loading someone in crisis (me) into an ambulance. I feel bad to be the cause of this too early, too noisy, rude awakening.

I am in the ambulance, and as we drive away, I feel as though I am flailing from side to side, unmoored. “But how will I keep from falling?” I say aloud.

“Don’t worry,” says Elisheva the medic, who is also my friend. “We strapped you in very well. You can’t fall.”

It didn’t feel like it. I didn’t feel the straps, but I trust Elisheva. There is no place to look but up, so I do. I am looking at the interior of the roof of the ambulance. Everything is as if in brownout. Then suddenly the brown lifts away and the “ceiling” looks bright white. “I feel better!” I cry out.

Elisheva says, “Good, good!” encouraging me. Then the brownout returns. This happens several times. Each time the foggy, beigey brown clears to white, I say, “I feel better!” surprised. Relieved.

Each time, Elisheva says, “Good!”

At some point during the ride to the hospital, I wonder why this is happening to me. And then I know. It is October 7. It is the atrocities, the war, the ongoing situation with the hostages. I lift my head and look at Elisheva, “The hostages,” I cry to her, knowing she will feel me. “I can’t bear it,” I say and both she and the MDA guy look at me, and the brownout comes once more.

It was the most alive I had felt since this whole thing began. And I knew that what I had promised would not happen, had happened.

At the start of the war I had said to myself, “I will not let Hamas break me,” and now it had. I had broken. It had been too much for me. I was human, flesh and blood. It was too much for a body to bear and not be overcome. I had suppressed it too much. Had tried to, anyway.

I had vowed not to write about the atrocities, not to play the poor us card before the world. I talked “around” the harshness, the hideousness of Hamas and what they had done and continue to do, in my columns. I wrote about rape fear, rather than rape. I wrote about Gazan support for Hamas; the “ceasefire deal with the devil;” the dirty money trail that led to October 7^th; the fickleness of Joe Biden in regard to his (non)support for Israel; and so on and so forth. Anything but to talk about women raped until finally dead, their legs that could not be closed, but stood at odd angles, broken. Raped front and back, the men, too. Women raped in front of their husbands, husbands raped in front of their wives. Daughters, sisters, children in front of parents, in front of each other. Sights and sounds that would haunt the survivors, the few of them that remained, forever.

I vowed not to write about any of this, even as it ate me from inside. I knew it was eating me from inside. But it was not fair for me to be feeling this. I was not the one suffering. The suffering belonged to the raped, the murdered, the decapitated—those who could no longer feel, and those who felt still, wherever they were, in the depths of some tunnel suffering unimaginable horrors.

I remember the day I heard about Hamas baking a baby in an oven. I was in the car with my husband when I read it on X, and I cried out. “What?” asked my husband.

But I could not tell him. First because I was too consumed with the pain, the thought of the baby and what it experienced, and then because I knew it was too upsetting to share. It was something that was new to me. It had obviously just come to light. I didn’t want anyone else to have to know this—to have to live with this knowledge of the baby, in the oven, and what it experienced. Even now, I can’t write about it without crying.

I moaned and cried in the car the whole way home, telling my husband, “You don’t want to know. It’s too awful. It’s too awful.”

He understood I had heard about an atrocity just come to light and he said I was right. He didn’t want to know. So I moaned and wailed the whole way home. I couldn’t stop. I cried about this on and off for days. Couldn’t, shouldn’t wipe it out of my mind, and it ate away at me and ate away at me. But I did not deserve to have this pain, I thought. It wasn’t about me, but about the victims. I had no right to make it about me.

Years ago, when my column was hosted on a different platform, it was understood that the terror victim beat was mine. I had a knack for making people feel the horror, for making it real, for making the victim real, someone the reader had never met. I had a knack for making women cry, reading my words.

And it began to feel icky, to feel exploitative. I didn’t want to have thousands of pageviews only when I wrote about tragedy that didn’t feel as though it rightly belonged to me. It was a writerly trick, no more. I stopped. I didn’t want to do it anymore.

Plus, I have to say it affected me. I took it to heart. I thought about the victims all the time. I dreamt of them. I carried them with me. It hurt my heart. My heart. And finally my heart stopped. It had had enough, had broken.

Hamas had, indeed, broken me. Broken my heart.

Several times a day I think about the hostages and the victims of October 7, and my eyes well up with tears. “No! It’s not about YOU,” I chide myself, though I know that this is my people and I too, own the sorrow and the tragedy.

And yet something inside me feels guilty for imagining that I know anything at all about what these people, MY people had suffered—even now continue to suffer! I can picture it all in my writer’s mind. I’m a creative. I picture everything in “living color,” the full horror of it all. I hear the sounds, the flames, the screaming, I picture the baby. I can’t, I can’t.

***
In the ER, Elisheva sits by me as I go in and out of that strange brownout. “How long is this going to take,” I ask her. “I need to get home to take care of Dov.”

“You’re not going to be taking care of Dov, now.”

“But he just had surgery!” I moan.

“You’re not going to be caring for Dov. And you’re not going to be cleaning for Pesach.

I continue to protest.

“Varda, this is serious,” she says.

Finally, I get it. Just as I finally understood that I had to go in the ambulance—had to go to the hospital. I lie back. I accept it for what it is. I died.

“You weren’t with us for a while,” says Elisheva, “You were lucky you were awake when it happened.”

***

The day the war breaks out, I awaken to the noise of war. Booms. Artillery. I know what I am hearing. My husband comes home from shul to tell me what he knows. But he sees that I know and understand that we are at war.

Not that I did know or understand. I could not have imagined the full horror of it all. No one could have imagined it except for the sick minds of the black-souled terrorists who perpetrated deeds the Devil himself could not imagine and would never have contemplated.

My youngest begins getting ready to go back to base. His elder brother says, “What’s with all the panic? Slow down,” and I hear the younger say, “You don’t understand!” and then whisper something about thousands of terrorists on the loose, terrible things happening, terrible.

He gets ready to go, and as he’s going down the walk to his car, the sirens go off and we make him come back in to go into the safe room. Finally, he is able to leave with whatever food I can pack for him in a hurry.

Later, as the holiday comes to a close, the other son says to me, “Don’t listen to the news. I’m telling you, Eema. Don’t listen to the news.”

Telling me not to listen to the news is like telling me not to breathe the air, not to drink water. I am all about the news. “Don’t do it, Eema,” he says, my son, so wise beyond his years. “It’s not just the war on the battlefield. There’s also the psychological war. They want to break us, Hamas.”

That stays with me. “Hamas wants to break us.”

I vow that Hamas will not break me. I say it to myself all day long—say it until I am blue in the face. But invariably, I hear things on the news. I cannot live under a rock. I need to know what is going on. And I hear terrible things. Things that break me more and more.

Each time I chide myself. “How dare you make it about you? How dare you,” but I can’t stop it from eating away at me. It nibbles at my heart, at the very core of me.

Sometimes I listen to the testimonies of the survivors obsessively. I can’t stop. I also cannot bear to hear them. “You’re not the only one,” I tell myself. “Everyone in the country feels what you feel. Everyone. And the survivors have it far worse—feel it far worse than you ever could”

But the hostages? How can I not feel this? The scenarios of what is happening to them come to me unbidden. I can’t help it. I picture it all. I picture it all. I cannot stop.

And it eats away at me, at my heart, until my heart says “ENOUGH,” and stops on a strange dark morning.

I don’t really understand why, after it stops, my heart once more begins to beat, except that God puts this instinct to live in all of us. We live, sometimes with terrible knowledge, in spite of ourselves. Whether or not we feel we can bear it all—all that life throws at us.

Later, in the hospital, the doctor comes to tell me that my heart stopped for 30 seconds. He seems impressed by this number. My son who accompanies me to the hospital trades glances with me. We’d gone from the two seconds cited by the MDA guy to 30.

That was in the ER.

Sometime after I am moved to the Intensive Care Cardiac Unit, another doctor comes and says, “You had a ‘pause’ of 40 seconds.”

My son and I look at each other, both of us thinking, “First two seconds, then 30 seconds, and now 40??”

The doctor nods. “Yes,” he says. “I counted it. There was a lot of ‘noise’ on the EKG but I counted it myself and it was 40.”

We can see this is a long time from his perspective—that he is impressed by this number.

Actual screenshot from my hospital release letter detailing the 40-second "pause."

The next morning, the ward cardiologist comes to see me and he explains that there are pauses, long pauses, and very long pauses. Mine was apparently impressively long. “That is a LOOOOONG pause,” the white-haired physician tells me, adding that in his entire career, he had never seen such a long “pause.”

After many days and much testing—the tilt test, a shot of atropine, an MRI—the doctors decide to put in a pacemaker. The local anesthetic doesn’t work, and I scream as the knife slices into my flesh. “This is nothing,” I tell myself on the table, “compared to what the hostages are suffering, compared to what the victims of October 7 suffered.”

I am certain Hashem is giving me just the smallest taste of what they felt/feel in their agony. Just the tiniest taste, so that I will have some understanding, just a glimpse of what they went through, are still going through. They deserve that, the victims and survivors. They deserve for us to know and to feel it, too.

Our people, a part of us. A part of my own flesh, my own blood, my own people, my nation. My heart. I hope that in some way, my experience on the table will serve as a kapara against whatever sins had brought this down upon our people. “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my atonement.”

Once home, I ask two cardiologist friends, “What’s the longest ‘pause’ you’ve seen in a patient.”

One says, “Ten seconds,” the other says, “Ten, maybe 15 seconds. Three seconds earns you a pacemaker, he adds.”

Neither one had seen a 40-second pause.

When I go back for my two-week checkup, the doctor squints at me, trying to place me. I say, “I’m the one with the 40-second pause,” and she remembers the case immediately, if not my face. What was my face to these physicians? I was a “pause.”

The longest pause they had seen. I was a miracle: In spite of Hamas, and almost in spite of myself, I lived.

Hamas broke me, but didn’t break me, because I lived.

My heart is not the same and there is lasting damage, yet I live to tell the tale.

I live.

Because that is what the Jewish people do. We live and outlive our enemies. And there is not a thing they can do about it. It’s ordained by someone far more powerful than Hamas. And Hamas will come to know this as the flames begin to lick at their feet for all eternity.

No one can best Hashem. No one. The Jewish people will dust themselves off, never forgetting what has been done to them, and they/we will continue to live.

Our God is more powerful than Hamas, than even the worst that Hamas can do to us. The evil ones will never, ultimately, win.

As for me, my heart will never be the same, and that is only right. I am not stone, should not be stone when my/our people are suffering.

Now I know: it’s not that my heart betrayed me. I had to break, a least a little. My injured heart proved to me that I am human, something that Hamas will never be.

Earlier: Part I: Varda wakes up, and begins to feel truly ill, and Part II: The medics arrive.

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!

More EoZ cartoons

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!

Jewish women don't matter to the UN: @UNWomen tries to bury Hamas rapes. UN Office @EndRapeInWar has not said a word about October 7 rapes.

JTA reports:

Nearly 50 days after Hamas’ attack on Israel left 1,200 dead, and after weeks of criticism over its silence about allegations of sexual violence during the attack, the women’s rights group UN Women issued a statement condemning the terror group on Friday.

Then it deleted the post.

“We condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on October 7 and continue to call for the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages,” read the initial statement, posted on UN Women’s instagram page. It was soon replaced with a statement that dropped the condemnation of Hamas and only called for the release of the hostages.

Reached for comment, UN Women told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the Instagram post had been scheduled in advance and was deleted because the message in it no longer reflected where the organization wanted to put its main focus.

Here is the initial post and what replaced it.

It is pretty obvious that the real reason they took down the post condemning Hamas is that there are a lot of Hamas fans in the UN that were upset..

CNN anchor Bianna Golodryga asked UN Women Deputy Executive Director Sarah Hendriks why they couldn't specifically call out Hamas atrocities. Her response was a word salad about independent investigations that didn't come close to answering the question.

This is all a way to say that UN Women doesn't care about Israeli women victims of war. And it isn't only from October 7 - Hamas sent thousands of rockets all over Israel and women were the targets of those attacks as well. Today there was a terror attack that murdered two women in Jerusalem. Where is UN Women?

UN Women has published about 16 posts on Instagram specifically calling to protect Gazans without mentioning or even hinting at Israeli victims. It cannot be bothered to call out Israeli victims or to condemn Hamas.

But perhaps there is a UN organ that is even worse.

The UN has an Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict. It's X account is named @EndRapeInWar. If any UN organization should condemn the brutal rapes and sexual assaults against Israeli women on October 7, this should be the one.

It hasn't said a word.

The message is clear: Israeli and Jewish women are not a concern to the UN. On the contrary: it actively tries to hide and obfuscate the violence that is aimed specifically at them by Palestinian terror groups.

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!

Where Will Your Children Go to School? (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

--1--

As an American-born Israeli, I have worried about antisemitism on American college campuses for decades. For me, it’s personal. My friends and family are there. I worry about the physical safety of their children, but am actually more concerned that the rhetoric will damage their psyches and souls. When we text or speak I always want to ask, and sometimes do, especially if the kids are seniors in high school, “Where will they be going to school?”

My question is no different after October 7^th, but now I voice it to the collective: Where will your Jewish children go to school, now that all of us know they are unsafe? And where will they go to college?

Will they attend Hillcrest High, where a Jewish teacher hid in a locked office for two hours? Will they go to Citizens of the World Charter School-East Valley where teachers spoke to first graders about the “genocide in Gaza”?

Portland-area teacher Hailey DeMarre launched a harassment campaign against Beaverton School District after they told her to remove a Palestinian flag students had painted on the classroom wallshttps://t.co/QgI1CXX0pw https://t.co/QgI1CXX0pw
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) November 19, 2023

Sometimes I imagine what you are thinking now: How long until it reaches the playground, the grocery store, the synagogue, now that it has been proven without a doubt, that Jew-hatred can rise up, as it did on October 7^th, and sweep across a kibbutz, dance festival, or campus like a tidal wave.

It’s not about October 7^th, but about the nature of antisemitism. Too many of us don’t want to learn the lesson that yes, it can happen again. And it did. Because it’s not enough to say a slogan.

--2--

I knew what this column would be called, but I didn’t know what form it would take. All I knew was that I wanted to talk about the fears that Jewish parents must be experiencing right now. Did I want to focus on the individual schools? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure what I’d need, but I did want to get an idea of the scale. So I went online and boom, boom, boom. The internet started blowing up. Within the hour I had found dope—antisemitic dope, so to speak—on the following 33 schools, the majority of them institutes of “higher” learning.

1. University of Michigan in Ann Arbor

2. MIT

3. Yale

4. Columbia

5. University of Pennsylvania

6. UC Berkeley

7. Harvard

8. NYU

9. University of Southern California

10. University of North Carolina

11. Hillcrest High School

12. University of Maryland

13. Brown

14. UCLA

15. Princeton

16. University of Minnesota

17. Montclair State University

18. Brandeis

19. Bard College

20. CUNY

21. University of Cincinnati

22. Oberlin

23. George Washington University

24. Wellesley

25. Murray State University

26. Cooper Union

27. UC San Diego

28. Stanford

29. University of Arizona

30. University of Massachusetts

31. University of Florida

32. Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh

33. Citizens of the World Charter School-East Valley

An hour’s worth of research cannot claim to be exhaustive or authoritative. It is only disappointing that I found so much of this stuff in such a short time, just surfing the internet. It’s not surprising; it’s unsettling. I worry about Jewish children and what the hatred and violence is doing to them. Antisemitism is a kind of crucible. Will they merely wrestle with fear, despair, and faith, or are we looking at a Norman Finkelstein or Max Blumenthal situation?

It’s hard for kids and adults of any age to go through this, to experience antisemitism, no matter how jaded we think we are. It hurts—especially when it comes from a teacher and the university does nothing, or when it happens where you least expect it.

This was discovered today at @BaruchCollege pic.twitter.com/JE4AlLGrM6
— Aviva Klompas (@AvivaKlompas) November 28, 2023

You know what I will say, because I must. I believe that the answer of where your children should go to school is, “in Israel.” There is no remedy for antisemitism, but there’s treatment: come to Israel and strengthen your people. Take your children and move there—move to Israel. Make Aliyah. I wish you would.

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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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!

The Partial Ceasefire Deal with the Devil (Judean Rose)

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are solely those of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein.

--1--

If it were you, my child, husband, brother, sister, mother, grandmother, grandfather, aunt, uncle, grandchild, friend. If it were you I would fight like hell to set you free, to bring you home and into my arms. Safe.

Then we would deal with the aftermath. The nightmares, the poisoned minds of the children raised to hate themselves and what they came from. The massive, multi-level trauma of it all, from beginning to the something that will never end.

Still, from a distance so far away that I don’t want to see it, I know that procuring your release has broader implications. You are a Hamas bargaining chip, or rather an Iran bargaining chip for use with Joe Biden, along with a cascade of other evil actors across the globe who will use human beings—use you—to get what they want. Hamas randomly keeps you alive—if you are alive—to get concessions; to retrench and regain strength to hurt the Jewish people; to score a victory; to wound Israel and live to kill, maim, and destroy more Jews another day.

--2--

Every day since October 7th, we have heard Israeli officials say, all the hostages or no ceasefire. It was clear from the start—Israel had been quite clear from the start. Or rather, the objective was clear until it wasn’t, and Israel began to speak of a “partial ceasefire,” when just to speak of this even in a fuzzy sort of way, already put Israel. at a distinct disadvantage. It must be said and taken into account, that while the hostage deal may save the lives of some of the hostages, it will put an untold number of other lives at risk, for example, just now, our dear Israeli soldiers. To breathe life into Hamas is to wreak havoc with the future. This Amalek must be stopped. Hamas must be obliterated, completely.

Ain breira. There is no choice. It's all or nothing. There is no other way. All the hostages or no ceasefire, partial or otherwise. Israel must hold firm, because a deal with Hamas is Obama’s deal, Biden’s deal, a deal with the devil, Iran. For Hamas, this deal translates to Jews ceding victory and paying the jizya, even unto releasing 300 felons back onto the streets of their natural hate-infested society.

We have certainly learned something here: the going rate for a handful of Jews is 300 felons for Hamas to parade as trophies. "How stupid is the Jew?” you might hear from the laughing crowd as they watch the 300 go by, and slap each other on the back. "They turn Gaza into rubble, then cry to us, 'You won!'"

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!