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.”
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.
Friday, December 02, 2022
Elder of Ziyon
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