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| -Land of the Free |
| Greenfield: American Jewish establishment built on providing guns to Jews |
| 2015-10-15 |
| [SultanKnish] Ben Carson’s comments that armed Jews might have saved lives in the Holocaust by resisting Nazi terror have been met with condescending mockery from the left. The Jewish establishment, a network of wealthy non-profit organizations that claim to represent Jews without ever being chosen by them and while working against their interests, has reacted in the same way as their liberal brethren. But this establishment has forgotten that it was built on providing guns to Jews. Historical revisionism is what the left does best. American Jewish history in the last century is a revisionist history in which the heroes are the “establishment”. The truth lies buried in old papers and lost documents. And it’s a deeply compelling truth of how the left suppressed Jewish self-defense. The Jewish Defense Association was the first time that uptown establishment German Jews and downtown Eastern Jewish immigrants came together. The JDA’s goal had little in common with the empty rubber chicken dinner agendas of what the establishment that grew out of it would become. Instead the Jewish Defense Association’s mission was simple. Buy guns for Jews. Its agenda, as reported by the New York Times was, “New massacres are preparing. Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.” The year was 1905. The slow bloody beginning of the Russian Revolution was underway. Much like the Syrian Civil War, brutal militias aligned with different factions from the left to the right would arise out of the violence. Like the Christians in Syria, the Jews were an isolated minority. Xenophobia allowed both Communists and Czarists to score populist points by massacring the Jews in violent pogroms. The Jewish Defense Association responded with a call to arms. Its motto took a part of Hillel’s credo, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me.” Its membership encompassed the left and the right, Zionists and anti-Zionists, religious and secular Jews. A march of 200,000 Jews to Union Square included 5,000 former Russian soldiers, the volunteer Zion Guards in blue uniforms carrying rifles and the young men of the Manhattan Rifles, begun in the Lower East Side’s Educational Alliance as the Alliance Cadets, which had been formed in imitation of the Jewish Lads Brigade, a group that had put thousands of Jewish boys in the UK through military training. More at the link |
| Posted by:badanov |
| #1 Scathing. Not to mention history I hadn't learnt in my Israeli- and Persian-dominated Hebrew school in the 1960s and '70s. But it does perhaps explain why my father, who until age 15 had gone to Latvian Jewish day schools, had taken mandatory military training as part of his coursework, and was good enough to be tapped as a shooting instructor for Haganah once he and his mother emigrated to what was then British Mandate Palestine. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2015-10-15 16:55 |