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November 2024/Cheshvan 5785 Vol. 18.1

A Universe in Thirteen Words: the Seven Laws of the Rainbow Covenant

Jews, the Descendants or Children of Israel, are called to live by the Bible's Ten Commandments' laws, involving a total of 613 Scriptural black-letter laws, including the laws that make the end-of-the-week Sabbath compulsory and make Israel a nation apart. This is Israel's obligation, arising from the Covenant of Sinai, including the entire Law of Moses - the Torah, the Divine "Teaching," "Guidance," "Way" or "Law."

Non-Jews or Gentiles - in Torah parlance, the Descendants or Children of Noah, the vast majority of the human race - are subject to an older covenant and a simpler, much more straightforward body of instruction, which doesn't compel Sabbath-observance: the Seven Noahide Commandments, the Code of the Rainbow Covenant.

The Rainbow is the symbol of this, the Bible's First Covenant - a solemn, binding, eternal contract - between the Sovereign of the Universe and all the Earth, including the whole human race.

In Genesis 9, the One and Only Living God speaking to Noah and his family, puts all humanity on notice: "This is the token of the covenant which I make between Me and you and every living creature with you, for perpetual generations: I do set My rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of the covenant between Me and the Earth (Gen. 9:13).

The word "covenant" - in Hebrew, b'rit - appears here seven times.

It's always noteworthy when Deity "speaks" to mortals. Ten generations earlier, the Bible says, He "spoke" to Adam and Eve, the first true humans, according to the Bible. At that time, He revealed the basis of the Rainbow Covenant: that He, God, created man "in His image" (Genesis 1:26-27).

All the Rainbow Covenant's Seven Commandments logically follow that first revelation, that every human being exists in "the image" of God. Basically, the Seven Universal Laws of the Rainbow Covenant make the prior universal revelation, to Adam, operational.

Many nations have traditions that roughly correspond to these precepts - the so-called Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would be done by," is just one example - but only Israel, thanks to the Teachings of Moses, kept the whole tradition alive. Genesis 9 is a memory-retrieval device, a mnemonic, declaring the word "covenant," or "b'rit," seven times, reflecting the Rainbow Covenant's Seven Commandments.

Israel's famous Torah, in the ancient Talmud Bavli, the so-called Babylonian Talmud, sets them all out (in Tractate Sanhedrin, 56a). The Seven Commandments are simultaneously a comprehensive body of law, and a framework for every nation's laws; a philosophy, a moral code, and a compelling, elevating, dynamic, logically harmonious worldview.

Dinin. Vrachas HaShem. Avodah zorah. Giluy aroyos. Ushpachos damim. Ugzal. Ever min hachai

They probably sound puzzling, these bare words, "naked" as they are, but this is a dazzlingly sophisticated body of wise law. These are the Seven Rainbow Covenant Commandments, the Universal Law, Heaven's basic rules and instructions for living a moral, fully human life.

Against all the contrary ideas and philosophies of savage paganism and of tyrannies of all time, these are the fundamental principles of human righteousness.

Starting with the latest of the Universal Laws, the last-mentioned above:

1) Ever min hachai. In English, "Torn Limb," signifying: "Do Not Tear a Limb From a Living Animal to Eat It."

It sounds strange, doesn't it? But it's a whole philosophy in just three words. Life and the Earth are real. The pain of animals matters, to the Lord God Himself. He will not suffer people, created in "His image" and designed to serve Him as His stewards over Earth (Genesis 1), to treat His creatures with gratuitous cruelty, to devour them or any part torn from them as wild animals might, as monsters would, while they're living.

The gift from God of life, and His supreme, exalted gift to us of dominion over this planet, of stewardship over Earth, is not just a license for savage piggishness.

This commandment - to kill your food before you eat it - applies to all the higher animals with developed nervous systems. That is, it applies to all mammals, and many birds, who would suffer from such cruelty.

This commandment casts light on the Torah's famous dietary ordinances governing the People of Israel, such as those banning consuming meat and milk together (the very symbol of a mother's love together with her slaughtered calf), against inflicting needless pain in the slaughtering process, and against human consumption of blood. It also relates to the Torah obligation of feeding one's animals before one himself eats in the morning.

Like all of the Seven Commandments, this prohibition is or should be obvious, a "no-brainer." Eating like a monster, cruelly, oppressively, and in a manner calculated to inflict needless pain, is something that no one should want to do. It's something that no society should condone. Pursuant to the following law, every society should pass and enforce a prohibition against it.

The Seven Commandments, unlike most of the Ten Commandments, are meant to be enforced by courts and laws and police. The laws that Noahides devise - such as commercial laws, insurance laws, or even parking regulations - are, with the Seven Commandments' very basic, framework prohibitions against seriously oppressive crimes, nothing if they're not enforced.

2) Dinin, or literally "laws." This is the Anti-Anarchy Commandment, the Law against lawlessness. Everyone - every adult participating member of society - is Divinely obligated to stand up for justice, fairness and equity on Earth and fight against oppression and injustice. Humans must necessarily organize ourselves into societies - this is the pro-government Commandment - and do what we can to ensure that our societies operate justly. Laws, police and courts are fundamental to all civilization.

3) Vrachas HaShem This is the Law against sacrilege, or [against] "blessing the Name," as this is euphemistically phrased (really, the violation is "cursing" the Name - the Divine Name).

The Rainbow Covenant, like the Torah, teaches that people have the power both to sanctify what is holy and Godly - people's deities, in this case, whomever or whatever they may be - and disparage or profane them. The reputation of Deity - whether the deity in question is the Infinite Sovereign of the Universe or, God forbid, a pagan god or gods - and what people think of Him, or them, is in our hands. To disparage or profane what people sincerely revere as holy is itself unholy. Ultimately, the reputation of Deity depends on living human beings.

This Commandment is so closely related to the following Commandment, against Idolatry, that it's like the two legs of a man walking.

In the modern world, and liberal, rule-of-law countries like the United States, this,and the following Commandment, would normally apply only to terribly, egregiously oppressive violations, like torturing or murdering people to exalt a vicious so-called deity.

4) Avodah zorah. This is the Commandment against Idolatry - or, really, literally, "against Weird Service" or "Weird Worship." The great sage Maimonides - Rambam - put this prohibition first among the Universal laws. But it's connected to the prior Law and resembles it. Worshiping or "serving" a cause or deity by performing acts that no deity worth worshiping would ever countenance - like torturing or cruelly oppressing innocents to glorify somebody's perverse conception of Allah, for instance - is both blasphemous (a violation of the Law against Sacrilege) and Idolatrous.

5) Giluy aroyos, or Sex Crimes. Human beings are sexual beings. Using sex to diminish and oppress others, to infringe their right to not be forced, coerced or pressured into sexual relations, or to force sex on animals, is sordid, forbidden, blasphemous, and less-than-animal misconduct.

6) Ushpachos damim, or murderous bloodshed. This universal prohibition corresponds to the Torah's "you shall not commit murder" (Exodus 20:13, Deuteronomy 6:17), and the early black-letter revelation in Genesis: "Whosoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the 'image' of God made He man" (Genesis 9:5-6). This precept has bearing on matters including suicide, "assisted suicide," and fetal abortion - since the Torah recognizes that there is some sanctity even in womb-bound humans - as well as capital punishment and warfare.

7) Ugzal. Larceny, usurping what's not yours, defiles the Earth. This commandment corresponds to the Torah's "you shall not steal" (Exodus 20:15). Volumes could and have been written about the extent of this prohibition: it covers commercial crimes, and defamation, kidnapping, and even rape. It prohibits, like all the Universal Commandments, savage oppression.

Notice that all these "Noachide" or Seven Commandments Laws are negative, "You shall not," prohibitions. Unlike the Torah's Ten Commandments, they're designed to be legislated into criminally enforceable law, administered by police and courts. Which in fact they partly have been, in the nations' law codes: in no nation is it lawful to murder children to glorify any deity, even though some nations - we're thinking particularly of Iran and the nations of the Arab League, in their endless struggle to annihilate Israel - practically encourage it.

No nation and no person is virtuous unless it, he, or she, do the opposite of what the Seven Commandments prohibit. To refrain from murder is not particularly praiseworthy, for instance, but it is indeed virtuous to try to save the life of one in danger. To refrain from larcency isn't all that wonderful, similarly, but charitable giving really is good. Further, unquestionably, one way to determine what is good and virtuous is to reference the world's only other Divinely given set of laws, the Torah, which should be regarded as the Universal Laws' other face. All Divine legislation is related to all other Divine legislation. And "Happy is he who heeds Your Commandments, your Torah and Your word." (Siddur).

In the Torah, the whole Book of Genesis, the Book of Exodus, up to the Revelation at Mt. Sinai, and Numbers 22-24, constitute terrific learning material for Noahides, along with all the rest of Bible: Psalms, Proverbs, the Histories and Writings and all the prophets, etc. The Bible exists, partly, to help Noahides, or Gentiles, orient themselves towards the people and the phenomenon of Israel.

We need to emphasize that, every person existing in the "image" of Divinity, that democracy, one man, one vote; government of the people, by the people, for the people, strikes us, at least, as the highest and most righteous type of government. One aspect of every nation's sovereignty is the right and obligation to determine the details of its own laws for itself. The Seven Commandments are all general prohibitions which point the way to that which is good, "and what HaShem (the Living God of Israel, the Lord of all Creation) demands of you - to do only that which is just, to love generosity and kindness, and to walk humbly with" Him (Micah 5:28). Within the framework of the Seven Rainbow Covenant Commandments, each nation is obliged to forge its own path to what is good.

Why Anti-Semitism?

Israel's obligation to help raise up the nations, scholars say, is one of the reasons for the Jews' dispersal among the nations.
From "Rainbow Covenant: Torah and the Seven Universal Laws"

The cartoon here is a tongue-in-cheek version of Isaiah's "Suffering Servant of the Lord -Israel, the Jewish People, Jacob, God's "light unto the nations" (Isaiah 42:6) - among the nations.

Recently, discussing the phenomenon of Jew-hatred, we asked, sarcastically:

"Why would anyone hate acolytes of a religion that claims to be radically different and better than all others, making us better than all others, and gives us a basis for declaring all others to be lacking, while offering them no real way to join us cool kids?"

It seems only natural that people should feel inclined to presume such people to be guilty, before considering the genuinely extraordinary facts of history and world-affairs.

As the Jewish people confront Iran and the myths of the 22-countries of the Arab League - that the Jews' ancient Holy Land, the size of tiny El Salvador, or the state of New Jersey, is really a sacred Muslim trust, a wakf, belonging to the followers of Islam and to no one else, while the Jews are strangers, "colonialists" and interlopers in the Middle East, who really need to pack up and move "back" to Poland - it seems appropriate to mention two things:

1) With some notable - and very praiseworthy - exceptions, the Arab peoples have been extremely ungracious to the Jewish people, from before Islam began, and then even more so subsequently. The Persians - the Iranians - haven't been excessively hospitable either.

In our times, hundreds of millions of petro-dollars from the Arabs' and Iranians' vast oil wealth have poured into the cause of convincing the so-called Palestinian people - the descendants of the different Arab sojourners and squatters who claim to have ever lived for any length of time in the Jews' Holy Land - that the Jews' Holy Land is rightfully entirely and exclusively their property.

These deluded people have also been convinced that the Jews are solely a European people who have no connection to their Holy Land nor to any part of the Middle East - and that Zionism, the element in Judaism that calls the Jews back to their indigenous homeland, is merely a modern "colonialist" and purely racist movement.

2) All of Iran's and the Arab League's chatter about Jews being European colonialists who should go back to Poland is ridiculous. This map helps tell the story:

Notice the vastness of the Arab countries' territories. Israel, just north of Egypt, south of Lebanon, is barely even visible. The ancient Roman orator Cicero used to ridicule the Jews and Judaism, saying that the God of Israel must be only a very tiny, very weak God, Who could only give His people, the Jews, such a tiny little country as the Jewish Promised Land. But it's far too much, it seems, for the Muslim world to tolerate!

By Michael Dallen
Detroit
November 2024

The Torah is a unitary program for all humanity.

Let all who walk the earth recognize and know that You alone are the God over all the kingdoms of the earth. - Siddur, morning prayer

To sub/unsub or contact us: https://1stcovenant.com/covenant-connection/

September 2024 Vol. 17.10

New Website work-in-progress

Israel is Goliath and Palestine is David, Christean Amanpour said on her international TV show, "Amanpour and Company." She was talking to Israeli author David Grossman, who is a prize-winning novelist and a renowned Jewish "peace activist." Grossman insisted: "Despite everything, we must show faith. We must defeat the Jewish Messianics with the Two-State Solution."

That anybody could look at this map - "The Green is the Arab world. That Tiny Speck is Israel" - and claim that the real problem between Israel and the Arabs and the Arabs' allied Muslim countries is that Israel is too big.... We are not prophets but we predict that future generations will ponder this in wonder. It's like believing the Nazis' crazy lies about the all-powerful Jews as they murdered them.

The famous Ancient Roman orator Cicero disparaged the Jews and Judaism - and particularly, the Jewish Holy Land - with mordant humor:

"The God of the Jews must be a little God, since He has given His people such a little country."

[By the way, I found this quote from the famous Jew-baiting pagan Cicero in a book of sermons from the infamous Jew-baiting Depression-era "radio priest," Fr. Charles Coughlin (may his name be erased). This was from one of his 1931 sermons - when he hadn't yet developed into the raving anti-Semite he became.]

That the King of the Universe should set aside a tiny land - a/k/a Cana'an or Eretz Yisroel, the Land of Israel, no larger than the state of New Jersey or the barely significant country of El Salvador (invariably described as "tiny El Salvador") - for the Jewish People is, to me, a sign of His greatness, signaling as it does that He loves our species, mankind; that He wants us to be happy; and provides us with a defined objective that's practically achievable. Even though it drives the world insane - with "wise" commentators fulminating against the Jews' "illegal occupation" of "Arab territories" - it can somehow, still, with God's help, be practically realized.

Creating conditions where the Lord of all Creation can "walk" among His people in the Holy Land of Israel is the principal objective, politically, of the Torah - the principal principle. The idea is, obviously, that foreign peoples suffering from the myriad crazy pathologies of paganism - the endless cruelties to the weak, to women and children and animals; the oppressiveness; the meanness and all the unholy stupidity of Jew-hating Gentiles - shouldn't poison the one tiny land.

One of the oddest things about the Arab countries' - and now some of the most powerful non-Arab Muslim countries, like Iran and Turkey's - program, of declaring the Holy Land to be a sacred Muslim wakf, or trusteeship, is that it's utterly devoted to making Israel (that is, the successful re-establishment of the Jews in the Jewish Holy Land) fail. Because a successful Israel is and would be an affront to Islam. So, rather than trying to better the lives of the so-called Palestinians (the ridiculously misleading name of the phony nation of Arab squatters, whose problems could be solved in a week, with all the Arabs' vast wealth and empty lands), they actually try to poison the land, scheming to dry it out by diverting or poisoning its water, or blasting it with nuclear bombs. Let us remember, it wasn't so long ago, when Saddam Hussein sent missiles screaming into Israel from Iraq - missiles which were thought to carry poison gas or nuclear warheads, which would have destroyed the "Palestinians" too, the "Palestinians" got up on rooftops and cheered! Lest the Jews succeed - Allah forbid! - and the Land of Israel fulfill its sacred destiny as a genuinely exemplary place, a land of genius and decency, to help redeem the whole world.

___

We tried to publish this map several months ago. We had problems with our Internet hosting. We changed carriers and modified the website... and that's been a messy process, too. Now we're beginning, I hope, to get things together, and we expect vastly better results and a wonderfully improved website... soon.

Thank you for your patience.

By Michael Dallen
Detroit
September 2024, Elul 5784

If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.

April 2024 Vol. 17.7

We are the Party of Freedom....Read More

The comedian Dennis Miller has claimed that the Arab world is like a football stadium and Israel like a book of matches on the 50-yard line. The Jews keep offering the Arabs, two, three, even twenty matches - "the two-state solution," "land for peace" - but the Arabs keep refusing. They don't want just a few matches. They want them all.

That’s no joke. Practically all the polling that's ever been done on the subject confirms it. Among so-called Palestinians, support for Hamas' October 7 pogrom, for instance, ranged from "extremely support" by about a third of respondents, to "strong support" by another third and "support with some reservations" (worried about future payback) by all but a few percent. (In no polling among the Arabs - not just "Palestinians" - outside Israel is there any kind of constituency for a "two-state solution.")

The huge crowds around the world chanting "Free Palestine!" think they are pro-freedom. "The Palestinians" are supposed to be the revolutionary "Stick it to the man!" party of liberty. Imagine! That the outrageously chutzpadik scheme cooked up by the Arabs' medieval-minded clerics and tyrants - its long con, its big scam, its multi-generational confidence game, jamming together a phony nation out of the wildly disparate non-Jewish herders, wanderers and squatters who'd ever passed through the Holy Land, calling them "Palestinian refugees"; barring them from permanently settling anywhere except in Jewish Israel, to create, forge, fatten, multiply, indoctrinate and arm a whole made-up nation just to sacrifice it - to crush Israel and annihilate Judaism, would win over so many!

You wonder how these folks could ignore the larger story - of Israel's struggle against persecution and European colonialism, British imperialism, Turkish and Arab despotism, the depredations of the Nazis and the Communists, to try to create an exemplary society in a neglected semi-desert region smaller than New Jersey. How could people support such a transparently artificial cause, fronted by such a murderous anti-Western "vile nation that is no nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21) as the so-called "Palestinians," as the Arabs' and Iranian clerics' Palestine scam?

Obviously, part of the problem is anti-Semitism. Not just the outlandish, Nazi-inspired propaganda that the Muslim countries pump out by the car-load - new sets of the Czarist-era "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," movies, music, plays, poems, kiddy shows, and streaming videos of Jews baking matzos with the blood of Gentile children, learned commentaries by talking heads proclaiming Jews and Judaism to be Satan's slaves - but, IMHO, more of an envious free-floating resentment of world Jewry.

Consider Israel's "mission civilisatrice," its "civilizing mission." The Jews' role on earth is to serve all the nations of mankind as an elder brother (Exodus 4:22), as witnesses to the reality of the Living Yah, the Creator and Master of all things (Isaiah 43:10), as His designated "light unto the nations" (Isaiah 42:6). Alas, that project's insulting, unless one's personally on-board with it: the Jews' mission is to help fix others' deficiencies - or at least refine them somewhat - to elevate Gentiles so they're more like Jews. Is it any wonder that people thus regard the Jews as guilty unless proved innocent, thinking that they, the Jews, have a much too high opinion of themselves? (It calls to mind a quip that may or may not be from Winston Churchill, defining anti-Semitism as "hating the Jews more than necessary." Hating the Jews too much is creepy, in other words, but one must hate us somewhat.)

Then there's the injustice factor. Injustice makes people crazy. It “brings wild beasts into the world, filling it with violence" (Mishnah, Pirke Avot 5:12).

Our esteemed counselor Rabbi Katz always tells me to avoid politics but, frankly, to hell with that: when, following the Great Recession, not a single banker, rating agency, regulator or crooked money-man who'd helped cause the debacle went to jail - the Obama White House explaining that it couldn't focus on that kind of thing while it was busy trying to save the economy - millions of Americans decided that "the whole system's rigged!" and itched for anyone who'd "shake things up." That great failure helped shape America's politics. Similarly, the "Palestinians" and really all the Arab League's pro-Palestine chumps, their "useful idiots" and sympathizers, naturally perceive injustice in "Palestinians'" suffering. It's just that they lazily swallow the Arab and Iranian propaganda archetypes, the utter baloney of primitive native people oppressed by powerful Jewish interloping colonialists, concluding - despite the reality of the matter, that the Arab League simply determined to sacrifice their fellows, dashing them like firewood against the only nation on earth that's guaranteed to be eternal - that the people of Israel are mere strangers in the Land of Israel, tyrannical conquerors, racist occupiers of "Arab lands."

Time and Memory and History

On top of that there's the factor of memory, and story-telling, and perceptions of time and history. People of different cultures naturally process time and history with different mental structures. Jews have a more intimate relationship with ancient history and the prophet Abraham than most non-Jews would ever imagine, due to our prayer-life; Jews who pray walk in Abraham's footsteps every day. Religious Jews all live with visions of someone, like his grandson Jacob, our father "Israel," watching us over our shoulders - an old ancestor but a vivid character, worrying for his descendants and the cause that bears his name. To the Jews, history is continuity, part of a religious mindset, and our connection to the past in every generation is fundamental to our consciousness. Our current affairs, our daily activities, and the continuity of reality, are part of Israel's sacred history.

Christians don't have that. The 33-years of Jesus' life matter more than all of history put together. Muslim's don't either. The life of Muhammad, Islam's founder, and the years of his followers immediately after his death, matter more than anything. Whatever else ever happens is radically less-important. We could go on and on about the Arab and Qur'an-influenced peoples' lack of historicity, their vague time-sense, and the blasé constant lying, such a striking feature of the world of Islam (See "The Arab Mind" by Raphael Patai, 1983 rev’d. edition, pp. 65-72). Let’s just say, that while non-Jews' relative lack of an acute historical sense or adult regard for facts tends to handicap them in secular and business matters, vis-a-vis the Jews, it's also very frustrating for Jews, since weighty historical facts and truth have much less impact than they might.

Younger people, suspicious of "history written by dead white males," have a tendency, supposedly, of disregarding historical arguments involving facts that aren't already known to them. So, for instance, the millenia of Gentile persecution of the Jews generally come down to them foreshortened, with the entire history of the Jews and Israel in the world presented as Jews versus Nazis and the Holocaust. Which, alas, is not enough to help them recognize recurring historical patterns, nor even distinguish between such actual freedom-fighters as the defenders of Israel and the Jew-hating anti-Western phony revolutionaries created by Islam’s most-medieval minded clerics and the cynics of the Arab League.

Where to Go

If Patai's "The Arab Mind" is correct in its thesis that only transactional arguments based on personal advantage, honor and shame - as opposed to appeals to historical truths, ideals and moral principles - the only way to get the Arab peoples to stop polluting the world with ship-loads of racist, anti-Semitic hogwash, including the loony suite of "patriotic" lies that's Palestinianism, is: 1) to shame them: to convince them that decent people have gotten wise to their lies, and that it's past time for them to start treating the phony nation that they created as real human beings, not sacrificial objects - and let the “suffering refugees” settle finally in their own almost-empty countries; and 2) Point out that by attacking Israel they have been ruining themselves, stuffing billions of Arabs and Muslims full of stupid racist Jew-hate and sub-rational magic-thinking, and falling farther and farther behind Israel, and subjecting themselves to the Bible's special curse for they who oppress Israel, continuous civil wars ("I will feed them that oppress thee with their own flesh; they shall be drunken with their own blood," Isaiah 49:26)

The Arab world generally applauded Hamas' October 7th pogrom, as did very many of the world's Muslims. Since then Israel's fierce response has the world's attention - even the attacks from Hamas' "Palestinian" ally Hezbollah, shooting rockets into Israel's northern cities, seem very secondary. The people of Gaza, steeped in the "Palestinian" cause, chose Hamas over the equally appalling Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, and Gaza became Hamastan, the apotheosis of Palestinian irredentism ("never to be appeased") and revanchism ("revenge"), more loaded with lethal, genocidal Jew-hate than Nazi Germany. (The Nazis didn't drill their youngest girls and boys to physically murder Jews.)

The Stakes

My worst fear is that, if the world doesn't get this right, how will the human race ever deal with problems of climate change and the movement of billions of people? How can the West deal with tidal waves of Muslim refugees, loaded full of Jew-hate? Who will help the refugees of the future, who will need to be resettled? UNRWA, the United Nations' agency for "Palestinians," started out 70-years ago with a couple of hundred thousand "Palestinians," and now has more than 5.5 million on its dole - with no one resettled! Gaza and the rest of the "Palestinian" centers are all huge obstetric centers/nurseries, with the world's highest live birthrates, subsidized by UNRWA and the Arabs.

If the world followed the UNRWA "model" with future refugees... then the hundreds of millions or billions of our fellow men who will surely need help due to coming climate change - and probably we too, if we can't get such stuff right - are doomed.

I'm deeply dismayed by the awful jurisprudence that went into some legal “thinkers’” pronouncement that the return of the Jews to Judea and Jerusalem is a war crime; that the Jews illegally "occupy" the old League of Nations' mandate lands, despite seizing them from no sovereign authority at all; capturing Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria in wars waged against the Jews by practically the whole Arab world - applying the Fourth Geneva Convention's so-called anti-Nazi law, forbidding murderous Nazi-like forcible population transfers, to declare the heartland of Israel "occupied" and a crime for a Jew to live in Judea. It's such a clear perversion of law! In fact - as a law never ever applied to anyone, except in this regard, prohibiting the long prophesied return of the people of Israel to the land of Israel - this "anti-Nazi law" exemplifies the principle that Palestinianism makes people stupid.

The Arabs' Anti-Jewish War is evil. How many times have the assembled Arab peoples with their armies or their designated sacrificial lambs, the "Palestinians," dashed themselves against Israel, to annihilate it? If they had won even once, there wouldn't be an Israel. They keep trying…Why won't they let up?

Causes

Yes, of course it starts with hate for Judaism. The Arabs' claim that the Jews - "so-called Israel," the Muslim clerics called us - weren't and couldn't be the true "first born" of Allah (because Allah had called the Arabs to be His special people instead of Israel). The Jews' exile from the Land of Israel was the proof that Allah had damned the Jews. So the Jews' return from exile, the beginning of the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures' prophecy, starting around the end of the last century, was intolerable to the Arabs' awful leaders' stupid sense-of-self.

If facts and history could convince anyone, the accusations against Israel and Judaism - Christianity's claims to be "the religion of love" by dishonestly suppressing the Torah's "love your neighbor," "love the stranger," and "love HaShem", while claiming Jesus, not the whole Jewish nation, as Deity's sacrificial offering to the nations....; and then Islam's claims that Muhammed's followers fulfill the role of Israel under Allah's heavens - are idiotic. But the Jews also have to recognize that today's messy situation couldn't have happened if we had done better.

It's not just the obvious things - treating Palestinianism with all its lies irresponsibly respectfully, letting the Arabs completely off the hook in accomodating their own brethren, related to them by language, religion, history, customs and blood; letting the world community set up a whole special agency to reinforce psychotically irredentist, revanchist, completely artificial national feelings in "Palestinians"'; even experimenting with co-governing fast-multiplying millions of people raised to hate and kill Jews... - but, at least partly, a failure of Jewish confidence.

Is there or isn't there a God over all the Earth? Are we or aren't we His witnesses? Do we or don't we represent El, HaShem, the Living Yah of Abraham, Isaac and Israel? Christianity and Islam - not to mention all the later gods of the nations - are bankrupt and absurd, but we, Israel, are still flailing around over how mankind (all the Noachites, or Noachides, or Noahides, noting that we even lack common, agreed-upon terms) should serve HaShem.

Conclusion
We're going to have a challenging next few months, as Israel tries to liquidate the enemy that unexpectedly hit us with that last pogrom - obviously, in retrospect, we should have expected it, because that is the whole point of Palestinianism - while the world mourns the suffering "martyrs" of Palestinianism. As I write, Israel's accused of deliberately starving Gaza's children, insisting that - regardless of Gazans' psycho commitment to "martyr" their loved ones and even themselves to stab or bomb any Jew, including any Jews who’re trying to help their children! - Israel feed and medicate and clothe and house them. They cry about their own people, "They have nowhere to go!" when Egypt and Jordan insist on it: the Arabs could easily take all the “Palestinian” children and adults into their vast countries, but they won't. They could provide medicine and food to their brethren without getting suicide-bombed - unlike the Jews! - but they don't.

“Palestinian” misery won't be ended by giving away what the world is demanding - the escape of lethal blood-drenched enemies, and the delivery of Israeli real estate, to help the Arabs win the next-coming war.

The only way the suffering of "Palestinians'" can be avenged is by holding the hate-filled clerics and tyrants of the Arab and Muslim worlds to account, recognizing what they're doing and requiring them to stop their shenanigans and stop inciting evil. They love the "Palestinians," whom they deliberately created, and armed, and incentivized, so much: let them take them, finally, into their embrace.

By Michael Dallen
Detroit
March 31, 2024

If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.

March 2024 Vol. 17.6

Einstein and Gaza... Agnostic Einstein stumbling upon traces of "the infinitely superior spirit" coursing through "the incomprehensible cosmos," venerating the "superior reasoning power" he discovers, but still falling prey to "Newtonian" errors... ironically, errors that Sir Isaac Newton himself, a disciple of Maimonides, avoided... Concerning my own stubbornly skeptical journey to conscious service to that Power... "Then We Had a War"- the information power of the Six-Day War and the wonderful educational value of the Arab world's disgraceful struggle to erase the one nation on earth that's guaranteed to be eternal... Amalek, the Anti-Semite - the evil cosmic force that's not all bad... Busting the Arabs' con; simple, obvious solutions to "these intractable problems"....
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Albert Einstein tells you again and again in his writings how he - along with other sincere scientists, he says - keeps finding in the study of the cosmos, "behind all the discernible concatenations," intimations of "the infinitely superior spirit [emphasis added] that reveals itself,” he says, “in the little that we can comprehend of the knowable world."

“It's subtle,” he says, “intangible and inexplicable." “It evokes a deeply emotional conviction in the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe." (“The Ultimate Quotable Einstein,” Princeton, 2011, pp. 324-5).

He venerates this presence, he says. He calls it "cosmic religion," "a worship of the harmony and beauties of nature." In fact, he claims that it's already become "the common faith of many physicists." (ibid., p. 329). "I will call it the cosmic religious sense.” He says, "This is hard to make clear to those who don't experience it, since it does not involve an anthropomorphic idea of God; the individual feels the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvelous order revealed in nature" (ibid., p. 330).

As a prophet wrote (Psalm 8:3), "When I behold Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have established...."

In truth, Einstein suffered a ridiculously pro-forma early childhood Jewish education in Germany, so he ended up believing, to the end of his life, that "the Jewish God" was anthropomorphic, as he put it. That is, he imagined that "the Jewish God" is a figment constructed in the image of man, like a man-made idol. “People make their gods in their own image.”

That kind of nutty mischaracterization of Jewish belief – an uninformed de-limiting of all that's holy - is common with Jewish atheists. So is Einstein’s other big theological mistake: accepting the idea, supposedly based on Newtonian principles, of a rigid cause-and-effect universe ruled by an implacable "blind watchmaker." The idea is that a Deity or First Cause initiated all Creation but then, in doing so, legislated Himself out of a job. That is, the Creator, having set the Universe on its course, left Himself with nothing to do and no way of subsequently affecting, changing, or influencing anything at all. Ultimately, it’s another way of saying that God abandoned the world – that, practically, speaking, “there is no God.”

Oddly, Sir Isaac Newton himself, whose teachings helped inspire that nonsense, didn't believe anything of the kind. Newton’s library and papers have been available for study since 1936. John Maynard Keynes, the great economist and polymath, purchased and perused them. In a renowned lecture, delivered by his brother just a few months after his death, he recognized in Newton a disciple of rabbinic Judaism and, particularly, Maimonides (known as Rambam to religious Jews, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon - RMBM.) ("Newton, the Man." J.M. Keynes, London, 1946).

Newton read Maimonides in Latin but taught himself Hebrew to better know and please the Deity. As for Maimonides, the great 12th Century elucidator of Torah from Sinai, didn't just teach metaphysics but also… physics!

Maimonides instructs: All reality - this and any and every other universe - depends for existence on a great Guiding Intelligence. All is not one. One Creator unifies Creation and He alone sustains its every particle, force and atom, but the Creator and His Creation are not the same. All things and beings are dependent on Him but He is not dependent on them. His essence is completely unlike them. He Who is infinite is no more divisible than a geometric point. He has neither similtude nor peer. "To whom then will you liken Me, or shall I equal?" (Isaiah 40:25). Because He sustains everything, He knows everything - with no forgetting! As for favoring and sustaining the cosmos’ ineluctable natural laws, which He Himself devised and cherishes, He retains the capacity (as the study of quantum mechanics, even in Einstein's time, began to intimate) to alter at will the course of Creation and everything within it.

The fate of matter isn't written in stone; subatomic particles can change their orbits or gain or lose a proton, for instance, for, apparently, any reason; the causation of a sunspot, hurricane or tidal wave - or, say, the appearance of a parking place - depends on invisible, indeterminate forces and, basically, "only God knows what." God's will, in other words, is everything.

Clearly, Einstein made up his mind based on wrong information. Even the Einsteins can make mistakes! People get the facts wrong all the time. Only HaShem is omniscient.

I mention this because I, too, heir of passionately devout Jews, was an atheist, and mistaken. I had more Jewish education than Einstein did, as a baby-boomer kid in America, but "God" - the word "God," a relic of German paganism, is a little misleading; as I found out later, Hebrew's much better for conveying the spiritual nature of Deity - struck me as a figment, a phony, wishful idea, and the Bible's stories about Creation, describing things that no mortal could have witnessed, childish. That the Hebrews' Scriptures are the world's only Scriptures that become more convincing the more one gets into them doesn't matter much to a Hebrew who won’t take them seriously.

Then We Had a War

Until the Six Day War - the Arab-Israeli War of 1967 - I didn't feel much affection for the Jewish people. But, watching the palpably angry, over-stuffed Arab and Communist ambassadors to the United Nations on TV, vocally enabling the aggressors in the Arab armies' biggest-ever war to crush “the Zionist entity,” I saw when they abruptly got word that Israel, amazingly, was winning. And they suddenly all became pacifists, calling for an immediate armistice! It was literally jaw-dropping, and hilarious. l remember saying, "Being hated by such disgusting clowns for being Jewish can’t possibly be all bad!”

That war sensitized me to Jewish peoplehood. But I still considered the religion - and all religion - nonsense. I could see religion was historically important so it needed to be studied, but I still went around feeling that, as I’d say occasionally, "I don't have a religious bone in my body." Until, at 19, I read a piece on revolution.

Young people in the early 70's talked about revolution all the time. "The First Revolutionary," by Dr. Wilfried Daim, a Viennese psychiatrist and Catholic writer, was the first thing that I remember reading that treated the Bible as seriously as any other work of literature. It forever blew apart the lie, for me, of religion being "the opiate of the masses" (the words of another Jewishly-ignorant Jewish atheist, Karl Marx). It showed that the Exodus, even beyond being a model and inspiration for human liberation and revolutionary freedom movements ever since, is also the story of a wildly radical revolution, an almost unimaginably liberating upset in human society.

That piece, as moving as it was, would have fallen on sterile ground if it hadn't first been prepared by the spectacle, earlier, of the evil in the Arabs' and Communists' anti-Israel crusade. My religion today - which I regard as the greatest blessing, connecting me with my Maker while I'm still able to learn and serve Him - was made possible by the Arabs' crazy Jew-hate.

Even then, I wasn't a Torah-Jew. But the Arabs kept the war going, and the "Old Testament" prophecies, as I could see from my studies, are utterly unique. One always hears from academics that they were all created by committee - that Documentary Hypothesis, Biblical Critical stuff, about the Torah's origins. But then, if you approach them seriously, on their own terms, you encounter the surprising holiness of Torah and its prophecies. By then, as a young adult, I’d served on lots of boards and committees. I finally realized that I couldn't conceive of any human committee ever coming up with anything remotely like them.

Imagine a committee ruling, “[If you, Israel, fail to follow My instructions to you in the Land that I give you] I will punish you with a non-nation; I shall provoke you with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21).

[If you, Israel, fail to rid the Land of Israel of co-claimants] "they shall be pins in your eyes and thorns in your sides and they shall vex you in the Land" (Numbers 33:55).

It was a spiritual education. Since 1967, watching generations of leaders and thought-leaders politicians pushing "land for peace," "two nations for two people," and the perennial "two-state solution [sic]" claptrap, against the explicit Torah prohibition, [You, Israel] "shall not make any covenant with [co-claimants of the Land of Israel]" nor try to divide it up (Exodus 23:32), and the dire promises, "or I shall to do to you what I had thought to do them" (Numbers 33:56), or "I will provoke [you] to anger with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21), impressed me and many others, Jews and Noachides, indelibly. (The ambiguous thundering pap of Nostradamus and all the other phony prophets, of all the world's religions and pseudo-religions that I've looked at, isn't remotely like it.) With time, and study, and great good-fortune in getting decent Torah-teachers, many of us, including me, became serious students of Torah and - we hope! - conscious servants of HaShem.

After October 7th, we've also got what looks increasingly like a study of the ongoing relationship, repeated throughout history, of Israel vis a vis much of the rest of humanity. A vast international conspiracy including Amalek, the jealous anti-Israel, and the Ishmaelite or Arab world, including Philistines and Lebanese, to "cut off" Israel "from being a nation," to erase even the memory of Israel's name! (Psalm 83). As we see from Hebrew Scripture, from history, and current affairs: the enemies of Israel – who are the enemies of all humanity – have energy and savagery, and numbers!

The Point of All This

The point I want to make here is a revelation based on my own personal spiritual trajectory. People who reject HaShem and the Torah - like Einstein did, like Karl Marx, like little moi, former young atheist - operate under false factual premises. So do the enemies of Israel, the "Palestinians" and their boosters, including all those peoples listed in Psalms 83. They've bought into the scam, the lie of Palestinianism – all about a human-constructed "vile nation that is no nation," that mysteriously can't be allowed to settle peacefully and permanently anywhere in the world except to annihilate Israel.

It's a ridiculous and more or less obviously transparent con; a giant and enormously cynical, cruel scam. Even the most well-meaning people who speak of "the two-state solution [sic]" - which, according to recent polling, at least 90% of Israel-adjacent "Palestinians" reject (they say they want one state, with no Jews) - are simply chumps for the scam, advancing the con. The whole point of it is to cripple and finally annihilate Israel by whittling it down. But the Arabs’ program is so transparent… and truth has a way of coming out - of emerging into the light.

If not for the Arabs' war against Israel, I wouldn't be here writing this today, nor - God forbid - be any kind of Torah-Jew. Amalek, the anti-Israel, the spirit of the Nazis and Hamas and Al-Qaeda and Fatah and Haman, is as evil as it gets, but Amalek, which is, after all, God's creation – a wonderous feature of the cosmos, ordained from the Beginning, even though its members need to make a completely free-will choice to enable it - serves a positive function, not just a horrid one.

Consider how Amalek must have heard story after story of how a mighty invisible God was toying with Egypt, a neighboring country, with plague after plague and fantastic manifestations of supernatural power. Even then, and even while the flower of Pharaoh's army was still rotting on the Red Sea's beaches, Amalek spied Israel rushing inland, the strongest people pushing ahead, while the weakest, the women with children, the aged and infirm - "the weaklings," Moses called them (Deuteronomy 25:18) - lagging behind (Exodus 17:8). Israel had just been wondering, idiotically, "Is HaShem with us or not?" (Exodus 17:7).

Amalek surely asked, What kind of people march through desert with no regard for their weakest members? And immediately determined: “Those people aren't that holy!" They must have thought: The gods made a mistake in choosing them. We are holier than they are. We are the chosen, and we’ll prove it!

That’s how it is with Amalek. The Nazis, for instance, saw the Jews divided over religion, and about returning to the Land of Israel, and vulnerable, and determined to destroy them, as supposed pretenders to God's favor; Hamas, similarly, saw the Jews divided, questioning themselves and their role under Heaven, over-confident in mere physical walls and fortifications, and attacked... It's a hallmark of Amalek, in all times - in every generation - to deliberately target the weakest Jews, the infants, the children, the women, in a world where armies normally attack only other armies.

It should be obvious that the only way to settle the supposedly impossibly "intractable problem" of Palestinianism is to reveal the Arab League's hoax to be the cynical, evil scam it is and to shame or force them into fixing the problem that they themselves created. If they want to be honored by civilized folk; if they want to be regarded as decent people, not murderous racists, murderers and misogynists; if they want to be regarded as sane, and capable; if they ever hope to grow their people past Jew-hate, they need to stop pumping themselves and the world full of stupid anti-Semitism, with all its Nazi trappings. And, obviously, they also need to start treating their own people decently: not as pawns, that is, with the doomed assigned destiny of furiously dashing themselves forever against the Jews - the world's only guaranteed-to-be eternal people! - but to settle them as full citizens in their own vastly underpopulated countries. To give them a shot at a decent life, having nothing to do with crushing the Jews.

It's not that hard a problem! America's Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, a major component of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, suggests itself as a model for fixing the Arabs' mess. Israel’s experience with what does and doesn’t work in settling millions of Jews in what used to be the barren Land of Israel - including all the needy refugees who came to Israel fleeing murderous hatred and persecution by the Arabs – could be valuable too. If little Israel could do that, so can the Arab League countries do it for their own.

Planet Earth could use the labor, wit, youth and talent of the “Palestinians,” turned to re-greening God’s Creation. And the world could use more truth. It’s amazing what problems caused by mistakes of fact and lies can be solved or ameliorated by the simple application of truth, and reality’s healing light.

Alas, after Hamas goes the way of Haman and Hitler's Nazis - may it happen speedily, in our time! - the envious, "holier than thou" spirit of Amalek is bound to persist on Earth until "Shiloh comes" (Genesis 49:10). That is, until Israel more fully realizes who and what it is, and stops needing the bloody goad of Amalek to bring its members devotedly to HaShem's fully conscious service.

By Michael Dallen
Detroit
March, 2024

If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.

February 2024 Vol.17.5

Cracking the Arabs' Palestine Scam....and more

January 2024 Vol. 17.4 Incontrovertible. Want incontrovertible, indisputable proof of an inhuman world-historical conspiracy against the re-establishment of the People of Israel in the Land of Israel? Check. The Arab countries' cruel, heedless malevolence: breathtaking. We explore solutions ("What Do We Do Now?"). Earth's fate depends on getting this right... Plus, an addendum, "People Have Asked," how to help Israel in crisis: some practical suggestions...Read More

The Arab countries, and now Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia (non-Arab Muslim countries) crank out the crap daily, by the ton: recycled ridiculous Jew-hating absurdities, arguments and false facts, including preposterous re-assertions of the Nazis' 90-year old spewings from enemies of humanity like Julius Streicher (Der Stürmer) and Joseph Goebbels (Hitler's Minister of Propaganda), and from crackpot anti-Semites like Detroit's Henry Ford (The Dearborn Independent, "The International Jew"), to snow the world and blind it to what should be obvious:

With inhuman malevolence, cruelty and cynicism, the Arab League countries - the original 21-countries - have perpetrated a remarkable scam, a con, a confidence "game," upon mankind. They've conjured up a synthetic nation, an artificial ethnic group with fierce nationalist pretensions, from their own people, with a made-up past and a horrific future, to defraud the world by beguiling it with false facts, to rally it, to undermine Israel, challenge Israel face-to-face, and ultimately destroy Israel.

If you want Nazi propaganda, including sexy shots of leather-clad Nazis, find it readily throughout the Arab world. If you want concrete proof of what's going on here, in this plot against the world, just look at Egypt's and Jordan's immediate declarations, following the Hamas-staged October 7 (Simchat Torah, "Torah Joy," the ancient Hebrew holiday celebrating the Revelation of the Torah) pogrom, by Gaza's "Defenders of Al-Aksa" (the Muslim shrine that sits atop Solomon's Temple), which proves it:.

Israel prepares its military response. Everyone knows that Hamas' millions of civilian subjects in Gaza are going to need help - particularly, a place to flee to. No Muslim country offers to accept a single soul from Gaza as a refugee. Every Arab country bars all of them absolutely from their borders - Egypt, for instance, penning them in with steel and threatened violence - while both near neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, and then the whole Arab world, collectively, adamantly insist that, whatever war threatens their precious brethren, the "Palestinians," they cannot be moved; that all Palestinians everywhere are solely Israel's problem; and that the only conceivable response to their problems, beyond feeding and arming them, is to give them the Jews' land, either carved off from Israel or simply completely eliminating Israel.

"Welcome to Egypt!" The Palestinian side of Egypt's Gaza border. Thanks to The New York Times (Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

"Palestinians stand at a border fence with Egypt in a tent camp set up on the Gaza side of the border." The New York Times, Thursday, January 25, 2024.

This has been going on for ages. The Arabs' "Nakba," Arabic for "Catastrophe," struck the Arabic-speaking peoples back in 1949, when the Arab League's alliance including the armies of Syria, Egypt, Jordan (then "Transjordan), and Lebanon, with support from virtually the whole of the Arab world, failed to wipe out Jewish Israel. (The Jews were supposed to be cowardly, the opposite of warlike; a pushover, easy to "drive into the sea.") The Arabs who heeded the League's call to evacuate, pending the promised complete elimination of the Jews, became the world's first "forever refugees." The great catastrophe, in this equation, isn't that the neighboring countries completely refused to absorb them, but that they didn't get what they wanted: the Jews dead or at least driven out of Israel, and the Jews' property for themselves.

Supposedly, the Nakba is Palestinianism's formative event. But the scam's real foundation was and is the collective determination of the Arabs' to sacrifice all these people, their supposedly precious brethren, including their descendants, to the original evil cause.

"Try and try again" is the essence of the con. Its formula for success: "persistence in hatefulness."

In this week's news we see more unwinding of the plot: the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, called UNRWA, the only permanent United Nations agency devoted solely to the problems of one ethnic group, got caught recently: hundreds of its Gazan agents are Hamas! That is, beyond the UNRWA workers who merely sympathize with Hamas' awful goals, these UN employees belong to, serve, are paid by, and owe their primary duty of loyalty to Hamas.

Recognizing that the Arab League's managed so successfully to put its people on the UN's payroll, a New York Times writer insists, calling incidentally for abolishing the agency, what at this point seems like a truism:

"[The Palestinians] have been kept perpetual refugees as a means of delegitimizing Israel and preserving the irredentist fantasy that someday their descendants will exercise what they believe is their "right of return," effectively through the elimination of the Jewish state." (Bret Stephens, "Abolish the U.N.'s Palestinian Refugee Agency," January 31, 2024)

Land-Love

"Nothing is as good now as it was then. The water [in "Palestine"] was so sweet and healthy that a dying man drank from the village spring, washed with it, and was healed on the spot," the "Palestinian" grand-mother said. "The houses were as big as palaces!" said her grand-daughter. "The land was wonderful, and the sky was always blue." [From a Detroit News review of mine of David Grossman's "The Yellow Wind" (3/27/88), about the manufactured "Palestinian dilemma," as he called it).

Over more than 70 years, UNRWA and the Arab League have worked to create a people whose feelings for the Land of Israel compete in intensity with the Jews'. (The Jews' love for their Holy Land is deeply entrenched in the religion, in the prayers and rituals and customs, over thousands of years. The Arabs lack anything like that, but they've been trying, with tons of published programing and teacher-training.) And we spoke before how, the Arab countries being the hopeless kinds of places they are, corrupt, the "cause of the Palestinians" seems like the freshest, truest, most self-sacrificing cause on earth (despite the Palestinians' leaders' caustic habit of skimming off billions in aid dollars to themselves). Meanwhile, in Gaza, the con, under Hamas, assisted by Iranian money-men and military trainers, has accomplished even more than Hitler's Nazis could: turning most of Gaza's able-bodied boys and men into wanna-be Jew-exterminating SS storm troops.

Chumps for Palestine

Rewarding this breathtakingly malevolent con with any measure of success is unthinkable. Especially when it's a scam that unfits human beings for survival, for the future and the challenges of future climate change.

More than 130,000 impoverished people a year have been trying to enter Europe. They're looking for work and a better shot at the good life, from the awful places - many of them in the Arab world - that they've left. The Arabs among them have been scam-infused. But Jew-hate unfits people for decent company. The magical, conspiracy-thinking, fact- and logic-denying nature of it makes Jew-haters bad neighbors. Europe can possibly be forgiven for trying to keep them out.

All the Arabs' countries, and the whole Muslim world, want development. But their own dirty con has infected them with pathologies. How are they going to fare in the world, devoted as they are to Nazi crap and all this nonsense? You don't have to buy into the Bible's Prosperity Gospel, that God blesses those who bless Israel and curses those who curse the Jews (Genesis 12:3, Numbers 24:9), to believe that Jew-hate brings down trouble on the haters.

In the next 75-years, regardless of all the arrested development already resulting from this con, just about half a BILLION people are projected to lose their homes to rising seas. If we can't get the matter of a few million so-called Palestinians straight - when less than a month's worth of the Arab countries' windfall petro income would suffice to settle all of them - then we'll never be able to deal with 500-million genuine refugees.

The Arab-Israeli (or really Arab-Jewish) War is not intractable. The conflict between Israel and Palestine is phony and not in any way insoluble. We - the human race - need to learn from the lessons of the last 70-years and resolve to not let the malevolent, awful Jew-haters of the Arab League make us chumps for Palestine.

The Current Mess

Palestinianism makes people stupid. International law is not the farrago of badly reasoned group-think that people often claim it is. It's unearthly, for me, to hear supposedly estimable legal thinkers weigh in on "occupied Jerusalem" or "the illegally occupied West Bank." The Jews' dramatic, against-all-odds liberation of the old League of Nations Mandate for Palestine territory, smaller than New Jersey, which never belonged to any Arab entity, is no war crime! Zionism is nothing remotely like South African apartheid, ethno-nationalist imperialism, white racist colonialism, or Jewish supremacy masquerading as a legitimate liberation movement.

You can see this clearly in their works. Zionism makes the desert bloom and invents new technologies. Palestinianism hijacks planes and kidnaps innocents, and makes the world more dangerous.

Zionism is a legitimate liberation movement. Palestinianism is the opposite - the artificial creation of the Arabs' degenerate kings and sheiks and dictators, and plutocrats and fascist-minded ideologues.

Yes, it's pitiful watching young people who claim to worry about the environment cursing the one country on earth that plants more trees than it loses, very literally making the desert bloom, while they bless the petro-Arabs' cause and accuse the Jews of racism. They lack historical knowledge. They see what they think are freedom fighters in the Palestinians!

Israel, the land of the supposed-to-be cowardly Jews, is blamed for causing ruination to the civilians of Hamas-land, despite Hamas' constant war-crimes. Trying to recover the hostages that Hamas kidnapped and (if it hasn't already murdered them, God forbid) is holding, the world is struck by the havoc caused as the Jewish Army proceeds. It may help to note what value Israel puts on its own - whether they be foreign guest workers or visitors for pleasure, Arabs, Druze or Jews. For one common soldier, kidnapped by Hamas (Hamas ignoring all cease-fire agreements, as is its way), Israel turned more than 1,300 enemies over to Hamas. For all the horror involved in the loss of human life, that ratio - 1,300 to one - is something to keep in mind as the IDF strives to free the more than 100 hostages still in Hamas' clutches.

This current mess - watching normally smart people gassing idiotically about "the two-state solution" and "land for peace" and "why can't Israel just get along with its neighbors?" - invokes, for me, the shade of Mark Twain, beholding the follies of his age, then cursing "the damned human race." Watching college administrators and college students cheer for Hamas, when I'm thinking of how Palestinianism murdered our beloved Bobby Kennedy (Sirhan Sirhan considered him too "pro-Israel"), the innocent Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, 9/11's World Trade Center innocents... and....

Palestinianism is the one cause advocated collectively by ISIS, Yemen's Houthis, Iran's mullahs and its Revolutionary Guard, Islamic Jihad, all the countries of the Arab League and now all Muslim countries, and formerly by Al-Qaeda, Fatah, Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Soviet Russia. If the world can't see clearly enough to "judge them by their works"....

Thank God, the Bible - Hebrew Revelation - and the Torah give us hope. With hope we can accomplish anything. Without it, and the Bible's profound optimism, we'd be sunk.

Michael Dallen
Detroit
February 2024

2023

December 2023 Vol. 17.3

Crying 'War Crime' against the Children of Israel liberating the Land of Israel is so ridiculous; we're evidently living in a sacred time in the era of new Biblical Books. But Gentile philosophers have been thoroughly crazy, as you'll see in "Philosophers" and "Philosophers on Law" on Divine versus man-made law - and more ridiculous treatment by philosophers. "Milk and Meat" exemplifies one kind of divine law: "Expel the Aliens" (Number 33), which is a law with a clear rationale and obvious context. Discussing Amalek. "The Arab League Conspiracy" to knowingly sacrifice a whole people in the genuinely stupid cause of annihilating Israel. "From Time Immemorial," Palestinianism obscures the vivid fulfillment of remarkable prophecies. "Lies and More Lies" about Palestinianism. "The Arab League" explores the nature of the fraud and the Arabs' need to fix their own disaster. "After October Seventh," revealing the ridiculousness of the Two-State Solution Land-for-Peace ideas. If we wish the "Palestinians" well, help free them from their brothers' evil plot. "Solutions": evil won't succeed. Resettling the Jew-haters where they can make something of themselves and work and help make the world more livable will show mankind a way to successfully handle other migrations and mass movements of difficult people with unlovable cultures... Read More

Crying 'war crime!' against the long-prophesized re-connection of the People of Israel to Judea, the Land of Israel... Calling Israel’s ages-old struggle to return, "white-settler imperialist colonialism"... and the land's liberation and hard-won modern revival, "ethno-colonialist white-racism," "illegal occupation," and even "genocide"....

You couldn't write this stuff.

We've gotta hand it to the nations of the Arab League and the other Jew-haters who've accomplished it.

We should definitely expect these things, which are so weird, to be recorded for all time as an extension of the Bible. The Holy Book will undoubtedly be supplemented in time to come - as with the late introduction to the canon of the Book of Esther, say - with spectacularly instructive fresh revelations. Possibly some of the earlier historical Biblical Books, like Chronicles and Judges, will be relegated to background-reading. So it follows that when we hear, "Nobody could believe" the wild ironies and preposterous absurdities of our days – just one stand-out item: ordinary people, unquestioningly confident in their own righteousness, justifying appalling barbaric attacks against ordinary Jews, as in the Nazis' time and nowadays - it's quite reasonable to expect it to end up Biblical, as canonized sacred history, in the ever-developing saga of Divine Providence, human free will, and the fate of Israel.

We certainly appear to live in such times. Future generations will study them and wonder!

Philosophers

In the context of absurd reactions to Israel and Torah, consider the subject of Philosophy: an outstanding mix of related nuttiness.

Some examples: Voltaire insisting that only Jews were descended from Adam while everybody else was "pre-Adamite," who should be separated from the Jews because of what he called "the horrible immorality of the Bible." Immanuel Kant, a central Enlightenment philosopher, declaring the Jews to be "a nation of cheaters," enslaved to purely material, amoral considerations, so utterly incapable of participating in an ethical society. Hegel calling the Jews "indissolubly bound up with the Land of Israel and inextricably connected to the God of Israel," and, thus it follows, utterly unfit for Christian society.

The towering German philosopher Martin Heidegger was literally a big fan of Hitler and a member of the Nazi Party. Arnold Toynbee, a supposedly great English “wise man” - my personal favorite, who reigned in my childhood, soon after the end of the Nazis' war against "the Jew" ("the anti-man," in Hitler's phrase) - decreed the Children of Israel to be mere "fossil people," who'd missed the boat as to Jesus and have been pointless ever since. (Presumably nagging data-points like Freud or Marx or Einstein, or Nazi Germany's crusade to utterly exterminate them, didn’t bother him.)

Philosophers on Law

In the same vein, modern philosophy makes a sharp distinction between man-made law and Torah, or Divine Law. The fundamental qualities of man-made law - apparently, the ancient Greeks first said this - are, supposedly, intrinsic rationality, truth, universality, and immutably, or permanence. On the other hand, Divine Law, because it's grounded in Revelation, needn't be any of those things, philosophy teachers teach (they really teach this!) so it carries no - that is, zero - presumption of rationality, truth, universality, nor immutability. "Don't expect it to make any sense," in other words. Which suggests that Jewish people who try to fulfill these laws are blindly but stubbornly obedient to arbitrary, capricious, irrationality.

Modern philosophy is so nuts... This shouldn't be hard: Abraham, the father of the movement called Israel, confronts God, demanding, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?" (Genesis 18:25). Jews praise God: "You, HaShem our God, gave us the Torah of life and a love of kindness [chesed, "loving kindness"], righteousness, blessing, compassion, life and peace [shalom, "completeness," "perfection"] (Jewish prayerbook, Sim Shalom). "God's seal is truth" (Talmud, Shabbat 55a).

Man studies God's laws to gain insight into the thinking of their Author and the underlying nature of reality. An unjust Divine Law or an irrational, false, impermanent or vain one, is a contradiction in terms.

Indeed, one expects Divine Law to be MORE just, penetrating, truthful, universally applicable and permanent than the laws devised by mere human kings, courts or legislators. We study Divine Law to deepen our understanding of all existence.

But that's not the philosophers' take. They regard observant Jews more as sheep. "How could any rational person bother with a bunch of supposedly Heaven-made commandments, rules and instructions," professors ask, "that don't even purport to be reasonable, that date back to the Bronze Age?"

Let's quickly examine two examples of such laws. Both are black-letter Scripture, Moses' Laws from Sinai. Only one connects to any kind of explicit Scriptural rationale.

Milk and Meat

A basic rule of Torah-interpretation, an invariable principle, holds that the Written Torah contains no excess words, nor even a single surplus letter. Yet the Torah warns Israel no fewer than three times, "You shall not cook a kid [a suckling, a young goat, sheep or calf] in its mother's milk" (Exodus 23:19, 34:26, Deuteronomy 14:21). So this is obviously a significant matter to God. Happily, we can look to the Oral Torah for greater understanding. Which teaches that it is unholy - it is unrighteous, and certainly insensitive - to eat meat cooked with the milk of any mother at all. In fact, the Rabbis teach, expanding on the Black-letter Torah's ban on cooking meat and milk together, Israel may not mix meat with milk in any manner, for any purpose (Talmud, Hullin 115b).

Obviously, milk means growth and life for the young of all the higher species. Milk is a symbol of motherhood. It represents the providential mechanism by which the higher creatures, including man, lovingly sustain their own kind - their weakest ones, their youngest.

So, thinking about this... Slipping cheese, made from a live mother's milk, onto meat - the dead flesh of a mother's child – is that an act of great good taste or elevated morality? Jews may kill and eat the clean (kosher) animals and may take their milk from them as well - milk coming from a clean source is itself clean - but does anyone need the added triumph of adding insult to their injuries by devouring both their life's milk together with their flesh? Plainly, non-Jews, in the exercise of human dominion over planet Earth, may do so - no Divine law forbids it - but, in this as in other matters, it seems, God holds His "people of priests" to a more refining standard.

The law against eating milk and meat together is called a "Chok," a "statute," in that the Law itself does not reveal its rationale - we don't know exactly why God legislated it. Does that - the lack of a stated rationale - make it vain, irrational, impermanent, or false?

Expel the Aliens

The Torah declares: "Speak unto the Children of Israel... "you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you...” the Torah commands. “And you shall drive out the inhabitants of the land and dwell therein, for unto you have I [God] given the land to possess it... But if you will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then shall those that you let remain of them be as pins in your eyes and as pricks in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land wherein you dwell. And it shall come to pass, that as I thought to do to them, so will I do unto you" (Numbers 33:51-56).

Later, in the Song of Moses, Ha'azinu (Moses’ amazing farewell Teaching), "Give ear, o ye heavens, and I will l speak...."), the great man predicts how God will respond if we fail to follow His Law. Channeling the LORD: "They have roused Me to jealousy with a no-god; they have provoked Me with their vanities; and I will rouse them to jealousy with a no-people [a lo-am, a nation that is no nation]; I will provoke them with a vile nation" (Deuteronomy 32:21).

In Psalms we have the enemies of God and mankind taking "crafty counsel" against the Jews. The historical enemies of Israel, including Ishmaelites (Arabs), Amalekites and Philistines combine in a vast international conspiracy to "cut them off from being a nation," to erase even the "remembrance of the name of Israel" (Psalms 83:5).

Of course Amalek, the anti-Israel, is germane here. Amalek, history's vicious pogromist, the psychotically jealous Jew-hating spirit eternally inherent in the like of Nazis and Hamas, is related to Esau, Jacob's brother (Genesis 27), and Haman, the Hitler-figure in the Book of Esther. The Torah command to expel the enemy aliens obviously relates to the several Torah Commandments against Amalek (see Exodus 17:8; Deuteronomy 25:17-19).

Regarding those Biblical commandments, and their seeming harshness: the Black-letter Torah often come off as coldly severe but it's really more of a cream-puff. It's holy - and full of loopholes. In fact, this is not a bug but a feature, the inherent nature of a Law that must be studied, not just scanned - including legions of God-given logical exceptions to the laws, which soften them - which ensure, for instance, that no one ever gets executed for eating a shrimp cocktail. So, speaking of expelling enemy aliens, for instance, no Torah authority anywhere would ever require the expulsion of a decent law-abiding resident - even a child of the leader of Hamas! - who sincerely pledges his or her allegiance to Jewish Israel. [See Mishneh Torah, Hilchos Melachim 6:1]

With Divine law, unlike man-made law, it's impossible to know everything behind it - the laws' rationale, their complete reason for being. But clearly, part of the thrust of this Scripture is keeping the Children of Israel in the Land of Israel, and helping them succeed despite all Jew-hatred.

The Arab League Conspiracy

Anyone can read a Bible and the Arab world's intellectuals are no exception. Possibly they merely stumbled onto Palestinianism, but some of them certainly read Numbers 33, and liked it, and decided to make it come true. About the time that their countries drove out their ancient Jewish communities, shortly after the Holocaust, they came together and plotted. Israel’s Arab enemies determined to concentrate their own brethren in special camps as close as possible to Jewish Israel.

Who ever heard of "refugee camps" existing generation after generation? Instead of letting their supposedly beloved brethren settle in ANY of the 22 countries of the Arab League - collectively, more than 650 times larger than "Palestine" - as equal citizens, allowed to do things like work there, or own land there, they pushed them into camps: to count the days until the promised time for "driving the Jews into the sea."

People who had been Syrians, Egyptians, Saudis, Iraqis, Jordanians and Turks, mostly, became "Palestinians." (Before that, the Jews in pre-state Israel were called Palestinians. The Romans had renamed Judea "Felix Palestina," Happy Palestine, after the Roman-Jews wars, after exiling all the Jews; the original Palestinians were the vile Philistines of the Bible. In Arabic, the Palestinians are Filistin, Philistines.)

The cruelty is breathtaking. With immense cynicism, defying the appalled advice of all the international refugee-resettlement experts, the Arab countries, advised and helped by other Jew-haters, invented a new nation - a people supposedly indigenous to the Holy Land! Not to help it to accomplish good deeds but, rather, to indoctrinate it, fatten it, multiply it and arm it, to throw it against Israel, to sacrifice it as their spear-tip for annihilating the Jewish state.

This Arab-Israeli War! It’s unique in history: never has there been a war like it! Look at ancient enemies, like France and Germany, China and Japan, Rome and Persia… never have countries combined together like this, to utterly annihilate a neighbor, denying the neighbor's very existence, boycotting it, attacking it, generation after generation, as the countries of the Arab League have done with Israel. The nearby "confrontation states," Lebanon, Egypt, Syria and Jordan, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, initiated and lost multiple hot and horribly costly wars against Israel, but – even after all that - still train against Israel as the "main enemy." Now, in the last few decades, the world Shi'ite movement, which purports to be Islamic and dominates Iran and Yemen, keeps pledging to violently obliterate Israel. While Muslim Turkey talks all the time as if it wants to, along with Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

From Time Immemorial

How did the Arab "Palestinians" become so connected to a land as to peculiarly belong to it, supposedly, like its hills and lakes and mountains? How did people famous for "quietly slipping away" with their tents manage to attach themselves to this one particular place like coral? In fact, actually, many thousands of Muslims today consider this nuts.

Islam is pretty clear on the subject of the Land of Israel belonging to the Children of Israel, while denying any right in the Land to the Arabs. The "crafty counselors" of the Arab nations, in their hatred, didn't care that Islam's abhorrence of Israel is ridiculous. The Qur'an itself declares the Land of Israel to be the Land of Israel - of and for "the Children of Israel." So it's contrary to Islam to push Muslims into fighting Israel to keep Israel from succeeding in the Land of Israel.

The Holy Qur'an, as it's called, declares: "And We [Allah] said thereafter to the Children of Israel, 'Dwell securely in the Promised Land'" (Sura 17:104). The Prophet [Muhammed] himself says to them, "O, my people [the Jews], Enter the Holy Land, which Allah has assigned to you" (Sura 5:21).

From where does all this hate in our time come? Probably from dumb pridefulness and ego. After all, if the Torah is true, that means the Jews - the supposedly cowardly, cheating, animalistic, criminal, weak Jews, as the Qur'an tells the story - were and still are the special people of HaShem. Which means that they remain God's special "witnesses." Which means that the Arabs and Muslims aren't. Which also means, ultimately, that they've got profoundly wrong ideas about Allah and reality.

In creating the Palestinians, the Arab countries also obviously inflicted acute antisemitism on their people, and on their fellow Muslims. Presenting the "brave Palestinians" as the world's purest, truest suffering selfless warriors for Allah and Islam, the Arab world injected itself with passionate hatred of their enemies. Palestinianism is simply the photo-negative of Zionism. To be pro-Palestinian is not to desire the good welfare of the so-called Palestinians but, rather, success for them in their mission: the complete elimination of Israel.

What a lousy mission! What a lousy cause!

Lies and More Lies

Clearly, a principal theme of the Bible is the Land of Israel's unique connection to the People of Israel. It's also a feature of history - a fact that the belligerent lying narrative of the Arabs' is designed to obscure. After the ancient Bronze Age's Cana'anites, nobody but the Jews ever succeeded there.

Mark Twain, visiting Palestine a little before modern Zionism began bringing the Jews back in numbers, spoke of its dreary emptiness, it's out-of-the-world quality, asking, "Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land?" (The Innocents Abroad, 1869). The Torah promises, in one of the most daring prophecies in the Bible, that the Land of Israel, with the Jews exiled, will remain mostly empty, a wilderness. "Your land shall desolate, and your cities waste. Then shall the land enjoy its sabbaths, as long as lies desolate, and you be in your enemies' land" (Leviticus 26:34). God will preserve it desolate will it awaits the Jews (Leviticus 26:43). It’s a spectacular historical truth and also a cosmic dynamic: whenever Israel is separated from the Holy Land, the Bible promises [right at the end of the Bible, closing out Chronicles], the Holy Land will remain untilled and barren, "enjoying its sabbaths" (2 Chronicles 36:21).

By the way, you'll notice when you see photos of "the Occupied West Bank," as it's called - Divinely liberated Judea and Samaria - the barrenness and emptiness of the rocky rolling hills. That's because the Arabs, and the Turks and Mongols and Egyptians and Kurds and Circassians and Romans before them never did very well there. But, after the Jews began coming back in numbers, the Arab population, partly from immigration, partly from lavishly subsidized "natural" increase, exploded. Yet the land outside their fast-growing cities, their palaces and their slums, remains mostly desolate, without the Jews.

The Arab League

Besides supplying their Philistine brethren with Jew-hating propaganda, weaponry, rocket tubes and rocket fuel, and enough food and aid to encourage the continuing population explosion, the 22 countries of the Arab League, with more than 650 times the land of Israel, ALL absolutely banned ALL of them from settling down with them as equal citizens with recognized human rights. Usually, they refuse to even let them work!

That's been the rule, generation after generation. They've all refused - as they accuse Israel of committing "genocide" against the Palestinians - to take them in. Cynically, cruelly, they simply keep insisting that the only place on earth where their brethren properly belong is Jewish Israel. To them, obviously, the name of the game is imposing their brethren on Israel. To defeat Israel according to the Bible's own published formula for defeating Israel!

After October Seventh

One good thing about theOctober 7th Simchas Torah pogrom by Hamas in southern Israel, and the continuing rocket fire into Israeli population centers from Lebanon as well as Gaza: it proves that the so-called "two-state solution" is ridiculous.

Parenthetically, October 7th might also be said to demonstrate the absurdity of claiming that Isaiah 53's "suffering servant of HaShem" is anybody but the People of Israel collectively, given the pogromists' crazed, specifically anti-Jewish viciousness, and the atrocious suffering inflicted. Who’s the inheritor of Esau’s wrath, of God's eternal war versus Amalek? Whom do the Nazis, the Arab terrorists, Communist tyrants, ISIS, Hamas, Iran, etc., hate more than they hate the Jews? Who can doubt that the Jews whom they so hate are the true Israel of Isaiah?

No sane person would ever hand over the highlands of the Holy Land to anybody who admires and praises pogromists. Who would seek to live near Hamas, nor anywhere close to anybody who even likes Hamas? But that, according to the evidence - including polls and mosque-sermons and man-in-the-casbah interviews, online commentary, newspaper commentary, etc. - is more than 80% of all adult Palestinians in the Middle East. More than a quarter express "extreme admiration" of Hamas' pogrom. So in the name of peace, for the good of the haters as well as the hated, nobody should allow Jews to live anywhere near such people. Which means the "two-state solution" isn't a solution but only a formula for endless violence. Which means that, in the name of peace, the Arab nations need to finally stop trying to annihilate Israel, and start taking care of their own. Not just by supplying them with weaponry and copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion!

I admit that my main interest is the Jews, not the so-called Palestinians, but it should be obvious that being used as a sacrificial offering to destroy Jewish Israel is no path to success for them, either. If you wish them well, help them free themselves from the Arab nations’ evil plot.

Solutions

Usually when I mention getting the Arab countries to stop screwing over their own people in their shameful crusade to annihilate Israel, folks reply, "Ain't gonna happen." However, these folks probably aren't prophets and don't foresee the future prophetically.

Prophecy's hard. We remember when the Kaiser of Germany met Theodore Herzl, a father of Zionism: "Herr Herzel, for your plan [for a sovereign state for the Jews in their Holy Land] to succeed, no fewer than THREE empires [Russia’s, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turkish empires] would have to die." That was in 1898. All three were gone by 1918.

The Arab nations’ plot can't be allowed to succeed. Decent people can't be expected to want to live anywhere near people of bad, vicious culture. A good definition of a bad culture is a Jew-hating culture. People who hate Jews make bad neighbors, because that sickness spreads and they will ultimately set themselves up as the enemies of all mankind.

The Arab countries have cynically fomented, cultivated, subsidized, broadcast and manufactured Jew-hate now over more than a century. You can't expect the Jews to solve that problem when they're the chief victims of it. Nor expect them to fulfill whatever legitimate (non-genocidal) aspirations that the Jew-haters may have. Making the Jewish people responsible for the happiness of Jew-haters is ridiculous. The Arab countries ginned up this mess on their own and the world can't let them impose the burden of their folly on Israel, nor on anyone but themselves.

We have good reason to hope. Relying on truth and other Torah values - above all, the fact that God made all men in His image - and the resilience and richness of planet Earth, mankind can save itself along with the Earth.

One thing we can expect in the future is mass movements of different peoples, in their millions, fleeing droughts and floods, tidal waves and climate change, earthquakes, wars, anarchy and oppression. If we can deal wisely with the so-called Palestinians we can deal wisely with all such challenges, particularly, what can be done with people whom no one wants?

We suggested before that the world can use the genius of Palestinians, their youth - they're one of the youngest populations on Earth - and energy and numbers, to help save the world, to restore life and fertility particularly to the vast waste places of the ridiculously underpopulated Arab countries, who've been cruelly trying to sacrifice them in their misbegotten war against Israel.

In a world where people need labor, young, healthy, versatile and honest workers, they, and the other peoples whom no one wants, should be allowed to redeem themselves through labor. Culture, we know, is malleable. It changes in the historical eye-blink of one or two generations. People can heal themselves.

The key to the human future will be dealing with this issue, the world's Jew-hating Arabs against the Jews. We mustn't reward the Arab countries for their evil. If we can crack open the Arab world's plot against the Jews it'll take us directly to the solutions for other misused, under-used, and currently unwanted people. In all things, if we can address the problems of the world and our fellow men honestly, as God wants, the future is bright.

Mankind needs truthfulness, fairness, compassion and wisdom for tackling the human population issues of the future. Sometimes people need to move - as the Jews moved from the Arabs' and other Muslim countries, and from Europe, and all over. The Southern and Western Asian and Central American and African peoples fleeing war, drought, bad government and anarchy needn't remain paupers. The world can afford them and the so-called Palestinians a never-ending supply of rewarding, productive, necessary work.

No people is completely immune from the historical imperative to need to move. Nobody has an absolute entitlement to occupy any portion of the planet! Change your place and change your mazal [your "stars," your fate or destiny] is ancient Jewish folk-wisdom but it seems appropriate in the circumstances. The so-called Palestinians need to change their mazal.

By Michael Dallen
Detroit
December 5, 2023

If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.

November 2023 Vol. 17.2

"Palestinians Over God, International Law, and Eretz Israel. Israel becoming re-established in the Land of Israel, which seems to be prophecy fulfilled, is alleged to be, basically, a war crime, violating International Law. We analyze that here....Read More

You know you’re dealing with powerful stuff: ancient prophecies about modern history and current affairs, stated and stated emphatically by the Jewish people and the Bible’s prophets over millenia, and then, mostly in modern times, transformed into action.

It didn’t have to go this way. For many, many centuries it seemed like it wouldn’t, the Jewish People coming back to the Land of Israel, Eretz Israel:

"I shall plant them upon their own land, and they shall be no more plucked up" (Amos 9:15)

"He that scattered Israel will gather and guard him as a shepherd his flock" (Jeremiah 31:9)

"All nations shall call you happy, for you shall be a delightsome land" (Malachi 3:12)

"He will assemble the dispersed of Israel" (Isaiah 11:12)

"the ransomed of the LORD shall return with singing to Zion" (Isaiah 35:10)....

These are nation-specific, unique, compelling prophecies, and we today aren’t just humbled and astonished but blessed to see them being fulfilled, spectacularly, in our time - in just the last few generations.

The Jews - particularly after the Holocaust - are back in Israel in numbers. Most of the world won't see it this way, but when you talk of Hebrews settling and improving the Land of Israel, building homes there, you're talking about something extremely unexpected, despite it being prophesized.
The return of the People of Israel to Israel is a profoundly remarkable and certainly at least arguably miraculous phenomenon, or sets of phenomena, "making the deserts bloom," astoundingly and against all expectations winning fierce wars, succeeding economically, creating a free society... This is something having all of the earmarks of something proceeding from Providence.

Opposing Providence is not smart. These are primary Biblical themes, from the very heart – the oldest and holiest parts - of the Bible. They are generally perceived as being indisputably sacred to Christians of every domination and - naturally - to Jews.

Even beyond that, any reasonably well-informed person and every believing (or even half-believing) Jew or Christian should be able to recognize that God, the Ultimate Power, or anyway, at least, Something Entirely Mysterious, has had a hand in making this happen.

It is, very evidently, His will - expressed clearly enough in Biblical prophecy, for sure, but also in the modern history of Israel and the modern-time "Wars of the Lord" (See Numbers 21:14, and Exodus 17:14)... of the countless battles fought, and in the astonishing flourishing of the Land - to convey complete dominion of the little Land of Israel to one people and one people only. It's not a huge land - it's just a sliver of Eurasia near Africa - but it's wholly given over, not to the Children of Ishmael, the Arab Nation, which claims it, and not to any other nation, either, only to God's "first-born son," ("Israel is My first-born son," Exodus 4:22), the Jewish People.

Leave it to the human race to screw it up

The basis for claiming that the People of Israel's return to the Land of Israel is a war crime - which is, at this writing, the prevailing opinion among informed and supposedly enlightened humankind in our time – is radically thinner, more shaky and insubstantial than any reasonable, dispassionate onlooker would guess.

The nations tried, after World War II, to codify a ban on doing what the Nazis did, involving forcible transfers, deportation and harsh resettlement of civilian populations. The Nazis did this sort of things particularly to Jews, of course, and this is a law - Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention “relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War,” dated August 12, 1949 - banning nations from doing what the Nazis did to the Jews.

Besides seeming a little like "closing the barn door after losing the horses," this statute, ironically, has never been applied at any time in any context - except ... against the Jews!

Worldwide, evil governments savagely uproot different populations, of "foreigners" or their own populations, banishing them, forcing them to relocate, killing, torturing, robbing and raping them - but Article 49 has only ever been invoked against ... guess who?

It should go without saying that the scholars and diplomats who devised this piece of legislation were highly literate men and women entirely familiar - Biblical literacy in Europe was nearly universal - with the Bible's myriad promises to Israel and man, that the Jews should and would be returning to the Holy Land, to reestablish Israel in the Land of Israel.

In the shadow of the Holocaust, even any atheists among those jurists probably felt averse to creating any more trouble for the Jewish people, as by preventing any re-establishment of Jewish life in any part of the Land of Israel that any other nation claimed. And it follows, and it's very evident, that they wrote the law carefully, deliberating over every word, to keep it from being perversely misused.

But just give folks a chance to mess up good things....

Whether the People of Israel have acquired tenure in the Land of Israel through inheritance, or Biblical decree, through purchase from human land-holders, through settling and improving abandoned wastelands, or – obviously - through conquest in desperate defensive wars, this is undisputed:

Not one inch of the land where Israel is sovereign, which used to be part of the Turkish Empire, was part of or belonged, legally, to any sovereign country!

Gaza wasn't Egypt. The heart of the Holy Land, Judea and Samaria, a/k/a "the West Bank" of the Jordan River (as the Jordanians named it), was occupied by the Kingdom of Jordan by force of arms but didn't legally belong to it. The Golan Heights in the north was never "internationally recognized" as being inherently Syrian.

This matters. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention was carefully written, to criminalize Nazi-like oppression, where a powerful country steals - expropriates - another country's territory. NONE of the real estate now being described as illegally occupied by Israel belonged to other countries!

Incidentally, this is a little off-point, but anyone with a globe or world map will recognize that we're not speaking here of vast territories.

The whole of "Green Line Israel" (Israel after the 1949 armistice), plus "the disputed territories," could fit within Lake Michigan, or the state of New Jersey, with room to spare. The Arab world is not land-poor! But as far as Israel's enemies are concerned, the whole of the Holy Land is "disputed territory," given the Jew-haters' oft-expressed ambition to "liberate" it all - that is, to "cleanse" it entirely of Jews - "from the river to the sea."

Most of the world, despite Article 49's clear wording, and plenty of expert jurists' emphatic declarations that Israel never "illegally occupied" anything following the 1967 Six Day War, firmly adheres to the profoundly asinine proposition that Article 49 applies to Judea, Samaria, the Golan Heights and Gaza, and that the presence of Jews in Jerusalem and Judea is a war crime.

“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population in the territory it occupies.” That’s it. That’s Article 4.

Written and designed to ban Nazi-style ethnic cleansing through government-compelled forcible population transfers, those few words have been absurdly re-interpreted to turn pious Jewish civilian families' hopeful purchasing of mortgages in the historic heartland of the Jewish People, to live Jewish lives there - into criminal violations of international law, or, basically, war crimes.

This is ridiculous. The popular catchphrase, heard every day on television, in newspapers and the internet, "illegally occupied Jewish settlements in the West Bank," is a grotesque caricature and mind-blowing perversion of law.

If Article 49 were ever applied to the settlement of the Americas as it is to the return of the people Israel to the land of Israel, it would damn all the white pioneers, immigrants and settlers as war criminals!

Against the plain Nazi-fighting intent of the framers of the law, obviously, later generations came up with a much more “woke,” “anti-colonialist” transformation of it.

This ridiculous result insults even the idea of man-made law! It puts in doubt man’s capacity to self-govern.

If Israel returning to Israel, against all the claims and obstacles and viciousness of all the myriad Jew-haters, constitutes colonialism, then we had all better re-think what is colonialism!

By Michael Dallen
First Covenant Foundation
Detroit
November 2, 2023

If God does not exist, nothing matters.
If God does exist - nothing else matters.

October 2023 Vol. 17.1

Middle East Game Plan - now we're engaged (again) in a great war... Specifically pertinent prophetic teachings, including "pins in your eyes and thorns in your sides". (Those who hate Israel needn't live in Israel.) Amalek, the anti-Israel... General Scriptural principles are particularly pertinent right now... Laws for Noachides... Noachides in the Land of Israel, legal standards, requirements, and violations. Godly Worshipfulness - Techniques. Follow-up from Last Month. Dialogue with Jewish people's Conservative and Reform movements... and more.

September 2023 - Vol. 16.5

Salvation Coming! Earth's future is bright! Getting real. To "recognize and know" the LORD is a discipline and a goal. Ad Astra, To the Stars. Noachides and the Sabbath. Noachides, dear to God. Sacred tools and techniques - let's hear from you. The world's birthday: Happy New Year! More

August 2023 - Vol. 16.4

Noachide Sabbath - Colloquy involving Dr. Robert Buxbaum, Rabbi Michael Katz, and Michael Dallen. Should a Noachide, a non-Jew, celebrate or keep a Sabbath (Shabbos)? If so, when, how, and why? A conversation... and more

July 2023 - Vol. 16.3

Prosperity Gospel - Four different promises - absolute Divine promises of direct reward for good conduct - applying to everyone of every nation. Leviticus 18, "I AM THE LORD." Genesis 12:3, "I will bless them that bless you." Psalm 41, Proverbs 19, "THE LORD will deliver him..." (here's Prosperity Gospel with a bite!). Psalm 92, respecting God's surpassing mighty holiness. and more

June 2023 - Vol. 16.2

Eternal: the Seven Noachide Commandments. The "Justice" Commandment, dinim, the "pro-government" Commandment. No messiah/no "redemption" will diminish or end human obligations and privileges to establish, defend, maintain, and perfect good government. Don't expect the obliteration of politics - nor of deluded self-interest - or controversy in the future; don't expect the obliteration of work. Noachides and Jewish input regarding government. Book review: Dr. Robert Buxbaum reviews "Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions." The author is a self-described "agnostic heathen," calling monotheism "child abuse" and positing, instead of a Creator, an "inflation." The negative dogmatism of the modern academy. Finally, a short obituary of Harvard astronomer Owen Gingerich died May 28, 2023. Late beloved scientist insisting that "a super-intelligent Creator exists beyond and within the cosmos".... and more

March 2023 - Vol.16.1

If God Does Not Exist (If God does not exist, nothing matters. If God does exist, nothing else matters)
Proving the case for God .... Apocalypse: Nice future or weird Gentile fever dreams? ... God's Personality"... God's Fury ("Fury is not in Me") .... Ukraine... Messiah and the Future ... Amalek, the Anti-Israel, Haman and Hitler ... and more

2021

January/February - Vol. 15.3 Agents of the Revolution. "Servants of HaShem." This is how the Hebrew Revolution works. See the people: Amar'e Stoudemire, athlete in Israel, and - may they rest in peace, Dr. Andrew Brooks and Larry King... The Book of Joshua: "God chooses his servants from who's available." Joshua was a general and a Jewish George Washington, but not a Shakespearean or Lincoln, and certainly not a Moses. By the end of Joshua, you see that institutionalizing the Hebrew Revolution after Moses is going to be a slog.... "Next Issue, Judges": Israel usually skips over most of Scripture (you can see from this listing of what's read when), but there's priceless information for Noachides and Jews to learn from there... Stay tuned for some fresh lessons from Judges, Samuel, and Kings... And more

2020

December 2020 - Vol. 15.2

Saul Was a Jerk - King Saul was a Jerk. Rabbi Michael Katz doesn't like such talk, but Saul was a divine joke about Israel. The Lord's anointed, he did well for a while but hung on stubbornly and lawlessly past his time, committing awful crimes and bringing down a terrible military catastrophe on Israel. The prophet Samuel lectured Israel on the evils of monarchy - the Torah commands Israel to establish a good government, not tyranny - and his language in this Scripture helped spark America's Revolution. Israel picked a monarch who was a booby prize, George Washington without the substance, and Israel is still arguing about what deference is due... and more.

October 2020 - Vol. 15.1

Owns Everything? - Conversation: Deity is Knowable (Isaac Newton thought so. (Discussion with skeptical Noahides). Owns Everything? (God is the Ba'al, the Possessor?). 'Vanity' in the Book of Ecclesiastes. God's Eyes (What's the ancient liturgy getting at?). "Congregation of Peoples" from Isaac'sancient prophetic blessing, and More

September 2020 - Vol 14.12

Life After Death -What Happens When You Die? What Is the Essence of a Human Being? … Dust. Wind. Liquid. Nefesh. Sheol. Fire. Heaven. Neshama. Soul of Fire. God’s Coming Name. Kaddish… and More

August 2020 - Vol. 14.11

The Natural Condition of Mankind: extremely high level of God-consciousness. (Sixth and seventh Month of the Plague.) "Faith" is confidence in rational analysis. Pagan skeptics, philosophers, and clergy - and their remarkable evidentiary double standards brought to bear against overwhelming proofs - the more you learn, the more you know and the more you see - that HaShem, God, is Who He says He is... and more.

July 2020 Vol. 14.10

Fifth Month of the Plague... "Treating Scripture Like a Joke." Prophecies that seemed dubious, if not preposterous, when they were issued thousands of years ago: fulfilled! ... Little things that the ignorant and misled are missing... Coming into a genuinely conscious one-to-one relationship with God - GOD! - Himself ... Alas, what happens when someone "gets" it? When the seeker, bewildered by convincing proofs of God, turns to trusted clergy and philosophers? More

June 2020 Vol. 14.9

Sivan, 5780: Fourth Month of the Plague... Sivan, the Twins' Month - and the author... One Year Ago, Jack Saunders... "If Jews Were Any Good" - If Christians thought Jews were any good, they wouldn't be Christians... Punishments - criminal sentences and Nohide Law... Prophecy vs. Palestinianism, ancient promises, historical fulfillment, and mythic baloney... Prayers & Consciousness... The Prayer Word 'Selah,' what it teaches, how it works... and More

May 2020 Vol. 14.8

The Three Not-Quite Universal Laws... Beyond the Seven Laws we know about, are sorcery, emasculation, or mixing species in the Torah’s “forbidden mixture,” which are all forbidden by the Torah, so abhorrent that every nation should ban them? Some great Torah Sages believed so. But by studying their thinking, you see why it’s the Seven, and only the Seven, that has a claim on all humanity and more.

April 2020 Vol. 14.7

Gobsmacked - the Karma Quotient II, Gobsmacked by God... The Coronavirus really brings out the rule of God: you can all but see "the God that hides" in action. Hashgacha protis, Providence, manifests in the day-to-day how a conscious servant of God responds. "The world was created for me" - Talmud. God's humor and sense of irony: a necessary part of His holiness. God's wrath. The Master of a trillion galaxies a "creampuff"?...and More.

March 2020 Vol. 14.6

The Karma Quotient.... The Karma Quotient connects to the eternal Torah truth that God proclaimed three times at Sinai, "You shall not have any gods before Me." It's part of God's "Name." It's "Divine Communication at a Very High Level." "Even Moses May Have Puzzled Over This." "So, this is the Ratio." "God's Love." "Good, Good God." Prayer...and MORE

February 2020 Vol. 14.5

The Cool Kids..... Who are the Cool Kids, B'nei Noach or B'nei Israel - Jews or non-Jews? Getting with God using the same basic technique as George Washington and the prophet Abraham; the God Who made each one of us in his Image graciously invites our company. But does God's love for Israel mean He can't spare any love for any non-Jews? People's extraordinary, awful, blaspheming misconceptions of God's Name and refusal to learn from Jewish teachings. How do you get amongst the "cool kids" with the eternal holy power that manages creation? Universal Translator - help us with this new feature and MORE.

January 2020 Vol. 14.4

Who is Israel? News, back from Israel, Who is Israel? Black Hebrews. Universal translating button; helping out the Jewish Army; tankers’ memorial; Fathers of Zionism, Black racism and Black Hebrew Israelites; reflections on the Kokomo congregation… and MORE.

2019

December 2019 Vol. 14.3

FIXING RUSSIA. Moscow and KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin’s Russia has become a capital of white nationalism. Militarizing what the Torah calls loshon hara, weaponizing modern communications to spew falsehood, defamation, and character assassination, Russia disgraces its new “gods” and values. Russia needs fixing. RESPONSE BY RABBI MICHAEL KATZ. PARIAHS. No wonder Muslim refugees and immigrants are feared. HONOR. “Be a blessing,” God commands Abraham and all of us to answer His call to live an extraordinary life of honor...more.

November 2019 Vol. 14.2

True Dwellings of the Holy (Vol. 14:2), Fleeting Temples, abounding holiness; Tower of Babel, love vs. punishment; The Kokomo Congregation, continued: Concerns, issues, expectations, and hope and… more.

October 2019 Vol. 14.1

Kokomo Congregation … Indiana congregation “gets” the rhyming word music in Holy Scripture and ancient liturgy – could this be a portent of the Messianic Age? They call themselves Jews. Who knows their spiritual flight path? How to get to success: the key to righteousness, from Micah 6:8. Images of Kokomo… and more.

September 2019 Vol. 13.13

“The Enemies” DEEP TEACHINGS: Whoever you are, Jew or non-Jew, attack others’ privilege, power, or command. Expect trouble. Challenge the old ways at all? Denounce caste? Expect hatred. Attack tribalism, racism, and xenophobia? Expect hatred. Blast cruelty? Injustice? Oppression? Expect hatred. Blast stinginess and meanness? Expect hatred. Lewdness? Expect hatred. Blast, the whole might-makes-right thing? Expect hatred. False ideas, ideals, gods, superstitions? Expect hatred… People will cheerfully join and become Nazis and Inquisitors against you…. Compare the status quo defending the New Testament with the radicalizing, revolutionary record of the “Old.” The Torah directs and energizes irresistible forces against immovable objects (“the old ways” of injustice and tyranny). History teaches: expect spectacular results – like the American and French Revolution and the Civil War (not to mention the Scientific Revolution)... When Gentiles take up the Old Testament, revolutions follow..... and more.

August 2019 Vol. 13.12

Hating Hebrews: Mysteries... Weird characteristics of anti-Semitism. No one cares about Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, and Bernie Madoff any more than they credit the Jews for all the creative innovators, geniuses, and saints. Stalin and Henry Ford didn't let warm personal relationships with Jews detract from their fierce generalized Jew-hatred. Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia... Martin Luther was a brilliant fascist-minded, counter-revolutionary foe of peasants and Torah-inspired freedom movements. Jews were commanded to incarnate the holy and decent revolutionary radical, liberating, egalitarian, eternally progressive precepts of the Torah.... and more.

July 2019 Vol. 13.11

Mighty Cosmic Forces. While the churches shrink, "Judaism," Israel's holy path and the Path of the Righteous Non-Jews, is the outlier. Indeed, it's constantly the outlier, the unique religious, moral, cosmological, cultural, spiritual, and sociological movement in history. People claim Judaism is as phony as the rest of them, but you can't call revelatory data points ridiculous. Mighty cosmic forces reveal themselves in the bundle of phenomena making up the great phenomenon called anti-Semitism... The amazing cosmic physics that brings blessing to HaShem and His causes and cursing to those who hate them... Where are the Philistines, Babylon, Assyria, Rome, Constantinople, Zoroastrians, Crusaders, Czars and Soviets? How well did the Nazis do for Germany? ... The Providential system is outlined and foreseen in a few clear words from ancient prophecy. George Orwell's insight. ... "From one new moon to the next," be ready for sudden progress.... more.

June 2019 Vol. 13.10

Jack E. Saunders, Aleinu Man (1948-2019). Articles: Godless vs. God-filled, two schools of thought - with some elements in common. The Aleinu prayer is a statement of faith and philosophy. What kind of man was Jack Saunders? Passover/Pesach and Pentecost/Shavuos. Saunders' pictures and more

May 2019 Vol. 13.9

Angels, Afterlives, Contraception, Anti-Semitism, and... New Book! Just out: "From Rehovoam [Solomon's son] to Nehemiah [building the Second Temple]"... Angels, or "messengers"... Afterlives (say 'No!' to ghosts)... Abortion and contraception... Anti-Semitism: leave it to Israel and Torah and God to attract enemies from both the left wing and the right wing... the recommended corrective... and more

April 2019 Vol. 13.8

CONFIRMING PROVIDENCE. God is the hero here, but it's through the works of His "firstborn" (Exodus 4:22) that He displays and confirms His reality, reliability, wisdom, and eternity - and how His plan is supposed to work. "Sabbath Enlightenment," the 25-hour mental hygiene break, is a good time to read. "Six Men": from Gone With the Wind to The Twilight Zone to ballet and modern art, to artificial intelligence, to local real estate development: they are all advertisements for God and clues that we ignore at our peril. Godly values are unbeatable values that have supercharged the Jews... and more.

March 2019 Vol. 13.7

PROVING PROVIDENCE. Proofs of God's reality and the power of Torah abound, but they're often more visible to Jews than to Noahides. "The principal Jewish sport is reading lists of names" - since Divine truths lie behind them. "The fewest of all peoples" (Deuteronomy 7:7) and the Torah of matriarchal descent. Who is really Israel? "Old Israel" v. "New Israel." Noahides invited to this great and holy cause... and more

February 2019 Vol. 13.6

SCRIPTURE: FIVE GREAT PRIZES. Five precious gems of Torah: "From My Altar," "Tooth for Tooth," "Doctors' Bills,” "Milk and Meat, and "How To...." This month, we focus on and celebrate five prize passages from the Revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai: Exodus 21:14, 19, and Exodus 21:24; Exodus 23:19, and Deuteronomy 12:21... and more

January 2019 Vol. 13.5

UNFOLDING DEUTERONOMY, CHAPTER 4. The mysterious, lovely Divine "statutes" are becoming clearer in our time. The Bible's moral laws - the Noahide laws - are all logical laws, versus the statutes, which 1) aren't logical laws and 2) don't command Noahides. But as science lights up the remarkable goodness of the statutes, the statutes increasingly inform and can potentially elevate both Noahide and Jew... Two very powerful ideas from Deut. 4... Divine Spirit & Aleinu... Divorce or Covenant? The "Suffering Servant of the Lord," Isaiah 53, et cetera... Beware of censoring free speech and thought. (What people call "hate speech" isn't necessarily so)... and More