By Joan Swirsky
“Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.”
Those words were spoken by Menachem Begin in June of 1982 directly to the Democrat senator from Delaware, Joe Biden, who had confronted the Israeli Prime Minister during his Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony by threatening to cut off aid to Israel.
That’s right, only 32 years after the establishment of the tiny Jewish state, which was surrounded by 22 warmongering, Israel-loathing Arab states, and only 35 years after the Holocaust savagely murdered––tortured, and gassed to death––six million Jewish men, women, children, and infants, Senator Biden was once again terrorizing the Jews of the world with his menacing ultimatum.
Not a fluke, not a misstatement, not an error in judgment, but vintage Joe Biden, whose longtime antagonism and belligerence toward Israel has been exhaustively documented by, among others, Shmuel Klatzkin (Biden’s Hostility to Israel––read the whole article) and Janet Levy in AmericanThinker.com (Is a Vote for Joe Biden in the Interest of American Jews?).
EXAMPLES ABOUND
Levy reports a number of the Obama-Biden regime’s consistent anti-Israel policies:
- They interfered with the 2015 Israeli elections with the goal of defeating the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
- Their State Department granted $350,000 to OneVoice, a radical anti-Israel organization that supports the terrorist group Hamas.
- They fully supported the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement to destroy Israel economically.
- In 2016, Biden pressured Ukraine, an abstainer, to vote for UN Security Council measure 2334, which claimed that ancient and historic Jewish sites were “illegally occupied.”
- They approved the same UN measure, which condemned Israelis building settlements––emboldening the Palestinian Authority to call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Judea, Samaria, and the Jewish Quarter, reversing decades of U.S. vetoes against such moves.
Today, President Biden heartily endorses the Iran nuclear deal—which President Trump canceled––and has let Israel know that he adamantly opposes Israel attacking Iran’s nuclear sites. That is the same Iran whose stated mission for decades is to eradicate “The Big Satan” (America) and to exterminate from the face of the earth “The Little Satan” (Israel).
And we all know how thunderously silent Mr. Biden was back when his violently racist fellow Democrats––Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MI), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)—and a long list of simpatico Jew-hating, Israel-loathing activists––spewed their undisguised anti-Semitic bile for all the world to hear.
“Biden said he could never be silent on anti-Semitism,” Levy writes, “but raised no objections, as vice-president, to more than 60 White House visits by Al Sharpton, who [had] incited anti-Jewish riots in New York City in the 1990s.
LESSONS OF HISTORY
I was a very little girl––younger than six––when I first asked my parents why they were running frantically to meeting after meeting every evening, opening their checkbooks, delivering impassioned speeches, wringing their hands, and shedding copious tears.
They told me what few American-Jewish parents ever told their children, so numb were they from disbelief and so eager to protect them from the ghastly truth, which was that adults and children just like them, just like us––six million of them––had been savagely murdered by Adolph Hitler and his “willing executioners” in Germany, Poland, all over Eastern Europe, and even in “civilized” countries like France, simply because they were Jewish.
Jews who managed to flee Europe and come to America before the Holocaust––like my own and my late husband Steve’s grandparents––and those who survived the killing camps and landed on our shores by sheer good fortune thought they died and went to heaven on earth. For the first time in their lives––in fact, in Jewish history––they were free to breathe, to create, to pursue their dreams, to worship, and to raise their children without fear.
Yes, there were quotas in colleges and graduate schools, Holocaust denial, and today an upsurge in Jew hatred, but nothing stopped Jews from succeeding and excelling and contributing disproportionately to American society and to the world, just as the Jews in the state of Israel––only 76 years old––do today.
THE LEGACY OF PERSECUTION
But over 3,500 years of persecution exacts a heavy price. To understand, just think about the long-lasting toll the following events take:
- A one-minute gunshot,
- A two-hour bout of chemotherapy,
- A three-week recovery from open-heart surgery,
- A four-month lay-off,
- An almost three-year pandemic lockdown
- A five-year recession.
All of the above are life-changing, diminishing, often devastating, sometimes annihilating.
Yet Jews continued on, their survival instinct stronger than the most crushing circumstances of their long and besieged history of being haunted, hunted, and often destroyed in, among other cataclysmic events:
- The Crusades.
- The Inquisition.
- The expulsion from Spain.
- The Holocaust.
- And always, the diaspora.
- And now, October 7, 2023.
After the Holocaust, American Jews who followed politics––most did and still do today––were forced to ask themselves and taught their children to ask: Is it good for the Jews? Meaning, will this or that candidate or statement or policy or law lead to another Holocaust?
After all, the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s enjoyed tremendous success––in business, academia, the arts and sciences, and society in general. Unlike the United States today, every college and university did not feature violent anti-Jewish protests or professors who taught anti-Jewish propaganda. Until the rise of Hitler, there were no elected officials––as there are in the U.S. today––spewing Jew hatred, not only with no disapproval from the powers-that-be, but with total impunity.
Now, American Jews have to ask themselves: Is the presidential candidacy of Biden’s choice for VP, Kamala Harris, good for the Jews?
Writer Kenin M. Spivak, among dozens who affirm his thinking, cites numerous damning reasons why Harris is a terrible––and dangerous—choice, among them that she “has remained largely silent about the outbreak of anti-Semitism. She selected far-left advisors who oppose Israel’s Gaza operations, and she boycotted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.”
Not to omit that she was “open to” an arms embargo against Israel and, as Robert Spencer, a Middle East expert, predicts: “If Kamala is elected president, the American gravy train to Tehran will likely continue running, enabling the mullahs to continue their jihad against Israel…”
But nothing covers the true horrors of a Harris presidency more comprehensively than this opus, whose author wishes to remain anonymous.
“Biden-Harris-Walz is and will be a disaster for Israel and for American Jews,” he writes. “As a lifelong Democrat, it hurts me even more to admit that, this time around, given the prominence of the currently major issue for me, I believe I have to vote for the Orange Man.”
In short, a vote for Kalamity Harris and the truly regressive, Obama-clone platform she’s running on––including high taxes, a weakened military, an anti-fracking return-to-energy-dependence, open borders, confiscation of your guns, and a viciously contentious relationship with Israel––would be terrible for America and disastrous for the Jewish state.
If you’re a liberal American Jew determined to pull the lever or mail a write-in ballot for Kamala Harris—don’t!
Don’t be a Jew with trembling knees. Your very survival and that of your family are at stake!
~~~
Joan Swirsky is a New York based journalist and author. Her website is www.joanswirsky.com, and she can be reached at joanswirsky@gmail.com.
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