Tag Archives: Jews

Munich Massacre Widow Still Seeks Justice

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Iconic news photo one one of the Munich hostage-takers

In the summer of 1972, I was living in a dormitory at the University of Arizona, taking Organic Chemistry in summer school. That was five days of lecture and three days of labs, each of them three-hours long. The labs required a full written report for each session as well. It was a lot of work, and I had no job. Also no money… that was the summer I counted out pennies for a taco at Taco Bell, though mostly I lived on oatmeal, green grapes and “cup custard” sandwich cookies… I lost a good deal of weight, but at the end of three months I started getting sick all the time and went back to a more nutritious diet.

Clearly I had little time for radio, newspapers or TV, yet even I managed to hear about the massacre of the entire Israeli Olympic team at the Munich Olympic Games that summer.

During the Games’ second week, PLO terrorists sneaked into the Israeli dormitory one night around 4am, killed two of the Israeli team right there, took the other 9 hostage and in the end killed them all.

The movie Munich with Eric Bana is based on this event, focusing on the actions of Israel’s Mossad to bring the criminals to justice… or to exact retribution, however you wish to look at it. I think they accomplished both. (It’s a good movie; I recommend it)

Recently The Times of Israel ran an article on Ankie Spitzer, wife of slain Israeli fencing master and Olympic team coach Andre Spitzer. For decades she’s been trying to get the Olympic authorities to commemorate her husband and the other murdered athletes within the framework of the Olympic Games themselves.

Why at the Games? Because all the victims were Olympic athletes or coaches, and all were attending the Olympic games when they were killed. The International Olympic Committee has allowed official commemorations for all sorts of other tragedies, some of which had nothing to do with the games or the athletes, so remembering the Israeli deaths seems entirely appropriate.

She’s been at it for 40 years, stymied by the committee’s fear of alienating Arab nations who have threatened to boycott the Olympics should there be any such official remembrance of the slain Israelis. This from the representatives of the so-called Religion of Peace. And in the context of an event that supposedly celebrates “Man is Wonderful! Lets All Just Get Along!”

Except for the Jews, it would seem.

Here are a couple of quotes:

 The International Olympic Committee, while promoting peace and fraternity, also has a history of honoring the despicable. In 1936, some 11 months after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, the committee allowed Hitler to host the Olympics in Berlin. In the 1980s, the committee bestowed its highest honor, the Olympic Order, on Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Erich Honecker of East Germany. In the 1990s, the committee welcomed Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic son, Uday, as the head of Iraq’s National Olympic Committee even though it was well-known that he regularly tortured and killed athletes who underperformed during the Games.

And,

 “They are a corrupt organization, led by greed rather than the Olympic spirit,” said Spitzer, noting that a great deal of funding comes from the oil-rich gulf states.

The whole situation illustrates one of the major fronts in the unseen spiritual war around us — which is the fact that the kingdom of darkness HATES Israel. It will do anything it can to destroy the Jews, being God’s people, the nation and race to whom He has promised a messiah and human king who will rule over them  personally on this earth during the Millennium.

If Satan can wipe them out, then God will no longer be able to keep His promises to them…not only that they’ll have a special part in the Millennial kingdom, whose king is directly from the line of David, but that He will preserve them as a nation until that time. If He can’t keep His promises then He is proved weak, unjust, misguided, unrighteous, untruthful, in short, not God.

This Times of Israel article provides a good outline of events seen from Ankie’s perspective and is well worth your time. Read it HERE.

For further information check out Wikipedia’s article on the Munich massacres as well. You can find that HERE.

Update: And now that the 2012 Olympics have begun, with this year’s opening ceremonies including a moment of silence for Britain’s victims of Islamic terrorism in the London bombings which occurred the day after London was selected to host these very games, the Olympic committee’s refusal to hold a moment of silence commemorating the murdered Israeli athletes only confirms their hypocrisy.  You can watch the memorial  production for the Londoners — one NBC chose not to air Friday night HERE.

The Torah of Liberalism

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The “Torah” of Liberalism. So is titled the final chapter of the book Why are Jews Liberals? by Norman Podhoretz, which I mentioned in my last post.

 Throughout the book, he has laid out a brief history of the Jews in Europe and the US, detailing the terrible treatment they received at the hands of the conservative religious folks of their day, the absurd beliefs of the latter (eg, that Jews kidnapped and killed Christian children because they need their blood to celebrate their Passover; or that the Jews started the plague by poisoning local wells) and the nasty treatment these sorts of beliefs produced, examples of which I gave yesterday.

Then came the Enlightenment in France, when resident intellectuals challenged the religious status quo and began to talk about equality of men, whether they accepted Christian doctrine or did not. As science began to take over as the religion of choice among the intellectuals, the Jews gravitated to them, even though in many ways they required as much of a shift from Jewish beliefs as Christian conversion did. Though many of these atheistic intellectuals (like Voltaire) expressed anti-semitic sentiments from time to time, that was ignored (much as it is today) because of these peoples’ antipathy toward Christianity as well as their promotion of equality.

Thanks to the Enlightenment, the Jews were released from their ghettos and allowed to join society as regular people, though they really didn’t find true freedom and prosperity until they came to the United States where their lot improved fantastically, also as I mentioned yesterday. Podhoretz continues to follow their political journey through the last century, and specifically through the run of presidents since and including FDR, the latter seen as something of a Messiah figure to them.

Throughout this time they consistently allies with the Democrat Party, partly because of how it carried on Enlightenment ideas, partly because it was in opposition to conservative Christianity, which as I said, terrified them, and partly because many of them had emigrated from Eastern Europe as devotees of Marxism (Ironically, Karl Marx was a Jew, but both his parents converted to Lutheranism before he was six). There was also an involvement in labor unions, which Podhoretz traces, so the contributing factors are varied. In any case, they were so committed to the communist/socialist/liberal viewpoint that it was practically impossible to consider any other.  One lifelong Democrat was quoted as saying he was sure his right arm would shrivel up and fall off if he ever dared pull the voting lever for a Republican.

Reagan made some inroads in this area after the disaster of the Carter administration, but the ground was lost by George H.W. Bush whose policies with regard to Israel were very negative… Even though more and incidents of antisemitism were erupting on the left and more and more support for Israel was blooming on the right, the Jews continued to be Liberal… and so we come to the final chapter which was the most surprising of all: “The Torah of Liberalism.”

Having exchanged a belief in the God of their Fathers for the supposedly nonsuperstitious and “scientific” Marxism, they were befuddled when that turned out not to work so well even as capitalism after WWII “began producing wealth on a previously unimaginable scale that surpassed even the rosiest utopian dreams of Marxist theory” (to say nothing of the complete collapse of the Soviet Union). Unable to go back to God, or to keep on with Marxism, they moved through a series of downgrades — first to social democracy, then to American liberalism. According to Podhoretz, “To most American Jews, liberalism is not…merely a necessary component of Jewishness; it is the very essence of being a Jew… a religion in its own right, complete with its own catechism and its own dogmas and, Tertullian-like, obdurately resistant to facts that undermine its claims and promises.”

In other words, in the face of facts to the contrary, some rely upon denial to maintain their belief system. That’s bad enough. Worse are the ones who defend their  position by claiming that their liberal faith is ‘the new Torah’  — “and,” says Podhoretz, “in the most literal sense of pursuing tikkum olam, the ‘repair of the world,’ a concept that (with the scantiest of justifications from the sacred texts) they have singled out as the essence of Judaism.”

Podhoretz then quotes the publisher’s description of a recent collection of Jewish essays entitled Righteous Indignation:

“In this ground breaking volume, leading rabbis, intellectuals, and activists explore the relationship between Judaism and social justice, drawing on ancient and modern sources of wisdom. The contributors argue that American Jewry must… dedicate itself to systemic change in the United States, Israel and throughout the world.”

Specific “justice issues” addressed in the essays include “eradicating war, global warming, health care, gay rights and domestic violence,” and amazingly, in every case the “teachings of Judaism” turn out to be right in line with these issues and the systematic change liberals are devoted to making.

“Repair of the world?”  This was the first I’d ever heard of such a thing. How weird that the Jews would throw off their old beliefs in the God of their fathers and the promises He made to Abraham, Moses, David… about the Millennial reign of their king, who will indeed repair the world… only to try to reproduce it on their own. In fact, in an earlier part of the book he mentions how they saw communism as the means of actually making a world where there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, but everyone equal. That is, they see Liberalism as the means of bringing in the Millennium — without having to wait for their King.

And that just blew me away.

He Will Bless those Who Bless the Jews

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As I said in my Sunday post, I recently read a book called Why are Jews Liberals?  by former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz. I found it fascinating and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in this area. I found it particularly fascinating where politics and religion intersect.

There were several things that prompted thought for me. As I said, Podhoretz briefly traces the history of the Jews throughout the church age — the time when the franchise for bringing God’s word to the world was shifted from the nation of Israel to the (mostly) Gentile Body of Christ. Instead of a particular nation that was tied to physical ancestry, the truth of Salvation is now disseminated through various gentile “client” nations where enough freedom exists for the gospel to be preached, and for people to believe freely and be able to gather together to study God’s word and grow in grace as believers. The church age is a time when, as Romans says, there is no Jew nor Greek, no slave or free, no male or female, but all (Believers) have equal privilege and opportunity as members of the Body of Christ.

The first client nation was the Roman Empire, where the early church flourished and eventually got distorted into a state religion. That religion dominated the middle ages and much of Western History thereafter and unfortunately some of its leaders had what I consider to be very odd ideas. Whereas the muslims were commanded in their koran to kill the Jews, and drive them out (if they could) Christians were not. But that didn’t mean they were to treat them well.

Indeed, according to Podhoretz, it was from St. Augustine that the notion of the Jews as a “witness people” began (though this is not obvious from a quick investigation through Google) (he did cite his reference but I didn’t make a note of it when I had the book). That is, the Jews were destined “to live as testimony to both evil and Christian truth, but were not to be killed, for like Cain they bore a sign.(14) ‘Let them live among us, but let them suffer and be continually humiliated’. In obedience to this concept, then, the Catholic Christians of Western Europe gathered Jews into “ghettos”, not to kill them, but not to give them any opportunities either. Unless he converted to Christianity, the Jew had to wear specific types of clothing, was not allowed to attend school or hold any job but money lending. Their misery was said to be the proof that Christianity was true.

Eeerch! Say WHAT?!!

Their misery would be proof that Christianity is true? What a concept! I would think that the proof that Christianity is true lies with the Bible. And only that. The idea that the God of all grace would need to deliberately use someone’s misery to prove the truth of His word just strikes me as … wrong. 

And what about Genesis 12:3 “And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

The fulfillment of that promise is played out starkly in Podhoretz’s narrative. And I’m happy to say that it was the United States that ultimately provided the greatest freedom — and prosperity — the Jews experienced in all their history since the fall of Jerusalem. It’s amazing the number of European Jewish immigrants who came here virtually penniless, were quickly employed — often self-employed — worked their butts off and ended up some of the wealthiest people in our country.

Just think: Levi’s began with a Jew (Levi Strauss). Sears, Levy’s Department Store, Goldwater’s, Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, Goldman-Sachs, Calvin Klein, Costco, Starbucks … okay so some of those are current. It’s amazing how many of them are in Hollywood… amazing how many things we take for granted, that are pleasures and blessings of life that have come from Jews in this country.

But then, the greatest blessing of all comes from a Jew as well, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who, of course was the one mostly being pointed to in God’s promise that in or through Abraham all the families of the earth should be blessed.