Two Jews meet during the first year of the Third Reich. One ofthem is reading “Der. Stuermer.”
“Are you crazy?” asks the astounded second man, “reading thatpornographic antisemitic rag?” “I will tell you why,” says thefirst. “In all the other papers I read that Jews are persecuted andpathetic. Only in this paper do I get to read that Jews run the world!”
For the same reason I like to hear and read the musings of our own rightwingers. The left wingers whine. All is lost. We have lost power; wehave lost our state. We are helpless and have no influence. It is onlywhen I read the words of the right wingers that I realize how omnipotentthe Left really is, that it is the elite, controlling the media, theeconomy and the rest of our infrastructures.
One such Balaam is Amnon Lord, who writes in a Tel-Aviv localpaper. Every once in a while Lord showers me with complimentswhich work miracles on my ego. A few months ago he wrote: “After all, UriAvnery… had a tremendous impact on the entire spiritual life as itexists today in Israel.” I have never heard such words coming from a leftwinger.
Two weeks ago, this Lord Balaam scaled new heights. In a debate with acompeting local paper, he defined the following historical truths: “Maybethis is the time to inform the snot-nosed and dull-witted in the decadentcamp that “the children of the Sebastia settlement” and “the children ofthe Hebron settlers” are the ones with the real lineage, in contrast tothose who have sprung from the impoverished seeds of S. Yis’har, UriAvnery and Joseph Stalin.”
I look to the right and I see the giant of the spirit, Yis’har, theIsraeli Thomas Mann, a man who should been awarded the Nobel Prizefor literature long ago. I look to the left, and I see thegiant of power, Stalin, one of the dominant figures of thetwentieth century. How can my ego not get inflated?
In truth, Joseph Visarionovich Dzhugashvilli, known as Stalin, hasnever been among my favorites (with the exception, perhaps, of ashort period when his army marched west, vanquished the Nazi monster andsaved the remaining Jewry from the ovens of Auschwitz).
I have never been a Communist, and, woe is me, not even a Marxist. Icould never comprehend how so many honest and bright individuals couldworship this monstrous man and see him as “a sun to the nations” until hisdeath. As a murderer of peoples, he was no slouch compared to Hitler.His innocent victims numbered in the tens of millions.
It is not clear to me what a true humanist such as S. Yis’har andan inhuman despot such as Stalin could have in common, and even less so,what could I have in common with either one. It is unclear how the seedof the three of us compares with that of Meir Kahane, Amnon Lord andBenito Mussolini, for instance. But perhaps the learned Amnon Lord meantthe spiritual seed.
If this is the case, then there is plenty to discuss. Are those youthsof Beit Hagi, who murder a poor Arab farmer as a prank, spirituallysuperior to those children of peace movements, who stand up for therights of every human being in God’s image? Is Margalit Har-Shefi anobler individual than, say, Hanah Senesh? Does Yigal Amir’s courageexceed the courage of the combat soldiers described by Yis’har in “TheDays of Tsiklag”? Is Baruch Goldstein’s conscience better than that ofthe heroes of Yis’har’s “Hirbat Hiz’ah”? If I had but a fraction of theinfluence that the writer ascribes to me on the hundreds of thousands ofthose demonstrating against Sabra and Shatillah, should I, then, hang myhead in shame vis a vis Moshe Levinger?
A few weeks ago, at the Yigal Allon award ceremony, YitzhakBen-Aharon spoke to an audience of Leftists, opening hisspeech with the following words: “Greetings, all you homeless people. Youare all homeless. Some of you have lost a kibbutz, some have lost acountry, some have lost their friends. All of you have lost your home.”
No, no, a thousand times no! I am not homeless. We have a home, we havea country, and for those we will fight with all our might. We have thepower, and it is not only the moral and spiritual power. We have thecapability to make a difference in actions, with our personal example,with logic and with spiritual fervor.
It is only the low spirits and the lack of will which are our undoing. Itis not the warmongers and the hatemongers who are the greatest enemies ofthe Left, nor is it the Orthodox and the settlers, nor the Bibi Netanyahus- it is our own despair and whining, the rampant fear among the Leftitself.
Such an outburst of frustration and self-pity is natural in times ofhardship, but a mentally strong individual pulls himself out of it and,come morning, goes into action.
For those who want a demonstration of our true might, let them pay heed tothe words coming out of the House of Lords of the Right.