The mission statement of the Central Reform Congregation avows community, diversity, and commitment for a vibrant, Jewish presence in their city, St. Louis, Missouri, but specific Jewish issues and Israel are not addressed. There is concern for a broad swath of social issues, none to address Jewish survival and the ongoing, increasing threat of anti-Semitism by Islam and the socialist/communist Left. Rather, the congregants reach out to Muslims whose dedication to jihad (religious holy war) threatens Jewish and Christian existence; the Koran dictates jihad for every Muslim and death for every infidel.
Jihad seeks to enforce Sharia worldwide, which includes curtailing our speech (for starters), revising our educational system (strongly underway with history textbooks that whitewash Islam and relegate America, Judaism and Christianity to a few insignificant pages); killing the infidels and harshly treating their own, and much more. Why does the rabbi deem these crucial issues so unimportant to the people she purports to represent, and why is there no platform to protect minorities and women from this xenophobic ideology? The Jews, with their 100% literacy rate and 78% idiocy rate at the ballot box, advocate for their own destruction when they ignore Islamic totalitarianism and its ambition to establish a global caliphate. Jews are kept so severely uninformed, that they facilitate our transition to a totalitarian regime.
So many Americans are completely heads-in-the-sand unacquainted with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB):
- its influence in our government – supporting Islamic groups worldwide, including foreign mosque construction;
- its connection with our overwhelming illegal-immigrant resettlement programs;
- its support of the Muslim Student Association (MSA) campus rallies (some violent) that harass Jewish students and preach boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East;
- the “humanitarian aid” sent to UNRWA, which is diverted to constructing terror tunnels, supplying weaponry to Gaza terrorists, building homes for suicide bombers’ families;
- the propaganda machine that teaches hate and beheading in Islamic schools, and creates propagandist films of massacres that never happened (as in Gaza and Jenin);
- financing CAIR (Council of American-Islamic Relations) outreach, deceptive public relations, and providing revised book donations to libraries and schools;
- the MB cruelty against even their own coreligionists that Egypt has come to recognize and oust, that Norway is expelling, and that Angola has banned;
- and its seduction of those who have turned from and against their Jewish backgrounds – the Stockholm Syndrome, when victimized Jews turn to caring about others’ rights more than their own, some deliberately supporting their enemy.
Instead of hearing a broad range of respectable speakers, the congregation attendees hear from the highly disreputable J Street, Jewish Voice for Peace, Rabbis for Human Rights, and others supported by George Soros, who, greatly influenced by Nazism, Marxism and globalism, has been perverted to despise his heritage.
The congregation recently hosted Jacob Ari Labendz, who claimed he was robbed of his birthright when Israel “occupied” Arab land, but this is not Arab land! After a brief comment about loving Jewish traditions, he switched to the deceptive Palestinian narrative – unchallenged! Jews were the only Palestinians for centuries (the land named by first-century Romans to offend Jews). When the Jewish state was named Israel, and “Palestine” fell into disuse, Egypt restored the name for the new PLO, which organized the Egyptians, Syrians, Jordan and Iraqis and gave them a hook to the land.
Why was there no mention of unceasing aggressive wars by Muslims? the perpetual pogroms against the Jews since Mohammed’s first onslaught? the centuries of jihad that destroyed about 60 million Christians in the once-Christian Middle East and North Africa? the more than 120 million Christians and animists slaughtered in Africa? Tamarlane’s ferocious army that killed 19 million through Asia, Africa, and Europe, leaving mountains and towers of skulls? the slaughter of 80 million Hindus and 10 million Buddhists? The 400 million slaughtered over 1400 years, with no end in sight. To this day, slavery is lawful in Islam for slaves’ descendants and those captured under jihad. Yet, Labendz maintains that if not for Israel, there would be security and peace. Through this history of horrors and the Holocaust, there was no sovereign nation of Israel, and he cannot explain the absence of peace.
Rabbi Talve should clarify that League of Nations set a precedent at the San Remo Conference, in 1922, that cannot be overturned. After World War I and the division of the Ottoman Empire, the League legally gave Israel and surrounding Palestinian territory to the then-14 million Jews throughout the world; Palestine was declared the Jewish “reconstituted homeland,” and the international law today is still binding. Arabs refused their (larger) portion, expecting to conquer Israel. Why did she invite a speaker who is evidently unaware of this highly significant arbitration, who seeks to extinguish the only home for the Jewish people, a state that is a mere one-thousandth the size of Islamic land mass?
Perhaps, for Lebendz, it was a youth’s misinterpretation of events of security and defense that blinded him to 14 centuries of Islamo-fascist villainy, or simple treason by a damaged, delusional, intellectually dishonest person. I deduced that he was traumatized by something he saw but failed to understand, perhaps an IDF soldier confronting an armed terrorist. Yet, the Holocaust survivors who had been severely traumatized did not devote their lives to revenge and destruction, but built the only parcel of land – barren desert and malarial swamp – in a mere 67 years into a country that has become a major contributor in the worlds of art and science – enormous accomplishments in medicine and technology, not to mention First Responders’ humanitarian, medical assistance who rush to global natural disasters, setting up mobile hospitals, treating the injured.
Unfortunately, Lebendz also fell prey to Rabbi Michael Lerner, a notorious anti-Israel activist, who works to gather up the purposeless and marginalized – the personality types that might just as readily have been seduced and indoctrinated into a Kool-Aid cult or such as ISIS, had either of these been options. If he were Muslim, he would have become a suicide bomber.
As an aside, British Army Office, Col. Richard Kemp (ret’d), who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and many other theaters of war, has testified that the IDF is like no other army in the world, confirming the particular care and compassion shown by its forces. We are justified in adding that Israeli society is like no other society in the Middle East, where the democratic laws apply to all people, regardless of race, religion, national origin, and gender.
The speaker said, “Do not ask Palestinians to be Zionists.” The Arabs were invited to stay after Israel won its justified, defensive war, but surely no one is held captive in Israel. Everyone is free to give up his/her citizenship to live elsewhere, to forsake Israeli democracy and enjoy the full extent of Sharia, where a parent is free to kill his daughter for honor, men may stone a woman for an accusation of infidelity, and a young man may learn to decapitate others or detonate himself with explosives. Yet they do not flee the imposition of democracy and the dearth of oppression, apartheid, persecution, racism. A recent poll shows that most Arabs living in Israel, including Judea and Samaria, are Zionists by choice, preferring to live under Israeli administration than under the Palestinian Authority. It is one thing to be an activist and support one’s position with facts and quite another to defend with fabrication!
Jacob Ari Labendz believes that he lost his birthright. Rather, he has surrendered his birthright. What he has truly lost is his Neshama, his Jewish soul.