If Neturei Karta (NK) did not exist, anti-Semites, Islamist terrorists, and neo-Nazis would have to in-vent it. In fact, in many ways NK is little more than an invention of such people (or at least the bulk of NK funding seems to come from such groups).
The latest fundraising junket by its pseudo-rabbis was to the Holocaust denial conference in Tehran last week – an action that in effect granted pseudo- rabbinic approval by the NK cult to the worst Jew- haters since the 1940’s.
Many in the Jewish community have been com-paring NK cult members to the kapos who collabo-rated with the concentration camp officers and other Nazis during World War II. That comparison is im-proper and insulting to those who were forced to make unimaginable moral choices by the horrific conditions of the Shoah.
Neturei Karta members are not collaborating with terrorists and neo-Nazis out of duress but rather out of an intense sense of self-indulgence, delight, and amusement. These are quite simply Philistines with peyos, well-paid underlings of Amalek.
And I am hardly the only one who thinks so. In recent days Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger called for members of the Neturei Karta sect to be excommunicated. He was joined not only by the national-religious rabbinic organization Save the Nation and Land and by a group calling itself the Front for National Judaism, but even by members of the Eida Hachareidit, Israel’s council for ul-tra-Orthodox groups.
Former Israeli chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, himself a Holocaust survivor, said of Neturei Karta: “It is something completely insane… Is it conceivable that any Jew, for whatever reason, would sup-port a Holocaust denier in a generation when people with numbers tattooed on their arms are still among us? It is an insanity that has no justification and no explanation.”
I have long argued that members of Neturei Karta should not be called to the Torah in any real synagogue, and now it appears that even the Satmars have come to share the revulsion felt by most other Torah Jews toward the NK cult.
Breathes there a normal Jew who can feel anything but revulsion upon reading the words of one Ahron Cohen, a leader of the NK cult in Britain, who was quoted this week by the London Sunday Times as saying the Six Million got what they deserve?
“There is no question that there was a Holocaust and gas chambers,” Cohen said. “There are too many eyewitnesses. However, our approach is that when one suffers, the one who perpetrates the suffering is obviously guilty but he will never succeed if the victim did not deserve it in one way or another.”
Cohen also described Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who has vowed to destroy Israel and denied the historical reality of the Holocaust, as “not a man of war. He is a man of peace.”
Neturei Karta’s collaboration with the worst enemies of the Jews did not begin with its pilgrimage to Tehran. NK has collaborated with Palestinian terrorist for decades and would not hesitate for a moment to join an anti-Israel coalition led by Osama bin Laden. The Neturei Karta prescription for the Middle East is for Israel to be destroyed.
The NK cultists oppose all acts of Jewish self- defense (proving once again how little they know of Torah and Judaism). A Neturei Karta bumper sticker shows a Jewish boy waving a Palestinian flag with the slogan “Surrender Is the Torah Solution!”
In 1999 NK members held solidarity meetings with the Afro-fascist anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. NK members attend the pro-terror, anti-Israel (and anti-America) rallies of the neo-Stalinist group AN-SWER. And Neturei Karta has been active in promoting the tales invented by neo-Nazis and anti- Semites about a Jewish neoconservative-Zionist cabal that controls American foreign policy.
It should be emphasized that the only thing “Jewish” about NK is the clothing and sidecurls favored by its members, who strike me as inverted Marranos. The anosim or Marranos in Portugal and Spain passed themselves off as Christians while secretly living as Jews; NK members dress like Jews but behave like Philistines. No wonder, then, that in London many synagogues do not allow NK members entry, or that in 2002 an American umbrella group comprised of Satmar, Bobov, Belz, Vizhnitz, Munkacz, Kiryas Joel, Monroe, and others issued a statement sharply condemning those who openly collaborate with the PLO.