My original plan was to follow my recent columns on the shidduch crisis with something on the family crisis – the troubled relationships between children and their parents and children and their grandparents. This is something that impacts our communities all over the world.
We are a generation that breathes the toxic fumes of chutzpah. The way that many children address their parents and grandparents, rabbis and teachers, is often nothing short of outrageous. But even more outrageous is that many parents and grandparents do not know, do not recognize, that the chutzpadik manner in which they are spoken to should not be tolerated. If parents and grandparents do not recognize the problem, there is little hope of curing it.
I mention this as a way of introduction to the horrific events around the world we are now encountering. Before we can combat the evil behind those events, we have to be able to identify, to recognize, who and what we are combating.
As a graduate of the Holocaust I have seen the blood of Jews mercilessly shed throughout Europe. Tragically, I’m not new to hearing about and seeing Jews being slaughtered. And yet there is something different with what has been unfolding in Paris and elsewhere.
When I was a child in pre-Holocaust Europe we understood what the Nazis stood for. We knew their ideology. We knew their aims, their goals. We knew Hitler’s prime objective was to rid the world of Jews.
Now, however, as people are tortured and murdered in the most brutal fashion, the world convinces itself that the monsters behind these atrocities are simply madmen who misinterpret their faith. Even the word “terrorist” has become politically incorrect, and one uses it at the risk of being labeled biased or prejudiced.
We just witnessed horrific massacres in France. In response, more than two million people marched in Paris with heads of state from all over the world (with some notable exceptions). But what will that march accomplish? Will it prevent terrorists from savagely murdering people? Will it stop the satanic evil that calls for the destruction of Western civilization? Will it contribute to any real changes in the world?
Who are these barbarians who have come forth from the jungle to take up residence in our midst? As stated above, we have to identify our enemies so that we can know how to deal with them.
And what of the allegedly civilized countries that have become welcoming havens and incubators for the beasts that now wreak havoc on the soil of those very same countries? Are they not complicit?
The Nazis sprang from a culture big on impeccable manners, a meticulous manner of dress, and an oh-so-polite way of speaking. Germans especially prided themselves on the latter. Their sentences were filled with words and phrases like bitte (please), danke schön (thank youvery much), and bitte schön (you’re very welcome).
Instead of loudly voicing objections and calling names, Germans would politely make their point and ask, “Nicht vare?” – “Isn’t it so?”
They would never be found eating with their hands. Knife, fork, and napkin were always at their side. And their music was not the noise of today but beautiful compositions that symphonies are made of. How could such a cultured nation be guilty of such barbarism?
Similarly, France is renowned for its noble ideals and culture built on the pillars of liberté, égalité, fraternité – liberty, equality, fraternity. But those French ideals have become casualties of Islamic terrorism.
I’m fully aware that while the Nazis were Germans and that most Germans supported them, either actively or passively, the savages in France are Muslim immigrants or their offspring from North Africa and the like. But France has allowed its Islamist elements to grow and flourish despite the fact that their loyalties are directed not to liberty, equality, and fraternity but to Islamic sharia law. And French officials have constantly and vocally criticized Israel in international forums while reacting with relative passivity to atrocities committed by Islamist terrorists against French Jews.