How have we fallen so low? Sacrifice to Moloch is ANATHEMA to Hashem, anathema to Judaism. And yes, you are so right, Sultan Knish. So what will it take to STOP the cult of Moloch in Eretz Yisrael once and for all???

Thank you Dan.

Sacrifices of Peace

By Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog

In one of the most famous events in the Bible, G-d commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son. So Abraham took his son Isaac, bound him on an altar and prepared to bring him up as a burnt offering. And then the voice of the angel called to him and told him not to harm his son.

G-d did not want human sacrifices. The peace process does.

After the handshake with Arafat in the Rose Garden led to a wave of terrorist attacks, Prime Minister Rabin invented a new sacrifice to describe the dead Israelis murdered by the Muslim terrorists who had been permitted to enter Israel, to form armies, to train openly and to kill openly. Korbanot Shalom. Sacrifices of peace.

In Ancient Israel, in the Tabernacle and the Temple, the Korban Shelamim, the Peace Offering, was brought as a celebratory offering to be eaten by all. In the modern State of Israel, the Korbanot Shalom were brought by the families of the dead who often had little more than a few scraps of skin tissue, a finger or a hand caught in a crack in the sidewalk to remember their children by.

In the old Israel, only the pagan worshipers of Moloch, the abominable cult that placed its own sons and daughters into the idol's flames, practiced human sacrifice. In the new Israel that was ushered in on that glorious day in the Rose Garden under the beaming gaze of Bill Clinton, everyone in the land was expected to be prepared to offer up their children to the Moloch of peace, the idol of the Palestinian Authority, its altar engraved with Nobel Peace Prizes, its service overseen by the international diplomats and domestic pacifists who had appointed themselves its Priests of Peace.

Peace made the service of death into a national duty. There was no telling where or when one might be called upon by Israel's peace partners in Ramallah to become a sacrifice for peace. It might be at a mall or at a pizzeria or while riding the bus. An Israeli could become a sacrifice for peace at any time. And the Labor Party leaders would bow their heads solemnly over his grave, like the biblical elders were obligated to do over every murder victim in their vicinity. But unlike the elders, they could not recite the ceremonial verse, "Our hands did not shed this blood."

Eventually Prime Minister Rabin, who had offered up so many Israelis as sacrifices of peace, was privileged to himself became a sacrifice of peace. His ascension is commemorated annually and has long since made its way into the Israeli curriculum as an example of the dedication to peacemaking that is expected of the true visionary of peace.

The sacrifices of peace have diminished as the left has fallen out of power. The wooden altars of the Moloch of Peace stand empty and the Priests of Peace pass mournfully through international airports, studying maps, drawing up plans and calling for new sacrifices. And eventually their call is heeded.

In the spring, America's prince of peace, the man who had thrown thousands of American soldiers with their hands tied behind their backs into the arms of the Taliban, who had sacrificed every other American ally in the region, came to Jerusalem to demand that the altars once again be raised up and the blood of peace flow over the negotiating tables.

"It can be tempting to put aside the frustrations and sacrifices that come with the pursuit of peace," Obama told a carefully selected audience of Israeli students. Some of them future sacrifices on his bloody altar of peace. "Here on Earth we must bear our responsibilities in an imperfect world. That means accepting our measure of sacrifice and struggle."

And so the measure of sacrifice comes again. The ceremonial release of terrorists with blood on their hands commenced this festival of negotiations. Some of the freed terrorists had been notoriously talented sacrificers; claiming the lives of women and children. And in reward for their service, the Moloch of Peace smiled upon them and commanded that they be set free.

Netanyahu, who replaced Olmert who was put on trial, who replaced Sharon who fell into a coma, who replaced Barak, who fell out of favor, who replaced Netanyahu the first time around, bowed to the inevitable. And to his credit, he did it reluctantly.

That is how conservative governments in Israel can be distinguished from liberal governments. The liberals eagerly rush forward to bring human sacrifices on the altar of peace and will not stop no matter how many angels cry from heaven telling them to stay the knife. But the conservatives do so reluctantly, they offer excuses, they stall for time, they give courageous speeches, they beat their chests a little, and then sighing wearily, they shoulder the burden of the Galut Yid and build up the pagan altars of peace in sight of the ruined heap of the temple and the graves of their fathers.

Netanyahu, we are told, did his best. Like the most dedicated of the ghetto leaders during the Holocaust, he stalled for time, he gave out false lists, he tried to distract the important foreigners swaggering through his ghetto, hoping that they wouldn't see the children, wouldn't start thinking about how those children might look splayed across an altar of peace with their throats cut and a bloody worthless peace agreement in their mouths.

But then when he was cornered, he bowed to necessity. Was he a Rumkowski, hallucinating that he could save the Jews of Lodz through peaceful Nazi collaboration, or a Kastner, playing the game to save a majority and then maybe a minority and then leaving with a few trains of important people with the death screams of the half-a-million Jews of Hungary whom he lied to and betrayed for their own good ringing in his ears.

Perhaps when all the peace processes are done, then the Labor Party, Kastner's party, will rescue a few planeloads of important people from the burning ruins of Israel and mark that as the success of their peace efforts.

If you wish to understand, pause and listen for a moment to Chaim Rumkowski as he delivers the infamous speech to the Jews of the Lodz Ghetto that will one day be known as the "Give Me Your Children" speech.

"The ghetto has been struck a hard blow. They demand what is most dear to it - children and old people. I was not privileged to have a child of my own and therefore devoted my best years to children," Rumkowski, the former orphanage director turned head of the Lodz Ghetto Judenraat, says, wiping his forehead.

"I lived and breathed together with children. I never imagined that my own hands would be forced to make this sacrifice on the altar. In my old age I am forced to stretch out my hands and to beg: Brothers and sisters, give them to me! Fathers and mothers, give me your children!"

"Yesterday, in the course of the day," Rumkowski tells the assembled Jews, who only thought that they had lived through hell at that point, "I was given the order to send away more than 20,000 Jews from the ghetto, and if I did not – 'we will do it ourselves'."

And it is this phrase. This "we will do it ourselves" that is the true name of the moloch of peace. Hear the rationalizations now from Rumkowski's lips on September 4, 1942, addressing men and women who are doomed to death. Hear it from the lips of Netanyahu and his associates. Hear it from the conservative rationalizers who warn that if Israel does not give up its children on the altar of peace, Obama and the European Union and all the rest will do it themselves.

"The question arose: 'Should we have accepted this and carried it out ourselves, or left it to others?' But as we were guided not by the thought: "how many will be lost?" but "how many can be saved?" we arrived at the conclusion – those closest to me at work, that is, and myself – that however difficult it was going to be, we must take upon ourselves the carrying out of this decree," Rumkowski said, transforming his collaboration in the murder of thousands of children into an act of personal courage.

"I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation, I must cut off limbs in order to save the body!"

Israel has chopped off quite a few limbs already. But there are more to be chopped off. And the question is not how many will die, how many will be thrown out of their homes, but how many can be saved. That diplomatic triage is the bloody rationale of peace.

Rabin warned that if Israel did not accept an autonomous territory, then it would be forced to accept a state. Peres warned that if Israel did not accept a state in Gaza and the West Bank, it would lose Jerusalem. Sharon warned that if Israel didn't accept the expulsion of the Jews of Gaza, it would lose everything up to the '67 borders. Olmert warned that if Israel didn't accept the partition of Jerusalem, it would lose the entire city.

Israel accepted most of these things and each of the terrible losses it sought to avert came about anyway, not naturally, but because of these prior concessions. The autonomous territory paved the way for a state. The loss of Gaza and the West Bank made Jerusalem next on the schedule.

And now, the Priests of Peace warn that if Israel doesn't accept a deal that will be based on the '67 borders and partition Jerusalem, it will be forced to accept a one-state solution that will destroy the country.

Or as Obama put it, "Given the demographics west of the Jordan River, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine." Another way of putting it, a more honest way, is give me what I want or you will be destroyed.

A fool could see what the next step is, but the Priests of Peace do not allow the wise men of Chelm into their meetings. The Rumkowskis and the Kastners do not want any distractions in their diplomatic operating rooms while they are performing surgery on the Jewish State.

Like Rumkowski, a series of Israeli Prime Ministers arrived at the conclusion that they would have to take a stiff drink and then take upon themselves the task of carrying out the decree. The surgeries have yet to lead to a healthy Israel vigorously limping along while waving to the State of Palestine across the way, which has its missing limb. But the Priests of Peace promise that with enough rites, enough incense, enough smoke, enough children carved up and their entrails examined for promising signs of peace, the day will come.

Take a walk back to the Lodz Ghetto in September and listen.

"I tried everything I knew to get the bitter sentence cancelled," Rumkowski tells the crowd. "When it could not be cancelled, I tried to lessen the sentence. Only yesterday I ordered the registration of nine-year-old children. I wanted to save at least one year – children from nine to ten. But they would not yield. I succeeded in one thing – to save the children over ten. Let that be our consolation in our great sorrow."

There are our leaders who return from Nazi HQ or the Wye Plantation to inform their people that at least they saved the ten-year-olds. All it took was a willingness to give up the children under the age of ten. They saved the larger settlements, they tell us. They saved Jerusalem. They saved Israel. They saved something. And all they had to do to get it was to give up everything.

When Rumkowski declared, "I must carry out this difficult and bloody operation", he stopped being one of the ghetto Jews and became, for a little while, a Nazi. A triage of this sort is the death of the soul. When you take it upon yourself to decide which of your own people should die at the hands of the enemy for the greater good, you take on the murderer's perspective. You begin to think like the enemy.

When Israeli leaders sit down to the territorial triage of diplomacy and begin contemplating which Israelis should be thrown out of their homes, which parts of Israel to surrender and how many dead are acceptable for the sake of peace, then they begin to think like the international diplomats and cease to think like Israelis.

They allow the enemy into themselves and wrapping themselves in Rumkowskian nobility, they become callous to the suffering that they cause. What Rumkowski, what Netanyahu and so many others have forgotten is that when you begin deciding how many Jews should die, you become a Nazi.

There was no angel to stop Rumkowski from sacrificing thousands of children for the greater good, for it was not an angel he was listening to, but the Nazi officers leading him along to the abyss with the promise that an ever diminishing minority could be saved if he got everyone to go along.

Of the more than 200,000 Jews to enter the Lodz ghetto, there were less than a thousand left in the end. Thousands more managed to survive in the concentration camps to which they had been sent. Rumkowski was beaten to death by other Jews in Auschwitz. Kastner, who had become an official in the Israeli Labor Party that would one day perpetrate the peace process, was shot to death.

Now the altars rise again and the ever-diminishing amount of territory that will be saved is matched by the ever-increasing amount of sacrifices for peace that will be tolerated. In the last exchange of fire, rockets struck major Israeli cities that had not been bombed in decades. The terrorists have made the rocket into their altar and the suicide bomber into their sacrifice and Israelis make the negotiating table into an altar and the victims of terrorism into their sacrifice.

We know what comes next, but we choose not to know it. Just as they chose not to know it. It is easier that way. Either the sacrifices for peace will stop or Israel will become another Lodz Ghetto whose frightened overlords go on believing that they can stay alive if they strike the right deal, if they delay enough, if they give up the nine-year-olds to save the ten-year-olds from the altar of peace.

Step back now to August 2005 and watch as another man speaks. This man is no Rumkowski. No cringing ghetto-dweller. He is a famous general and the Prime Minister of the State of Israel and he is speaking to the nation.

"This step is very difficult for me personally. It was with a heavy heart that the Government of Israel made the decision regarding Disengagement, and the Knesset did not lightly approve it," the old man who is barely six months away from the stroke that will put him into a coma says.

"The responsibility for the future of Israel rests on my shoulders. I initiated the Plan because I concluded that this action is vital for Israel. Believe me, the extent of pain that I feel at this act is equal only to the measure of resolved recognition that it was something that had to be done."

And there is the supreme joke. There is the shriveled voice of Rumkowski coming out of the mouth of Ariel Sharon. There is the echo of the cold Polish autumn of 1942 in the hot Israeli summer of 2005. Like Rumkowski, Sharon took responsibility for the problem. He felt the pain, but something had to be done.

And there it is again in his Knesset speech on the Disengagement that will ethnically cleanse the Jews of Gaza and turn over the territory to Hamas.

"It is clear to me that within the political vacuum which will be created if the "Roadmap" collapses, and Israel will not succeed in presenting its own alternative, dozens of political initiatives will be drawn up often, from all over the world."

Six decades later, Jewish existence was still being negotiated on the same terms. If we did not do something, they will.

We had to present an alternative to cutting off an arm and a leg, by limiting the damage to only a few fingers. We had to give up the nine-year-olds to save the ten-year-olds. There is Prime Minister Rumkowski presiding over the Lodz Ghetto of Israel. There is the peace process is all its sordid glory. There is the altar and there is the patriotism of cutting away a few limbs, turning over a few thousand children, in the hopes that the rest may live.

And the true horror of it is that the Rumkowskis are the decent ones. They believe that they are doing what they must. There is no way to compare them to the Abraham Gancwajchis or the Yossi Beilins, the Peace Now's or the Group 13's that do not do what they do for the vanishing prospect of a greater good, but believe that their crimes are the greater good. They are not the worst of us. They are the best of the worst of us. They sacrifice us, but they do it reluctantly. They wish there was a better way.

Meanwhile the altars are built and wait for their victims. The voice of Moloch is heard in the land and the booming cry from its mouth is "Peace". Fathers and mothers take their sons and daughters to the metal maw while singing songs of peace. It has been this way for decades now. Human sacrifice has come to be accepted as the noble thing to do.

G-d does not call them and no angel directs them. They listen to their leaders and their leaders sit at meetings with foreign diplomats who draw up plans and charts. And as they sit there at the mahogany altars where toasts are made and papers are pushed around, they scramble for a compromise, another in a long fatal line of compromises, how much must be given up, how many must die, so that the rest must live.

This long train of sacrifices has taken the PLO from a relic in Cyprus to a mortgage on the West Bank, Gaza and part of Jerusalem. And now another bout of sacrifices begins. Murderers are set free, victims are forgotten and the blood begins to flow. There is no peace, but there are sacrifices for peace. And one day, if this goes on, a nation will have been sacrificed for the peace of the altar in a new Shoah.

A million Isaacs lie on the altar and no voice calls out to stay the knife, the sacrifice of peace that G-d did not command, is made again and again. The blood flows over the altars of peace and it is never enough. Not so long as one Isaac still lives.

Caroline Glick gave it to Bibi this time. Who will listen?

 Bibi and the true believers

August 2, 2013, 10:20 AM

 

Standing next to US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday morning, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni gushed that through his indefatigable efforts to bring Israeli and Palestinian officials to Washington, Kerry proved that "nothing can stop true believers."

As usual, the cognitively challenged Livni told us something she hadn't intended to say. The term "true believer" was coined by Eric Hoffer in his classic work The True Believer from 1951, which Livni has obviously not read. Hoffer's epic study of the psychological roots of fanaticism described a true believer as a person so fanatically committed to a cause that no amount of reality can make him abandon it.

And that just about sums up Kerry, and the man he works for, US President Barack Obama.

Kerry visited Israel six times in the four months leading up to the meetings in Washington this week, during which Americans, Palestinians and Israelis discussed the size of the table they will be sitting around in the coming discussions.

During the same four months, the Syrian regime used chemical weapons against its opponents on multiple occasions. Most recently, they gassed Palestinians in Yarmuk refugee camp outside Damascus, killing 22 people.

During those four months, al-Qaida strengthened its control over the Syrian opposition groups fighting the regime.

During those four months, the Syrian civil war became a focal point of a wider Sunni-Shi'ite religious war that has already spread to Lebanon and Iraq. In its post-US-withdrawal role of Iranian satrapy, Iraq has allowed Iran to use its territory and airspace to transfer war materiel to the Syrian regime.

During those four months, the Obama administration decided to begin arming the al-Qaidadominated rebel forces. It has also deliberately raised the risk of a Syrian-Israeli war by informing the media every time that Israel attacks missile sites in Syria.

Also during the four months that Kerry obsessed over convincing PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas to send his representative to Washington, Egypt experienced its second revolution in which, buffeted by millions of demonstrators who filled the squares of Egypt's cities, the Egyptian military overthrew the US-supported Muslim Brotherhood regime.

The Obama administration was quick to jump onto the bandwagon of the first Egyptian revolution in January 2011. That revolution led to the military's ouster of then-president Hosni Mubarak, a staunch US ally, and so paved the way for the totalitarian and deeply popular Muslim Brotherhood to rise to power.

When the Brotherhood became subject to its own revolution due to its incompetent handling of Egypt's failed economy and its single-minded focus on transforming Egypt into an Islamist state as quickly as possible, the Obama administration was confounded. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal this week, a senior administration official expressed complete befuddlement at events in Egypt. "None of us can quite figure this out," the official said. "It seems so self-defeating."

And that is the thing of it. In its support for the Brotherhood, the administration was implementing its wholly unfounded, dead-wrong ideological belief that the Muslim Brotherhood is a progressive, "largely secular" organization that is dedicated to good works. And now that the Egyptian military, supported by about half of the Egyptian people, has rejected the Brotherhood, its actions are incomprehensible to the Obama administration.

In the face of massive documentary evidence, and facts on the ground, (Egypt has run out of food, and rather than get them some, overthrown president Mohamed Morsi rammed through a totalitarian Islamist constitution), the Obama administration still clings to its ideological belief that the Muslim Brotherhood is a positive, progressive, "largely secular" organization that is devoted to good works for the poor.

So, too, in Syria. The administration thinks it is okay to fund the Free Syria Army, because its leadership is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Owing to the administration's blind faith in its belief that the reason that the US is hated in the Muslim world is because it has opposed populist Islamist forces, Obama and his advisers think it makes sense to arm those forces in Syria now - so long as the Muslim Brotherhood is able to hide the fact that it is dominated by al-Qaida for a sufficient number of news cycles to sell this fiction to the media.

The administration's faith in Islamist reasonableness holds for the Shi'ite Islamists just as strongly as it does for the Sunni Islamists. This is why it maintains its commitment to negotiating with Iran's fanatical regime about its nuclear weapons program, despite overwhelming evidence that the Iranians are using the negotiations as a means to develop their bomb in peace.

This week David Albright and Christina Walrond at the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington published a deeply disturbing report. They explained that based on what we know, Iran will reached "critical capacity" in its nuclear program by mid-2014. Albright and Walrond defined critical capacity as "the technical capability to produce sufficient weapongrade uranium from its safeguarded stocks of low enriched uranium for a nuclear explosive, without being detected."

Albright and Walrond then explained the many ways Iran can speed up the process, and hide its achievement from the international community for long enough to make it too late to conduct military strikes on their nuclear facilities to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

In other words, they told us politely, and diplomatically, if urgently, that we have arrived at the moment of decision. Will the US or Israel strike Iran's nuclear installations to prevent it from becoming a nuclear power, or will Iran become a nuclear power? If we wait much longer, we won't have sufficient time to act.

But for Kerry and his fellow true believers the most urgent priority was to convince the Palestinians to sit in the same room as Israelis. And this week they scored a great victory for US foreign policy by achieving their goal.

In her brief remarks, not only did Livni inadvertently tell us that Kerry is a fanatic. She also told us that she is a fanatic.

Livni said, "[I]t took more than just a plane ticket to be here today. A courageous act of leadership by Prime Minister Netanyahu that was approved by the Israeli government made this visit here and the beginning of the negotiation possible."

The "courageous act" she referred to was the government's decision to release 104 "Palestinian prisoners" from Israel's prisons. The demand for their freedom was the obstacle Abbas placed in the way of Livni acquiring her long-sought-after plane ticket to peace talks and five star receptions at Kerry's Washington mansion.

The 104 "prisoners" are made up of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs. They are not car thieves or pickpockets. They are monsters with human faces. All 104 are serving life sentences for murder or attempted murder. Their crimes were gruesome acts of barbarism marked by demonic cruelty.

Yusef Said al-Al and Ayman Taleb Abu Sitteh stabbed David Bubil and Haim Weitzman to death and mutilated their bodies, cutting off their ears as souvenirs.

Three other "Palestinian prisoners" hacked four teenagers to pieces, killing them with pitchforks, hatchets and knives.

Thirteen-year-old Oren Baharmi was raped and murdered by Amad Mahmad Jamil Shehada.

And the list goes on and on, and on.

There was nothing even vaguely courageous about Netanyahu's decision to release these monsters.

There was nothing even vaguely courageous about his cabinet members' decision to vote for their release. Theirs was an act of utter cravenness. They dishonored the victims, the victims' families and the nation as a whole.

And they endangered the country. According to the Almagor Victims of Terror organization, from 2000 to 2005, 180 Israelis were murdered by Palestinian terrorists released by Israel in previous "deals." And those terrorists had been imprisoned for non-lethal actions, (i.e., without blood on their hands).

The fact that Netanyahu and his ministers passed this decision simply to provide a sufficient payoff to Abbas for him to send Saeb Erekat to Washington to talk about nothing with Livni, makes their actions, not only craven, but insane.

Livni's obscene characterization of this cowardly, life-threatening injustice as a "courageous act," exposes her as well as a true believing fanatic.

Only a fanatic could say such a thing.

In his remarks, Kerry said that the talks about the size of the table are going to bring about a situation where Israel will achieve, "not just the absence of conflict, but a full and lasting peace with the Arab and Muslim nations."

Like Kerry's demand that Israel free the terrorists, this statement bespeaks an underlying fanatical dementia. Regarding the "Arab and Muslim nations," in Syria, neither the al-Qaida forces nor the regime have mentioned anything about putting down their weapons if Israel coughs up Jerusalem and Elon Moreh. The same goes for Hezbollah, Iran and their friends and enemies warring for power throughout the region.

As for the Palestinians, if they were interested in "lasting peace" with Israel, they wouldn't demand freedom for terrorist murderers. Moreover, while Kerry was exulting in his brilliant success, Abbas announced that in his version of "lasting peace," Jews will be wiped off of the map of Palestine.

As Abbas put it, "In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli - civilian or soldiers - on our lands."

So again, while Kerry and Livni see rainbows and unicorns, Abbas sees a Jew-free Palestine, with the 600,000 Jews of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria rendered homeless refugees to make room for his anti-Semitic fiefdom.

It is not surprising that Kerry, Obama and Livni are going along with this obscenity. It is not surprising that fanatics who pray to the god of the two-state solution think it is courageous to free Jewish-baby killers. It is not surprising they think the most important thing on the international agenda is to secure Israel's surrender of land, our legal rights, and our ability to defend ourselves to a terrorist group that hates Jews so much it requires all of us to be gone before it will do us the favor of accepting sovereignty.

What is surprising - and frightening - is that Netanyahu, who is not a true believer, and knows that they are true believers, is going along with this.

Netanyahu knows that Israel cannot survive without Judea and Samaria. He knows what the Muslim Brotherhood is. He knows the nature of the Iranian regime. He knows that the PLO is no different from Hamas. Their goal is the same - they want to destroy Israel.

Netanyahu knows that Obama is hostile to Israel and that he will not lift a finger to block Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

So why is he going along with their insanity? In bowing to US pressure and approving the release of 104 terrorist murderers from prison, Netanyahu behaved like a coward. In bowing to US pressure not to bomb Iran's nuclear installations, Netanyahu is being a coward.

The most important question for Israel today then is whether our leader is capable of being anything else.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. 

http://www.carolineglick.com/e/2013/08/bibi-and-the-true-believers.php