I didn’t want to write this in the wake of the atrocity that happened last week in Connecticut, but since the anti-gunners gleefully waded into the gore of the innocents, I’m going to exercise my First Amendment rights in defense of my Second Amendment rights, with a focus on a Jewish perspective.
Back in 2004, I wrote the following:
The Maccabees -- the Jewish rebels who tossed the Greeks out on their posteriors -- didn't win with pleas for tolerance or even harsh language. It was an armed rebellion. Too many Jewish Americans gloss over this fact during all the holiday shopping, menorah lighting, and wolfing down potato pancakes.
The point that American Jews need to take to heart from Chanukah is that sometimes the government is not here to help and the only way left to preserve our freedom is through force. That means the willingness and means to use force. In 2004, the means of force are firearms and that's why it pisses me off to no end that so many Jewish Americans support gun control, especially in light of the most blatant act of antisemitism in history -- the Shoah (Holocaust) -- being a mere 59 years ago.
When only the military and police have guns, we call that a police state. If you grant a government that much power, there is a really good chance that they will commit democide. As we know, anytime you have a runaway government, one of the favorite targets is its Jewish population. Six million Jews were murdered within living memory, by a country which was considered one of the most sophisticated in Europe.
Anti-semitism is not a relic of the past. Entering “resurgence of anti-semitism” into Google yields 901,000 results. Recently, the leader of a political party in Hungary called for Jews to be registered.
Resurgent anti-semitism isn’t an entirely European phenomenon either.
“Oh, but that can’t happen here!” you say. Really? Why? Again, within living memory, Americans of a unfavored ethnic group were singled out and forced into concentration camps. The Japanese-American Internment of World War 2 pales in comparison the atrocities committed by the Nazis, but I shudder to think of what would’ve happened to those Japanese-Americans had we not been able to turn the tide of the war within a year.
“Turn the other cheek” is a Christian concept, not a Jewish one. In fact,in the Talmud, we are instructed that, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” (VILNA TALMUD, Tractate Sanhedrin, folio 73a). Sometimes, that someone who is coming to kill you wears a uniform.
If you advocate civilian disarmament, you are advocating making Jews defenseless. If you are serious that never again will Jews be slaughtered en masse, then you need to make sure that we have the tools to prevent it. Freedom isn’t safe. There are risks to freedom. But giving up our freedom in search of safety is a fool’s errand, as history shows.
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