Kamala’s Words Mean Nothing Against Hamas

A man who was a student once at New York’s Yeshiva University wrote of attending a Talmud class taught by a European-born rabbi who was a fine scholar and an excellent teacher.

The rabbi had called upon him to explain a certain complex argument in the text, and he had offered his answer, which reflected his own preparation and intelligence. The man tried to recreate the teacher’s distinctive English as he set down the rabbi’s response to him: “You’re right, you’re right, you’re a hundred prozent right … but you’re wrong.”

The rabbi’s response is steeped in the understanding that, as one Hebrew proverb puts it, the action is the main point. One can make many arguments, this way and that, and remain on a treadmill. Even worse, we can make endless rationalizations for things that, were we not entranced with the idols of our own thoughts, we would recognize as foolish or worse, certainly not worth further thought.

But we are fascinated with our own ability to spin thoughts and develop the arguments that come from them. Were we not held to something higher than home-made abstractions as our ultimate aim, we could spend our entire lives bowing to the work of our minds.

Sometimes, our fascination with thoughts and words is appropriate. Speech defines us as humans. It is a divine gift that, as Rabbi Yishmael put it 1,900 years ago, that “the Torah speaks in human language” — God is gracious with His gift of language and uses it to share His wisdom and purpose.

It is, however, that very divine language that tells us at the very beginning of Genesis that the world is itself divine speech. So language is both within us and without us, and if we are to be whole in God’s gift, we must not allow a rupture to develop between the inner and the outer, the words as they are in our minds and the words of creation enwrapped within the world. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Tucker Carlson Gives Credibility to a Hatemonger)

Our abstractions must constantly adjust themselves to better reflect the concrete reality they aspire to model. If we don’t hold them to that task, they can bring us to spectacular failure. 

There is no more searing example of such failure than the appeasement of Hitler. The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, was so sure that his thoughts and words could determine reality, that he said in 1938 to Hitler’s special envoy that he would like to see “the Führer entering London at the side of the English King amid the acclamation of the English people.”

After Hitler had already consumed Austria, accepted Chamberlain’s gift of the Sudetenland, and then, despite his signing an agreement that Chamberlain declared to mean “peace in our time,” swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia whole, and now was demanding that the city of Danzig be given to him, the British ambassador to Berlin advised his government that the demand was “not on the whole unreasonable.”

Media was then flexing its muscles. Not unexpectedly, those who work in media are prone to this intoxication with unhinged words more than most. Perfectly precious is this incident recounted by Piers Brendon: 

The Director General of the BBC suggested that “it would be a good idea to relay to Germany ‘the famous song of the nightingale’ in Bagley Woods as a token of Britain’s peace-loving intentions.”

The song of the nightingale is beautiful. Peaceful intentions are lovely. The goal of peace is just fine. But the reality was that the Nazis already had found a way to include love of the outdoors and of beauty with their industrial barbarism. In the Nazi world, beauty was co-opted. Auschwitz and other centers of slavery and factories of death had their own orchestras, which augmented the savagery rather than dispelling it.

Kamala Harris’ statements on Israel and Hamas are only another updated version of words and ideas thoroughly detached from concrete reality. She began with something real: a true and honest condemnation of Hama’s orgy of torture, rape, and massacre on October 7.

She then pivoted, as she had done just a few days before, and with barely a breath, and her characteristic condescending tones, insisted that the casualties in Gaza have been too many and that the war must result in a Palestinian state — the famous “two-state solution.” Not the utter defeat which is the only way to destroy entrenched Nazism, but a state ready to be run by the same people that participated in or cheered the hideous orgasmic spree of October 7.

How lovely! Just like the nightingale’s song in Bagley Woods. And the orchestra playing in Auschwitz.

The True Nature of Hamas

Hamas is not a musician’s union. It is not a righteous cause, though it uses the language of religious morality to describe what they do. Nazis as well successfully portrayed their vile program as moral and right. 

Hamas was founded and continues to exist for the purpose of utterly destroying Israel the state and Israel the people. In language borrowed from Nazi propaganda, which was widely and approvingly read during World War II, they describe in their original covenant how all the great disasters of the world have been caused by the Jews.

They intend, like the Nazis, to seek a final solution of this problem. Hamas is interested in a one state solution, stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, in which they envision about as many Jews as currently live in the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq — none (at least openly). 

Perhaps Ms. Harris and her party envision the Palestinians rising against Hamas, willing and eager to live in peace and build prosperity with Israel. But a series of polls, taken by Arabs, not Jews, shows a steady 80+ percent support of Hamas. This holds true through the PA-governed areas as well.

A great majority of Israelis wanted the two-state solution in the 1990s. That support was there in spite of the bloody Yassir Arafat being their negotiating partner, who spoke one thing to the West and when speaking to his people in Arabic, incited violence. It continued even as Arafat initiated the Second Intifada, incinerating families sharing meals in a pizza shop, commuters going to work on city buses, shoppers buying clothes in a mall, and on and on.

Finally, the ultimate hawk, Ariel Sharon, delivered the entire Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in 2005 and withdrew every single Israeli soldier and policeman. 

In response, in a free election, Gaza overwhelmingly voted Hamas in. And instead of peace, Hamas dug its tunnels and launched unending rockets day after day, year after year. And then October 7.

In the real world in which we live, the one that God challenges us to face and to make better, this is the actuality. Harris’ ideas are no more realistic a way to deal with Hamas, Hezbollah than the methods of Halifax and Chamberlain were to deal with Hitler. 

Hamas and the Chamberlain Treatment

Churchill gave Chamberlain credit as a loyal countryman. He employed both him and Halifax in high-level positions in his National Government. We need not declare those advocating equally absurd policies today as guilty of anything more than negligence and foolishness. (READ MORE: Trump’s Vision Transcends the Party)

When led with Churchillian clarity, even those people played a positive and important role. No doubt Harris and company might as well, but only if led by someone who sees reality more clearly than she does. She spins words, but she did nothing about the border, and as head of the Space Agency, she is leaving astronauts stranded in space.

But the results of elevating wishful thinking to state policy is to send an RSVP to every narcissistic psychopath in control of a country, of which there are quite a few today. 

Whatever his faults, and there are many, Trump gets this. He gets that words mean less than nothing if there are not deeds that assure that lofty ideas translate to policies that actually make the world better, disabling the hateful tyrants, and protecting and giving heart to those who believe in civilization and peace.

This is the point that needs to be hammered home, as Harris’ party indulges in a flood of words that are meant to sound good but only hang out a welcome sign for the malevolent agents of apocalypse. 

From now till November, that is our message — it is all about action. Four years of no Russian expansion, the only administration in the new millennium of which that is true. Four years of containment of Iran and all its proxies. Four years of near-total peace in the Middle East, after demolishing ISIS’s last strongholds. Four years of the lowest interest rates and highest employment and workforce engagement — at least until the China virus. 

The action is the main thing. When not serving sound policy, talk is cheap and its results are reliably disastrous.

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