Anger

This is beyond fury.....

The closer it gets to the anniversary of October 7, the angrier I get. I am beyond fury.

It’s funny really. I was in NY on 9/11. Well my husband was in NYC and so was my sister. I was in the suburbs. But I never felt anger. I felt fear, sadness and overwhelming despair. But I never felt angry. And each year following I would not feel anger. I would sit and watch the reading of the names and I would cry. I would stand as they rang the bell for each time a tower was hit, then when each tower eventually fell, and when the Pentagon was hit and when the plane went down in Shanksville, Pa. But I never felt anger.

But the closer I get to the anniversary of October 7, there is a wellspring of anger that I do not feel I can contain. It is not because the wars are ongoing in Gaza and now in Lebanon. Lebanon, the fear of the bloodbath to come, that the most evil and mendacious Iran with its proxy hezbollah is going to unleash is keeping me up at night. But the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq were on going. Decades long in fact. These wars did not make me angry. (Honestly I was more upset that we cut and ran in both Iraq and Afghanistan. What was it for? All those lives lost if we simply hand the countries back to the terrorist, Islamo-nazis, misogynists, and death cultists. In my town we have parts of a highway dedicated to a young man who was burnt alive in his humvee in Afghanistan while serving his country. What must his parents be thinking? How do they contain their anger?)

So why am I angry? After 9/11 the world had America’s back. We understood why the US and its allies went into Afghanistan. We understood why they went into Iraq. (Yes yes yes, there were no weapons of mass destruction. So maybe Saddam Hussein’s propaganda ploy backfired, or maybe just maybe, his nuclear program was transferred to Syria, where Assad gave Iraqi Baathists safe heaven. Funny, in a not so haha kind of way, that within a year of Iraqis being given sanctuary in Syria, Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear facility that had not existed until after the Iraqi Baathists fled there. You do the math. Conspiracy theory, maybe, maybe not.) We understood why we stayed both in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the consequences of the US leaving, which are being played out in real time.

But the one thing the world did not have after October 7, was Israel’s back and by extension the Jews of the world. There was a massive eruption of joy when the massacres occurred. You saw it on the streets of every major city and every major university worldwide. Protests are ongoing calling for “intifada, from the river to the sea,” celebrating what happened on October 7, “resistance by any means necessary.”

Refusing to condemn barabism because that barbarism was directed at Jews.

Ok, big deal they turned the Eiffel Tower blue an white and showed the Israeli flag on the Brandenburg Gate. Of course, you saw the spire of the Empire State Building in NYC turn the colors of the Israeli flag as well (well as far as the empire state building is concerned, it turns Blue and white every year for the Salute to Israel parade). In the city with the largest Jewish population outside of israel, it was kind of expected.

But today, the UK, Germany, and the US are withholding munitions from Israel as she fights for her existence. No one is withholding weaponry from hezbollah. In fact, the US government still lives with the fiction that the Lebanese army and hezbollah are 2 different entities and the US just approved armaments to the Lebanese army. Yes, you got that right. The US is arming hezbollah. Tell me again how Biden is a friend to Israel.

I am angry because I feel alone. Not that I didn’t know about antisemitism. Not that I didn’t warn others about antisemitism. Not that I didn’t know what it felt like to be singled out for being Jewish (as I mentioned before, my sister and I were the only Jews in our school in US south during the 60s and 70s. Antisemitism was the norm, not the exception.) I remember telling a friend a decade ago, that the US will have a Holocaust within 3 generations. Sometimes, as I watch the news and what's going on around the country on campuses I am not so sure that it will take 3 generations. Remember the nazis were legitimized first by the universities and then by the courts.

And yes, over 80% of Americans support Israel. But the up and coming generation does not. They traffick in antisemitism not indistinguishable from ancient blood libels that stoked the ovens of Auschwitz. I am angry because this is the country I bequeath to my children and their children. I am angry because my family risked life and limb to come here. Fought life and limb to help this nation grown. Risked life and limb and served in her armed forces, and in her governments. And yet the only way for my descendents to belong here is to renounce the fact that they are proud Jews. They may actually have to leave, if there is any other place to go.

Every day I grow angrier and angrier. I grow angry because the powers that be are too ignorant to see the fight before them. They are too absorbed in the need to win an election than to stand up and tell the Hamas and Hezbollah loving part of the electorate to fuck off. I am angry because my vote as a Jew is taken for granted.

However, I am mostly angry because as Jews halfway around the world fight for their lives and so many really do not care. They think of the war in Gaza and now Lebanon as a distraction. Instead of being grateful for the sacrifices of others, there are those in the Jewish American community who wish Israel would stop being Israel and maybe just maybe, go away quietly and let them not have to apologize for Israel’s right to defend itself among their antisemitic cadres.

(And yes, I also know that Israelis first and foremost are fighting so that their families are not slaughtered the way the Jews were slaughtered on October 7. But if you really think our freedom as Jews is not tied to a strong Israel, then you really have never paid much attention to history. If you really think this isn’t the first salvo in the war for western freedoms and civilization you are ignorant of history.)

Last year on Rosh Hashana I streamed a holiday service from a rather famous Temple. where the junior rabbi had given a sermon that the Chabad, or those who believed that the late Rabbi Schneerson was the Messiah, was the greatest threat to the Jewish Community. That messianism was a specious and backwards look on life and anathema to Judaism he said. Funny that. I remember feeling at that moment, how inappropriate that talk was. How full of lashon hara, or evil speaking, was the rabbi’s sermon. And on one of the holiest days of the Jewish year, too. Castigating other Jews for how they practiced judaism reminded me of when I was spit at as a young woman walking down 47th street in NYC by a hasidic man, because I was wearing a miniskirt. Since October 7 I wonder if that young rabbi still thinks that Chabad is the biggest threat to the Jewish community in the world.

I remember when I quit my Temple after my sons were bar mitzvahed because the senior rabbi who had gone with the UN to Gaza had came back raving about what a good job Hamas was doing governing Gaza. He wrote there were even women without their heads covered walking down the streets. I wonder if that rabbi still thinks Hamas is doing a good job in Gaza.

I am angry because as October 7 approaches I only see things getting worse, and worse not simply in the way that wars take a bloody turn, but in ways that those too stupid to understand that you cannot bargain with evil simply make the future more dangerous. They are ready to risk other people’s children on the backs of their holier-than-thou stupidity with ceasefire proposal after ceasefire proposal. I am angry because the world thought it could negotiate with Hitler and they learned nothing. Today these same styled assholes think they can negotiate with death cult Islamists and it will not eventually lead to WW3.

I am angry because at a time when the world is at a crossroads of dire consequence, we are led by a dementia addled fool, with our future being a choice between a world salad brained inadequate twit with proIran advisors whose campaign advisors won’t let her attend the Al Smith dinner in NY (a staple for presidential contenders) for fear of what she will do or say, or a narcissistic charlatan, an authoritarian wannabe who is simply a batcrap crazy conman.

I am angry because as we see at the UN general assembly the world is made up of garbage governments, run by garbage people, all of them denying Jewish indigeneity to their ancient lands while promoting Jewish genocide.

Meanwhile, there is a story that says the Israeli government made the conscience decision to not show the gopro video taken by the Hamas terrorists from October 7 to their soldiers going into battle. They did not want them to be angry when they had to deal with the population in Gaza. Use your imagination as to what is on that video.

The paramedics who dealt with the aftermath of October 7, most of them are in therapy and may never recover from what they saw.

I have never seen the 45 minute video of October 7. I am never going to see that video. I am never going to watch Silence before Screams. I am not going to watch the new movie on Paramount about October 7, We Will Dance Again. I am angry enough.

I do not need fake platitudes about the right of self defense while castigating that self defense decision from the oval office, or some bullshit from the dimwit they call the UK foreign minister, or the french president who instead of demanding Hezbollah leave Lebanon, chastised Bibi because Israel, finally after 11 months of rockets, decided to defend itself. (Notice it is the west that angers me, Iran, Russia and China they do not claim to be our friends, so what they say doesn’t matter) So to the fly by night friends of the west- Fuck you. Fuck every last one of you antisemitic pricks.

I am angry. God help me. I am angry beyond measure. And my anger, like what is going to happen in the Middle East, is only going to get worse before it gets better.

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