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Elazar Larry Freifeld

On disproportionate response in the conduct of this War

In response to comments made on my last blog, that we are losing the propaganda war, I can only say I would rather lose the propaganda and win the war. Besides, propaganda ain’t what it used to be in the time of Hitler and Goebbels. The old print and film noir media of the Nazi regime took months, sometimes years to fully saturate the populous world. Today’s media is more rapid fire and short lived; it’s ‘the message’. Yesterday’s thumb of propaganda is today’s pinky of misinformation. In seconds, one piece of useless information is replaced by another. By the time you wake up and put your finger to the wireless instrument of your power and entitlement, it has already shifted from one peculiar digit to the next. Poof! then gone in a whiff of white cloud as it trails the course of rockets exploding in mid air. Imagine eating that for your breakfast, before reaching for your iPad and the news.

Drowning as we are in this ‘illusion’ of information and ‘knowledge’, it is extremely hard to get at the truth. And so people accept the lie because it’s easier to believe and understand. We spiral downward in a plethora of staged and fully paid-for political corruption and propaganda. One of the chief targets of this recent wave of anti-Jewish propaganda is that our response to being bombed daily with hundreds and thousands of rockets is disproportionate. And those who claim to be Jewish while abrogating the ‘Zionist Regime’ have deluded themselves into thinking they are safe from anti-Semitism because they are Jewish and not Israeli. There is more here than meets your little morning pinky. Picture the demographics. Israel with a population of some 6-7,000,000 Jews is surrounded by an Arab population of 170,000,000, including fanatic Islamist terrorists. Assuming, conservatively, that 20 to 30,000,000 of these Muslims are Jihadists, what in your opinion should be a proportionate response to the killing of one Jew by Hamas? Do the arithmetic yourself, while keeping in mind that according to Talmud, ‘To kill one Jew in the state of Israel, is to kill the entire world’.  Proportion would then be more in the neighborhood of at least 4 or 5,000 Jihadists (ya think?) for every Jew killed in defense of his home land and country.

You can bank on it, this war will be remembered as one the most efficient and humane in the history of modern warfare, on this planet. As for losing support from our traditional allies east and west, though they dislike us now, they also respect and admire our ability to conduct ‘the art of war’ on the highest level of moral and ethical Judaism. As a friend reminded me, a just war is better than a good war. There is a difference.

I close here, for edification, with a ‘Covenant’, from The Moral Principles, by Rav Kook.

‘The basis of entering a covenant as a commitment to a moral discipline is so that the obligation to the ideal that emanates from the highest level of morality shall become deeply fixed in the nature of heart and soul and there will be no need for admonitions and precautionary measures to assure one’s conformity. It will become a fixed sensibility as is, for instance, the revulsion of murder and similar offenses in the heart of upright persons, which the general moral sense has succeeded well in absorbing. When a person reaches this state in all his values he rejoices in G-d and trusts always in his mercy. Any violation of the covenant weakens the natural vitality in the moral sense, and it is for this reason that it begets anxiety and weakness in the depths of the soul. This anxiety is engendered by the act of straying from the right course and we then have the necessity of exercising special vigilance in thought’.

28.07.2014

 

About the Author
Born April 15, 1941 in Manhattan, of Jewish immigrants from Poland and Galicia, Elazar spans three literary generations from the streets of New York to Tel Aviv. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous books, literary magazines, newspapers and anthologies throughout the world. Since first publishing in 1964, he has had 17 books published, including The Importance of Swimming, Television Analogs, Love Cycles, A Jew in the House of Harvard, Poet's Guide to the Holy Land, The World According to Animals and What Walks. A Jew in the House of Harvard was awarded first prize by the Israel Federation of Writers for the year 1987. Translated into 8 languages, including Hebrew, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish and Hungarian, Elazar's readings and seminars include such venues as, The New School for Social Research, The Whitney Museum School of American Art, WBAI Radio, WNET TV/Channel 13, CBS TV/Video at The School of Visual Arts, and the American Embassy in Tel Aviv. During the Scud War in Israel, continuing a career begun in the U.S., Elazar wrote a weekly column for The Jerusalem Post and is now contributing editor of LeConte Publications, in Rome.