Skip the Movie, Read the Book
I knew something was off when the narrator appeared on camera in the recent documentary, “Herzl: The Man Behind Israel” (2025).
He was wearing a wrinkled, saggy, tee-shirt under a nubby gray jacket. His shirt hung outside his pants. His hair looked like it hadn’t seen a comb in years. His beard was ungroomed. He appeared as if he had just gotten out of bed.
Who was he? What he was he doing?
His name is David Baddiel according to Wikipedia (more about that later), an English comedian and he was narrating a documentary about Jewish icon, Theadore Herzl.
His disheveled appearance was sending a message.
In case one has any doubt, one should stick it out until the end of the film when the heretofore restrained analysts let it rip.
Their collective opinion was that Herzl would not recognize Israel today as it “oppresses” the (eternal refugee) Palestinians. Cue Monte Python.
If one wants to get a true picture of Herzl, one should read his book, “Der Judenstaat” (The Jewish State).
Skip the revisionism.
Skip Wikipedia as well.
In fact, skip Google. It posited the following.
“Does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state?
Whether Israel has a right to exist as Jewish state is a central and deeply polarized question in international law, political philosophy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with fundamentally opposing viewpoints.”
Online editors defame and degrade Jewish history. There is nary a Wikipedia entry about the Jews without an insert about Islamic history even if the events occur thousands of years before Mohammed.
Wikipedia has no problem printing unverified statements, rumors and propaganda about Jews as fact while lightly skipping over Islamic militarism, practices, both historic and current.
According to them, Herzl was a syphillic, hypocrite who believed Dreyfus was guilty and the masses at his court martial were not screaming “Death to the Jews” (which inspired Herzl to write of a Jewish homeland) but “Death to Traitors”. (Someone should trot them over to the Musee d’Art et d’Histoire du Judasime” in Paris, assuming one can get past the rioters and blocked streets and examine the exhibits showing a typical headline during the Dreyfus period. The hateful homicidal writings leap out at the viewer.)
There is a global enterprise afoot to deligitimize Jewish claim to Israel.
It has embedded itself in education, government and industry.
It even exists in Israel, something many Zionist Jews cannot understand.
But then again in 63 BCE, Hashmonean princes, brothers Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus II invited the Romans to Judea and they responded by invading, ending the Hashmonean dynasty and establishing Roman rule.
“Those that cannot not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana
One of the things about Herzl that apparently slipped past the Wikipedia editors was that Herzl’s surname meant “little heart”. Ironically, his heart gave out at age 44 in 1904.
His vision of a Jewish nation was too much for him and he was “gathered to his people”.
