Ramble on Saturday

As anybody knows who reads the news, there have been some pretty nasty demonstrations breaking out across our land in support of the Palestinians, including rallies in both Dearborn, Michigan and New York where participants called for not only death to Israel but death to America.

In Michigan, the protest took place April 5 to mark Al-Quds Day, an annual event held on the last Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan to express support for the Palestinian cause and condemnation of Israel.

Local activist Tarek Bazzi, who organized the Dearborn gathering, railed against “the United States government providing funds that allow the atrocities” and Israel’s “satanic actions.”

Chants calling for the destruction of both America and Israel were heard during Bazzi’s remarks.

Forget about Death to Israel or Death to the Jews for a moment and let's focus on Death to America. Personally I think anybody who utters such a chant, free speech rights notwithstanding, should get an immediate trip to the border and exit ticket, never to return.

You hate America so much, try being a woman in an Islamic country and see how you fare? Or a gay person. Their human rights record is so darn good over there.

The progressive squad is all up in arms over the suspension of the openly antisemitic Ihlan Omar's daughter from Barnard.

U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Michigan, criticized American universities on Thursday for responding to anti-Israel protests on campuses across the country where protesters have engaged in antisemitic behavior. 

"From UM to Vanderbilt to USC to Columbia, students across our country are being retaliated against for using their constitutional rights to protest genocide. It’s appalling," Tlaib wrote on X in response to a post by Isra Hirsi, the daughter of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

Hirsi said she was suspended from New York City's Barnard College hours before being arrested and later released for protesting against Israel at Columbia University. 

Hirsi is free to protest but not to fail to obey a lawful order to disperse. Do the crime, do the time. Sorry, no tears here for her. You people in Dearborn, Michigan and Minneapolis, Minnesota who hate this country so much, why not get the fuck out? You will not be missed, I can assure you.

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Of course, this anti Israel, anti semitic and anti American rhetoric is epidemic at college campuses across our country, where Jewish students are now demonized and persecuted and professors preach the most vile and hateful invective without punishment.

How did this round of bile begin? On October 7th, when Hamas operatives decided to kill a bunch of kids and old people, rape and behead and take 250 hostages. You never hear much about that anymore, do you? Israel was supposed to sit back and take the death of over 1200 people nonchalantly and then reward the terrorists with concessions for their perfidy.

There is an interesting opinion out this week by an older woman in the Bay Area, Opinion: I survived the Holocaust. What I see happening in Berkeley is frightening. 

...since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the hatred towards Jews that I have seen in Berkeley terrifies me more than anything I have experienced while living here. I am still reeling from being called a liar at a Berkeley City Council meeting, where I asked for a proclamation to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and spoke about October 7. The Jews at that meeting were circled and called “Zionist pigs” by menacing protesters.

It is incredibly painful to see my neighbors vilify Jews, tear down posters of Jewish hostages in Gaza and not believe Jewish rape victims. In this hotbed, hatred and hostility have become normalized. Families have moved their children out of public schools. Jewish businesses have been vandalized and boycotted. And lies about Jews and Israel have gone unchecked and unchallenged in our public forums. Our local Jewish community is both horrified and petrified.

Unfortunately, we can hear similar stories in Jewish communities and at college campuses throughout our nation today. My tribe is once more, under attack.

I was driving through San Francisco last week and I drove by a large Jewish temple. And my first thought was, how secure these people must feel to practice their religion out in the open, after massacres in synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway. 

And I flashed on the Mandalorian Star Wars series, about a group who have survived their own holocaust and then hid their "coverts" in back alleys and sewers, cloaked and disguised. If they are discovered they have to move and re-establish in an entirely new and hidden location.

I see parallels to my people's existence. Dispersed by the Romans, then put in two hundred years of slavery by the Persians and Medans, banished from near every country in Europe, put through burning at the stake, the inquisition and finally the gas chamber. Is any idea of security merely illusory?

I was looking through some things I had written on  a couple Y genetics boards I belong to that I will reprint here that fills in some detail about Jewish history:

I was in Spain a few years ago and remember reading that Toledo (Toletum) had a jewish population that dates back as far as 586 BCE. Tarshish, which is probably Spain, is spoken of in the biblical books of Ezekial, Obadiah and Jonah. The Council of Elviris segregated the jews from the Spanish population at large in 306 and then things started getting really nasty around the sixth century. I have no doubt that they had similar roots throughout Europe. Large numbers lived in Greece at least as far back as 300 BCE, many in Rhodes. In his Facta et dicta memorabilia, Valerius Maximus makes reference to Jews and Chaldaeans being expelled from Rome in 139 BCE for their "corrupting" influences. According to Wiki "As early as the middle of the 2nd century BC, the Jewish author of the third book of the Oracula Sibyllina, addressing the "chosen people," says: "Every land is full of thee and every sea." Croatia, second century, Switzerland, third and fourth, France, fifth and sixth. From Wiki again:Persecution of Jews in Europe begins with the presence of Jews in regions that later became known as the lands of Latin Christendom (c. 8th century CE) and modern Europe. Not only were Jewish Christians persecuted according to the New Testament, but also as a matter of historical fact anti-Jewish pogroms occurred not only in Jerusalem (325 CE), Persia (351 CE), Carthage (250 CE), Alexandria (415), but also in Italy (224 CE), Milan (379 CE) and Minorca (418 CE), Antioch (489), Daphne-Antioch (506), Ravenna (519), amongst other places. Hostility between Christians and Jews grew over the generations under Roman sovereignty and beyond; eventually forced conversion, property confiscation, synagogue burning, expulsion, stake burning, enslavement and outlawing of Jews—even whole Jewish communities—occurred countless times in the lands of Latin Christendom. In the Early Middle Ages persecution of Jews also continued in the lands of Latin Christendom. After the Visigoths converted from more tolerant non-trinitarian Arianism to stricter trinitarian Nicene Christianity of Rome, in 612 CE and again in 642 CE expulsions of all Jews were decreed in the Visigoth Empire.[26] The Catholic Merovingian dynasty decreed forced conversion for Jews in 582 and 629 CE. Under the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toledo multiple persecutions (633, 653, 693) and stake burnings of Jews (638 CE) occurred; the Kingdom of Toledo followed up on this tradition in 1368, 1391, 1449, and 1486-1490 CE including forced conversions and mass murder, and there were rioting and a blood bath against the Jews of Toledo in 1212 CE. Jewish pogroms occurred in the Diocese of Clement (France 554 CE) and in the Diocese of Uzes (France 561 CE). Persecution of Jews in Europe increased in the High Middle Ages in the context of the Christian Crusades. In the First Crusade (1096) flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were utterly destroyed; see German Crusade, 1096. In the Second Crusade (1147) the Jews in France were subject to frequent massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades of 1251 and 1320. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including in, 1290, the banishing of all English Jews. In 1396, 100,000 Jews were expelled from France; and, in 1421 thousands were expelled from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled to Poland. Charting the diaspora is difficult across the span of time but if I had to guess I would say that with the clues we have been given regarding tmcra the most logical place to look for the forefathers of our cluster is Poland. 

What do you feel is the 64 thousand dollar question regarding our group's particular origin story? For me it is where the members actually lived between the eighth and twelfth century of the common era. Denis Savard (what happened to you Denis?) used to postulate that we started in France. Due to the favorable treatment of Polish King Boleslaw III in the eleventh century, I find it more likely to be Poland. By the sixteenth century it is estimated that three quarters of the world's jewish population lived in Poland. My own family came from Plock, which had one of the earliest Polish populations of jews, starting around 1237. Jews were expelled from Alexandria in 415, Minorca, 418, by the Visigoths in 612, finished off in much of Europe in the Crusades in 1095 forward, Spain mid twelfth century, Bavaria 1276, 1290 in England, 1293 in France. Hungary 1360, Switzerland 1362. Poland looks like the only real port in the storm, the only place that granted at least a chance of survival and the most likely place for our ancestors to have frequented.

The dates of the earliest jewish emigration to Poland loosely dovetail with the emergence and mrca of this haplogroup. Plotsk was one of the oldest Jewish settlements in Poland with them being mentioned in literature as far back as 1237. At one time Poland, founded in 1025, was one of the most hospitable places in Europe for the diaspora. It would be interesting to me to see how many of you trace your origins to that general area. As an informational note, some general history on the subject of jews and Poland from Wiki: The first Jews arrived in the territory of modern Poland in the 10th century. Travelling along trade routes leading east to Kiev and Bukhara, Jewish merchants, known as Radhanites, crossed Silesia. One of them, a diplomat and merchant from the Moorish town of Tortosa in Spanish Al-Andalus, known by his Arabic name, Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, was the first chronicler to mention the Polish state ruled by Prince Mieszko I. In the summer of 965 or 966 Jacob made a trade and diplomatic journey from his native Toledo in Muslim Spain to the Holy Roman Empire and to Slavic countries. The first actual mention of Jews in Polish chronicles occurs in the 11th century. It appears that Jews were then living in Gniezno, at that time the capital of the Polish kingdom of the Piast dynasty. Among the first Jews to arrive in Poland (in 1097 or 1098) were those banished from Prague. The first permanent Jewish community is mentioned in 1085 by a Jewish scholar Jehuda ha-Kohen in the city of Przemyśl. The Radhanites are a very interesting people. Look them up. Early merchants and traders, they brought paper back from China and may have been instrumental in the conversion of the Khazars.

Probably way too much information than you are able or have the time to process and not really applicable to the thrust of this blogpost but you get the general idea. Our history has been one of intense pain and suffering and it is no wonder that we have serious trust issues regarding being able to live with our neighbors. Everybody deserves a homeland except, of course, the jews.

Yet we can trace our genetic ancestry back into the middle east as easily as any bedouin.

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I can't stand the progressives. I can't stand Omar, or AOC, or Bowman, or Tlaib or any of the other people who have piled on regarding this issue.

We are attacked from the left and from the right, from Berkeley to the "good nazis" at Charlottesville.

I do not trust any of them whatsoever.

I do not trust the mamby pamby district attorneys in Oakland, Los Angeles or Alameda either, who no longer believe in punishment and allow theft and violent crime to go by unabated and unpunished.

Or the A-hole in New York, Heastie.

Assembly Speaker Carl E. Heastie has expressed skepticism on additional criminal penalties. “I just don’t believe raising penalties is ever a deterrent on crime,” Heastie told reporters last month. Instead, he often says, government should focus on resolving root causes of crime.

This type of progressive la la fantasy is what is driving shop owners out of business and sending Democrats like me running for the exits. Root cause of crime? We going to put all the crooks in therapy now and ask if they were loved as children? Ain't going to work. There are lambs and there are wolves, let's not reward people for bad behavior any longer.

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I have always been center left but mostly center. And I have always believed in strong borders and a country's rights to police its own border. I am sickened by migrants who come to our country illegally and then demand their "rights" while sucking off our welfare programs. In my view, you come here illegally, you relinquish all rights to citizenship forever.

We do not have the resources to "save" the entire world. And I have to wonder if these migrants' enablers in the legal and humanitarian communities are behind the recent wave of squatting in this country?

I counsel my friends, don't ever let anyone stay in your house, next thing you know the locks are changed and their lawyer tells them that they have six months to languish around and suck you dry.

Look for the left to do more to attack landlords and land owners, to push cheap housing for the homeless no matter at what economic and environmental cost to the community. Suck the rich, the third rail of the progressives. Watch them as they attempt to mercilessly and clumsily redistribute the wealth in this country.

Our Attorney General in California Rob Bonta, recently said that it is every community's new most pressing duty to build more housing. The mayor of Los Angeles I singing a similar song. The rich have to give the poor money for housing.

Why?

We in Southern California live in a desert and are facing another forced reduction in Colorado River water. Our freeways are already clogged. Maybe not everybody can live here?  Of course there is another factor in play; empty nesters are not giving up their big houses and the boomers are in a bit of a class struggle with the later millennials. This is happening globally. A Belgian Health Fund executive is now proposing euthanizing the elderly. Oh my. I saw the movie back in the sixties, Wild in the Streets.

Belgium’s euthanasia laws should cover elderly people who are “tired of life” or who feel they are a burden on the public purse, a health insurance chief has urged. Luc Van Gorp, 57, the president of the CM health fund, a Christian mutual insurance provider, said that the number of Belgians over 80 would double to 1.2 million by 2050.

“Many elderly people are tired of life. Why would you necessarily want to prolong such a life? Those people don’t want that themselves, and when it comes to budgets: it only costs the government money,” he told the Nieuwsblad newspaper. “We must remove the stigma.”

What a freaking world we live in. Completely adrift from our moorings. A world largely inhabited by idiots. A computer at everyone's fingertips and yet a people never so uninformed, manipulated and ignorant.

Happy Passover to those that celebrate.