Yom Ha Shoa

Pour out Thy wrath upon the nations that know Thee not,/And upon the kingdoms that call not upon Thy name./For they have devoured Jacob,/And laid waste his habitation.

Pour out Thine indignation upon them,/And let the fierceness of Thine anger overtake them./Thou wilt pursue them in anger, and destroy them/From under the heavens of the Lord. (Passover Haggadah, Glatzer edition)

Now there’s something for us Jews to remember, as we commemorate our Holocaust dead. 

Does the violence offend you? The chosenness horrify you? You’re free to memorialize your disgust as you wish—and so often do—from your despotic/autocratic, left-wing/right-wing, murderous/pusillanimous, armed/prostrate roosts; you may even enter Israel’s eternal and undivided capital, Jerusalem, and cram little Israel-scourging prayers of denunciation into the crevices of the Old City’s Western Wall with your manicured, Kabbalah-braceleted hands—which is more freedom to pray or dissent than most Mussulman descendants of Nazi collaborators and “citizens” of any of the oppressive, brutalizing, terrorizing lands encircling the Jewish State will ever experience, or remember, in their lifetimes.

But please, by all means, wail on. And while you’re doing all that disapprobatory shuddering; while you’re sobbing over your false Davids and specious Goliaths; while your fingers are twitching on your pens, and your rocks, and your grenades, and your rockets; while that familiar little frisson of horror over the detested Jews who unaccountably will rise up from subjugation is snaking its way up your spine once again; while you’re whispering your “love” for Israel in the tongue of anti-Semitism; while you’re sniffing the scent of our blood, we’ll be counting our dead, and when we’re done with that, we’ll be reminding you never to forget the mighty hand and the outstretched arm—and the long memory—of the Israeli Defense Forces.

Agony Under the Cedars

“Women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” So goes the Afghan saying. But there are no women in the Hindu Kush or Kabul or Kandahar. There are no mothers, no sisters, no grandmothers, no aunts. There are only the shades of womanhood; pale shadows flitting in the background of the horrific crimes routinely committed against their little boys—their sons, their brothers, their grandsons, their nephews—by Afghani men awash in the sick pleasure of pedophilia. And there is no childhood for those little boys. There is only their agony, and the creatures imitating men—the fathers, the grandfathers, the brothers, the uncles—who buy them, steal them, enslave them, groom them, rape them, prostitute them, turn them into dancing playthings, “bacha bazi,” for the pleasure of others of their ilk, and then discard them: “When he starts growing a beard, his time will expire, and I will try to find another one who doesn’t have a beard,” declares one such “man” about his “companion” of two years. And there is no Afghani government, apparently, either: “A kid who is being sexually exploited, if he reports it, he will end up in prison,” a UN worker tells the Washington Post. “They become pariahs.”

This is where Bad Rachel came in. And this is where I have begun to wonder whether it is possible to help these benighted forgeries of humanity save themselves from themselves—for after all, isn’t that the point, once we’ve beaten our enemy, of continuing the fight?—and, more to the point, and though it pains me dreadfully to find myself standing in anything resembling proximity to the execrable anti-American left and its befouled doppelganger on the right, whether the attempting to do so has been worth the lives—and the terrible sacrifice of their mothers and fathers, their husbands and wives, their sons and daughters, their sisters and brothers, their grandmothers and grandfathers, their aunts and uncles—of all those great, valiant, heroic, wonderful, Americans who’ve given them for that cause.