"The Left Have Hijacked the Public Discourse" (And How!)

Here's Alan Freedman, vice-president of the Australian Jewish Association, ably and justifiably calling out the unconscionable intolerance of today's Woke Warriors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WI38SzSSA4o

Which brings me to this horrible piece of Wokism issued some days ago. To read this vomitous statement from the American Reform Movement is to revisit that equally vomitous slogan of crackpot radicals during the 1960s: "we are all guilty".  It's not so much a call for bridge-building and compassion, which needless to say are admirable objectives, as a one-sided exercise in self-flagellation and group demonisation. 

"Black Lives Matter is Jewish value" the statement declares, going on to castigate "white Jews" for their collusion (more supposed than real), in keeping black Americans down.  It's as if the visible Jewish presence in the Civil Rights era never happened.  It's as if there are no antisemitic or anti-Israel aspects to the organised Black Lives Matter movement.

Of course "Black Lives Matter", along with the lives of every human being on this earth, of whatever hue our skin happens to be.  That's why many of us, Jew and non-Jew, prefer the slogan "All Lives Matter", since all of us are made in the image of our Creator: that is why the concept "All Lives Matter" can be considered a Jewish value.

But try telling that to some of the politically biased bigots both in and outside the Reform movement and you risk being smeared as a racist.  They should know that Judaism is not a racist religion and that Jews who harbour contempt for their fellow human beings are, fortunately, few and far between.

As Rabbi Chaim Ingram of Bondi, the famous beach suburb in Australia, a man known applying sound common sense to socio-political questions andrefusing to be intimidated by leftist and "politically correct" activists has admirably stated, inter alia, in a recent post on his blog:

"....  Judaism is not racist and never has been.

In a very powerful statement to this effect, the Mishna declares: (Snahedrin 4:5): Why was Adam created singly? So that no-one would be able to say to another: My (racial) ancestor was greater than yours!

Our sages in the Midrash (Mekhilta Shemot 20:1) ask rhetorically why the Torah was given in the no-man’s land of a desert and not in the Land of Israel? They answer: so that no nation could complain that they did not have an opportunity to accept it.

A few paragraphs earlier in the same Midrash we are told that indeed, there in the desert, all the nations, one by one, beginning with Edom, Ammon,, Moab, and Ishmael, were explicitly offered the opportunity to accept the Torah. All refused because one or other of the mitsvot they were offered was not to their liking.

Whether or not this Midrash is to be taken literally, the message it conveys is plain: Every nation had potentially an equal opportunity to accept the Torah. Am Yisrael became G-D’s chosen nation not because of any racial superiority but because only they chose to accept the Torah unconditionally (Exodus 24:7). It is the Torah alone upon which Jewish distinctiveness is predicated.

Moreover, any individual of any nation may voluntarily accept the Torah (as indeed Jethro the priest of Midian pioneeringly did) and become Jewish.....  

Let me leave the last word to R’ Aharon haLevi, revered 13th-century author of the famous rabbinic educational treatise on the 613 commandments, Sefer haChinukh (Book of Mitsva Education): If someone …..has set in his heart a firm hatred towards them [here he talks about the progeny of Edom descended from Esau but it is equally applicable to all nations] because they come from a different race, he violates [a] …prohibitive commandment [of the Torah] (Mitsva #563)

Judaism was already avowedly anti-racist millennia before “racism” ever became a word or a concept in the dictionaries of the world’s nations!...."

 And read Rabbi Ingram's well justified strictures regarding the Australian BLM protesters' unconscionable flouting of governmental pleas not to hoild mass rallies during the present coronavirus pandemic, here