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Imagine you hear of a conflict in some faraway land you can’t find on a map, between two parties whose names you can’t spell, and you don’t have the foggiest idea about any of the relevant history. Not Israel. Still, you would like to take sides, so you listen to the official speakers hoping to determine who is in the right.

One side speaks of a “rich historical connection” to the land and the other starts shaking the keys to their alleged ancestral homes from which they were displaced.

One side says, “Did you not notice? We criminalized those who use rhetoric that sounded like a mirror image of your own. We were hoping to model good behavior for you.” And the other side says: That’s the least you could do!

One side is aggressively violent and refuses to “recognize” anything about their enemy, but the political leadership of the opposing side invites the liberation movement’s leaders into the country, gives them legitimacy and money, and views them as junior partners.

One side mentions other powerful states giving them guarantees and talks of how the UN once voted in their favor. The other side swears fealty to undying eternal justice and states no one else has a right to touch their patrimony.

One side notes they ceaselessly prayed to return from the diaspora but the others insist they are indigenous to the region, and the others are all interlopers and colonizers. “Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” if not more.

One side says they demand the immediate return of their refugees and the other says, “Well, that’s hardly feasible, especially by now. Let’s be reasonable. How about we negotiate?”

One side says, “We are a simple people. We demand justice, simple as that.” The other side whines, “But we want peace with you! We keep offering you peace. Why won’t you lay down your arms and accept our unending overtures of peeeeeace?!”

One side says we are willing to give some of the land to you, as long as you stop teaching your kids that we’re prey. The other side rages, “No way! It’s all ours, the River to the Sea!”

One side lustily kills civilians on the other side but the victims’ regime cracks down hard on “their own,” brutalizing and torturing their own so-called “terrorists” while giving free guns, free electricity, and free everything else to the killers from the other side.

One side unanimously shouts that any sincere peace treaty would constitute treason and the other side cries in exasperation: “Oh, why do you keep missing golden opportunities?!”

One side says: “Look at all the good we’ve done for you. We found a desert and transformed it into a garden!” The other side answers: “This may be true. But it was my desert and now it has become your garden”. (Source: Rabbi Meir Kahane)

Now you tell me: Which side would you tend to support?

Come, let us abandon weakness and speak of justice and the truth. Our actions, too, must reflect justice and the truth. This is how we win hearts and minds and achieve victory.

Yehuda Israel is editor of Hyehudi.org – Aggregated Articles About Judaism: Daily articles on Emuna, The Temple, Jewish Clericalism, Libertarian Anarchy, Austrian Economics, and more. Yehuda Israel is a pseudonym.

Again, find it here.

ליקוט מדברי כמה רבנים בעניני מלחמת שמחת תורה

December 11, 2023 – כ״ח בכסלו תשפ״ד by Hyehudi

באתר היברו-בוקס כאן…

והנה מכתב של הרב מאיר קסלר מקרית ספר על תפקיד לומדי התורה בעת הזו:

קונטרס ‘והודעתם לבניך’ – הקניית שמחה והצלחה לבנים בדרך ארוכה שהיא קצרה

December 11, 2023 – כ״ח בכסלו תשפ״ד by Hyehudi

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Periclean Athens Was a Massive Welfare State

December 11, 2023 – כ״ח בכסלו תשפ״ד by Hyehudi

Periclean Athens Was a Welfare State

Gary North – October 21, 2015

Periclean Athens was a massive welfare state. Scholars of the era have long known this. The public is never told, however.

The state built huge public works projects, organized public assistance, offered pensions to the disabled, subsidized bread purchases, established price controls on bread, imposed export controls, established free theater programs for the poor, and regulated corn merchants [G. Glotz, The Greek City and Its Institutions (New York: Barnes & Noble, [1929] 1969), pp. 131-32.]

The “bread and circuses” political religion of Athens ended in an enforced inter-city alliance, war with Sparta, defeat, tyranny, and finally the loss to Macedon. That is the fate of all bread and circus religions.

Athens worshipped politics with all its being, on a scale barely understood by most historians. It was understood by Glotz:

Five hundred citizens were to sit in the Boule for a whole year. The heliasts, whose functions were originally confined to hearing appeals against awards made by the magistrates, were now to judge in first instance and without appeal the increasingly numerous cases in which citizens of Athens and the confederate towns were involved: they formed a body of six thousand members of which half on an average were in session every working day. There were ten thousand officials within the country or outside, five hundred wardens of arsenals, etc. Thus public affairs did not merely demand the intermittent presence of all the citizens of the Assembly; they required besides the constant exertions of more than a third of them [Glotz, p. 126].

Consider this: one-third of all the estimated 35,000 to 44,000 resident male citizens of Athens in the year 431 B.C. were in State service. [Alfred E. Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1915), p. 172.] At least 20,000 were “eating public bread,” meaning that they were either on the payroll or on the dole [Zimmern, pp. 172-73].

This is not the standard textbook view of classical Greece.

From Ron Paul Curriculum, here.