Shalom Aleichem!
As a Modern Orthodox Jew in a Modern Orthodox discussion forum, I was simply curious as to what you guys thought of a very contreversial figuure, Rabbi Meir Kahane ztl hyd.
He is rarely talked about, and his bio used to be on ou.org until they removed it form the site and all the archives, so I was curious as to what some of my co-religionists thought.

Avi Snyder

Hi Avi!

I don’t think very highly of him, although I will be the first to admit that it was an absolute travesty of justice that his assassin walked on the murder charge.  An inexperienced asst. DA vs. William Kunstler?  That was a lost cause!  Travesties like this make me think that maybe the jury system is an idea that has outlived its usefulness; 800 years ago in England, it may have been a good idea but perhaps not anymore.

I saw him speak once, by chance.  It was during the 1988 Knesset election campaign.  I was going to get my laundry in the Ramot Eshkol commercial center in northern Yerushalayim (I was a grad student at nearby Hebrew University & lived in Ramot Eshkol at the time) & he was speaking.  Few people seemed to be listening but I heard him say (in Hebrew): “Druze?  Circassians?  Bedouin?  They’re all the same thing, they’re all Arabs.  Give me the tools and I’ll take care of them.” I switched off.  Israel’s +/- 106,000 Druze (http://tinyurl.com/6z9g5; not the Druze who live on the Golan Heights, they’re separate) & +/- 3,000 Circassians (http://circassianworld.5u.com/Israel.html) are conscripted into the IDF (at their own request!) & many Bedouin volunteer to serve in the IDF.  Between 200-300 Druze have fallen defending the Jewish state & more than a few Bedouin & Circassians have as well.  I think that it is a blight on Israel that so many non-Jews have given their lives to defend our Jewish country, including in the latest round of Palestinian violence (i.e. the one that started in the fall of 2000) while so many healthy Jews will not lift a finger to do so!  I was privileged to serve with Druze & Bedouin in the IDF before I was discharged.  On Feb. 18, 2002, Ahmad Mazarib, a Galilee Bedouin serving in the Israel Police, at the station in my hometown of Maaleh Adumim, stopped a suicide terrorist en route to Jerusalem, right outside Maaleh Adumim, & paid with his life (see http://tinyurl.com/be6nx) .  He left a wife & three daughters.  I pass the small memorial that has been erected on the spot twice a day, every day (except Shabbat).  I will not hear these people slandered by a politician out to scare up votes on the cheap by preying on people’s fears & prejudices.

It strikes me that Kach’s ideas regarding Arabs are simplistic in the extreme and proffer a simple solution to a complex problem (expel them & all will be blissful.) To a weary & exasperated people, this can be powerfully seductive.  All of our ills are blamed either on the Arabs or on our inability to view the Arab problem properly.  While I (unlike many members of Kach) am loathe to equate/compare any Jew with the Nazis, Kach’s whole approach regarding the Arabs reminds me of the infamous Nazi slogan, “The Jews are our misfortunes.” (Also, I have seen lurid Kach propaganda which depicts every Arab man as a sexual predator waiting to defile the poor Jewish maiden; this could have been taken lock-stock-and-barrel from what the Nazis said about us or what the Ku Klux Klan says about blacks.  Ugh!  The title of Rav Kahane’s book “They Must Go” reminds me of Juden raus.) Many people are/were attracted to Kach because it offers very simple, stark, clear-cut, black-and-white solutions to just about every ill plaguing Am Yisrael & Medinat Yisrael today; totalitarians (be they Fascists, Nazis, Communists, Islamic fundamentalists, etc.) the world over & throughout recent history have all done exactly this.  Why wrack one’s brains (not to mention one’s heart & soul) trying to figure out solutions to complex issues/problems, when some leader/demagogue/philosophy can blithely dispose of them at the drop of a hat?  In my August 24th post on the “Is the Israeli government doing the right thing?” thread, I said that:

The Israeli right lives in a fantasyworld totally detached from reality because it thinks that we can beat the Palestinians into docile submission & that the latter will then, out of the fear in their hearts, leave us alone. Wrong. The Israeli left lives in a fantasyworld totally detached from reality because it thinks that if we withdraw to the 1967 lines (which the late, left-wing Abba Eban once derided as ‘Auschwitz lines’) the Palestinians/Arabs will then, out of the goodness of their hearts, leave us alone. Wrong. Both do their respective ostrich imitations & stick their heads in an ideological sandbox of their own devising, forgetting that one who sticks his head in sand usually gets it in the other part of his body rendered prominent thereby.

And I live in a confusionworld immersed in reality, depressed thereby, too afraid to slip into the ignorance-is-bliss comforts of this or that fantasy.

Rav Kahane & Kach offer just such an “ignorance-is-bliss” unreal fantasy that spares us the burden of having to think and/or feel too much.

No thanks.

Also, my former chevruta (an oleh from England who is much more learned than I) used to go to the late Prof. Nechama Leibovitz’s (http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/nleib.html) shiur at her Yerushalayim apartment.  My former chevruta says that someone mentioned Rav Kahane once & Prof. Leobovitz snapped, “No one can distort the sources like that man.” That the late Prof. Leibovitz should say such a thing impresses me very much.

So, please excuse me if I say that I don’t think very highly of the late Rav Kahane or of Kach.

Be well!

stillsmallvoice

Hi all!

I’ll add the following.  I think it is a) relevant & b) interesting.

The late Prof. Richard Hofstadter wrote an essay in 1963 entitled: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (http://tinyurl.com/2alvz).  While the examples he gives are all from US history, his conclusions, I think, are applicable everywhere.  Prof. Hofstadter writes:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. (...).

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

(...).

The paranoid style is not confined to our own country and time; it is an international phenomenon. Studying the millennial sects of Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Norman Cohn believed he found a persistent psychic complex that corresponds broadly with what I have been considering—a style made up of certain preoccupations and fantasies: “the megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted, yet assured of ultimate triumph; the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary; the refusal to accept the ineluctable limitations and imperfections of human existence, such as transience, dissention, conflict, fallibility whether intellectual or moral; the obsession with inerrable prophecies…systematized misinterpretations, always gross and often grotesque.”

(...).

Perhaps the central situation conducive to the diffusion of the paranoid tendency is a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular social interest—perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of its demands—are shut out of the political process. Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

Be well!

stillsmallvoice

I don’t know much about Rabbi Kahane but I do listen to the Jewish Task Force on the internet who is a member of Kach and I really do enjoy Chaim Ben Pesachs site and show.

In terms of being simplistic uh it is a sad reaity that the vast majority a arabs don’t like Jews and that is true to the great majority in Israel. The Israeli Arabs have knesset members who openly support Israeli’s enemies. Are there exception? I’m sure there are. It doesn’t change the facts of the vast majority of arabs who live in Israel and everywhere else. What arab country allows Jews to live in it. I know it isn’t politically correct to criticize arabs but I think most of what Chaim Ben Pesach is true and he is a big supporter of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. BUt the sad reality is when you try to be PC you end up criticizing innocent decent people to fill in the gap who it isn’t political correct to never ever criticize

In this weeks show Chaim Ben Pesach talked about how abusive the government was to the Jews who lived in Gaza and that they are not allowed to even use minor torture to even arab terrorists who have murdered babies. They put 12 year old girls in an adult jail for months before trial for blocking a street. A police officer ripped a young boys nostrols for blocking a street.  I thing they support the right side and no I don’t agree with everything but I agree with most of what they have said. They hate people who have murdered Jewish children, Jewish mothers, Jewish fathers, civilians in cold blood and say they will do more of it. What is so terrible about that.

Read Kahane’s books. He was right. Most of his predictions came true.  Yes, the Druze and other ethnic groups are fine people. Kahana wanted to remove the not-nice ones. The Americans removed(rather, slaughtered)most of the natives. Other countries remove and resettle people(that is, if they don’t slaughter them first). Have you noticed Kahane wanted to resettle not slaughter the arabs? There was actually interest amongst the arabs - they wanted to leave Israel.  Roo

I also say Rabbi Meir Kahane, zt"l was right.  His only crime was that he told the truth and forced many Jews (especially Israeli Jews) to look in the mirror and they didn’t like what they saw, so it is always more convenient to blame the messenger for the message.

Regarding the Arabs, if one reads Kahane’s books carefully, one would see that Kahane actually had more respect for the Arabs then the leftists do.  Rabbi Kahane knew that we would not be able to buy Arab pride with washing machine, TV’s, college education, or even land and he also realized, unlike our “enlightened” left, that the Arabs are NOT to be taken for backward fools.

Unfortunately both Rabbi Meir Kahane, zt"l, as well as his son, Benyamin Zeev Kahane, zt"l, (along with his wife, Talia) were murdered in cold blood (may G-d avenge their blood), but their ideas continue, despite the Israeli government’s, as well as the Shin Bet’s official policy of trying to silence anyone who dares speak the truth.

You can cover up the sun with your hand and pretend it doesn’t exist, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t; and so it is with the truth.

Roo - 08 February 2006 02:30 AM

Read Kahane’s books. He was right. Most of his predictions came true. 

That is very true and I agree with it!

The druze are turning against us and that is a very sad reality.

I have learned that Kahane in the end was not a good man. I do think his idea’s against democracy at least one of the factors contributing do it was the fact that he really was liberal when it came to Jewish divorce between a Jewish man and a Jewish woman and if you believe that then you are going to be worried that Jews can’t naturally have a high birth rate and if that is the case you can’t give any rights to minorities because some day they may outnumber you and that was his thinking not just with arabs but with all people. He didn’t believe that anyone who wasn’t Jewish should be allowed to vote and his views on divorce played into that as he really thought that Jews could become the minority from any group.