Extremist Muslims lashing out angrily at the West, as leverage on the Hindu majority in India, have slaughtered over 100 people in the Indian city of Mumbai. These people were killed, in classical Islamist terrorist style, for just being who they are. So naturally the Jews were on their list of targets too, and the latest news is that “ten to twenty” Israelis are being held hostage in Mumbai’s Chabad House and a Mumbai hotel.
What’s a Chabad house? CHABAD is the Hebrew acronym for the words chochma, bina and daas — wisdom, understanding and knowledge — which form the basis of the philosophy of these Orthodox Jews, hasidim of the Lubavitch movement (named after a Russian town whence sprung their grand rabbis). Chabad has been controversial among Jews for over half a century, both for important aspects of its philosophy that distinguish it from other Orthodox Jewish approaches and the messianic inclinations of a significant percentage of its adherents regarding the movement’s late Grand Rabbi, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a multifaceted genius who passed away 14 years ago and who despite his revolutionary leadership did not bring the Redemption.
Antipathy towards Lubavitch, or Chabad, has been intense among non-Lubavitchers among the strictly Orthodox for many years, in fact, and there is very little interaction between this group and the rest of us, even though many — such as myself — were profoundly and positively influenced by them at one time in their lives, frequently as a result of Chabad’s groundbreaking worldwide outreach efforts. Their interest has always been to recapture the spark of Jewishness in every child of the people Israel, though as is our practice not to proselytize outside of this extended family. But as to those within, not a single Jewish soul, they believed, taught and lived, is to be written off. Unfortunately, and ironically, their subculture within the broader strictly Orthodox Jewish subculture has departed so far from the main that, in the main centers of Jewish life Lubavitchers and other strictly orthodox Jews, including other hasidic groups, do not mix.
But today we are all Lubavitchers, all Chabadniks. Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka Holtzberg were sent to Mumbai by Lubavitch to do their part to account for the thousands of Jewish souls, many Israeli, doing business, and others seeking (we believe, erroneously) spiritual enlightenment, in this major Indian city. They manned the Chabad House in Mumbai and met the expectation of every Jew who travels the world that in any place where it is likely that more than a handful of Jews might be found, there is a Chabad House (frequently where the Chabad rabbi and his family live) to offer Shabbos (Sabbath) hospitality, kosher food, perhaps even a bed for a few days, a connection to the root of the Jewish world and perhaps a little mashke (straight vodka) and a few hasidic stories more than “thrown in” for inspiration.
The latest report on the status of the Holtzbergs, their place and their persons targeted, as persons such as these have always been, is not encouraging. <Read the rest of this entry>
{ 5 comments }
India is part of The West now?
Anyway, this is appalling, and I’ll say a prayer for these innocent people.
No, Dean. They attacked Westerners and West-oriented targets in India, because that is a more "high value" target for terrorists than mere Hindus. Hence "leverage" — it causes far more bang for the buck, if you will forgive, in terms of Western media coverage, reaction and, well, terror to kill 100 westerners in India than some multiple of that of Hindus in Inda.
Ron Coleman’s last blog post..Giving thanks to to whom? And why?
Alas, for many Muslims, India is indeed ‘The West’. They think (as do some fundamentalist Hindus) that the Indian government is far too cozy with the West, the US in particular.
They blame the Indian government for selling the farm to get a nuclear deal with the US, for one recent grievance. They don’t like the constraints on protectionism that came with WTO accession, either.
Other parts of the Indian bodies politic dislike capitalism (and guess who that means?) on principle. Calcutta, for example, has a Communist government. It’s actually functioning pretty well, particularly in the poorer areas of the city. But you can get a mob ginned up with anti-Western rhetoric pretty easily.
John_B’s last blog post..Saudi Women’s University Gets Sports Center
Lets face it they want to kill whomever is a kaffir and the more spectacular the better. Killing Americans, Britons and Jews is just the most effective way of making sure they get the max amount of publicity for doing so.Â
Ron, regardless of all the efforts of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, and all the other grand jewish savants of the past 2000 years, there is not and never will be any redemption for the Jewish nation — individually as well as collectively — other than through acquiring deadly arms and learning to use them through regular, diligent and focused practice on the fine art of killiong people in order to save your own lives in emergencies such as in Mumbai.Â
That, in a nutshell, was the sum total of what I learned from my 18-month stay in Israel in 1973-1974, where my wife and I were graduate students. You shoot first, and make damned sure you use a double-tap — one shot in the main body mass and the second shot one in the head — to make sure you killed him. Then he can’t kill you. Even better, you can strip his corpse of the firearm and ammunition, and give them to another Jew to help save him. That probably is the most meaningful gift one Jews and give another, considering the world we all live in.
Otherwise, Jews are forever condemed to lives akin to sheep who wander around in cages to which tigers have access to them for occasional feeding purposes.
If you want to pray for the murdered Lubavitcher and his wife on Shabat, that’s fine. But think about spending a few of the other days of the week in somethink that may be put to immediate practical use.Â
And don’t forget. The one thing ha-Shem always rewards you for is good aim, trigger control, and quicker shooting than your would-be attacker.Â
That’s basically what I always have wanted to see. That Jews become the world’s foremost killers. The goyim won’t hate you any the more for that. But they sure will learn to keep their distance from you, when push comes to shove.
Life sure is rotten, isn’t it? But it’s all you ever are going to get.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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