• Home
  • Bio / CV
    • About Bruce Louis Cohen
    • IMDb • LinkedIn
    • Education & Certifications
    • Skill Sets
  • Shop
    • Printed Matter
    • Compact Discs
    • Digital (Downloadable)
    • Manuscripts (Music) As Art
  • Commissions • Hires • Bookings
    • Commission/Hire • Words
    • Commission/Hire • Music
    • Hire • Directing
    • Booking • Concert
    • Booking • Speak or Teach
  • Contact

BruceCohenWordsMusic

  • Words
    • Editing
    • Books
    • Essays
    • Journalism
    • Blog (Secular)
    • Blog (Theology)
    • Poetry
    • Translation / Diplomacy
    • Educator
  • Music
    • Musical Affiliations
    • Reviews-Music
    • Concerts
    • Conducting
    • Discography
    • Composition & Songwriting
    • Lyrics
    • Producing/Arranging
    • Film-Scoring
  • Film & Stage
    • Screenplays
    • Stage Plays
    • Film-Scoring
    • Directing
    • Film / Video
    • Producing/Arranging
    • Stage (Dance)
    • Stage (Music)
    • Song Lyrics

“CEASEFIRE NOW” PRESSURE On Israel Equals, “Let Hitler & His Nazis Live After Babi Yar!”

August 12, 2024 by admin

The Morally Inconceivable Aspect of “Ceasefire Now” Pressure On Israel

HamasNaziFlagFORBIDDEN.jpg

“According to reports sent to the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi Genocide Squads) headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were massacred during a two-day period at Babi Yar in September 1941. It  was only one of many mass shootings perpetrated by the Nazi Germans beginning in 1941. It was also one of the largest mass killings at a single location during all of World War II. ” – From “The Holocaust Encyclopedia”

 

This seems an appropriate Blog/Essay for Tisha B’Av in this current season of history.

Now, in mid-August 2024, the naive and antisemitic “Ceasefire Now” push on Israel is seeking to compel the Jewish State to stop its war against Hamas with the equivalent of the 1945 Nazi government (Hamas, now) and Adolf Hitler (Yiyeh Sinwar, now) still alive and intact as Nation and Führer; and still openly and enthusiastically committed to Nazi goals like world-conquest, destruction of “inferior races,” and Jewish “vernichtung” (annihilation): genocide of all Jews everywhere.

Would we?

After knowing that Babi Yar was not a unique massacre but merely  an example of the Nazi “standard model” in action – would we have allowed Adolf Hitler to emerge from his bunker in 1945 alive, with a surviving portion of the Nazi government and military, including its uppermost leadership who planned, authorized, and executed its aggressions and mass-barbarities? 

Shall we see Hitler emerge triumphant, declare victory as having come from monstrous choices like Babi Yar … and perhaps worst of all, gleefully announce he and his surviving Nazis intend to commit the same level of atrocities wherever and whenever they are able, until the world is emptied of “mongrel races,” and the swastika flies over every national capital in the world?

THAT is the choice the world is pressing Israel to make.

Would we?

If some Mexican radical sub-group was successfully holding a piece of land just across the Mexican-American border, and was steadily firing rockets into San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas, and holding atrocity-squad expeditions into south Texas to mass murder, mass rape, and mass pillage, demanding that America “end the occupation” by evacuating all of Texas and handing it over to Mexico under the government of the radical sub-group … 

Would we?

If thousands of Americans had been killed, maimed, or raped … 

Would we?

If hundreds of thousands of Texan Americans had been displaced from their homes by violence, and were living displaced for almost a full year, and the Texan economy were in ruins for months …

If it were our nation and October 7th befell our people, would we …

Leave October 7th architect Sinwar alive literally next door?

Leave Hamas in place as “the” power in Gaza?

Permit their use of their survival to plan and execute more October 7th-style atrocities against our nation and people at their every opportunity? Hamas has plainly said this is their intention without diminishment of any kind.

No. Of course, we would not.

We would use the full military might of our nation to end the absurd barbarity quickly.

Absurd levels of barbarity.

In Hamas, the aggression’s goals are to murder or subjugate by force anyone who does not accept as valid, and submit their lives or nations to the rule of a set of governmental and ethical-spiritual ideas found vacant of merit by all of civilization having educated analytical tools in their cultures: the religion of Islam as set forth in the Quran, claiming to have been dictated by the illiterate mass-murderer, Muhammad of Mecca.

Ceasefire now?

Let Hitler live?

Let the Nazi war machine go on?

Brace ourselves for an endless series of Babi Yars/October 7ths?

I think not.

For “The Golden Rule” to be truly golden, it must apply to the treatment of Israel and Jews as well as the rest of humankind. “Do not do to (or demand of) others what you do not want done to (or demanded) of you.”

Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen

Erev Tisha B’Av 5784 • 12 August 2024

ICJ Finding Of “Genocide In Gaza”

May 26, 2024 by admin

The ICJ (International Court of Justice) with 5 of 13 judges being Islamic, found Israel guilty last week of “genocide in Gaza.” This was a travesty of known Iranian bribes moving paid-off South African leaders to make false accusations, and then other Islamists piling on to create a public relations slander-cascade onto Israel.

Some genocide facts for anyone interested.

genocide | ˈjenəˌsīd |

[noun] the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a nation or racial or otherwise legitimately defined group with the aim of entirely erasing that nation or group from existence.

“Genocide” is not “a tragically high civilian casualty ratio” in warfare (and Israel’s ratio is the lowest in the history of urban warfare, per West Point’s professor of Urban Warfare Studies): especially responsive warfare in which a victim (Israel) is warring in response to an Aggressor’s attack, and seeking to remove any ongoing ability to make more such aggressive war.

There is no evidence that Israel has the aim of destroying ANY nation, race, or non-criminal group.

Israel is waging war against Hamas: a criminal, terrorist organization, which attacked Israel on 7 October 2023, committing mass murder, mass-rape, mass-pillaging, and attempted mass-civilian-center destruction by wanton missile barrage – all of which were “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity.”

Israel is warring with the aim of destroying the organization, Hamas (not all Arabs or Muslims everywhere), just as the WWII Allies warred to destroy Nazism and Nazi Germany – not the entire nation of Germany, nor all Germans everywhere.

Hamas has (a) the genocidal erasure of Israel and all Jews everywhere written into its charter; and (b) committed a military aggression against the Israeli civilian population; (c) and the chartered goal of eventually violently conquering and erasing ALL of non-Islamic humanity. 

  1. The ICJ ordered Israel to act non-genocidally by “opening the Rafah Crossing to allow for the passage of sufficient humanitarian aid from Egypt into Gaza.” BUT …
    1. It is EGYPT who CLOSED the Rafah Crossing! 
    2. It also came to light recently, Hamas-Ruled Gaza and Egypt have a highly developed array of tunnels between Egyptian Sinai and Gaza, and could easily have been using them to pass food, water, medical aid, etc into Gaza at will. Hamas nor Egypt have not, and do not. No Islamic countries have shown any desire to help alleviate suffering in Gaza, because suffering in Gaza helps the Pan-Islamist, Pan-Arabist, and Antisemitic causes.
  2. The ICJ Ordered Israel to cease all military operations in Rafah, based on a report of “massive civilian casualties that would surely follow it; BUT …
    1. Israel’s Army, already setting records for low ratios of civilian casualties from urban warfare actions, conducted an even more-restrained “house-to-house” action in Rafah (risking and costing many more Israeli soldiers’ lives than a broad-scale attack) … and the “report” on which the ICJ based its indictment of Israel has been proven for weeks now (as even the antisemitically dominated UN has admitted) to be inaccurate to the extent that the figures from the Gaza/Hamas sources were shown to be doubled — 
  3. The ICJ Momentum hs coming from South Africa … whose ANC leaders were personally bankrupt UNTIL Islamic power Iran has PAID off their debts and PAID THEM more profits, even while their country falls into the condition of a “failed state.” In short – South Africa is being PAID by Iran to use their podium as a nation to hurt Israel and help Pan-Islamism.
  4. The Sinai-Gaza parity is stunning. Israel gave back Sinai to Egypt in a “land for peace” deal. It turns out. Hamas has been getting military supplies from Egypt with Egypt’s full knowledge, via Hamas tunnels from Sinai into Gaza; just as Gaza was handed over by Israel totally to the Arabs with hope that the Arabs there having 100% control and self-determination would build “The Singapore Of The Middle East.” 
  5. Instead, Gaza elected Hamas (an Islamic genocidal and hegemonist party and organization), as their official government, and set about to build a military based armed to the teeth, and filled with military-use tunnels –– all directly contrary to the terms under which Israel handed Gaza over to them and left.

Israel has NO “genocidal” acts or intentions. 

It is only seeking to exist securely in its own land.

Finally – the highly-abused and misrepresented word, “Zionism” – which a Dartmouth College protester recently defined as “Jews thinking they are the best people on earth, and should rule the world” – actually ONLY means (a) Jews, like any other nation, have the right to self-determination, and (b) Jews have the right to live securely and peacefully in their recovered ancestral homeland, as well as if they are living identifiably Jewish anywhere else in the world.

The Dartmouth student’s definition comes from a fake document of two centuries ago, the antisemitic blood-libel, “The Protocols Of The Learned Elders of Zion” – which alleged falsely to be a record of the meetings of the secret Jewish cabal planning the Jewish takeover of the world.

An Ivy League student in 2024 believing the same blood libel having created the Eastern European pogroms of the 1800’s is a shameful tragedy in American higher – indeed, highest – education.

There is only one group in Gaza having (a) committed actual acts of genocide, (b) having genocide officially included in its organizational chartered goals, (c) have said plainly it will continue massacring every Non-Muslim everywhere and every opportunity it gets until it achieves what its “jihad” (sacred war) wants: an entirely Islamic planet Earth with no Israel, no Jews, “Infidels” (non-Muslims).

“Fight those who disbelieve until there is no more resistance, and all religions are for Allah,” the Quran of Muhammad commands (Quran Al-Anfal 8;10:5:39); meaning, every human alive accepts Muhammad as God’s One, Final Messenger, and his Quran as the definitive revelation of what the Creator wants all humankind to know and do, morally and legally.

Hamas has declared it exists to kill everyone, and every idea, that is not them.

Israel has said, “we just want to be allowed to live in peace and security.”
Israel does not want to conquer anywhere or eliminate anyone.

The ICJ decision is, thus, not “justice” of any kind, nor a “verdict” (speaking of the truth of a matter).

It is Pan-Islamism, Pan-Arabism, and plain old Antisemitism … again.

As Aaron Sorkin so brilliantly wrote a decade ago: “It’s time to suit up, ’cause they’re coming for us now.”

“Never again” is here … again.

Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen

New York City • 26 May 2024

7 October Endgame Is Upon Us Now

April 12, 2024 by admin

Sinwar’s Endgame & Israel’s Difficult Choice

“Never give your enemy what he wants. Never give him anything he asks for.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“He (Ishmael and his descendants) will be a wild donkey of a man. His hand will be against everyone, and everyone’s hand will (by self-defensive necessity) be against him.” – Genesis 16:12

“The Islamic Government over Iraq – and ‘the rest.‘” – Translation meaning of “ISIS” or “ISIL” or “DA’ESH” (“the rest” wa-shahb – means “the rest of the entire world.”


 

We are now in the exact “endgame” for which Islamo-fanatics Sinwar and Hamas mass-kidnapped Israelis.

As of early mid-April 2024, the IDF has cleared out most of Hamas from Gaza.

The few remaining brigades of Hamas have retreated into Rafakh in the extreme southwest of Gaza, and the IDF is closing in. The hostages are being held by Hamas specifically to

(a) force Israeli cessation of operations (“cease-fire”), and

(b) to extract an internationally-legally-binding promise from Israel it will not hunt down and execute the leaders/planners of the Hamas 7 October Massacre the way Israel hunted down and executed the PLO leaders and terrorists who kidnapped and murdered the Israeli athletes in the Munich Olympics forty years ago.

The day after Jewish hope for recovering some of the hostages still held in Gaza forces Israel “cease fire, and to give the above-described binding guarantee to the planners of the deliberate mass-raping, mass-murdering, mass-kidnapping of Israeli civilians, and mass-destruction of their property …

… the psychopathic coward Sinwar emerges from his “Hitler-bunker” and from behind his Israeli hostages and Gazan children he uses for self-protective “human-shields,” and declares “Victory!” 
He then tells every violent Pan-Arabist/Islamist on the planet:

“Our strategy *worked! We  murdered thousands of Jews, raped and kidnapped hundreds of others, and missile showered their country —  and the Jews have given up, and have given the world a guarantee they will never hunt us down and bring us to justice! So … what’s stopping you? Go, mass-murder the Jews everywhere, and just take hostages so you can escape any retribution for it!”

It is fairly certain a plurality, or even a majority of the Israeli hostages in Gaza are, as of 12 April 2024, already dead.

The IDF needs to commit to rescue militarily whomever of the hostages it can, and do a surgical series of military actions closing the net on Sinwar and his fellow Islamo-Nazis, to rid the world of the remaining brigades of Hamas, and destroying or capturing the Hamas High Command, just as did the Allies in World War II. 

Seventy years ago, there were no international pleas for the survival of Hitler, Himmler, Goering, and Goebbels made in the end of World War II. The Allies stated clearly, “Unconditional Surrender” was Nazi Germany’s only choice other than total defeat and capture, with all the destruction going with continued Allied military action against Germany until they were unable to wage war any longer.

We are now *in the exact endgame* Sinwar and his crew planned when they directed their storm-troopers to mass-kidnap Israeli citizens. 

As Sun-Tzu wrote in centuries ago in his “The Art of War” quoted above – “Never give your enemy what he wants. Never give him anything he asks for.”

If Israel is successfully forced by world pressure to give Sinwar and His Hamas Islamo-Nazis the exact prize for which he and they took their hostages – the world opens itself up to unending attacks from Islamic hegemonists (Quran-driven world-conquest fanatics), who now have nothing preventing their use of violence to install an Islamic tyranny over the whole world. By stealing loved-ones from their target nations, and using them to escape justice or retaliation, they can mass-murder, mass-rape, and mass-destroy at will – and survive to do it all again – which Sinwar and his Hamas gangsters have promised they will, every chance they get.

Israel must now make a terrible decision.

Israel must commit itself to military rescue of as many hostages as it can reach, and face the fact that no further negotiations will succeed.

Israel cannot, must not guarantee the survival of the Hamas planners of the 7 October Pogrom. It would doom civilization to an endless “hunting season” – with the prey being first, Israel – then all Jews everywhere – and then, all non-fundamentalist Muslims everywhere.

May Heaven mercifully bring forth an idea for closure that no human mind has yet produced, ending Israel’s and Gaza’s misery created by this psychopathic and stupid group of brutes who hold an ideology the rest of the educated/civilized world has long seen as meritless as its founder Mohammad’s attempt to be declared “The Messiah” by the Jewish leadership in Israel 1200 years ago. When the literate Jewish leaders pointed out to the illiterate maniac that he did not have the credentials to be “The Messiah” he reacted by with violence: it is a matter of historical record that he mass-murdered the entire Jewish population of the Khyber region. When Hamas fanatics attacked Israel last year, many were shouting, “It is a new day of Khyber for the Jews!” Muhammad of Mecca’s followers then and since got the message of his life-example: Islam’s ideas can only be advanced through threats of harm, or mass-murder.

If one’s ideas are across centuries so persistently and obviously seen as bankrupt of merit that no educated soul can be induced to accept them through discourse, and must forced to accept them at sword/gunpoint … it should be high time for any reasonably sane individual to sit back and and admit to oneself, “Since no one sees merit in this ideology, maybe it has no merit.”

Bimhayrah b’yamaynu! (May it be soon, and in our lifetimes!) 

Shabbat shalom.

Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen

12 April 2024

CNN Anti-Israel Propaganda Cascade Refuted

March 7, 2024 by admin

The following is not my usual style of Blog entry. I usually write: here, I used film/video — but it was blocked by the Server to cease replay of it.

Below WAS a video of the CNN news broadcast  “Global Public Square” on 3 March 2024, in which it usually moderate host, Fareed Zakaria (a professing Muslim), departs from his usual pattern of careful fact-attribution and unmanaged descriptions –– and falls into rank propagandizing with unattributed and almost entirely Hamas-sourced data and descriptions –  to foment a USA-forced early Israeli ceasefire –– and thus, let Hamas’s top leadership, and the organization itself, live on – even with them having stated they intend to kill, rape, and kidnap Jews again and again, as often as they can manage to do so.

Since Fareed’s conduct was such a far departure in this segment from his standard conduct (he always cites his sources if he gives data or 2nd-hand information) it begs the question, why is he acting totally outside his usual professional conduct?

It is my guess a Hamas representative got Zakaria alone and told him if he did not use his “bully pulpit” for the cause of Allah and Islam (as Hamas sees it)l they would do in his presence to his family what they did to the Israeli families in the Negev on October 7th.

I intercut propaganda-challenges into the broadcast, in the video below.

With the video blocked from view — I say merely that there is no argument validating the goal of Hamas in their hostage-taking contrary to international law and the rules of war concerning civilians.

The world has developed an unacceptable tolerance for Jewish body count as “business as usual” and “the cost of doing business” simply for being a Jew.

It has to stop – at some point in time, civilization may say “no” to endless Jewish body count, while raging at body count among any other population. Fareed’s Muslim self-interested and viewership cultivating positions were just one more disgrace against journalism’s ethics thrown into the morass having started long before October 7, 2023.

The Jewish nation – among whom I am proud to count myself both as a Jew and as an Israeli citizen – are making a determined stand: we are done asking for approval from anyone for our right to survive, or to self-determination in our ancestral homeland.

Antisemites at Columbia University are chanting, “Go back to Poland!” (where mass-graves of Jewish victims of October 7th-style massacres (called “pogroms”) fill the land. Europe screamed at us, “Go home, Jews!” – and we did.

Now, antisemites scream at us, “Go back to the countries that were slaughtering you en masse!”

We will not.

Our national hero Yoni Netanyahu, who gave his life to rescue Jewish hostages who were terror victims, said

“I would rather live in my Homeland and face endless struggle, than be part of the story of a helpless Jewish population wandering among the nations who hate them.”

Offered into the conversation – with hope.

Two State & One State Solutions

November 19, 2023 by admin

How The Israel/Pan-Arabist Chess Game Plays Out Over Time

by Bruce L. Cohen • 19 November 2023

In chess, the skill of “thinking into the tree” is a core ability of master-quality players. Masters are not only playing “the moment” – they are playing the move of the moment after having thought into “the tree of” five to ten moves ahead and all their implications for position and tactics. Some genius-level players, like Bobby Fischer, were able to think ahead to the end of entire games.

What does the “tree” of possible future moves for a solution look like in the present Israel-Arab dispute over the future of The Land of Israel?

Here is an overview:

  1. A “Two State” Solution, by its very nature, demands compromise between Jewish and Arab interests. In the UN’s 1947 “Plan For The Partition Of Palestine” (Resolution 181)– a genuine “Two State Solution” – neither side got all it wanted. We Jews agreed to it as a place to start our forward journey together, side by side. The Pan-Arabist and Pan-Islamist forces in the Arab world said no, and attacked from 5 countries with armies outnumbering Israel 10 to 1, with the intent of destroying Israel. They lost. Arab interests have been attacking and losing ever since. The Sinai War, The Six Day War, The Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War – all have been attempts to “push the Jews into the sea.” All have failed. Some have resulted in losses of territory and resources, like the Sinai Peninsula and Judea-Samaria (“The West Bank [of The Jordan River]” in anti-Jewish parlance).

Pan-Arabist and Pan-Islamist group’s opposition to compromise allowing a Jewish State to exist is driven either by nationalist-ambition, or religion: so, their extremist, one-dimensional vision (as was was that of Hitler and his Nazis) is therefore reason-resistant and compromise-resistant. To achieve their extremist, non-compromisable views, these sides will commit terror against any peaceful momentum leading to acceptance of a compromise solution, and toxify any peace developing between any Arabs and any Jews – especially the Jewish State.

Hamas is a good example of the above truth: the Hamas charter states that nature itself hates the existence any Jews anywhere, and will actively help Muslims to find them and kill them, no matter where they are, or hide. They feel ideologically compelled to kill every Jew alive. They are genocidal movements. Hamas is a small faction among them. There are larger organizations like the Houthis, Hizballah and even whole nation-states like Iran having this commitment, and willingness to have their entire nations destroyed by Israeli nuclear counter-strikes in order to cause Islam to conquer the world and remove the Jews from existence. 

All “Two-State Solutions” proffered up to 2023 doom Israel to ongoing terror. As “the cost of doing business,” Israel faces the implicit demand of finding “acceptable” some annual number of Jewish lives destroyed by terrorism. No way has been found to meet Israel’s repeated necessary conditions to any “Two State Solution” – “security” and “secure borders” – and seems it cannot be met while there are Arab states and factions fomenting and supplying arms and military training to Arab and Islamic terrorism forces. Israel’s post-7 October Massacre position on Jewish victimhood for 2023 forward now sums up as this: the new acceptable number of annual Jewish and Israeli deaths and casualties from terrorism is now “zero.” Israel will after the events of 7 October 2023 do anything she must to bring the Zero Annual Victims standard into reality: and Hamas-type perpetrators of atrocities and war crimes, and their world of sympathizers can whine about it all they want: it won’t change this commitment now forward as it has in the past, as Israel has sought to appease an anti-Israel biased world.

  1. A “One State Solution”

One State, democratic in operation, would be either (a) non-national and multi-nationally governed, or (b) entirely Jewish, or (c) entirely Arab. Here is how the One State “tree” plays out.

A. An all Jewish State (“Greater Israel”) absorbing the entirety of the Biblical land-grant to the Jewish people, would be condemned by the entire world as unjust territory seizure. The world in 1947 granted that Israel’s claims to the Land are just, but cannot be inflicted on the longterm Arab squatters without showing respect for their cultural memory developed among the long-term squatters in the land historically known to have been stolen from the Jewish people by Imperial Rome in 70 c.e. –  when Rome conquered it, re-named it with a non-Jewish Latin nonsense name (“Syria-Palestina” – the Syrians who live East of Israel, and Philistines who were Aegean colonialist conquerers on the western central coast of Israel, were deadly enemies with almost nothing in common); and threw out the Jewish population into world-wide exile.

B. An All Arab State would, of course, mean the end of Israel’s existence, and Jewish acceptance of return to a life of exile among the nations, with no national homeland, and again being at the mercy of the “host nations” which always, at some point, turned toxic on them with pogroms and Holocaust-like events. There is no way the Jews will accept this fate propelling from the original Roman seizure of the Jewish homeland, and condemning us to live from pogrom-to-next-pogrom, and Holocaust to next-Holocaust. “Never again.”

C. A One-State With Two Peoples Solution (either self-governed or multi-nationallly governed) would lead inexorably to the death of the Jewish State and its people for the following reasons:

i. In the One State with Two Peoples, the Arab nations would call on Arabs from all over the Arab world to flood Israel in as many numbers as possible; and those Arabs in the land to reproduce at a frenetic rate, so as to change the demographics of the One State by creation of a VAST ARAB MAJORITY. 

ii. This majority would then be cited as the “democratic” justification for the Arab presence in the land to pass laws “democratically” that entirely ARABIZE the one state: its name would “democratically” be changed to Palestine. Jerusalem would “democratically” be renamed Al-Quds and given to the Arab world. The names of Jewish cities would “democratically” be changed to Arab names. Laws diminishing Jewish rights and existence would “democratically” be passed. Eventually, the Jewish homeland would  democratically” be entirely Arabized, and laws would surely further be “democratically” passed that eliminate Jewish citizenship across time.

And if Jews objected to the above “ethnic cleansing” process, the Arab world would say to the rest of humankind, “it’s a democratic country, and these are laws and conditions created by democracy. How can you object? You believe in democracy, don’t you?”

The nations of the world have displayed a consistent propensity for Jew-hatred and anti-Israel bias. Thus, a multinationally governed Two-Peoples state would most likely result in a cascade of “democratic” legislation manifestly and increasingly anti-Israel/Jewish in nature.

So – the road for total peace from now forward is pocked with serious pot-holes.

Zealotry-based groups like Hamas –  whether religious or nationalistic in their zeal – will always look for a way to become “a poison pill” to any momentum between Arabs and Jews leading to peaceful co-existence.

Jewish existence itself, and the Jewish State make the Quran clearly inaccurate and meritless – basically, an arabic Mein Kampf – and thus, Islamo-zealotry cannot rest until Israel is entirely Arab “from the (Jordan) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea.”

As for Arab national pride – having the Jews in a state next door, outdoing Arabs in every area of human endeavor 1000 to 1 … is intolerable.

As the son of one Hamas founded stated – “The west cannot understand: Hamas is still stuck in the Arabian desert in its thinking: it sees itself as a tribe, and the Jews as a tribe. In desert banditry-based culture, you attack other tribes to take from them what you need. Either their tribe dies or your tribe dies: there is almost never “enough” in the desert for both tribes to co-exist.”

A positive closing note for those who believe the Two Testaments of Scripture – there is a prophetically-foretold time coming when a solution will be found: the borders between Israel and her neighbors will eventually be so peaceful, there will be no need for checkpoints or defenses or bars or gates. 

Ezekiel 38:11 describes Israel at a future time as …

“… the land of unwalled villages – those who are at rest, that live securely, all of them living without walls and having no bars or gates.”

The contention between our cousins and us will, at some point, come to an end to the extent that no borders or protective barriers between us will be necessary. What a glorious vision!

May it be soon, even in the days of some who are alive right now.

Kadima – forward (into history) we go.

Bruce L. Cohen

New York City • 19 Nov 2023

P.S. – the workbook (cover pictured above) “Israel, Arabs, and the Middle East” is available for purchase at this link. > PURCHASE

A New Halloween Essay: Human Lemmingry

October 31, 2022 by admin

Behavior With No Reason Other Than “Everyone Else Is Doing It”

by Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen ©2022

“The crowd is untruth.” – Søren Kierkegaard 

“You shall not follow a crowd to do wrong.” – Moses, Exodus 23:2

It’s Halloween again. The 31 October 2022 issue of “The New Yorker” magazine shows a pool of very “normal” people in Manhattan’s Grand Central Station – a rather elite environment – walking around “normally,” except for being dressed as witches, warlocks, zombies, and the occasional robot or alien. The humor in this cover art is the highly elite and erudite background of Grand Central Station, a miracle of human engineering and careful contemplation, filled with people acting en masse totally irrationally.

People are doing what everyone else is doing, and dressing as proponents of witchcraft, sorcery, star reading, and necromancy. 

Why are even intelligent, rational people doing this? 

Even many of our fellow-Jews are doing so, despite the Torah’s direct commandments against such things. Why?

Our human genetic hardwiring says these two things very loudly:

Run with the pack, and you’ll survive.

Don’t, and you won’t.

Approve the current “Alpha” and you’ll survive.

Don’t, and you won’t.

These survival-enabling values are embedded in us through the eons of life-form development having led to us existing in our present form.

Lemmings are cute little feral rodents with a hardwired reflex to run wherever the pack is running. While it serves them in some ways, it also leaves them vulnerable to mass-compliance-driven errors like running off a cliff literally “just because everyone else is doing it.” Since they are animals – “bio-machines” without human level understanding and thinking processes – they follow their hardwiring without any contemplative analysis.

We humans also have instinct-level hardwiring.

One of those engrained patterns is crowd-following, for the same reasons lemmings do so.

Even a superlative intellect like Harvard Law School Professor Alan F. Dershowitz admitted in his 1997 book, The Vanishing American Jew, “… I grew up around the (religion-based total separation of) milchigs (dairy) and fleischigs (meat) as Orthodox Jews observe them, and certainly (practiced them) without having the foggiest idea why.”

No level of intellect, capable of extremes of sophisticated analysis, is autoimmune to these autonomic patterns.

The “move when the pack moves” reflex leads us to start running away from danger before we have individually perceived it, merely because our group appears to be fleeing from it. We ask questions later: we run now – with the pack. Ones who survive run first and ask questions later: ones who ask questions before they start moving get eaten by the predator others have perceived and are already fleeing. This is framed in the old joke about the two men in the woods who encounter a carnivorous bear and start running: the one behind shouts to the other ahead, “Do you think you’re really faster than a bear?” The reply shouted back is, “I don’t have to be faster than the bear; just faster than you!” 

However, The Scriptures teach us, “Humankind, without תְּבוּנָה t’vunáh (contemplative understanding) is like the beasts that perish.” Psalm 49:20

What distinguishes us from animals like lemmings is our ability to consider the wisdom, validity, or ethical nature of our choices.
Kierkegaard told us, “the crowd is untruth” because he observed “civilized” human beings driven or released into uncivilized behaviors among crowds – like shouting “Death to the Jews!” in nineteenth century Paris at the trial of Alfred Dreyfus. Not an act a civilized Parisian would undertake while standing alone and distinguishable as an individual: yet, enacted by thousands of Frenchman, Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, and others when embedded in crowds knowing the “alphas” among them thought thusly, and wanted others to do the same: whether the French aristocrat Esterhazy, or the German political madman, Hitler.

Every year, as Hallowe’en approaches, I look at the human lemmingry all around me in action: my Jewish people doing what everyone else is doing, with no idea why they are doing it; and most importantly to me, directly defying the Torah of Israel to do so, as casually as if they were turning on a lightbulb.

The faith laws of Israel (Deuteronomy 18:10-12) forbid us from any sorcery or necromancy, which are respectively attempts to manipulate reality using spiritistic tools, and attempted communication with the dead.  The only valid spiritual tool to change reality is prayer: we ask The Most High, and He replies yes, no, or wait. We seek The Most High, his breadcrumb trail of validated “revelation” we call “The Scriptures,” or the tools of truth seeking involving seeking expert advice, the advice of elders or more experienced persons, and disciplined thought. 

Every October 31st in western culture, the entire culture celebrates the dark side of spirituality. Sorcerers and witches, magic, necromancy: the works. Everything we’ve been told to eschew, not only by action, but association. What kind of person would dress up as Dahmer, Bundy, or Gacy? We don’t dress up as sociopaths or Nazis “for fun” or “cosplay.” Or – do we?

This pattern is as bizarre as we Jews ending the Yom Kippur fast with a lobster dinner.

If you’d do the latter, why do you bother doing the former?

Oxymoronicity abounds: sane, rational conduct disappears. 

Why?

Run with the pack, and you’ll survive.

Approve the current “Alpha,” and you’ve survive.

Pause to consider, and you may become a meal for a predator, or be caught up in a tornado, flash-flood, forest-fire, or some other natural danger from which you’d have escaped if you had just started running when everyone else did, in the direction they ran, and the moment they started running.

For some, life has a momentum that simply excludes contemplation. My parents did it – I grew up doing it: so, my kids’ll do it. Many a terrorist inherited his or her belief in this way: and look where that can tragically lead. Emerson’s “examined life” is not only worth living – it can save countless lives as well.

Scripture enjoins us to use the human and humanizing quality of t’vunah rather than react by mere reflex:

Proverbs 15:28 The heart of the righteous ponders how (correctly) to answer/react.

James 1:19 This you know, my beloved brethren; that everyone must be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger (or any emotion-driven or reflex-driven choice).”

I have heard many allegedly God-revering, Scripture-adhering folks justify their family’s Halloween participation with:

“I don’t want to deprive my kids.”

My “rabbi” reply? “Your kids have Purim! They can dress up to their heart’s content, for good reasons! And not in profane or dark-magic evocative garb! Your kids need you to be parents, not pals! To role-model Isaiah 8:20 to them in ‘real world’ situations.”

“My kids will be stigmatized” or “I’ll be ostracized at work, if they know we / I take the Bible so literally.”

My “rabbi” reply? “So, by this formula, if you are pressed to be less than honest at work because ‘everyone else is doing it for the team:’ will you avoid being ostracized by discarding Biblical values and your very honor?

As stated clearly in our Torah …

Deuteronomy 18:10 There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, 11 or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. 12 For whoever does these things is detestable to the Lord.

and

“You shall not follow a crowd to do wrong.” – Exodus 23:2

As for the excuse, “Oh, I don’t practice those things: I just dress up like other people who do, one day year, for fun …”

If you saw someone at a party dressed up as a Nazi Gestapo officer, would the following excuse placate your outrage?  “Oh, I don’t really believe in Nazism! I just dress up like a Nazi one day a year … for fun. And because everyone else is dressing up. See – look at Mao Tse-Tung over there sipping his Pumpkin Martini. Lighten up!”

The police ethic, “Broken Windows,” seems to me to apply here. Get reaction to small breaches right, and the big crimes are less often likely to shipwreck anyone.

If you go irrational on things appearing trivial, you prime the pump for errors on the big stuff.  “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much.” Luke 16:10

There are moments when “not going with the flow” is not only the best choice: morally, it is the only ethical choice.

And – humankind is depending on us to get these things right. (Exodus 19:6)

Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen

31 October 2022

Why Do I Still Wear My Chalutzim Academy Ring?

October 14, 2022 by admin

By Rabbi Bruce L. Cohen, of Congregation Beth El of Manhattan ©2022

Former Principal of Chalutzim Day School 1984 to 1988

Former Teacher in Chalutzim Day School 1980 to 1988

In 1986, Chalutzim Day School of Philadelphia – the first and largest full time “Messianic Jewish” private school in the world, was going to graduate its first high school class out into college. 

The school had started in 1977 in two basement rooms in Overbrook Park, a western suburban Philadelphia neighborhood right next door to “The Main Line.” By 1986, it had over fifty students, five full time faculty, and a dozen part time faculty, including cooperative programs with local accredited high schools, and a Principal: me. One of our first two graduates had been admitted to an honors program at a prestigious local university: the next year, our one lone graduate would be admitted to an Ivy League college. 

It was an occasion. As I was the main high school teacher and chief onsite administrator of the school, and I had come from a prep school background, it seemed de rigueur that our School’s first graduating Senior Class have a graduation class ring. So, I designed one and had it executed by ArtCarved: “the” graduation ring company at the time.

Our two graduates received their rings, and I got one for myself to mark the occasion. Our first high school graduation. 

My ring was stolen from my rented room in Yohanna Chernoff’s home a few years later, it turns out, by a fellow member of my Philly congregation who had a gambling problem; and I found out later, he had hocked the 18 karat gold ring for gambling money. On my 40th birthday in 1995, my wife, Debi, arranged to have an identical ring made for me as a gift. I have been wearing the reissued ring ever since. 

Chalutzim School in which I served for eight years as a teacher and the last four years concurrently as its Principal – and its host congregation Beth Yeshua in which I served for nearly fifteen years as a musician, teacher, and group leader: have both totally erased me from all memory and mention. So much so, that when Chalutzim Academy had its 30th anniversary celebration, my name was not mentioned even once. I know this from appalled former students who attended the event. A parent of one of the students, when visiting the school during the early 2000s, remarked to me, “You pretty much built that school, and there is nothing in the building to show you ever existed.”

Why?

My wife and I became “whistleblowers.”

We discovered one of the synagogue’s elders – Joe Finkelstein, who is now living in Arad, Israel   had been embezzling music ministry funds from albums in which I was a major investor and co owner, and he had also been committing a malicious and horrific slander spree against me and my wife to cover for his thieving, and for whatever other sick things were going on in his soul. 

Finkelstein had been caught “red handed.” He did not come honorably forward: he had initially mocked the very idea he could be held accountable, and was dragged to accountability, trying to lie his way out the whole way. If he had the “King David” reaction to Nathan proclaiming, “You are the criminal in this story!”    there would be a glimmer of redemptive hope to Finkelstein; but all he did was try to lie and blame shift, and when it became apparent there was no way to succeed at doing so, he folded and just asked how to get free of the situation.

There was copious documentation and were multiple witnesses to all Finkelstein’s criminal and anti ethical deeds. He tried to lie his way out for several hours, but could not. He even tried one very heinous “set up” to make me, as his victim, look bad: but it backfired on him, as members of Kol Simcha came forward and testified to Finkelstein’s full awareness of his own evildoing as demonstrated to them moments before he committed his act of emotional torture on the Cohens: Finkelstein’s crime of literal “sadism.” This act of Finkelstein was a direct abuse of office and abuse of the trusts of Kol Simcha as its director, and of the main stage of the annual international MJAA “Messiah Conference” as a tool for his own sick act of harm: it defiled the holiest of sites in the entire Messianic Jewish Alliance of America (MJAA) and Beth Yeshua religious calendar year: the main stage at “The Conference” during a worship service with around a thousand or more Believers gathered from all over the world. It was this act of sadism, and all the false witness Finkelstein committed to achieve it, that most fully demonstrated how truly sick Finkelstein was in mind, soul, and spirit. 

As part of a very gracious deal offered to him so he could go on after such a moral morass, Finkelstein wrote out a full confession, signed in attestation as truthful and accurate by the his fellow elder Joel Chernoff, brother of the rabbi of Beth Yeshua, David Chernoff. [See link here for Confession Document]

Finkelstein’s confession not only detailed his misdeeds, but stated directly I had done nothing wrong to deserve such treatment by the obviously deeply unhealthy Finkelstein. It affirmed my standing as a rabbi – the highest ethical standard in the Scriptures – and that I “certainly served nobly and well” my entire 13 year tenure in the music group Kol Simcha that Finkelstein had led, and I had been to Finkelstein, “above all, a faithful friend.”

Finkelstein’s several year crime spree came to light at exactly the same time his rabbi, David Chernoff, had been telling the whole world that “God’s Spirit just keeps on affirming” Joe Finkelstein should be the next assistant rabbi in Beth Yeshua.

David Chernoff was now “out there” in public with his array of statements about God’s Spirit confirming Finkelstein for elevation into the rabbinate (1Tim 3 level “overseer” standing) … when the Scriptures say a man who has been on a 5 year spree of thefts, slanders (harmful untruths) and breaches of fidelity to his lower office should NOT under ANY circumstances be raised into the highest echelon of spiritual ratification: the rabbinate.

David Chernoff’s solution to the above embarrassing dilemma was not, as it should have been, to thank God for revealing an unqualified candidate before he was installed.

Chernoff appeared to have decided that if he used the singular influence he had inherited from his late father, Marty Chernoff, to kill off Finkelstein’s victims’ social and vocational standing in Beth Yeshua and the MJAA/IAMCS, then everyone Chernoff really cared about could go their merry way once Bruce and Debi Cohen were socially and vocationally dead in Chernoff’s sphere.

So, David Chernoff’s solution to Finkelstein’s crime spree was create a new, fantasy version of the Finkelstein Affair in which Finkelstein (the witnessed, on paper self confessed perp) was somehow the good guy, and Finkelstein’s victims (me and my wife) were the villains. 

Chernoff had the evil or insanity or both to tell me to my face in August 1998 in regard to the Finkelstein Affair, “You want to know ‘the truth,’ Bruce? You did it all to yourself.” So, Joe Finkelstein having for several years stolen, lied, lied more, slandered, broke contracts, and even done acts of what could only be called “sadism” – while I was accused of nothing, and affirmed as “above all, a faithful friend” who had “certainly served nobly and well …” –– that all distilled down for David Chernoff  into me having somehow done it all to myself.

Cue music from Hitchcock’s Psycho.

I mean truly, a psychopathological situation. What is that old saying?

“Sociopaths are never, in their own view, the villain in any scenario: they are always either the hero, the victim, or both.”

Most alarmingly, as if to say to the whole world, “Joe did nothing seriously wrong,” David Chernoff not only went right ahead and ordained Joe Finkelstein into an office for which he was Biblically directly disqualified; Chernoff instantly made Finkelstein, a recently discovered financial criminal, the Finance Officer of the MJAA’s rabbinical association, the I.A.M.C.S. The evil and madness of this situation hardly needs explanation. Who would make a recently caught and convicted rapist the dean of a girl’s boarding school? I mean – really, folks.

So – why do I keep wearing my Chalutzim ring?

Isn’t it a symbol of terrible betrayal and abandonment?

Well   yes, it is.

But it symbolizes other, more important things as well.

Firstly, it symbolizes my eight years in the school as a teacher and administrator. I don’t want to allow a liar and apparent sociopath like David Chernoff deprive me of the beautiful array of memories and relationship experiences I had during my eight years in Chalutzim Day School: now named,  “Chalutzim Academy.” Several of my students stayed in touch across the years and even tapped me for counsel into their adult years: I performed the wedding of one of my students after I had become a Rabbi, and officiated at her daughter’s naming ceremony in Jerusalem. I am still in relationship with former students to the present day, and I’ll be damned if I am going to let a pathological liar like David Chernoff take that away, just to preserve his own ego about his mistake elevating Finkelstein (whom Chernoff knew to be a disastrous failure as a father and  leader before he chose him to be a reliable “yes man” in his congregation and in the MJAA/IAMCS as soon as Chernoff could place him in the Exec Committees of those associations).

Secondly, my wife devoted great energy and love into finding the jeweler in Philadelphia who had manufactured my original design for the Chalutzim ring, and got him to reproduce it exactly from my original sketch and spec sheet, which he still had on file when she found him. Her devoted act of love in recovering my stolen treasure for me is as much a part of what I cherish as the school history the ring betokens.

Thirdly – this ring is the only remaining, consistently viewed evidence of the blood, sweat, and tears of my first post-college decade of work: the fruit of not only my own labors in my education, but the three generations of Cohens/Canareks and Garfields/Garfinkels who preceded me. I’ll be damned if I am going to let a low-life like David Chernoff or his crew erase four Jewish generations of dedicated efforts by my forebears to allow me the education and opportunities they afforded me.

So, I wear it still.

For my wife, Debi. For  my students Rachel, Marika, Keri, Ari, Oona, Jamie, Jeremy, Erik, Rachel, Becca, Karen and all the lower grades I didn’t teach directly, but supervised; and for my fellow faculty Linda, Dinky, Sharon, Caren, Cathy, Lynn, my assistant teachers Candy, Mindy, and Kathy and the many others who served during my tenure. 

To paraphrase Forest Gump: “Low life is as low life does.”

From David Chernoff, not honorable acceptance of a mistake which God graciously warned him about in time to prevent: no, instead a heinous cover up by raining harm upon innocent victims: a whistleblower attack, just like the lowest of criminals do to witnesses for the prosecution.

Kill the witness(es), and (accountability for) the crime evaporates.

David Chernoff’s and Joe Finkelstein’s and every other accomplice in their Watergate/Dreyfus style coverup is this: “All liars go into the lake of fire prepared for God’s Adversary and his minions.” (Revelation 21:8)

All means all.

My Chalutzim ring, stolen and then recovered, reminds me of the truth of these matters, as established in due process, documented  and confessed by the criminal himself, witnessed in attestation by David Chernoff’s brother, Joel.

So   I wear it still.

As for “The Perps” in these matters? The Chernoffs, Finkelstein, Jamie Cowen, Russ Resnick, Elliot Klayman, Judah Hungerman, Bob Cohen, and all the perps in this matter face burning through all eternity, unless they truly repent.

May God visit them all with “the repentance that leads to life.”

But that would require that they (a) confess, (b) commit never to repeat their sins (c) pay the price in restitution of harms done, and punitive/community protective steps (like stepping down or out of office).

I don’t know of anyone who believes the Chernoffs and other perps in this matter possess either the genuine spirituality or the humility to take the steps that would lead them to eternal life.

So   in late 2022, as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote in Cats Cradle, “and so it goes.”

The photograph of my hand with my Chalutzim ring on it was taken today, 14 October 2022: the same day I wrote this blog entry. I wear my Chalutzim ring still – even today.

Bruce L. Cohen

New York City • Sukkot 2022/5783

Biden’s Nomination Of Jackson Literally Broke The Law

March 29, 2022 by admin

Fear Of Public Shame-Bombing Is Allowing Interest-Group Politics to Ruin Our Democratic Processes

 

With all discussion, past and present, of Judge Ketanji Jackson’s nomination for the US Supreme Court, it seems to me the real main point of the matter is being entirely overlooked in public discourse. 

Presidential-Candidate Joe Biden’s campaign promise “My first nominee to the Supreme Court will be a Black woman,” and his delivery of that campaign promise when actually President, both literally broke the law; as follows:

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

United States Code Vol. 42 §2000e Pub. L. 88-352 SEC. 2000e-2. [Section 703]

(a) Employer practices

It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer –

(1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or

(2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

White and Asian (and Indian and First-American and Inuit and Philippine, and Polynesian)  are “colors” and/or “national origins.”

Male is a sex (gender).

Those colors and that gender were excluded from hiring consideration, purely on the basis of their color and gender. Candidate, then President Biden, directly stated so when promising, and when nominating.

President Biden broke the law when making this nomination: Jackson’s candidacy is now too tainted with illegality and political interests to be healthy going forward. She is vulnerable to disruption of her service or disenfranchisement of her SCOTUS opinions by direct attacks on the validity of her position as a Justice.

For any interest-group: racial, religious, or otherwise to break the law so as to get one of their own into highest office in the legal profession is simply not a dynamic the our Republic can survive.

Imagine the furor that would have ensued if Candidate Biden had said:

“We need to change the endless cycle of only Black and White Christians and Jews on the US Supreme Court: my next nominee will be either a Muslim, or a Trans-gender Hindu or Sikh.”

The sky would have fallen in.

However, Candidate Biden needed the African-American vote: so he guaranteed that voting bloc that if they voted for him, one of their own would be put on The Court in the next opening. He got their vote: he got the Presidency. He then broke the law and violated his Presidential oath so as to keep his promise; and his candidate for the US Supreme Court accepted an illegal appointment. Let that sentence sink in:

Biden’s nominee for the US Supreme Court, the highest Constitutional legal office in the country, accepted an illegal appointment to the post.

She had been pre-selected because of her sex and race – and all other genders and races had been excluded, limited, segregated, classified OUT of the position – because of their gender and races.

It is a textbook, direct violation of Title VII.

The main reason no one in law or government will say so in public now appears to be because of fear of being “cancelled” – meaning, shame-bombed in public outside due process by cries of “racism” which were hurled nearly instantly at anyone merely probing the appropriateness of the nominee –  which is the specific job of Congress in regard to such appointments. Anyone questioning or opposing for any reason was publicly reviled as racist.

Breaking the law to place one of the highest Law officials in the Government is madness.

The group-interest-driven madness needs to stop.

Criticizing certain Islamic actions and ideas must cease being instantly labeled, “Islamophobia.”

Criticizing certain Jewish or Israeli actions and ideas must cease being instantly labeled, “Antisemitism.”

Criticizing certain Gender-Group actions and ideas must cease being instantly labeled, “misogyny, misanthropy, homophobia, or transphobia.”

Criticizing certain race-group actions and ideas must cease being instantly labeled, “racism.”

We must recover the skill of having non-demonizing discussions with those who disagree with us.

The sole legally-permissible qualification-set for appointment to the US Supreme Court is a supremely excellent record as a jurist, accompanied by a supremely excellent and persistent level of demonstrated character and wisdom in keeping with the legal profession’s standards. Gender and race are simply disallowed as qualifiers or disqualifiers from consideration for office.

Ironically, it was Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who said on the Capitol steps not far from The US Supreme Court: “I have a dream that one day my children will live in a country where they are judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Judge Ketanji Jackson missed a golden opportunity to go down in history.

She should have declined Biden’s appointment by saying something like this:

“Mr. President, I am honored beyond expression to be a nominee to The Supreme Court; however, this time around, as an attorney and officer of the court, I must respectfully decline the nomination because you directly cited my gender and race as reasons for my appointment. These criteria are entirely and directly illegal, per Title VII of the US Code. I gratefully here note that the next time a seat becomes open, I would be honored to be nominated, provided no reference is made to my gender or race in any way related to my nomination. I further say, this kind of strict adherence by me to the ethics of the legal profession will be what you can expect from me in the exercise of my duties, and ongoing effort to be an example of meticulous adherence to legal and Constitutional ethics and law above group interests or pressures of any kind. Thank you.”

If Ketanji Jackson had made this speech, she would be quoted and studied in every Constitutional Law class in every American law school for the next hundreds of years.

Instead, we have an example of a candidate for President cynically politically “playing” an interest group for votes, and a legal professional from that group violating her every oath to “defend and uphold the Constitution and Laws of the United States” in order to gain the high office.

I expect to be called “a racist” for writing this.

I was asked not long ago by one African American interests-advocate, “Why can’t you just be happy for us, that we got one of our own onto the highest seat in the profession?”

My reply was based on “The Golden Rule” – what if it was some other interest group that managed to “get one of their own” into the highest court in the land by breaking the law? Would you “just be glad” for them?

The Republic comes first.

So offers this one citizen to my fellow citizens for consideration.

May The Republic endure.

BLC

Written April 2022, revised December 2023

Russia’s Blitzkrieg On Ukraine • Pragmatism & Pasternak’s Poetry

February 24, 2022 by admin

This author in Moscow’s “Red Square” 29 years ago, while teaching at one of the first “Messianic Jewish” Conferences in the first season of “Glasnost” (openness)

“You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened.” – Matthew 24:6

“If a leader pays heed to lies (becomes delusion-driven), then all his ministers/underlings become agents of those same lies.”- Prov. 29:12


War in Europe began once more today. As Yogi Berra said, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.” Along with the rest of the democratic West, I awake today seeing the Russian “blitzkrieg” hitting Ukraine as the Nazi “lightning war” hit Poland less than a lifetime ago, and I am deeply moved by the pain yet another delusional madman is inflicting on the world because he has terrorized or murdered all opposing voices into silence.

Let’s be clear: here is Vladimir Putin’s argument for his war on Ukraine: he asserts the Ukraine leaving Russia is like one of the Confederate Southern States in 1860 having left the United States. His argument sums up as this: America fought a civil war to get states wrongfully having left the United States to come back in – against their own will. This is our war on Ukraine today. Ukraine is a state within Mother Russia; and Mother Russia will have her children back. In this, Putin ignores the fact that unlike the Southern States in America who joined the United States willingly under their own volition, Ukraine never voluntarily entered into a Union with Russia. In 1922, under a Russian assault they could not withstand, the independent nation of Ukraine was forcefully subjugated and absorbed against her will into the U.S.S.R. – Russia.

Putin’s view of the Ukraine as an historically natural part of Russia is pure delusion. It has no basis in historic fact.

Additionally and sadly, Putin is using the exact same argument for his attack on Ukraine that Adolf Hitler used to take over Czechoslovakia’s “Sudetenland” (Southern Region): Hitler asserted the Sudetenland was filled with German speaking, German people who were oppressed by the Slovakian majority surrounding them; and Germany attacked to ‘protect’ them from the abuse of the Slovaks who surround them. The Führer’s “logic” was pure nonsense; but lying to justify his own delusions was something Adolf Hitler turned into a kind of evil art-form.

The solution to 2022’s Russian Blitzkrieg problem is not to attack Russia.

It is somehow to remove Putin.

Imagine Nazi Germany in September 1939, if, once the German Blitzkrieg against Poland started, Hitler was somehow removed. Game over. No World War II. The Nazi Agenda was entirely an artifact of Adolf Hitler’s personal delusional quest.

Christian theologian and pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, understood this, which is why as a Two-Testament believing spiritual leader, he cooperated with Von Stauffenberg’s April 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer’s antipathy for “cheap grace” also expressed itself in disdain for the version of faith finding expression often as confrontation-avoidance rather than robust, ethics-driven action. Bonhoeffer did not subscribe to the idea that the highest Biblical value was the absence of conflict.

Additionally – it is wrong to punish sheep (bound by their nation’s laws to serve their country) for the choices of their leaders who are abusing their high offices. And Scripture teaches us, “If a leader heeds lies (becomes delusion-driven), then all his ministers/underlings become agents of those same lies.” (Prov. 29:12)

Bold American leadership in this situation?

Find some way to remove Putin from power as quickly as possible.

All Hitler wanted for a “Greater Germany” and “A Thousand Year Reich (Empire)” and a Europe made “Judenrein” (empty of Jews) ended the day Hitler’s reign over Germany ceased.

The world could move on.

Historian George Santayana (1863-1962 ce) said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Putin is running the exact same game on the West now that Hitler ran on Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s: lie about his territorial ambitions, and just keep taking-and-placating, taking-and-placating … moving toward his genuine goal – German Hegemony (world-rule).”

Putin wants the USSR back in its pre-Gorbachev/Perestroika form. Everything else is just conversation. As much so as trying to dissuade Adolf Hitler from his “Thousand Year Reich” vision by using reasonable arguments against its founding ideas of Aryan Supremacy, Mongrel Races, and The Jewish Plot To Rule The World. No facts or logic would avail. The ideas were not the result of rational thought, so rational thought would have no effect on Hitler – nor Putin.

There seems little actual hope of prying Putin’s delusions about Ukraine from him: and, the vast aquatic, mineral, chemical, and agricultural wealth in the Ukraine is an irresistible attraction for the actually-plutocratic Putin, who is, at present, one of the wealthiest people on earth – as his people suffer and die and starve.

Putin is the problem – not the Russian people.

The beautiful Russian soul is still alive, as Boris Pasternak held forth in his heroine, Larissa Antipova, in his novel, “Doctor Zhivago.” A Russian literary analyst with whom I discussed Pasternak in Israel last July, I told I understood from my comparative literature point of view, why he chose the names of many of his characters in Zhivago: for instance, the parasitic main villain is Komorovski – which is Russian for a mosquito, a bloodsucker. But I have long been puzzled by Pasternak’s choice of the name of his heroine: “Larissa” or “Lara” for short. So, I asked this Russian-born, Moscow-raised and educated master of Russian literature, whose Russian was far superior to my own, if she knew why Pasternak chose that name – and she answered that she did not know. She had never thought about it before I asked. But – thinking about my question, it seemed to her “Larissa” is suggestive of the Russian word, ларец “lari’etz” – a treasure-box meant to hold heirlooms of great value and significance. Larissa is the name with which Pasternak seems to have suggested his heroine was the symbolic cache of the Russian soul’s loving and exploited beauty; and the fact the poet, Yuri Zhivago, could see her for what she was, love her for what she was, and wrote exaltingly of her soul – that was Pasternak’s response to the Russian Communist Party’s assertion, “The personal life in Russia is dead.” and “The State is all that matters.” Pasternak wrote truth in response to delusion. The regime’s reaction? Of course, the Doctor Zhivago was banned in Russia by the delusional power-holders. Just as today, 24 February 2022, as Russia’s Novveye Gazetta newspaper declared it would publish in both Russian and Ukrainian to affirm the Russian People do not consider the Russian language used in parts of Ukraine an excuse to take over the country, Vladimir Putin quickly issued a statement saying, “Any publication criticizing the action on Ukraine will be considered treason (a capital crime) against ‘Rodiyna’ (The Motherland).” The Führer … uh, President Putin … will tolerate no dissent.

Putin said a short while ago, “Happiness (the pursuit of which was articulated in the American Declaration of Independence to be one of the core rights of humans everywhere) is non-existent in the world. It is a fantasy, and therefore, of no importance.” Like all despots, he leaves his own happiness out of his aphoristic reduction of reality. So says a man who has become a billionaire (which seems to make him very happy) at the expense of all the people he has murdered or trampled.

The madman Putin, has taken peace again from humankind simply trying to live in a world that makes that simple task challenging enough.

May this new Blitzkrieg end as quickly as it started.

The thoughts and prayers of this Two-Testament believer are with the people of the Ukraine – and Russia – as they and the West are newly at war – again.

Bruce Louis Cohen

24 February 2022

P.S. – My thanks to my friend “A” and my wife “D” for their input in creating a 2nd, better draft of these ideas. – BLC

News Without Rage or Agenda

January 13, 2021 by admin

i24News Israeli Network Shows Unbiased Journalism Is Still Possible. Their motto: “Stories without commentary or arguments, presented expertly by excellent journalists.”

The American journalism profession seems to be in ruins.

There is very little reportage now: there is event-exploitation to advance a political faction’s agenda; and journalists who have dubbed themselves “experts” speak individually or on panels, tell viewers immediately what the news means, and what they should think or feel. Journalists freely tell the viewers what they – the reporters – think.

What a reporter thinks has never been, in journalism, something an audience should hear, except in carefully-labeled editorial segments, offered in extremely limited quantity. Albert Brook’s brilliant 1980s satire, Broadcast News, about the oncoming showbiz-driven news industry replacing classic reporting, shows a new “spokesmodel-type” News Anchor (a great-looking, great-sounding guy who barely understands the news he is reporting) telling an audience while forced momentarily to ad lib during a crisis, “I think we’re all ok.” Hearing this, the Chief Editor in the production booth mutters to himself, “Who the #$%& cares what you think?”

However – now in America, we are living in a 50/50 divided nation.
The Left tunes into CNN for their news; and The Right goes to Fox.
Their call-letters may as well be WDNC and WRNC.
There is no more news: there is faction-support and agenda advancement. News events are carefully spun to advantage the agenda of “The Side.”

The Left says the Right (mostly not-of-color Majority Supported) Wing is alleged to be greedy and evil, and only wants to preserve undeserved wealth and “white privilege” at the expense of equally-deserving people who have not as much – even if those people are illegally in The United States. At the bedrock of these politics is simple desire for enough stuff for oneself and one’s loved ones or “crew.” The desire is understandable, which is why among the “inalienable rights” the US Declaration of Independence assigns to citizens is “the pursuit of happiness.” Not happiness, itself – but an even-playing field for pursuit of (effort to obtain) happiness. Many minorities are unhappy with the size of their slice of the financial pie at present, which they allege is conspiratorially maintained unjustly small in contrast to the size others have: they called the possessions others than themselves have, “privilege.” This “white privilege” must be erased, and be replaced with an even distribution. This is deemed a righteous crusade.

The Right says the Left Wing (having adopted a role as Of-Color Minorities Advocate), is coming for instant affluence (happiness itself, in the form of affluence, without the “pursuit” obtain it), which they say they deserve right now, Those who “have it” now (often as the result of multiple generations of work starting from the bottom up) should be compelled by taxation to give away to them serious percentages of the fruits of often multigenerational labor, to be redistributed by the government to people who have not worked across generations, as previous waves of immigrants did to earn what they have. BLM Co-Founder Patrice Cullers said it overtly on CNN a few years back, when asked by a Caucasian reporter what the solution is to the race problem in America. She replied instantly, “You all gotta give away some of what you’ve got to us.”  This is, to the Right, a typical “transfer of wealth” socialism that has historically been typically accompanied by the heads of affluent people being marched through the streets held aloft on pitchforks. The Right is afraid, and calls what they are doing, protecting American values.

Each side seems to hate the other.
Each side’s news organ seems bent on convincing their viewers The Other Side is pure evil.

And on “The News” in America – these tropes are nearly all you hear all day and all night.

Then – i24News surfaces with the motto, “Stories without commentary or arguments, presented expertly by excellent journalists.”

Watching i24News is like drinking purified water after years of being forced to drink water polluted with bitter-tasting Red or Blue dye.

For the first time in years, I felt like I was again watching Walter Cronkite, or Huntley/Brinkley. News being reported by journalists; not political indoctrination or Jerry Springer-style cockfighting with people shouting each other down in mid-speech.

I say again, the self-appointed New Priesthood of journalists, who present themselves as “experts” rather than interviewing genuine advance degree-holding or highly-experienced experts as they used to do, is using their bully pulpit to enfranchise themselves into niches of influence, advance their agendas, and subdue their adversaries, proffering as support their own opinions or those of fellow-journalists, who they introduce to audiences as “joining us to provide expert commentary.”

Social Media giants are joining the fray with editing/suppression of stories all the way to-cancel-culture removals of people, and even whole platforms, not aligned with their agendas.

The Left, fresh from electoral victories and President Trump’s massive January 6th miscalculation, is alleging 70 million Rightists who voted for Trump are as directly connected to the mere dozens to hundreds who abandoned an entirely peaceful protest by 10,000s in Washington, to invade the Capitol building and start The Capitol Riot. There seems to be a serious effort in progress to entirely disenfranchise the Right as having any remaining legitimacy in any corner of the political world.  Statements from Left influencers like Prep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) demanding “lists be made of anyone who ever supported Donald Trump” are not helping quell Right nightmares about political purges headed the Right’s way.

The Right, still sore over the Left Press’s total suppression of any reportage of the FBI’s in-progress Hunter Biden investigation for influence-peddling in collusion with his father Joe and other partners until after the election, is crying out, “Censorship! Leftist-Socialist jihad coming our way! Time to suit up! Socialists are coming for us and our stuff!”

Civility seems gone.

The Right says the Left has gone entitlement-absolutist and insane.

The Left says the Right has gone totally greed-protective and evil.

And on “The News” – these tropes are nearly all you hear all day and all night.

Then, there is i24News is leading the way by example.
They are peacefully showing genuine journalism is still possible.

The Newspeople are not “the story.” The story is the story. The Newspeople are to report news: not teach the masses their own opinions. The words, “I think” and “I feel” – now business-as-usual for telejournalists – words unspoken by Murrow or Cronkite or Huntley-Brinkley or Peter Jennings, except in brief, non-routine editorials for extreme circumstances – are not spoken during i24News.

As I’ve been typing an edit of this article, I have had i24News playing in the background, and in the 45 minutes I have been listening, I have not once heard a single reporter say even once, “I think” in any form, nor have there been any dueling commentators shouting each other down and hurling their talking points at each other to score with the audience. Just news stories. Think of it! Just news – and occasionally, genuine experts or involved leaders being interviewed when their output is relevant. My soul is going, ahhhhh with relief.

The reporter is not the story: only the story is the story. The reporters are not telling you what they think: they are reporting what they have seen, or heard, or have confirmed through an eye-witness or interviewed expert happened.

Hallelujah – a word from the language of the nation hosting i24News
Here is Israel being a true “light to the nations.”

Here is hoping the American nation’s journalism profession sees the light, and comes out of agenda-propulsion mode, to recover the holy, necessary, and profoundly ethics-bound vocation of properly functioning journalism.

As the old prayer goes, “May it be speedily, and in our days.”

Bruce Louis Cohen
13 January 2021

Next Page »

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in