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Cleaning up my computer, I found this piece, which I could not find as having published. It is unfortunately more relevant today. Maybe the mantra should be “Check Your Hate”

Two years now I have been at Sacred Heart's commemoration of Kristallnacht.

Two years this has left me unmoved.

Last year, I came expecting to be made to feel uncomfortable. I am an orthodox Jew. Surely, a Catholic school's commemoration in a Catholic Chapel would have some religious content or at least context to it, maybe a shout out to some apostle or the J-man himself for a lesson we should be taking.

It could have had a gesture across the religious divide, taught me something about where Catholicism has come, or how it has grown from its grievous indifference and even complicity in the events of World War II, and how it might have been a part of the fomenting of Jew-hatred that still infests this world, and how it is now praying and acting to celebrate the sanctity of every individual, saved according to Christian doctrine or not.

There was one glimmer of hope for me. At the end of the ceremony last year, one young lady from the choir, on her way out of the chapel, turned to the front of the chapel and bowed in acknowledgement of the place she was in.

With lowered expectations I came again this year. I was still underwhelmed.

It started with the politician's reference to his faith which his policies don't reflect.

It continued with exhortations to inclusion and seeing the humanity of the other, which of course has a place. Some of these terms are increasingly politically charged, or seemingly to me anyway, were used to push an agenda on the back of the Jews.

Then a chaplain got up decrying what some have done in the name of religion, but it is National Socialism, perhaps a religion of a different sort that ferried the evil of anti-semitism through the Holocaust.

The lesson supposedly is that it is not enough to say “I didn't,” but one must fight white-supremacy and antisemitism, these two somehow linked, along with insurrection, by more than one.

The keynote, do not say the word hate.

In closing, it was suggested we must remember, now more than ever.

I suggest this is not particularly actionable advice.

What should we not forgot? Not to kill Jews today. Most of us have that one down. Less obvious today than it seemed when I originally wrote this.

What is missed, what our children have not been taught, is that the “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956.

The point is the Holocaust wasn't a one-off by distant people. It was simply the springing up of an antisemitism that has simmered since there have been Jews, perhaps aided by a European enlightenment that was in the process of discarding G-d, losing along the way our absolute basis of morality.

The point is we do hate.

BET RIMON, Israel— The arabs who fashion themselves Palestinians continue to protect their warring class and bring “misery” upon themselves.

The leadership of Israel has made it clear that it is in a war to end Hamas. Israel has shown itself over and over again to be willing to overlook the genocidal rhetoric of the arab on the Gazan street, the arab who claims to have no electricity, who has no food, but can use his phone to film the humiliating treatment of the few hostages that are returned and has the energy to taunt these hostages and celebrate the return of terrorists from Israeli prisons.

The path to end this war is simple if the Palestinian street wants it. All that is needed is for these arabs to step aside and point to the terrorists who are the cause of this misery. The Israel Defense Force will do its clean-up and life can take a new direction.

If they separate themselves and their children from the enemy, they will not be hurt. But here is the rub. Many of their children, fathers and brothers are these terrorists, and they identify with the cause, and theirs is a culture that celebrates death and martyrdom.

Theirs is in fact a war with the west and its values. They do not“live and let live” as we purport to do. They do not celebrate life as we in the West once did, and in many places still do. They demand that the world live according to the dictates of Allah, or die, and if ten or ten thousand or ten million die to achieve this purpose, the price is acceptable.

Maybe in a hundred years we can change the stone heart of these most radical of muslims, whether we call them Hamas, Gazans, Fatah or just Palestinians. In the meantime, the Israelis must not be held back from completing the job they have set out to.

This is the front line of a world war, and if it is not stopped here, it will flow out on to the Western street in a way we have not seen since the second world war.