Sometimes the truth hurts. Many people cannot handle the truth. Still, sometimes a Rav in Israel has to call it as it is.
And so I respectfully part ways from the company of so many Jewish opinion columnists when I stand and say that the recent despicable riot outside the Adas Torah shul in Los Angeles was decidedly not a pogrom.” Sorry, it was not. I condemn non-Jews when they bandy about the terms “Nazi” and “concentration camp” and “Hitler” with no regard for reality. Israelis are not “Nazis.” They do not commit “genocide.” Politicians with whom we disagree are not “Hitlers.” Structures holding undocumented immigrants in detention along America’s southern border are not “concentration camps.”
And in the same way, the L.A. riot was not a “pogrom.” We disrespect the memories of the thousands who endured true pogroms when we use that word, making it sound like the 1821 Odesa pogrom or 1881 Kiev and Odesa or 1903 Kishinev. In only three years, from 1918-1921, Ukrainian pogroms murdered more than 100,000 Jews. Okay? That’s pogroms.
A pogrom is when the government, which Jews have had no hand in selecting, directly orders local police to pass the word to gruffians that, at such date and time, there will be a green light to amass and murder Jews in their hundreds or thousands and burn their towns or villages or shtetls and grab their wealth. The gruffians are in cahoots with the government: the Tsar or the Mayor or the Commisar, and they either are told to go for it, or they start and find that the police are under orders to stand by while Jews are murdered and their property destroyed. By a stretch, we can say that Al Sharpton’s Crown Heights rampage of 1991 also was a pogrom in that it saw a huge mob of locals, armed to murder, rampage, and destroy, and indeed murder during those three bloody days.
There are those who say that the L.A. riot or the campus riots remind them of Nazi Germany. But if we talk truth, the riots and pogroms and Kristallnachts of 1930s Germany were perpetrated by Hitler Youth or Storm Troopers or those who stood with them, with full support and sanction of Hitler, the national government, the local authorities, the courts, the media, and a majority of the populace. Jews never had a chance to defend themselves. Their only defense was to run.
That is not what is happening on American campuses or the L.A. riot. Rather, those events are instigated and led by Muslim Arabs, many of whom are in America on “student-exchange programs,” with their tuitions paid in full by Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, while studying in “Middle East Departments” funded by the same beasts. Others are here illegally. Even some disturbed Woke Jews accompany them. The government does not authorize these riots or support it even though the federal government, municipalities, and campus deans invariably are too feeble to respond as they should.
Riots and encampments like those against Jews and Israel do not happen outside certain locations. Just listen to Jason Aldean’s “Try That in a Small Town.” I mean it. Listen to that song: 60 million views. That is the America where such riots do not happen. That is most of America.
The violent American encampments and the L.A. riot were not pogroms. So, then, what are they?
They are violent attacks that—very easily—could have been suppressed immediately. They still can—right now—if only American Jews simply would stop whining, crying, weeping, and telling media they are “scared” and “frightened” and “can’t sleep”—and if they instead would do what Italians would do, Irish would do, Blacks would do, and Arabs would do if 100 or 200 external haters were to invade their communities, attack their Irish bars or Italian pizzerias or Arab pita-and-falafel stands: The locals would gather and beat the living daylights out of the invaders. End of story.
How can it be that 200 antisemites can drive an Orthodox Jewish community into political apoplexy? There are thousands upon thousands of Jews who live smack in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood. The neighborhood features more than thirty certified kosher restaurants, including delis, Chinese, Italian and Mexican kosher restaurants, donut and frozen yogurt shops, kosher bakeries, kosher butchers, even kosher supermarkets. The community features four men’s mikvahs and one woman’s mikvah. There are several major Jewish day schools and yeshiva high schools located there. Yeshiva University High School has campuses on both South Robertson Boulevard (girls’ school) and West Pico Boulevard (boys’ school). The community overall has a wide variety of Jewish denominational groups, and the Orthodox community manifestly has grown to become the largest Jewish denomination there. “Minyan Finder” reports over twenty synagogues operating in the area. In 1993, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “Museum of Tolerance” paradoxically was built there.
No, this was no pogrom. There was no Tsar Alexander or Nicholas who relies on his police to stir up the muzhiks to slaughter Jews when the economy goes bad. The real crime is that Jews are reared from birth to be so bleeding-heart nice that they cannot bring themselves to defend themselves. They don’t want to get their hands dirty so, as Jews always have done from Germany to the rest of Europe and beyond, they pay non-Jews to protect them, turn to the police and the university provost for protection, pay non-Jews to stand in front of their temples and shuls, in an equivalence to the “Shabbos Goy” who graciously turns the lights back on when they suddenly go off on Shabbat.
It would be like Israel reacting to October 7 by not fighting back but instead petitioning the U.N. Security Council, the European Union, and the International Court to protect the Jews. And then paying some non-Jewish mercenaries to fight Hamas for them. By now, a majority of Jews in Israel have learned the better way.
These are not pogroms at all. These are punks and thugs who just need to be met by 1,000 Jews in black leather jackets and sunglasses, brandishing baseball bats, bicycle chains, and appropriate plumbing equipment. Soon enough, calm will return and will prevail throughout America because, whenever Jews start fighting back, a miracle always occurs: sleeping and passive institutions, from the local police to the United Nations, arise from slumber, intervene, and stop the fighting.
One thousand Jews with baseball bats, bicycle chains, and plumbers’ supplies versus 200 thugs trying to stop worshipers from entering shul or temple. It’s that simple. Sholom al Yisrael.
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