Divided We Fall: Lessons from Israel
How civil unrest leaves the door open to greater threats
Good evening Maccabee Nation.
The following short essay is from Ron Schneider. Ron is a Jewish Israeli American. He was born in Israel to an American father and an Israeli mother. He came to America after his military service in the IDF, and has lived in America for the last 20 years.
Ron and I met several months ago online when I was inspired by his consistency posting images of motivational lions with Israeli and American themes to promote Jewish solidarity in the months following the events of October 7th. I will continue searching for more likeminded people who believe in our mission, so we can add more voices to Maccabee Nation as we grow.
Regardless of what you think of Trump, what we saw yesterday at the Pennsylvania rally is horrifying, despicable, and shocking beyond words. The assassination attempt on the former president and current presidential candidate not only rings the alarm, but calls for a reckoning that we are at a political low point.
We must rise out of this. This is terrible. It sinks my heart. I am grateful he survived and is doing well.
The assassination attempt is something one may expect to see in an anarchic or unstable country, but not in the free world, and certainly not in the USA.
And there is a bigger picture perspective that this falls into.
The winds of time carry ominous clouds of what our world order can come to if we do not wake up and adjust course.
Not too long ago, in another democracy across the globe, very good people with many opposing opinions got distracted and drifted to civil unrest. And this is when the October 7th attack happened. Jihadist terrorists unleashed unfathomable monstrosities on Israel at a time when the country was most divided, and vulnerable.
If terror were to bring down the free world, it would do so exactly that way – by bringing civil unrest and creating deep dividing fractures in the fabric of our society.
We must not let that happen.
Acute, venomous, dividing rhetoric weakens our democracies and the fundamental order of our societies. We need to recognize that despite our differences we can only be strong if we stand united.
United we are strong.
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It is an excellent idea, but I respectfully submit that is not "unity" that we need - which we will never achieve, but a modification of what most people believe to be the common values a community shares. I don't know or care precisely "when" or "who" began this demonic vilification of one's political enemies, but the only "unity" we as Americans should care about is unity of standards. People like to mock the "language codes" that prevailed in the US television industry until the 1970s. George Carlin famously did a comedic bit about "the words you're not allowed to say on TV." George got famous for working blue, but is the nation really better off and the culture enriched by everyone from little kids to octogenarians saying or writing "fuck, shit, cunt, bitch," and the like? I'm guilty of it, I know, especially when talking about the f*&$ing Fakestinians, but in the back of my mind, I know I am contributing to a societal erosion.
Before some simplistic, vapid moron tries to argue with me, saying I am drawing a straight line from the first time someone said "crap" on network TV to Corey Comperatore being ripped from his family while defending them from the [insert explicative here] who shot at President Trump, of course it is not that simple. If cause and effect were that simple, life would be simpler.
But the escalation of political rhetoric beyond policy debates to character assassination has poisoned this nation and that actually is something we CAN do something about. Nearly every YouTube video wants to bait you into watching, whatever your politica leanings with "X DESTROYED Senator Y." If you bother to click the link, you won't see anyone being "DESTROYED;" you'll see two people arguing, with sometimes a better editing job leaving the supposedly "DESTROYED" party staring slack jawed for a second, which is offered as evidence of his or her "DESTRUCTION."
Biden bears a huge amount of the blame for this for chairing the High-Tech Lynching of Clarence Thomas and the Democrats in general are to blame for Kennedy leading the way with the DESTRUCTION of Judge Bork's SCOTUS nomination.
After that, ad hominem attacks became the norm, often from both major political parties.
I don't know HOW we implement this change, but if every American just refused to listen to anything but policy arguments, it would be a step in the right direction. Biden's insane speech a year (or a century ago), flanked by bizarre red lighting and Marines standing ominously in the background like a 1937 Mussolini rally, while repeating the Democrats' insane lies about "MAGA Republicans," whomever or whatever they might be in the fervid fever dreams of the American Left, was just that - insane. Also irresponsible. I AM drawing millions of straight lines from every Leftist screaming about the supposed "dictator in waiting" Trump to the idiot killing Mr. Comperatore. If you keep telling the world that a man is not a political opponent but is an evil demon in human form, statistically, someone is going to try to remedy that.
I tell the world, for example, that Yahya Sinwar, one of the leaders of the Gazan Government is a demon in subhuman form because he is. He has crowed about - not admitted, but celebrated - that potentially dozens of PALESTINIANS he murdered with his own hands for "collaborating with the Jews," was a lead architect of October 7th, is holding Israeli and American hostages now while openly hoping for more harm to come Palestinian children as a result. HE is a demon in human form and there are millions of us who would morally and correctly put a bullet in his head if given the chance.
I try to ask my Democrat friends in calmer moments why Trump did not overthrow the Constitution and become Caesar in his first term, if that was his intention. They have no real answers - they mumble some bullshit at me about a lame duck term....
The truth is Trump is a crass, boorish man who made a lot of money in a hard, competitive world of New York real estate. He is not an intellectual or much of a reader, but he knows what is right and one of the things he knows is that Leviathan must be chopped down to size. I just published a 570-page treatise on how we shrink the Federal Government - it's like silver and sunlight to vampires.
Washington, DC is 92% Democrat. Not for any other reason than they are a union shop of government workers who want to sap the lifeblood of the free economy to pay for their lavish, unaccountable lives. Trump is no "threat to Democracy." He is a serious threat to unionized rent-seeking bureaucratic parasites that want to take everything you own for themselves. At least the Democrats are smart enough not to say THAT.
If everyone just stopped listening to personal attacks, or when they come up, were brushed off, we could move the needle back to substance. Try this: "What are you, five? We know you don't like your opponent because only one of you can win this race. What about your opponent's POLICIES do you think are bad for ALL AMERICANS, in contradistinction to your well- thought out policy positions which are good for ALL AMERICANS?"
We may not get Lincoln-Douglas, but at least we'll stop hearing about how supposedly evil Orange Man Bad is.
I have kept my comments to the USA because I know that system. From the bits and pieces I have gotten from Israeli friends both pro- and con-Netanyahu, I have gathered that some substantive changes or rebalancing of power between the Knesset and the Courts lie at the heart of their fights. I am not going to opine because I know next to nothing, but when I do know is that Netanyahu is assuredly not a demon in human form, nor are his political foes.
Unity for Israel now is - maybe - a bit different that for Americans, but given an assassination attempt, I am not so sure. Israel is fighting a war for existence against evil Islamist death cults, so national unity is a priority. Americans are very deeply divided, heavily armed and are being told by the Manipulator Class that our divisions are real instead of manufactured. I do not want to dwell on what today would like had Mr. Trump and Mr. Comperatore's fates been switched.
Sorry for the rambling note, but I understand the desire for "unity" and endorse the idea that each country can set its own categories and standards for what is off limits, but humans are a fractious and argumentative lot. We are not going to get unity, but we can achieve public standards and decency again.
George Carlin was wrong about why linguistic guiderails existed. He could have known that by heeding the works of South African born Mohandas K. Ghandi:
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
If you believe your political opponent is an evil, existential threat to America, everything will flow from that.
Conversely, if you believe strongly that you have a better policy prescription for one or more areas of Federal Budget expenditure, versus your opponent, whose values, vision and ideas you find lacking, everything will flow from that.
I the first case, bullets fly at politicians.
In the second, reasoned debate attended by rational voters will lead to policy choices which can be tried and tested and changed later, if the data so indicate.
We all must demand a change in tone and an increase in substance from those who want positions of power in this nation. That we can get. Unity may or may not result.
I am with you.