העורך Editor

Open Letter to Ben Shapiro: You Midwifed Our Enemies. Quit It and Return Home!

Dear Binyamin Aaron Shapiro,

 

Greetings from the Holy Land!

The foregoing all must be in question marks, because from my axioms, I never understood who or what or why you do what you do. To me, it’s all deeply schizophrenic (or to be polite: impossibly compartmentalized), like YU. The right critic for you would be someone who appreciates your actions in terms of your unique calling up until this day, at least, and suddenly urges you to rechannel your great gifts. Sorry, not it! But I haven’t seen anyone else do so (publicly). And I love you as a Jew.

I’ll get to the point, Binyamin (“Ben” ): Does “it” still seem to be working? Or is your shpiel being utterly subverted? Your proteges, caricatures, and rivals, such as Candace, Fuentes, and Carlson, are succeeding by the numbers as you fail. Are you sure that’s solely by chance or reversible?

Let’s go to the root:

  1. What are you?
  2. Who are you?
  3. What are you fighting for?

You went to a yeshiva (at high school level, but you also do the Daf!), so you know Torah is not reducible to “values”, reason, or evolutionary strategy. Chazal didn’t mimic Philo of Alexandria’s goyish outreach. You know that the State of “Israel” and Jews often have conflicting goals and interests, just as the US government is a pox on Americans, right, so why do you conflate them? Do you really not know hypenating “Judeo-Christian” is a whopping lie?!

We disagree on far too much, perhaps, but the issues are loosely connected.

  1. Why do you think the various parties you appeal to can form a united front or find common ground, and what about when they disagree?
  2. Where did you find national democracy endorsed in Shulchan Aruch? Not to mention what it actually is under the surface?
  3. How exactly can you talk about abortion, social justice, immigration or the like when you presumably know the Torah truth is more nuanced?
  4. Why do you think the US Constitution even distantly resembles the Sheva Mitzvos?
  5. Why do you think the “West” or the “Right” is still better?
  6. What’s your personal hetter for not making Aliyah, if you don’t mind the Israeli-style intrusion?
  7. You fight against identity politics, but what is your own, personal, familial, and national identity?

What if the civic sermonizing and Mosaic moralizing have only made the Goyim (as does Holocaust education, arguably) a stronger enemy? Eh?

I suggest you read my article on whether Goyim must convert or Maurice Samuel’s book, “You Goyim”. Please rethink mass immigration and non-interventionism. Study Austrian economics. Is “foreign aid” to Israel really any better than tariffs and rent control (read Moshe Feiglin)? Can you really belong to two different “proposition nations” (assuming that’s what they are)?

Yeah, yeah: you have speedy, practiced answers for everything. You [think you] would trounce me in a live, televised debate. But perhaps take a pause and recheck. What is not merely unassailable or shiny or a winning argument, but what is, in fact, the case — times, places and moods aside? As a smart Jew once said, “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

I don’t expect anything from your progenitor, D. Prager, who doesn’t keep mitzvos and is a total Am Haaretz. But you wear Techeiles, visited Har Habayis, once acknowledged Aliyah is an option if American Jew-hatred got bad “enough”. Copy Rabbi Akiva Yosef Shlesinger za”l.

“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”, to quote Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the same vein, when you talk, are you still convinced non-Jews hear the same thing you yourself think you are saying to them?!

You don’t have to answer anyone but God. Sit in solitude — without the non-kosher devices — and ask yourself this:

  • When you remove all your masks, what is left?
  • What’s the endgame, by any standard, and does it still seem doable to you?
  • So, you disagree. But do you have a Red Line past which you quit the show and come back home? If yes, please write it down in red ink, with a red underline. Don’t make excuses when (if?) you meet it.

Rabbi Avigdor Miller: IDF=House of Shame!

Q: Why isn’t unified support for Israel today encouraged by all Orthodox Jews?

A: And the answer is because it’s the opposite of Orthodoxy. Now, I’ll have to explain that.

Suppose somebody would make a big movement to take in all Jewish girls and to teach them to be harlots. Would you say that it’s justified by any purpose under the sun? Let’s say you wanted it for the purposes that their wages should go to support a kollel.

The State of Israel drafts girls. And they state openly in their writings, they have authorities who say what their reason is. They want to create a cultural rebuilding of the Jewish people; which means they want to teach the girls immorality, and the army is one of the best means for doing it.

The truth is, that a great part of the abortions are performed on girls in the army. A great many abortions are performed on girls in the army! Now, abortions don’t come from learning Rambam and Mesilas Yesharim.

And there are a lot of girls who don’t have to make abortions because they are using precautions. So the question is, can we approve of such a state? To us, it’s the greatest contradiction to the Torah.

Not only for Jews. Even if it was a gentile state, we would be violently opposed to such an order. Let’s say, suppose Japan were to draft girls, we would hate them for it! Japanese girls should all become harlots? If they want to become, let them do it voluntarily. But to force them into an army?! So how could anybody who is Orthodox or is a little bit decent think it’s a necessity to support the State of Israel?

Of course if they’re attacked by others who are trying to endanger the lives of the Jews there, we have to speak up. But we have to be opponents of that regime.

Now the present regime is one of the best that they ever had up till now, but still despite all the improvements, it’s still so wicked, it’s still so opposed to what we stand for that we can never make peace with such a state. It’s a huge bordello into which girls are forced to come and learn to sacrifice the principles for which the Jewish nation stand.

(December 1981)

Read it here.