by Rabbi Dov Fischer in the Israel National News

Sometimes the truth hurts. I often tone down but never knowingly distort the truth, toning it down because, paraphrasing the famous line in “A Few Good Men,” many people cannot handle the truth.

If I write that “reform judaism is a fraud, not Jewish, and one of the most central causes of anti-Semitism and the disappearance of Jews in the past 200 years,” not all can handle that.

If I write explicitly naming “reform rabbis” at leading central “reform temples” who are not even Jewish . . . Wow! They cannot handle that.

Or that most “reform Jews” today are not Jewish.

Or that the great majority of “Jews” involved in the anti-Semitic campus riots are not Jews but the non-Jewish children born to non-Jewish mothers married to Jewish fathers and bar-mitzva’d or bat-mitzva’d at “reform temples” where they learned at age 12 or 13 to hate an Israel that is governed by classical Judaic principles, they cannot handle it.

Everyone Orthodox knows the truth. I had a liberal Orthodox rabbi tell me — “off the record,” of course — I am too explicit in saying that. So I respectfully asked my liberal colleague: “If a Jewish father and non-Jewish mother were to bring their boy or girl to be bar- or bat- mitzva’d in your shul, to read the Torah or Haftarah on Shabbat, would you allow it?” He looked down and said softly: “No.” I asked “What about if the child were born to a woman who says she is Jewish because she had a “reform conversion”? Would that change things? Would you, your board of directors, or any Orthodox shul anywhere allow that kid to be bar- or bat-mitzva’d at your shul, to recite the brakhot (blessings) of the Torah, to lead any of the davening (prayers)? His answer: “No, we could not so would not, but that’s not the point.”

So I asked one more line of inquiry: “If that child were to die, G-d forbid, or if that non-Jewish wife of the Jewish husband were to die, G-d forbid, or if the “reform”-converted wife of that Jewish husband died, G-d forbid, would your shul allow that tragically deceased woman (or a man converted “reform”) to be buried in your shul’s cemetery section?” Again, the answer: “No, we just can’t allow that.” . . . Followed by “But do we have to say that out loud?”

No, Mr. Orthodox Rabbi, we can keep the truth a secret, just as we did during the Spanish Inquisition and the similar 1839 Persian Allahdad in Mashad. Some things are hard to say because the truth cannot be handled.

Thus, many prefer not to comment on a “denomination” that gave up Torah commandments, then changed prayers from Hebrew to the vernacular, then re-named their synagogues “temples” to demonstrate that the only “temple” in their “judaism” was down the block in Hamburg or Berlin, not in Jerusalem on Mount Zion; then abandoned Zionism saying that “Germany is our Palestine, and Berlin is our Jerusalem,” then has even their rabbis stop covering their heads, then eventually went to women rabbis (who do cover their heads!), then to homosexual and lesbian rabbis, then to homosexual rabbis who marry each other and to lesbian rabbis who marry each other, and — most recently — rabbis (male, female) who themselves marry non-Jews (female, male, same sex, non-binary). Lyrics to sing at a reform rabbinic ceremony: “Oy, Oy, Oy. The rebbetzin is a Goy.”

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 I love and read passionately, and from so many Jewish groups toward whom I incline philosophically, 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.” Republicans are not “Hitlers.” Structures holding Illegal 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 Odessa pogrom or 1881 Kiev and Odessa 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.

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, and a majority of the populace.

That is not what is happening on American campuses or the L.A. riot. Rather, those events are instigated and led by

(i) Muslim Arabs, many of whom are in America on insane “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; and by

ii) Muslim Arab illegal immigrants entering by virtue of an insane government that allows them in through a porous border. The government does not authorize it or support it even though the federal government and municipalities are too feeble to act in blue Democrat polities.

Those things do not happen in Republican conservative towns. 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.

These things are incited by Arab Muslims who assuredly do not reflect mainstream America outside Dearborn, Michigan, and they are augmented by Jews — yes, by Jews like George Soros and Bernie Sanders, peopled by the children who were taught as children in many (not all) “reform judaism” temples to criticize and hate Israel, and who — for the most part — are not even Jews but are the children of non-Jewish mothers or of mothers converted by reform rabbis (same thing).

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, even if only the smaller Orthodox population, 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 anti-Semites, half of them in America illegally or the children of reform temples, can drive an Orthodox Jewish community into political apoplexy? There are thousands upon thousands of Jews who live smack in that 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.

With those numbers, how is it that 200 Arabs — mostly non-Americans — and self-hating Jewish children of “reform judaism” cannot be crushed into ultra-fine matzo meal by those Jews in 15 minutes?

No, this was no pogrom. It happened in a city that just proudly elected their first Black woman mayor, elected with stacks of Jewish liberal money and support. She is their mayor. 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 these Jews are reared from birth to be so bleeding-heart liberal and “be a nice boy, Sidney,” 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, in an equivalence to the “Shabbos Goy” who graciously turns the lights back on when they suddenly go off in shul during Shabbat late-afternoon Mincha prayers.

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. By now, a majority of Jews in Israel have learned the better way.

I grew up in 1960’s-1970’s Brooklyn. Unlike L.A.’s rioting Arab Muslims and self-hating children of “reform judaism,” we faced back then a few White Supremacist neo-nazis and a few too many street thugs and inner-city gang members. They were far more dangerous and challenging than transexuals at Harvard or CUNY chanting “From the River.”

One such animal, James Forman, a Black extremist racist hater in the Deep South, decided he would raise tens of millions of dollars from Northern bleeding-heart White liberals for “slavery reparations” more than a century after Emancipation, and he would begin at the easiest, most vulnerable target of all: the Upper East Side knee-jerk liberal wealthy Jews. His battlefield: Manhattan’s Temple Emanuel, then the flagship of “reform judaism.” He announced he would be at the Temple on Friday night, May 30, 1969, to collect many millions, and he demanded in advance access to the pulpit.

They would have given him the pulpit and poured out their bank accounts to him. They could have afforded it, but the message would have been heard loud and clear: Threaten a Jewish temple, and they will pay “reparations” through their noses — even though none of them nor their ancestors ever were in America during the era of slavery.

But the promised moment never happened. He never showed up. Why not?

Because one single brave rabbi living in an outer borough, a long distance from Temple Emanuel, knew what those “reform Jews” and their reform rabbis would do, and he understood and foresaw how much worse it would get thereafter for other Jews elsewhere. So Rabbi Meir Kahane z”l, may G-d continue avenging his blood, and his Jewish Defense League showed up late that Friday afternoon, with big strong youths in their twenties and thirties, wearing black leather jackets and sunglasses, brandishing baseball bats, bicycle chains, and appropriate plumbing equipment, arriving shortly before Mr. Forman had promised to appear. He came, he saw, and he fled back to Dixie without even leaving his car.

That is what it took then. That is what it would take now. Not appeals to Mayor Karen Bass or to university deans. 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.

Yes, some will get arrested because police never go into action until Jews fight back, just as the UN and EU and ICJ and ICC do not until Israel fights back. So there is that. But, even if the cops arrest some of those Jews, as they did when some Jews fought back last month at UCLA, the record shows that, soon enough, even with 13 such arrests, a Jew still can end up admitted into law school, have a successful career of ten years at prominent law firms litigating complex corporate lawsuits, can end up as a law professor for twenty years, as a synagogue rav for 30 years, and so much more, and can hold your attention for 10 minutes (yes, this writer), even though he never had the honor or privilege of meeting or even seeing James Forman.

Honor the true hundreds of thousands who were murdered at pogroms by acknowledging that there was no pogrom in Los Angeles. Don’t use that exaggeration as an easy way out, to avoid accepting responsibility to face the demand of the hour. One thousand Jews versus 200. Matzo meal. It’s that simple.

Originally published in the Israel National News

Photo Credit Marek Studzinski on Unsplash