Bald-faced bullshit 

Israel’s government today can no more claim to be a righteous defender of Judaism than our own Congress and White House can claim that the United States is a “Christian nation.”

Give me a break. Can’t our cowards in Congress understand the First Amendment? Have they ever read it, or thought about it? Can’t they explain it to their Fűhrer, in words that he might understand?

Pretense, phony claims, empty rhetoric: overpaid proud peacocks masquerading as legislators strutting through their protected barnyard, kicking chickenshit into our faces with their scrawny, tax-subsidized legs.

We have today a Congress of cowards, truckling to an ignorant fascist, and their goal, aside from absolute power, is to make our country become willfully ignorant. So they attack the free press and our universities.

All it takes to shut down a bully is for a few people to stand up and say, “No.”

Yet day after day our corrupt Supreme Court, dressed in their plumage, bends 12 of its 18 knees to a fascist, as if they are praying to their god. And the only justices standing up to him are women.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right Cabinet members are neo-Nazis. And yes, I can call Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich neo-Nazis, self-proclaimed Super Jews, because of a simple lesson I learned 50 years ago from a bass player in New York City. He lived upstairs from me. Let’s call him Ali.

Ali said: “I don’t care what color you are, what race or religion or what country you come from, or what language you speak: Your people have been murdered and they’ve murdered; they’ve been massacred and they’ve committed massacres; they’ve been raped and they’ve raped other people. That’s history, man.”

True enough.

Now let me tell you a story. My father was a master sergeant in the U.S. Army in World War II. He memorized the eye chart to pass the induction physical because he was short-sighted and couldn’t really read it.

Kahn is a Jewish name, and I am not technically Jewish, because my mom was raised Polish Roman Catholic, and Judaism is matrilineal. But I would have been Jewish enough for Hitler. And his cowardly henchmen.

And his cowardly henchmen.

So today, with a parting glance at 70,000 Palestinians dead in Gaza, more than 17,500 of them children, I am not persuaded that it is antisemitic, or even unfair, to call Netanyahu and Smotrich neo-Nazis. Child psychiatrists might say they are only “acting out.” Which I accept — except for that word “only.”

Since when has our country, or any other, accepted a plea that “we suffered horribly some generations ago” as an excuse for genocide?

What about the Rwandan genocide 30 years ago, when more than 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by the ruling Hutu?

What if Tutsis gained control today and commenced exterminating Hutus? Would the United States, and the world, turn its back on another 800,000 murders?

Probably.

What if the Armenian government tomorrow commenced to slaughter 800,000 Turks, to avenge the first genocide of the 20th century? Would the world, and the United States, say: “Ah, let Armenia slide; they suffered a lot three generations years ago."

I don’t think so.

What if Apaches, Comanches and Sioux formed secret militias to murder tens of thousands of white people in the United States, with bows and arrows and AK-47s? Would our cowardly Congress and cowardly newspapers opine: “Well, you’ve got to take into account that we’ve been murdering Indians for 400 years, 14 generations, so let’s let them slide”?

I doubt it.

It’s true that European Jews did suffer, for centuries. But whose people have not suffered?

Whose people today are using their ancestors’ suffering to try to excuse their own genocide against people, and children, who were not even alive during World War II?

Guess who.

There is never an excuse for genocide, unless we’re talking about harmful insects — which Netanyahu and his neo-Nazi courtiers consider Palestinians to be. And which Trump appears to believe about Black people and immigrants.

But, and I may be wrong, no religion of which I am aware condones the slaughter of human beings as if they were insects. Except a few books of the Old Testament.

According to recent scientific research, we Homo sapiens  learned to live in peace with Neanderthals and procreate with them. Yet 40,000 years after we accepted Neanderthals into our tribe, and learned to live with them, and — we must presume — love them, why do we condone a tight-knit clan that murders mothers and babies of our own species for the despicable act of lining up in a bread line during famine and war?