Martyrdom is the selfless commitment to a cause, leading to one’s own demise. It has remained an essential concept in practically all religions. For example, in recent weeks, Catholic authorities repeatedly referred to the “martyrdom” of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of ISIS; and Islam, more than any other religion, still preaches the glory of martyrdom in expectation of a better afterworld.
While Democrats may feel blindsided by the arrangement, Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, planned secretly by Republicans, huge implications for American Jewry: U.S. Jews, who have historically favored Democrats over Republicans, will not only be able to see where the Democratic Party really stands in regard to Israel but, by extension, toward Jewry in general.
The Democratic Party started to shift away from supporting Israel during the 2012 Democratic Convention, when Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa faced fierce resistance from the floor in attempting to reinsert the longstanding recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel into the official Party Platform.
In our last post, we discussed how Jews had helped found the European socialist movement to then become excommunicated by that very movement.
After Israel’s overwhelming military victory against the united Arab world in the 1967 Six-Day War, the political left immediately started questioning the continuous inclusion of Jews and their nation-state, Israel, in the international socialistic brotherhood. Indeed, the left increasingly rejected the concept of the Jewish “victim,” and replaced him with a brand-new victim – the “Palestinian”-Arab. This concept had never even existed before 1967.
The French journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan (1749-1800) is credited with coining the adage “la révolution dévore des enfants” or “the revolution devours its children.” This observation was initially made in commenting on the excesses of the French Revolution (1789-1799) and has been used repeatedly throughout history in times of upheaval.
Jews have been leading figures of social movements and social revolutions throughout history. Eli Barnavi, Professor of Jewish History at Tel Aviv University, recently noted in an article on Jewish Socialism in Europe that over the last 200 years, every generation of Jews has generated a small group of activists who fought for a type of social utopia: In Germany, Jews were the pioneers of the socialist workers’ movement after the industrial revolution, when Moses Hess introduced Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to Historical Materialism. Marx and Engels, of course, co-authored the Communist Manifesto in 1848, and Engels financially supported Marx while the latter wrote Das Kapital.
The decision to run for the office of President of the United States, alone, already indicates a significant degree of psychosocial pathology. Which person of sane mind would voluntary go through the typical abuses of an election campaign? Who would really want the responsibilities that come with the highest office in the land and, most importantly, what sane mind would consider himself/herself qualified to shoulder those responsibilities?