emunah, tefillah, a little mussar, and a shmeck of geula

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

The Ghost Of Lewis Carroll



Believable unbelievability


This Hamas penchant for using women and children as shields, hiding in tunnels, and wearing Israeli army uniforms and ski masks brings back memories.

Some fifty years or so ago comedian, Bill Cosby, produced a number of very funny and popular record albums (in the pre-historic pre-CD days).  One of his routines has some bittersweet relevance to our times.

For the uninitiated, every high school, college, or professional football game begins with a coin toss.  The referee introduces the captain of each team and the winner of the toss gets to choose to kick-off to the opposing team or be on the receiving end.  Bill Cosby created a comedy sketch depicting various events in history beginning with a coin toss and one of them was the American Revolution:

Referee: “Captain Harbets of the British, this is Captain Sobers of the settlers.  Captain Sobers of the settlers, this is Captain Harbets of the British. 

“Call the toss, British. 

“The British call heads.  (He flips the coin)

“It’s tails.  You lose the toss British and the settlers win.  

“What will you do settlers?

“Okay.  The settlers say that during the war they will wear any color clothes that they want to, shoot from behind the rocks, the trees and everywhere.  And they say that your team must wear red and march in a straight line.”

With his voice inflections it was quite funny and everyone laughed.

But now that what was once considered to be great comedy has morphed into the tragedy of our times, it’s not funny anymore. 

As we wallow in the hell of Gaza we hear a lot of the usual talk about double standards (both media and diplomatic), the new anti-Semitism, the old anti-Semitism (one in the same) and a host of other low blows that relegate us to what can be charitably described as international pariah status.  
The above mentioned attitudes/tactics, as bad as they are, are but a means employed to manipulate the masses.  But a psychologically healthy population, grounded in traditional values is not grist for such a mill.

It must first be softened up.

Thanks to the nefarious diligence of the International Left in its ninety year assault on what was once considered to be a common sense understanding of right versus wrong, the Western world has exchanged those bed rock truths for a pottage called relative morality.  These distinctions have been blurred for so long that we now live in a world where the majority probably cannot distinguish between the two while a significant minority among the elites choose not to.

And once right and wrong was put on the endangered species list, every other traditional value followed in close pursuit.  So much so, that in the last fifty years the universal bottom line understanding of the collective conscience of mankind has been turned upside down.

We live in a generation in which six billion people no longer know their right hand from their left.  This is the new normal.  Let’s call it believable unbelievability. 

In such a world those who commit the gravest violations of the Geneva Conventions with virtually every breath they take are accorded victim status whereas those who commit no such violations, but rather do everything humanely possible to limit the suffering of non-combatants, even to the extent of putting themselves at risk are accused of atrocities and genocide, the relevant and accessible facts to the contrary notwithstanding.

In some circles kidnapping is considered all in a day’s work while the pursuit of kidnapers becomes a human rights issue.

For some, alleged revenge is the most reprehensible conceivable crime while for others actual revenge is accepted as a most understandable emotional reaction.

And so it goes.  

All of us are refugees from a world that no longer exists and we now reside in Wonderland.

And what better proof could there be of this than the fact that we have the Queen of Hearts in the guise of the Muhammad wannabes, otherwise known as the ISIS, screaming at the top her lungs:

“Off with their heads.”