Baruch Marzel is a criminal thug who has been convicted of assault, incitement, and supporting terror. There is in fact little difference in my mind between him and the Charedi gangs of Meah Shearim. It doesn’t really matter that their causes are radically different… that their goals are polar opposites. Their means of achieving them are the same. Violence. If it were up to me I’d expel them all from the country as subversives. But it isn’t up to me. The Israeli government is far more tolerant of these terrorist thugs than I would ever be.According to an article in the Jewish Chronicle - Marzel and a fellow thug - Itamar Ben Gvir - have promised to harass an American Jew if he holds his son’s Bar Mitzvah at the Kotel. That Jew is a rather prominent one. His name is Rahm Emanuel, former IDF member and perhaps the 2nd most powerful person in the free world… right after the President of the United States.
That may be a bit of an exaggeration but not by much. Rahm Emanuel does not have any official power but as the White House Chief of Staff he controls access to the President. You do not get to see the President without going through Mr. Emanuel. That’s a lot of power.
In the current climate of strained relations between Israel and the Obama administration – it was refreshing to hear that a key member was actually going to go to celebrate a personal Simcha in a portion of Jerusalem that is under dispute. The Kotel is in East Jerusalem.
Many people have called Rahm Emanual a traitor because of the treatment by the President of Israel in recent months. Because of a poorly timed announcement about construction in Ramat Shlomo which is not in the old city but technically under dispute as part of East Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been treated practically like a third world dictator.
That is indicative of a long list of slights toward Israel since Mr. Obama took office. I believe that the President thinks this attitude will produce 'peace in our time' which is at best a naive position that ignores history. It is a form of appeasement that hearkens back to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Adolf Hitler by ceding Czechoslovakia to Germany for promises of peace.
But I digress. Rahm Emanuel has been tainted by all this. Guilt by association. I guess the thinking goes that if the President has this policy, then his chief of staff must agree with it.
That is not necessarily the case. Members of an administration often disagree with a President’s decisions but never say so publicly. Members of the team are expected to keep their personal opinions to themselves and simply state the administration position when asked about it. This is not to say that he does or does not agree. Mr. Emanuel might actually believe that playing hardball with Israel will best serve Israel’s purpose in the long run. We simply don’t know.
But I suspect that his desire to have his son’s bar Mitzvah at the Kotel might signal personal disagreement with the President. An opinion that he might have shared with him privately. If that is the case, it’s nice to have someone like that on the team… especially someone with direct access to him.
Be that as it may, Baruch Marzel doesn’t care. He is going to make sure that the President’s man is going to be ‘protested’. We have all now come to understand what that word means in Frum terrorspeak. It means violence. Someone will get hurt.
Baruch Marzel sickens me - and he should sicken everyone who loves God, Torah, and the Jewish people!
