Sun Tzu and the Library Wars
/On December 12, the Republican Party of St. Joseph County in conjunction with Indiana Call to Action sponsored a talk on “Israel and the Jewish People” by Eli Wax, a Jew on the county council, and Casey Hendrickson, a local talk show host. Given the speakers and the auspices under which they spoke, it was a preposterous congeries of all of the tropes that we have come to associate with Zionist propaganda and Scofieldism, according to which Israel was founded in 1,700 BC by Abraham and not by Jewish terrorists like Menachem Begin and Itzhak Shamir 75 years ago. There was no mention of the Israeli war crimes that were happening as they spoke or the number of Palestinian babies who got killed during lunch while everyone listened to Jewish fables.
As if to correct that sin of omission, John Mearsheimer, who is “the Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and one of the leading foreign policy scholars in America,”[i] explained that: “What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose.”
Mearsheimer then documented his case by elaborating on seven crucial points:
First, Israel is purposely massacring huge number of civilians, roughly 70 percent of whom are children and women. The claim that Israel is going to great lengths to minimize civilian casualties is belied by statements from high level Israeli officials. For example, the IDF spokesman said on 10 October 2023 that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” That same day, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced: “I have lowered all the restraints – we will kill everyone we fight against; we will use every means.”
Second, Israel is purposely starving the desperate Palestinian population by greatly limiting the amount of food, fuel, cooking gas, medicine, and water that can be brought into Gaza. Moreover, medical care is extremely hard to come by for a population that now includes approximately 50,000 wounded civilians. Not only has Israel greatly limited the supply of fuel into Gaza, which hospitals need to function, but it has targeted hospitals, ambulances, and first aid stations.
Third, Israeli leaders talk about Palestinians and what they would like to do in Gaza in shocking terms, especially when you consider that some of these leaders also talk incessantly about the horrors of the Holocaust. Indeed, their rhetoric has led Omar Bartov, a prominent Israeli-born scholar of the Holocaust, to conclude that Israel has “genocidal intent,” To quote Israel’s Agriculture Minister, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” Perhaps the most shocking “evidence” of the depths to which Israeli society has sunk is a video of very young children singing a blood-curdling song celebrating Israel’s destruction of Gaza: “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to plow our fields.”
Fourth, Israel is not just killing, wounding, and starving huge numbers of Palestinians, it is also systematically destroying their homes as well as critical infrastructure—to include mosques, schools, heritage sites, libraries, key government buildings, and hospitals. As of 1 December 2023, the IDF had damaged or destroyed almost 100,000 buildings, including entire neighborhoods that have been reduced to rubble. Consequently, a stunning 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes. Moreover, Israel is making a concerted effort to destroy Gaza’s cultural heritage; as NPR reports “more than 100 Gaza heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks.”
Fifth, Israel is not just terrorizing and killing Palestinians, it is also publicly humiliating many of their men who have been rounded up by the IDF in routine searches. Israeli soldiers strip them down to their underwear, blindfold them, and display them in a public way in their neighborhoods – sitting them down in large groups in the middle of the street, for example, or parading them through the streets – before taking them away in trucks to detention camps. In most cases, the detainees are then released as they are not Hamas fighters.
Sixth, although the Israelis are doing the slaughtering, they could not do it without the Biden administration’s support. Not only was the United States the only country to vote against a recent UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but it has also been providing Israel with the weaponry necessary to wage this massacre. As one Israeli general (Yitzhak Brick) recently made clear: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability.… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.” Remarkably, the Biden administration has sought to expedite sending Israel additional ammunition, by-passing the normal procedures of the Arms Export Control Act.
Seventh, while most of the focus is now on Gaza, it is important not to lose sight of what is simultaneously going on in the West Bank. Israeli settlers, working closely with the IDF, continue to kill innocent Palestinians and steal their land.[ii]
I didn’t take a poll but judging from the Q & A following their talk, I had to assume that most of the people in the room were Christian Zionists. Wax’s Orthodox community, the one which got him elected to the county council, was conspicuous by its absence.
Eli Wax, South Bend's Jewish Council Member
If there was a Catholic contingent in the crowd, none of them came up to me after the talk to congratulate me for my courage in confronting a very hostile master of ceremonies. This is not surprising given the fact that Our Sunday Visitor, which was once the largest circulation Catholic newspaper in America and is still being published out of Huntington, Indiana, just gave one of its Catholic of the Year awards to Mary Eberstadt, who “emphasized that solidarity with the Jewish people is both a moral imperative and a pro-life stance.”[iii]
Evidently Scott Ritchert, who modestly gave himself another Catholic of the Year award as the courageous “publisher of Our Sunday Visitor,” doesn’t know that in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, over 400 Jewish organizations have announced that abortion is a “fundamental Jewish value.”[iv]
As I have already pointed out to Life Site News when they made a similarly preposterous claim, opposing anti-Semitism means increasing Jewish political power, and increasing Jewish political power means promoting abortion because abortion is a fundamental Jewish value. So, no matter what she says to the contrary, Mary Eberstadt – along with Our Sunday Visitor, along with the “dynamic coalition of influential Catholic leaders,” known as the “Coalition of Catholics Against Antisemitism (CCAAS), which was officially launched during the “Nostra Aetate and the Future of Catholic-Jewish Relations at a Time of Rising Antisemitism” conference held in Steubenville, Ohio, this fall – are all promoting abortion in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.
Our Sunday Visitor gave out no awards to Catholics who oppose genocide in Gaza or to Amy Drake, another Catholic in the room, even though she is a courageous Catholic politician from the state of Indiana. Those of you who subscribe to Culture Wars may remember that I mentioned in the November issue that Drake has been fighting a valiant battle to de-sodomize the South Bend Public Library. For reasons that I will mention, Drake arrived late and left early.
On December 6, 2023, Amy Drake sent out a newsletters announcing her concerns about the reappointment of Library Commissioner Alan Feldbaum. Over the course of his tenure, Feldbaum had presided over the sexualization of the St. Joseph County library. Feldbaum, according to Drake “went along with the library’s decision to keep the obscene This Book is Gay on the teen shelves this past summer.” During his tenure on the library board, the Library promoted Flamers and other material that qualified as obscene under Indiana law, and Drake was determined to use the expiration of Feldbaum’s term to clean house at the public library, by urging concerned parents to show up at the county commissioners’ meeting on December 12.
In the same newsletter, Drake also advertised the already mentioned lecture on “Israel and the Jewish people.” The county commissioners’ meeting was scheduled for 10:00 AM at the county city building, which was roughly a 30-minute drive from the Juday Creek Country Club, where the talk on Israel was scheduled at noon. Amy Drake’s attendance at both meetings shows that it was possible for someone determined to attend both, but it was certainly not convenient since for most of the people in attendance it meant driving from the Republican stronghold of Granger into downtown South Bend and back again…
[…] This is just an excerpt from the Jan 2024 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!
Articles:
Culture of Death Watch
Javier Milei by E. Luis Alvarez Primo
Of Camels and Unitarians by E. Michael Jones
Sun Tzu and the Library Wars by E. Michael Jones
Features
Voris Falls for the Second Time by E. Michael Jones
Reviews
Israel’s Friends: The Backlash Against Palestine Solidarity by Sean Naughton
(Endnotes)
[i] John Mearsheimer, “Death and Destruction in Gaza,” AntiWar.com, Dec. 13, 2023, https://original.antiwar.com/john-mearsheimer/2023/12/12/death-and-destruction-in-gaza/[ii] John Mearsheimer, “Death and Destruction in Gaza,” AntiWar.com, Dec. 13, 2023, https://original.antiwar.com/john-mearsheimer/2023/12/12/death-and-destruction-in-gaza/[iii] Our Sunday Visitor Staff, “Introducing Our Sunday Visitor’s 2023 Catholics of the Year,” Our Sunday Visitor, Dec. 15, 2023, https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/introducing-our-sunday-visitors-2023-catholics-of-the-year/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_email=Omeda&utm_campaign=NL-Our+Sunday+Visitor+News+Now&utm_term=6900G5442178D7A&oly_enc_id=6900G5442178D7A[iv] Our Sunday Visitor Staff, “Introducing Our Sunday Visitor’s 2023 Catholics of the Year,” Our Sunday Visitor, Dec. 15, 2023, https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/introducing-our-sunday-visitors-2023-catholics-of-the-year/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_email=Omeda&utm_campaign=NL-Our+Sunday+Visitor+News+Now&utm_term=6900G5442178D7A&oly_enc_id=6900G5442178D7A[v] Jordan Smith, “Dysfunction between city clerk and Council brings steep consulting fees, canceled meeting,” South Bend Tribune, Jan. 27, 2023, https://www.southbendtribune.com/story/news/local/2023/01/27/disarray-between-south-bend-city-clerk-and-council-leads-to-costly-fix/69826625007/ 
