| Dear TJC community, We hope that despite these painful and difficult times in Israel, this note finds you in good health and spirits.
First, we have some board developments to share. On behalf of the entire Telluride Jewish community, we want to recognize Adrienne Browning, to whom we owe an enormous debt of gratitude for her TJC board service. Adrienne resigned after nine years as a leader on the board, organizing events and generously opening her home for Shabbat and holidays. Thank you, Adrienne.
We also want to extend a warm welcome to four new board members: Irwin Witzel, Elliott Portnoy, Steve Raymund and Stephen Wise. They bring a wealth of experience and knowledge and TJC is excited to continue its work with these community leaders in the coming years.
Second, we have some upcoming events. There will be a Shabbat gathering coming up Nov 3 at the home of Ruth and Frank Hensen. Please RSVP here. TJC will also host a Chanukah party, with details to follow.
And third, after some deliberation, the board has decided to release the following statement on the ongoing war in Gaza. We recognize the diversity of views amongst our board and certainly the larger community. However, widespread moral confusion about recent events in Israel has compelled us to speak up. Furthermore, what began as a savage attack upon Jews in Israel has leached into a castigation of Jews everywhere.
It has been nearly three weeks since Hamas terrorists massacred 1400 civilians: children, men, women, elderly and the disabled; raping and torturing hundreds before murdering them, often maiming the bodies. It is in fact the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust. Two-hundred and twenty hostages, including the elderly, children and babies as young as 3 months old are still imprisoned in Gaza. The global Jewish community is small, and the scale of the devastation in Israel was the equivalent to ten 9/11 attacks. One of the hostages is a cousin of a TJC board member (another of her cousins was released). One of the boys killed at the concert was a relative of one of our community members. To be clear, we are not writing in support of Israel while opposing Palestinians. In fact, we support all peoples' rights to life and peace. Israel's war is not against the Palestinian people, though Palestinians will suffer because of this war. - We are writing in support of Israel's war against Hamas, a jihadist terrorist organizations that has been clear from the time of its charter about its intentions to form a regional Islamic caliphate, or an "Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgment Day," and to annihilate Jews, Druze and Christians.
- We are writing because Israel has been turned from victim to oppressor and because this perversion has and will continue to fuel hatred of Jews everywhere.
- And we are writing this so that we do not forget the more than two hundred hostages still imprisoned in Gaza.
Hamas is worth fighting against. A false narrative persists that these terrorists are "freedom fighters" responding to Israeli oppression or provocation. In fact, Hamas is essentially holding the Palestinian people hostage in order to turn Gaza into a giant "terrorist base" as Amichai Magen of Reichman University puts it, from which to fight a proxy war on behalf of its funder Iran. He adds that to lose the war to the weakest proxy of Iran is to invite an attack by the stronger, Hezbollah. Hezbollah has an estimated 150,000 rockets aimed at Israel. "On the one hand, Israel, having sustained this terrible blow, feels compelled—not only justified, but compelled—to restore deterrence, to signal to Iran or Hezbollah, to everybody in the region, that it will not stand by as Iran's weakest proxy in the Middle East, Hamas, inflicts that kind of damage." This isn't a war that Israel instigated or wants, but like Ukraine's war with Russia, it must be won so that a larger powder keg is not ignited, and hard-won diplomatic ties with much of the Arab world are not severed. Anyone following middle east politics knows also that Hamas "freedom fighters" have no sympathies for Palestinian people either. We should remind those that still believe Israel occupies Gaza that in fact Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in a "land for peace" deal in which dismantled 25 settlements, forcing 9000 Israelis to leave their homes and businesses in Gaza. The Palestinians subsequently elected Hamas despite its designation as a terrorist group by the US and most of the western world. Since it took over the Gaza government, Israel's "peace partner" Hamas has launched more than 10,000 rockets at Israel, killing thousands of Palestinians and Israelis. This strategy is described by Douglas Feith, Senior fellow at Hudson Institute, and Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in the George W. Bush administration, as "a human sacrifice" strategy by Hamas. Hamas launches rockets and Israel responds as Hamas knows it will, trying to destroy the origin of the launch. He writes, "As United Nations officials and others have disapprovingly noted, Hamas stores ammunition in schools, puts missile launchers adjacent to mosques, sets up command centers in hospitals, and generally bases its operations in densely populated civilian neighborhoods." Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State who helped broker the peace deal between the Palestinians and Israelis that included Israel's withdrawal from Gaza says bluntly: "The idea that Hamas is somehow representing the legitimate interest of the Palestinian people is so far from the truth. If anything, they have again and again crashed and dashed the hopes of the Palestinian people…Hamas has done everything they can to keep the Palestinian people in bondage."
Israel's war is not one of revenge or collective punishment. After all, Israel could annihilate Palestinians in a heartbeat if it had any interest whatsoever in doing so. However, we must remember that the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists are hardly "martyrs" or religious zealots deserving of our sympathy. These are people who intentionally targeted children. Skip to the end of this paragraph if you do not want to know about some of the torture they inflicted. First responders gave some of the following reports. One group of terrorists tied a six and seven year old up next to their parents and ate lunch while torturing them all. They then shot them. Hamas terrorists beheaded babies and toddlers. Hamas terrorists tied groups of children together and burned them alive. And there is worse, much worse. Hamas terrorists videotaped many of their crimes on so they could show them off to the world. Israel recently compiled a video to give testament to these horrors and to show an international media still in denial.
Israel has been turned from victim to oppressor and because this perversion has and will continue to fuel hatred of Jews everywhere.
Despite these tortures, the murder of more than 1400 civilians and soldiers, and the kidnapping of 224 civilians, Israel has been twisted into an oppressor deserving of these attacks. As Bari Weiss points out in her series, even before the bodies of the dead were buried, celebrations had broken out in prominent cities all over the world. Since the attacks, hundreds of thousands of people have gathered in LA, New York, Washington DC, Manchester, Edenborough, Glasgow, Dublin, Geneva, Turin, Toronto, Berlin, and many, many other cities. In London alone 50,000 turning out in London alone to chant "glory to the martyrs" or "from the river to the sea" -- an allusion not to freedom or a two-state solution, or even a one-state solution, but to the genocide of the Israeli people so that Palestinian Muslims (though not Palestinian Christians) can replace them. In Australia, "gas the Jews" was the refrain at a rally that drew 1000 people. A more recent Sydney protest drew 15,000 people. Surely, there are some well-meaning people at these rallies, motivated by compassion for Palestinians and not hatred for Jews. But the slogans shouted at these rallies belie a darker truth about what many of the protesters want and believe: an end to Israel and an end to the Jews.
Terrifyingly, it is not just anonymous street mobs that have celebrated the terrorist attacks. Intellectual leaders are also emboldened. There were the thirty student groups at Harvard who called Israel "entirely responsible" for the attacks. Columbia Professor Joseph Massad described the Hamas massacre as "awesome," and Columbia did not discipline him. Professor Russell Rickford of Cornell called the attacks energizing and exhilarating. Yale Professor Zareena Grewal's tweeted, on the day of Hamas's, attacks that "Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity." When speaking of October 7th, she added that, "It's been such an extraordinary day!" Yale has since defended her right to free speech. One can only imagine the backlash if, following – say - a lynching, a Yale professor were to call the day "extraordinary!" with no professional repercussions. There are too many more examples of the mainstreaming of antisemitism to scratch the surface here. As Weiss points out in her series of excellent podcasts on this war, universities, happy to comment constantly on nearly every crisis that comes along, have been silent on the attacks. In fact, Dartmouth's and Columbia's presidents have yet even to condemn Hamas.
As Weiss puts it, "This war should matter to everyone—not just Jews—who care about the future of civilization. Because if there is one lesson from history, it's that what starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews. And societies in which the Jewish people are persecuted are societies in which no one is safe." We are already seeing the prescience of her statement. An October 23 article in Foreign Policy (a Washington Post.Newsweek publication) says the following.
"In the weeks since the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel on Oct. 7, there's been an alarming uptick in terrorist activity in Europe, with Western intelligence chiefs warning that Islamist extremists, jihadis, and antisemites, inspired by Hamas's bold attack, could be looking for new ways to attack Western targets…. The intelligence chiefs of the Five Eyes partners—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States—met last week at a conference in California organized by the FBI, and they issued a joint warning that the threat of domestic attacks has risen as a direct result of the unfolding crisis in the Middle East… The Islamic State claimed responsibility after two Swedish football fans were killed in Brussels by a man, later shot dead by police, who was allegedly enraged by Quran burnings in Sweden. Italian authorities arrested two men accused of recruiting for the Islamic State. Gunmen with alleged links to the organization attacked and killed two tourists and their safari guide in Uganda… In Berlin, petrol bombs were thrown at a synagogue. The U.S. State Department issued a worldwide travel warning."
The world is a more frightening place than it was a few weeks ago. And while Jews are no strangers to hate and fear, we also know that as a community we must take steps to increase our security. TJC events will no longer be published in the newspaper, and we will be making steps toward hiring security for events. However, security guards and secrecy are not ultimately a solution to antisemitism (and perhaps there is no solution). Still, as Jews and as human beings, it is our moral duty to speak out against injustice and lies, to strive toward moral clarity, to defend our fellow Jews against unjust attacks, and to protect the democratic ideals of the western world and of Israel.
We have not forgotten the more than two hundred hostages still imprisoned in Gaza.
And finally, while mention of the hostages fades from the headlines, we have not forgotten and will not forget them. These people range from 3 months to 85 years old. They are human and these are their names and faces. Please keep them in your thoughts and prayers. As Rabbi Marc Soloway put it in a recent letter to his community, "we pray for the release of the hostages into the arms of their loved ones and pray for an end to the bloody conflict and violence and a peace that we can barely dream of in this moment."
Love and blessings,
The Telluride Jewish Community Board of Directors |
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