


I just published a review of how a month-long medical overload of doctor appointments, diagnostic exams, and procedures disrupted my February and half my January. As a result, there were some 20 infuriating news items, including thoughts on Israel and Gaza, that I wanted to address but could not. Lots of readers have written me offline to solicit my views.
I just addressed the first 10 infuriating items. Herewith, the other 10:
- More on the Israel–Gaza conflict: The slogan chanted by rabid Jew haters, “From the River to the Sea, ‘Palestine’ Will Be Free,” is very helpful because, in a one-sentence ditty, it reveals everything there is to know: Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there can be only one country. “Palestine” is the same as Israel. Only, it is Israel that is forever. There are no “Palestinians.” Rather, there are the Jews of Israel, the Arabs of Israel, and the Christians and others of Israel. Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”) are centrally part of Israel. So is Gaza. Open your Bible. Jews were indigenous. Mohammedan imperialists occupied land that was not theirs. Don’t want to go back to the past? OK. Don’t. There should not be and never will be a “two-state solution.” Abraham Lincoln rejected one. Now it is Israel’s turn. No patriot concedes half his land to “make peace.” And if Lincoln and Grant had given the Confederacy what it wanted, there would have been peace to this day. The Arabs of Gaza, Judea, and Samaria have proven for a century they will never make peace with a Jewish sovereignty. Fine. Memo received. All land west of the Jordan River (Judea and Samaria) will remain under Israeli sovereignty. Judea and Samaria are not a “West Bank.” The “West Bank” is on the Jersey City-Hoboken-Weehawken side of the Hudson River. From the River to the Sea, all of Israel will be free. In 1948, Israel had 800,000 Jews. As Obama, Kerry, Ocasio, and that woke cohort would say, the Left is on the wrong side of history. Here’re the numbers: Thanks to all the Arab Muslim countries expelling almost all their Jews in the 1950s, Israel’s population grew to 1,578,000 by 1951, to 2 million by 1958, and to 3 million by 1970. Then the anti-Semitic Soviets drove out their Jews, so Israel grew to 4 million by 1981. Not “settlers,” but immigrants (just like the millions of Muslim Arabs now changing the face of Western Europe). That became 5 million a decade later. By 1998, Israel was up to 6 million. Another million by 2006. In 2013, they reached 8 million; 9 million by 2019. They’ll probably hit 10,000,000 next year. No one will uproot the 850,000 Jews now living in eastern parts of Jerusalem and throughout the rest of Judea and Samaria. As a result of Hamas breaking the ceasefire on Oct. 7 and chopping off people’s heads, raping women, placing live babies in ovens, and murdering 1,200, the national debate within Israel is over. More than 80 percent of Israelis oppose any Arab sovereign west of the Jordan. That train has left the station. With Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, all but Israel’s craziest woke leftists are determined there will not be a third Arab cutthroat dictatorship operation on Israel’s remaining border to provide cover and material for home-grown terrorists. Mahmoud Abbas and his “Palestine” Authority in Judea and Samaria are partners with Hamas, and they pay a monthly stipend to families of killed or arrested Hamas terrorists who have murdered Jews. They deny Oct. 7 even happened.
- The Hamas Gaza war will end when (i) all hostages taken by Hamas are returned, including Israeli soldiers and the deceased; and (ii) Hamas surrenders unconditionally. George Washington accepted nothing less, although he allowed Gen. Charles Cornwallis to send a substitute to surrender unconditionally (and, therefore, had his own underling accept the capitulation). Lincoln insisted on the same. Indeed, it was said that the “U.S.” in the name of his Gen. U.S. Grant stood for “unconditional surrender.” Lincoln did not agree to live alongside the Confederacy in a “two-state solution” that could have “saved so many lives of innocent children.” He did not send food and water to innocent children while his Gen. Grant laid siege to Vicksburg in 1863 and later to Petersburg and Richmond to starve them all into surrender. He did not apologize to women and children as Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman burned down Atlanta. Harry Truman demanded the same, dropping another atom bomb daily — not food packages — until he got his unconditional surrender. Israel will fight this one to total victory. But what about the “poor innocent civilians”? Give back the hostages. What about the children? Give back the hostages. What about food and water? Give back the hostages. At that point, Israel should restore her status in Gaza to what it was before 2005, and Jewish communities should be rebuilt there in many multiples. Gazans started the war and lost the war. Ask the Ottoman Turks how that worked out. (READ MORE from Dov Fischer: Catching Up on 10 Infuriating Things in the Past Month’s News)
- Some anti-American nut went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., and set himself on fire, yelling “Free Palestine.” He is dead. Good for him. Another nut went to Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Texas and started shooting at worshippers with a rifle on which she wrote “Free Palestine.” Osteen’s security people shot her dead. Good for her. And for Texas.
- After Super Tuesday, Nikki Haley finally did the Marvin K. Mooney thing and went now (and took Vermont and D.C. with her). She apparently assumed her persistence gained her tacit respect for 2028. But she was foolish. Ron DeSantis was clever: He knew when to get in — testing whether Republicans would be too queasy about backing Donald Trump — and he knew when to get out, when he saw there is no quease. He gained national campaign experience, primetime stage debating experience, and broad exposure outside Florida, and he made a world of contacts, learning a world of lessons for 2028 (unless Trump makes an interesting effort to seek reelection then, arguing that the 45th presidency time served should not count against the 47th). Haley got too caught up in the spotlight and did not know when to drop out. Ultimately, she will do fine in life and end up a professor at Harvard or Yale, where anti-Trumpism will win her admirers despite her support for Israel. Claudine Gay, a disgraced plagiarist, still gets paid $900,000 a year for that, so the cash hordes are aplenty in the Poison Ivy. It is a more dignified way to get rich than is the Ilhan Omar way (paying her publicity guy $600,000 with campaign funds and then marrying him) or Cori Bush (same, just a security guard, so only 10 percent, but she’s worth it). Harvard-Yale professoring is a gentle life, lots of speaking tours, book contracts, maybe a show on MSNBC. Haley is set for life. Just not for the White House. Getting rich off the public — like Ocasio, Obama, and the Bidens. Is there anything more American than that?
- Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ocasio represent 3 of 435 House districts, less than 1 percent of the country. Do the math: 1 percent of 435 is 4.35. (Isn’t math fun when you learn it?) If you aggregate all House wokesters tied to the Racket Squad, you barely get 3 percent, if that. The corrupt leftist media, composed of a disproportionate number of extreme radical woke leftists, abuse their outlets to try brainwashing a gullible and susceptible public. So it seems that every fourth American is homosexual or lesbian, almost no one marries anymore, almost no one who is married is faithful, certainly no one believes in G-d, and every sixth American is a male locked in a female body or a woman in a man’s body. That same leftist media who exaggerate the Racket Squad’s importance hide a message in every movie: America rarely is honorable. Parents rarely are right. Instead, we are pointed to social media “influencers” who shoot golf balls into the Grand Canyon and die while seeking to pose for the perfect Instagram photo or most spectacular 15 seconds of TikTok trash. So the media distort reality by focusing on three outlier House representatives whose backing comes from some angry Puerto Ricans in Queens, hate-America Somalians in Minnesota, and Muslim Arabs in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that has attracted Jew haters going back to Father Charles Coughlin and the pro-Hitler Dearborn Independent newspaper of the 1930s. If the media were honest, the Racket Squad would get almost no coverage at all. And now Ocasio is getting hounded in public by her former acolytes, who won’t let her go to a movie in peace.
- It is enormously impressive to behold the degree to which Marjorie Taylor Greene has grown and evolved in Congress. She is great. Lauren Boebert does not seem to have grown that way. Her loss. Mitt Romney soon will finish his run. Good. A professorship for him. He let down the people of Utah who have been represented by the likes of Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee. Joe Manchin could have been heroic if he had cast a few votes with the Republicans on some critical judicial appointments. Instead, he let down the people of West Virginia and saved Biden–Harris repeatedly for four years. Meanwhile, in Montana, will Jon Tester fool and bamboozle the voters of that red state again? He does have them pegged as rubes. West Virginia looks to be a great GOP pick-up opportunity. Kyrsten Sinema exiting makes Arizona interesting. And what of Sherrod Brown in Ohio? If only voters would educate themselves sufficiently so that they cannot be bought by more heavily financed campaigns.
- It does not seem optimistic for us ever to return to honest elections. It was nice for two centuries. Most countries have learned from the American democracy catastrophe of the Obama–Pelosi years and are endeavoring to avoid the same. America always had a solitary Election Day. On that day, everyone did and would or would not vote, and an honest snapshot of the American mood was captured somewhat reliably. Instead, now elections are conducted over a period of two and even four weeks. That means different people vote based on different news and considerations that change weekly. Campaigns do not know how to spend. In the past, they built an advertising crescendo to Election Day. Now, if they do that, they lose all the voters who cast votes a month earlier. This happened, for example, when so many Pennsylvanians voted before John Fetterman debated publicly. On the other hand, if campaigns spend too much too soon, then they are weaker for Election Day. In addition, the new era of voting by mail is rife with corruption. It cannot be managed, and we see that the rest of the world wants virtually no part of it. In Israel, for example, the only ones who may vote by mail are diplomats stationed abroad, armed forces stationed away from home, and hospitalized and imprisoned voters who cannot otherwise get to the polls. By contrast, here we have chaos. We see it is unfair because Democrats promote it. The problem is vastly exacerbated by vote harvesting and its derivatives, where one person in a household can intimidate others into voting a certain way or persuade them while standing over them, then take their ballots and mail them. Or a college kid, salaried by Biden and Harris with federal funds, can come in and collect the ballots to mail after “helping” the challenged voters fill out their ballots. Signatures are forged but not checked carefully enough. We know this because we compare the percentage of ballots that get invalidated in some local elections against the remarkably lower percentage of ballots disqualified in a presidential race. Suddenly, a jurisdiction that throws out grievously unacceptable envelopes during a primary or when tallying votes for a city office finds that the population magically does it perfectly when they mail for president.
- The corruption of the process is aggravated by third-party manipulation. It is not the voting machines, and it is a shame that so much focus went that way after 2020. Similarly, it is a shame that so many blowhards who appeared on cable TV with all kinds of accusations could not make their charges stand in court. The focus should have been, and must continue to be, on the way social media allow some posts, ban other posts, and even banned the president of the United States as he campaigned for reelection. They barred posts about the Hunter Biden laptop, all of which we know are true. They promoted falsehoods about Trump being in cahoots with Putin. And we now have cultivated a TikTok generation of zombies who can be hypnotized, if not brainwashed, with a steady stream of 15-second videos posted by people who barely could pass a fourth-grade skills test, much less a civil service exam. Ask yourself: If the social media “influencer” whom your son or daughter “follows” for hours daily on TikTok were to come to your house, being introduced as the person engaged to marry your child or grandchild, you would kill yourself (or the “influencer”), right? And your last words would not be “Free Palestine,” right? So how can you allow your child to spend time with that garbage? Every American should do as I have done and go on TikTok for five minutes, just once. What an eye-opener! It is a peril for American youth.
- Republicans need to reach a national consensus as a party on how to address abortion. It cannot be each Republican making his own party. There must be a national message about the sanctity of life and the cruelty and horrors of late-term abortion. Americans oppose late-term abortion by enormous numbers. Why don’t Republicans speak to that constituency? We now have a chance to leverage the law to stop late-term, last-trimester abortion, to stop federal funding of Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics. I cannot understand why so many engage with such determination in getting duped by the Left into debating the nuances I want to highlight. I don’t want to debate regulating access to certain pharmaceuticals and how to regard laboratory embryos. I want to debate cutting up fully formed fetuses in that Philadelphia abortion butcher’s basement.
- It is amazing that Republicans could not leverage their House majority to control the border. This problem will not end completely until Hispanic majorities vote GOP. Then it will stop instantly. Until then: Laken Riley. Say. Her. Name.
To attend any or all of Rav Fischer’s weekly 60-minute live Zoom classes on the biblical prophets, the Mishnah, Rambam Mishneh Torah, or advanced Judaic texts, email shulstuff@yioc.org.
His 10-part exciting and fact-based series of one-hour classes on the Jewish Underground liberation movement (Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah) and the rise of modern Israel can be found here. In it, he uses historic video clips of Irgun, Lechi, and Haganah actions, decades of past Arab terrorist atrocities, as well as stirring musical selections from the Underground and videoed interviews of participants, to augment data, statistics, maps, and additional historical records to create a fascinating, often gripping, and scholarly enriching educational experience about issues that remain deeply relevant today as Israel engages in an existential war in Gaza against Hamas terrorism.
His latest deeply moving weekly series of informational and inspirational programs on the Hamas Gaza war may be found here.
His 40-part Bible study series covering all of I Samuel (First Samuel) intensively with Talmudic and Midrashic commentaries is now up here.