The Fifth Column

Sunday, December 22, 2024

Holocaust: Do Non-Jews Count?

Statista lists around 5.3 million Jews killed: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1287892/holocaust-jewish-deaths-by-location/

BBC lists around 5.5 million non-Jews killed:

"Historians estimate that between 1.5 and 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish people died during Nazi occupation...
Of the 5.7 million Soviet prisoners of war who were captured during the invasion of the Soviet Union, 3.3 million were killed...
Historians estimate that around 220,000 Roma and Sinti were murdered by the Nazis...
It is estimated that around 200,000 people with disabilities were murdered during the Nazi regime." https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zh9dwnb#z29fydm

The Holocaust killed more non-Jews than it did Jews.

The only way to deny that is to say what the Jewish Virtual Library and Yad Vashem says.

"However tragic, these non-Jewish victims are typically not considered victims of the Holocaust. According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, “By the 1950s, the English term Holocaust came to be employed as the term for the murder of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis. Although the term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the Nazis, strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six million victims of the Holocaust.” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/non-jewish-victims-of-the-holocaust

which is essentially, if you were murdered by the Nazis but you weren't Jewish, then your death doesn't count as a Holocaust death. They find circular definitions really useful.

It is interesting to note that: "No signed documents ordering Adolf Hilter’s “Final Solution” thus far have been found, because throughout their retreat the Nazis meticulously destroyed such documents along with, whenever they could, all physical evidence that death camps such as Sobibor had ever existed." https://www.historynet.com/did-hitler-sign-a-document-authorizing-the-killing-of-the-jews/

However:

"It may be added, as a reminder that we are not just discussing genocide against Jews, that documentation does exist, dated to August 22, 1939, of Hitler ordering the ultimate extermination of the Poles in order to assure that the “Lebensraum” of their soil would never again be disputed, with his notorious cynical reference to what the Ottoman Turks had done to the Armenians in 1915."
http://www.teachgenocide.org/background/hitler.htm

Glenn Reynolds Calls for Extermination of Israel

Heh (link)

Glenn, how bad a look is it that you called for the extermination of Israel?

"THE ONLY MORAL THING IS TO EXTERMINATE HAMAS:

...And their well-insulated funders."
https://instapundit.com/691001/
‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html

Here are some additional links documenting Israel's funding of a terrorist organization, Hamas:

Auschwitz Revises Holocaust numbers

When the museum staff and historians at Auschwitz tell us, on their official website, that the 6 million number was dramatically wrong, that's a problem for the whole Holocaust narrative.

The original 6 million figure included 4 million killed at Auschwitz, two-thirds killed at Auschwitz alone. But the Auschwitz number was off by more than 60%. If Auschwitz was off by 60%, how many of the other numbers are correct?

"It was accepted for many years after the war that about 4 million prisoners died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp. That figure, which originated with the findings of the Soviet commission investigating Nazi crimes, was based on accounts by former prisoners, fragmentary records, and crime-scene investigation at the site. In 1983, the French investigator Georges Wellers, a former Auschwitz prisoner on the staff of the Center for Jewish Documentation in Paris, extended his research to include documents on the number of deportees to the camp and concluded that about 1.6 million people were sent to Auschwitz, where nearly 1.5 million of them died."

https://www.auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/majdanek-victims-enumerated-changes-in-the-history-textbooks,44.html

We already know that, per capita, more Roma were killed than Jews. We already know Generalplan Ost, the extermination programme also involved the policy known as the "Hunger Plan", which would have killed more than 30 million Slavic natives in forced starvations, was in the works.

The Holocaust was not just about, or even primarily about, Jews. Yet if anyone points that out, certain groups instantly label these facts "anti-semitic." That's a different perspective than what you were taught in high school, but it is far more historically accurate than what the popular press pushes. So, yes, there are at least two perspectives on the Holocaust, and the perspective you know, the idea that the Holocaust was primarily about killing Jews, is simply incorrect. The Slavs, the Roma, were both more viciously targeted, and in the case of the Roma, more viciously persecuted, than the Jews.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost

"The Citizenship Law of 1943 omitted any mention of “Gypsies” since they were not expected to exist much longer. " https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/roma-gypsies-in-auschwitz

"It is difficult to determine the number of Roma killed during the Holocaust. It is estimated that of the approximately one million Roma living in Europe before the war, between 250,000 and 500,000 were killed." https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/roma-gypsies-in-auschwitz

"It is estimated that 3 million Christian Poles along with another 3 million Jewish Poles were killed during WWII-- a loss of 22% of their entire population (Silverstein). The occupation and genocide of Poland by the Nazis was known by the name Operation Tannenberg. This plan saw the Polish people executed as they were viewed to be subhuman by the German State. A lesser known plan, Intelligenzaktion Pommern, involved the elimination of Polish elites including teachers, doctors, priests, and community leaders." https://nmu.edu/english/sites/english/files/d7files/WritingAwards/Cohodas/2nd_-_Human_Rights_Contest.pdf

Despite these facts, the Jewish Virtual Library then says, "However tragic, these non-Jewish victims are typically not considered victims of the Holocaust. According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, “By the 1950s, the English term Holocaust came to be employed as the term for the murder of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis. Although the term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the Nazis, strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six million victims of the Holocaust.” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/non-jewish-victims-of-the-holocaust

The deaths of the Roma and the Christian Poles were just as numerous, just as important, and just as much part of the Holocaust as that of the Jews.

Saturday, December 21, 2024

When Judaism Imposes the Death Penalty

Jews can and do impose the death penalty on any Jew who collaborates with their enemies - it is a matter of legal jurisprudence in Judaism that anyone who collaborates with the enemies of Judaism should be murdered:

According to Rabbi Steinsaltz, "The Essential Talmud" (1992):

"Anyone bearing tales against others [Jews} to the alien authorities - even if his evidence pertains to civil law, and even more so if a capital offense is involved - places himself outside the law by his action, and members of the community are permitted and even encouraged to kill him. Even when the death penalty was abolished in certain communities, informers were still sentenced to death. It is interesting to note that in medieval Spain the Jewish courts sentenced Jewish informers, but the sentence was carried out by the Spanish authorities, despite the fact that the informer had been acting on the latter's behalf. The courts continued to judge informers in this severe manner throughout the centuries, and informers have received death sentences within living memory in Soviet Russia and Nazi-occupied territories." (pp 173-174)

Thursday, December 12, 2024

Who Knew Murdering CEOs Was Bad?

"UnitedHealthcare, in particular, has come under public scrutiny as it dramatically increased care denials for its Medicare Advantage enrollees.
The insurer more than doubled the rate of denials for care following hospital stays between 2020 and 2022 as it implemented machine-assisted technology to automate the process, according to a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation’s report released in October. That far surpassed its competitors, including Humana, whose care denials grew 54% during the same time period."

A homeless person can kill two or three people in a night, and only gets what are in his victims' pockets.

A white collar CEO can kill thousands in a night, and make millions in the process.

Which is more dangerous?

Obviously, the homeless man.

Nobody profits from the homeless man's murders but himself, whereas EVERYONE - employees, managers, and especially stockholders - benefits from the murders the CEO commits. That's why so many people applaud the murder of the violent homeless man, while being simultaneously outraged at the CEO's murder. They wanted the law to vet the CEO's murder, to make sure he absolutely had to be killed, and to delay his death enough to close out long positions.

People complain that Mangione embraced the Unabomber. Well, so has Elon Musk.

"Elon Musk, a businessman who’s building some of the most advanced technology the world has ever seen, suggested the Unabomber may have been right about the rise of tech creating too many problems for humanity. Musk tweeted, “he might not have been wrong,” in response to a tweet about Ted Kaczynski, the 81-year-old terrorist who died in prison on Saturday. Musk’s comment was made in response to conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, who tweeted a quote from Kaczynski on Saturday: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.""

So, Mangione was merely parroting Musk.

Trump is a billionaire who got elected by representing that he felt the pain and stood in the place of the poor and marginalized. Mangione's family was wealthy, but Mangione did exactly what Trump said Trump could do "Shoot someone... and I would not lose voters."

Brian Thompson was being investigated for insider trading.
Brian Thompson's company, under his leadership, was actively impoverishing and killing people.

Mangione is simply an instantiation of Trump's entire campaign. It is not at all clear why the right embraces Daniel Penny (who was neither attacked by Jordan Neely, nor did he see Jordan Neely attack anyone) while actively distancing themselves from Mangione (who was not treated by United Health Care, nor impoverished by them).

UPDATE: Apparently doctors were a little miffed with United Healthcare for killing patients.

Friday, December 06, 2024

Mary Did You Know You Are ... Palestinian?

So, the claim is that since Netflix cast the woman who portrays Mary in part because she is Jewish, everything is ok.

But, notice that she is an Ashkenazi Jew. According to DNA testing, while some (but not all, cf. Levite) Ashkenazi Jews can be traced back to the Middle East in the paternal line (Y chromosome), Ashkenazi Jews CANNOT be traced back to the Middle East along the maternal line (mitochondrial chromosomes).

According to the maternal line, over 80% of Ashkenazi are purely European, with no ties to the Middle East at all. And, of course, rabbinic Talmudic Judaism claims to trace descent by the maternal line, not the paternal line.

So, according to the Ashkenazi's own genetic rules, most Ashkenazi Jews are not actually Jewish. And yes, the Israeli rabbinate is known to do DNA testing to establish Ashkenazi descent. They test DNA, all the while denying that Judaism is a race or that there is "Jewish DNA." Obviously, given that Hitler argued precisely along these lines, this rabbinate-approved DNA testing is somewhat fraught with controversy.

And, to be fair, there is NOT such a thing as Jewish DNA. There is no DNA test that proves you are Jewish, no DNA segment that is unique to Jews. The best you can get is "Middle East descent." Which could as easily include Arab Muslims (70% and 82% commonality in the Y chromosome) or Arab Christians (50% commonality).

Thus, the Palestinians are not entirely wrong when they claim Netflix' casting is not genetically authentic. Indeed, they are correct to point out that, from a genetic perspective, anyone whose ancestors have an unbroken history of residing in the Middle East, such as, say, Palestinians, is much more suited to the role.

But, that's just genetics. When it comes to actual cultural/ethnic practice, any Jew who follows the rabbi-Talmud-synagogue system of authority is not very similar to Mary at all. Mary and her parents participated in the blood sacrifice of live animals at the Temple. They did not recognize the authority of rabbis or the Talmud. Before the destruction of the Second Temple, synagogues were more of a social club than a religious experience. No Jew alive today, no one alive today at all, shares a cultural or ethnic experience that has any real overlap with Temple Judaism.

Besides which, Christians insist that while Mary may have begun her life as an observant Jew, she became the very first, and greatest, Christian. She was also dirt poor So, from a cultural perspective, the person best suited to the role of Mary would be one of three people, in order of descending preference: (a) an impoverished Palestinian Christian, (b) an impoverished Palestinian Muslim or (c) a 21st-century Jew who had converted to Christianity.

After all, Muslims are much more aligned to Christian theology than unconverted Jews. Muslims agree that both Jesus and Mary were sinless. Muslims agree that Mary was a virgin and Jesus entered the world via virgin birth. Muslims at least have partial belief in Christian precepts.

Jews, on the other hand, don't agree with any of those things. Given that 21st-century Judaism is almost entirely unlike Temple Judaism, the Jew who converted to Christianity would be converting from an essentially monotheistic paganism to Christianity. As such, a Jew would need to learn to accept both sinlessness and virgin birth, two things which Mary understood from her lifetime of personal experience.

Casting a 21st-century Ashkenazi Jewish woman to play Mary is like casting Elizabeth Warren to play Pocahontas - you could do it based on her claims, but neither the genetics nor the history nor the culture really work to justify the claims.

Saturday, November 02, 2024

Women, Do Not Behold Your Son

The Church's teaching on IVF rescue is inscrutable. In Dignitas Personae #19, the Church tells us "All things considered, it needs to be recognized that the thousands of abandoned embryos represent a situation of injustice which in fact cannot be resolved."

Think about that.

With that statement, the Church tells us that women cannot adopt frozen embryos.

This means IVF is a sin of such magnitude, that a Catholic cannot even offer her own womb as sanctuary for a child who will otherwise starve and freeze to death, buried alive in a frozen nitrogen grave. Yes, this is the fate of every abandoned embryo. Such children cannot even be baptized, for the simple act of baptizing an embryonic frozen child would kill the child. So, since the Church forbids IVF rescue and cannot apply the sacraments, all those thousands of abandoned embryonic children cannot be adopted, they must instead die unshriven, placing their salvation into a state known only to God. (CCC 1261).

Whenever anyone tells you the Church cares more about embryos than it does about women, bring forward this counter. It is essentially the only time a woman can be uniquely damned to hell for having saved a child's life. Women are forbidden to save children conceived through IVF.

The Church looks upon the freezing, starving IVF children, throws up her hands and says, "Well, isn't that sad? Ladies, don't even think about rescuing those children. You are not permitted to take up that cross or lay down your life for them, not even your wombs. For these IVF children, you cannot even temporarily donate the use of your organs. We're fine with wet nursing, but we have to draw the line somewhere. You just stand back and watch them die, do you hear?"

Makes you proud to be a Catholic, don't it?

Friday, November 01, 2024

Judeo-Christian Morality at Work

So, if today's Jews are REALLY Jews, and if Christians are grafted onto the Jews, so that our morality is founded on Jewish morality, what do we do with this?

According to Jewish theology, it's ok for a man to have sex with a two-year old.
Remember, this is "Judeo-Christian theology".

https://x.com/SMSASSASMS/status/1852052059073483009
Rabbi #1: ISIS are better friends to Jews than Christians
Rabbi #2: Islam should invade Europe, Europe must be destroyed
Rabbi #3: An adult man who has intercourse with a toddler... this is not a crime.
Rabbi #4: This rabbi and his colleagues were jailed in Mexico for trafficking minors in Chiapa State
We get upset with Mohammed for having sex with a nine-year old. Jewish men can have sex with two-year olds, and it's fine (link). This is "Judeo-Christian morality."
https://x.com/SMSASSASMS/status/1852111497343709634
Now, keep in mind the Vatican has said Christians should not target Jews for evangelization:

"In spite of the historical breach and the painful conflicts arising from it, the Church remains conscious of its enduring continuity with Israel....Judaism is not to be considered simply as another religion; the Jews are instead our "elder brothers" (Saint Pope John Paul II), our "fathers in faith" (Benedict XVI). Jesus was a Jew, was at home in the Jewish tradition of his time, and was decisively shaped by this religious milieu. (cf."Ecclesia in Medio Oriente", 20). His first disciples gathered around him had the same heritage and were defined by the same Jewish tradition in their everyday life." (#14)

"[Thus,] In concrete terms this means that the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews." (#40)

Likewise, the Vatican condemns all forms of anti-Semitism: "The path that the Church has walked with you, the ancient people of the covenant, rejects every form of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, unequivocally condemning manifestations of hatred toward Jews and Judaism as a sin against God,"

So, Judaism teaches that men can absolutely have sex with girls under the age of three, and Judaism teaches that a girl aged three years and one day can be married to a man by virtue of having had intercourse with that man. But, remember, these two rules govern having sex with Jewish children. Jews can have sex with Gentile children under a different set of rules: Gentile children can be raped until they attain the age of nine years and one day. Since these ideas are integral to the Judaism taught by most of Judaism's most august and revered rabbis, then this must be respected. Christians who hate or reject Judaism's treasured theological teachings, which include the right to have sex with children, are arguably being anti-Semitic.

Also, keep in mind that this teaching about sex with children is not new, or invented by post-Temple Judaism. Rebecca (hebrew רִבְקָה rivqah), wife of Isaac (hebrew יִצְחָק‎ yīṣḥāq), mother of the twins Jacob and Esau (hebrew יַעֲקֹב ya'ãqōb and עֵשָׂו êśāw‎), was underage when she met Isaac, her family sent her off with her nurse Deborah (hebrew דְּבוֹרָה Deborah). The Hebrew word translated as nurse (in Genesis 35:8) is מֵינֶ֣קֶת mêneqeṯ which comes from yanaq, a primitive root meaning to suck, causatively to give milk. Using this word in reference to Deborah indicates that she was a wetnurse, breastfeeding a child. But the text says nothing about Deborah having an infant. Who was the child Deborah was nursing? According to many strands of Jewish teaching, when she left her family to join Isaac, Rebecca was still a child. Her age is still debated, but some Jewish scholars hypothesize she was 3 years old:

Since Isaac was twenty-six years old at the time, and forty when he married Rebekah (Gen. 25:20), she was thus fourteen years old when she married (Seder Olam Rabbah 1). Another tradition gives her age as three years and three days when she left her father’s house (Tractate Soferim, Hosafah [addition] 1, 1:4).

Also, see the Khehot Chumash: (https://www.sefaria.org/search?q=three%20years%20old&tab=text&tvar=1&tsort=relevance&svar=1&ssort=relevance) see also this link: (https://www.sefaria.org/Avodah_Zarah.37a.2?lang=bi)

Isaac was 40 years old when he married Rebecca, in the year 2088, when she was three years old.

So, child marriage and consummation by age three may have been common to Abrahamic Judaism. Child marriage is certainly accepted by post-Temple Judaism. It is reasonable to conclude that child marriage was common and accepted in first century Judaism, the Judaism of Jesus' time.

Oddly, at no point did Jesus, Peter, Paul or any of the early apostles condemn adult-child marriage or sex. There is simply nothing in Scripture to support the idea that adult-child sex was in any way considered wrong or sinful. Indeed, recall that the Blessed Virgin Mary, greatest saint of the Church, could have been as young as 12 when she was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia:

From the age at which Hebrew maidens became marriageable, it is possible that Mary gave birth to her Son when she was about thirteen or fourteen years of age.

Even if one were to argue that the Church forbids it now (although young Catholic saints did it), it is clearly the case that adult-child sex is an ancient and venerable Jewish teaching. Therefore, it is a teaching Catholics cannot attack, lest they be anti-Semites. Indeed, since Catholics are not supposed to evangelize Jews in a way which attacks Jewish faith, Catholics shouldn't even try to persuade Jewish men that having sex with three-year old Jewish girls or eight-year old Gentile girls is wrong.

Furthermore, given the irrevocable salvific covenant God has with ancient Judaism, given the fact that God incarnated as a Jew "at home in the Jewish tradition of his time", Catholics can be assured that Jewish men who have sex with Jewish or Gentile children are going to heaven, as long as they follow Talmudic rules.

As a Catholic, that's certainly something to be proud of, right?

Addendum:

So, this website has this amazing statement, which provides an alternate explanation for why Mary might be called virgin even if she had borne children other than Jesus:

“…the Greek parthenos could also mean that the girl was young and/or unmarried. In fact, in the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament parthenos was used to render three distinct Hebrew words, ‘Virgin’, ‘girl’ and ‘young woman’. Already Rabbis in the Tannaitic era (first to second century ad) subscribed to further nuances, and there is no reason to think that all these were invented by them. Even the word betulah, which normally means virgo intact, when used by them could carry the laternal sense of bodily immaturity with the consequential inability to conceive. In Rabbinic terminology this type of virginity in a woman ceased with the physical onset of puberty. The Mishnah, the oldest of the rabbinic codes, defines a virgin:
"Who is the woman characterized as a virgin in this context? It is any woman who has not seen the flow of menstrual blood in all her days, even if she was married and has experienced bleeding as a result of intercourse consummating her marriage." (Mishnah, Niddah 1:4).

The Tosefta, another early Jewish code of law, claims in the name of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus (late first century ad) that such a woman would continue to count as a virgin even after she had conceived and borne children without prior menstruation:
Who is [considered to be] a virgin [for purposes of niddah] (see Niddah 1:3)? Any girl who has not seen blood in her days, even if she is married and she has children, I call her a virgin, until her eyes have seen the first. Do not call her a virgin with respect to virginity, rather a virgin with respect to blood. (Tosefta, Niddah 1:6)
To understand these statements, we must remember that in the InterTestamental and early rabbinic age, pre-puberty marriage was generally permitted."

Tuesday, October 22, 2024

Why the Church is Two Centuries Behind

George Weigel, in his inimitably ignorant fashion, is bloviating about the latest synod and its discontents. Specifically, he deplores the invocation of Cardinal Martini (d. 1999). The problem, of course, lies precisely in the fact that Martini, might have been theologically insane in some areas, but he was also sometimes correct. Two of the points the First Things article decries are precisely the two points Martini got right: the Church is two centuries behind the times, and it is in need of another ecumenical council.

The Catholic Church was wildly successful in a subsistence-level society. In such a society, everyone was poor. The corporal acts of mercy were used as an evangelization tool to bring everyone into the Church.

But in a surplus-goods society, especially a first-world society like the US, virtually no one is poor in the 1800's senses of the word. No one starves to death, no one dies of smallpox, anesthetics means pain and suffering is minimal even when major surgery or death approaches. No one can identify with the Cross in a way that EVERYONE could in 1800.

Now, we suffer from diseases of wealth, like addiction, alphabet people, and abortion. Try this: find an addiction treatment center for lay people in the US that has daily Catholic Mass or even a weekly priest visit. Good luck. There is only one such retreat center in the entire nation, and it is run by a married lesbian.

While the bishops natter on about the problem of poverty in a country that has essentially no poverty, millions suffer from diseases of the wealthy. The Church completely ignores them, because it has no objective bullet point in any of its works of mercy for them. The Church teaches celibacy as objectively superior to marriage, and wonders why the TFR is dropping even among Catholic populations.

In 1800, everyone lived in extreme poverty. Today, according to the latest poverty statistics, approximately 9.2% of the global population, or about 700 million people, live in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1.90 per day. The Church is still trying to sell a subsistence-level response to a world that is 90% wealthy people. It doesn't understand its own market.

Martini was also correct about the timing of the next ecumenical council. If you bother to look at the intervals between councils, the geometric mean between councils is 60 years. That puts 2025 smack dab at the geometric mean: 60 years since the last council.