April 9, 2024: The Dem Dark-Money Machine Prepares for Battle

Hostage talks at impasse; Israel threatens to strike Iran; Warren calls Gaza war ‘genocide’

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The Big Story

Democratic-aligned dark-money groups have already pledged to spend nearly $800 million to reelect Joe Biden, according to a recent investigation by The Epoch Times. That’s more than four times the amount—$160 million—pledged thus far by Republican-aligned nonprofits and political action committees (PACs).

Let’s take a look at some of the groups protecting our democracy. Hint: George Soros and Reid Hoffman play a starring role:

• American Bridge 21st Century, or AB PAC, has pledged to spend $200 million on the 2024 election. A “hybrid PAC”—meaning it can contribute directly to candidate committees and make independent expenditures, as long as it maintains separate bank accounts for each purpose—AB PAC is mostly funded by Democracy PAC, which is in turn funded by George Soros and his various Open Society foundations and nonprofits. AB PAC has also received large donations from Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital, Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, and Deborah Simon.

• The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has announced that it will spend $200 million across seven swing states. As we reported here in our Feb. 14 edition, the SEIU, as it has become more dependent on college-educated government and para-governmental workers, has transformed from a “worker” organization into an interchangeable element in the larger NGO Borg. The SEIU has a “substantial ownership stake” in the Amalgamated Bank of New York, whose clients have included the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, and nonprofits such as the League of Conservation Voters and Color of Change. According to The Epoch Times, two SEIU-connected PACs are funded by union members and local branches, but it is unclear if the full $200 million will also come from members and locals. 

• The League of Conservation Voters (LCV), a complex of related PACs and environmental nonprofits, has announced that it will spend $120 million on the 2024 cycle. According to The Epoch Times, LCV has received funding from “multiple organizations tied to Arabella Advisors,” including the Sixteen Thirty Fund, which in turn receives funding from Soros, Amalgamated, and other Democratic megadonors. 

• Climate Power, which consists of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (Climate Power Education Fund) and a super PAC (Climate Power Action), has pledged to spend $80 million to “educate Americans about President Biden’s historic climate progress and the benefits of the Inflation Reduction Act”—which, as we reported Dec. 22, has involved handing over $600 million in EPA grant money to “grassroots” “community organizations,” including $50 million to one that promises to “mobilize … the climate movement for the fight to free Palestine.” Climate Power Action’s largest single donor is Fund for a Better Future, which gave $5.9 million to the PAC in 2022. Climate Power Action also received $3 million from LCV’s PAC in 2022. 

• Republican Voters Against Trump has announced a $50 million anti-Trump ad campaign in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. The group is financed by the Republican Accountability PAC, which is in turn funded by Democratic megadonors, including Reid Hoffman. Defending Democracy Together, a group led by Bulwark Media cofounder Bill Kristol, has also donated $2 million to the Republican Accountability PAC. 

Climate Power PAC’s connection to Fund for a Better Future—whose donors are completely unknown—offers a nice lesson in how, beneath the head-spinning array of acronyms and “nonprofits” and single-issue advocacy organizations and shadowy political operatives, the bullshit is all connected.

You may think, for instance, that “educating Americans about President Biden’s historic climate progress” and paying spies to run information operations on the American population are separate things. And they are, in theory. In practice, they are both species of the genus “Democratic electioneering,” and are funded by the same people. Fund for a Better Future, which gives millions Climate Power PAC, paid $2 million in 2017 to a group called The Democracy Integrity Project (TDIP). TDIP, which received an additional $1.5 million from Soros in 2017 and 2018, in turn paid $3.8 million in 2017 to firms connected with opposition research firm Fusion GPS and ex-British spy Christopher Steele. Steele, of course, was the author of the Steele dossier, which falsely claimed that there was a “well-developed conspiracy” between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Indeed, TDIP appears to have been founded, initially, with the sole purpose of continuing to fund Fusion GPS and Steele’s research after the 2016 presidential campaign and spreading the resulting propaganda throughout the American political system. The group was founded in 2017 by Daniel J. Jones, an ex-FBI agent and top staffer for then Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA). According to a 2019 RealClearInvestigations report by Paul Sperry, the group, in addition to paying for the Russiagate research, stood up an “elaborate media influence operation” to sell the Trump-Russia collusion narrative in the press, feeding leads to FBI and congressional investigators and then briefing reporters that “authorities” were “investigating” those leads. For instance, Chuck Ross of The Daily Caller reported in 2019 that Jones had bragged in private text messages about planting a story in Reuters that raised questions about wealthy Russians purchasing Trump properties in Florida—a story that was then picked up by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), the leading champion of the collusion hoax in Congress.

TDIP even got in on the misinformation game. Along with another nonprofit, it paid nearly half a million dollars in 2018 to a cybersecurity firm, New Knowledge (now called Yonder), that helped author a 2018 Senate report on alleged Russian social media interference in the 2016 election. But it turned out that New Knowledge was engaged in its own form of propaganda. The company participated in a 2017 project, funded by Reid Hoffman and directed by Mikey Dickerson, a former official at Barack Obama’s United States Digital Service, to interfere in the 2017 Alabama Senate race between Democrat Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore. According to an internal report leaked to The New York Times, the project created fake Facebook accounts posing as conservative Alabamians who urged other Republicans not to vote for Moore. New Knowledge also, in its own words, “orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

But let’s not be cynical. We’re sure that the various spooks, operatives, and oligarchs employed by this nearly billion-dollar messaging machine will play fair this time.

Read more here: https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/democrats-commit-vastly-more-dark-money-than-republicans-for-2024-post-5619292?ea_src=frontpage&ea_med=premium-featured-0 

And here: https://dailycaller.com/2020/04/22/new-knowledge-senate-intelligence-fusion-gps-daniel-jones-steele-dossier/ 

And here: https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/01/fusion-gps-steele-soros-millions/

And here: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/03/11/trump-russia_20_dossier-tied_firm_sending_dc_journalists_daily_collusion_briefings.html

IN THE BACK PAGES: Islamic humiliation and post-Christian horror explain the outpouring of hatred for Jews and Israel, argues David P. Goldman

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The Rest

→Israel and Hamas appear to be at an impasse over a potential hostages-for-cease-fire deal presented by CIA Director William Burns on Sunday. The deal reportedly calls for a six-week pause in fighting and for Hamas to release 40 “humanitarian” hostages (men over 50, women, and children) in exchange for some number of Palestinian security prisoners and Israel’s assent to the return of more Palestinians to northern Gaza. Hamas has claimed it does not have 40 living humanitarian hostages to exchange, and Israel is proposing that the group make up the difference by releasing living hostages from the non-humanitarian category (i.e., adult men, whom Hamas classifies as soldiers). The U.S.-drafted proposal also appears to back the Hamas demand for an Israeli withdrawal from the corridor that splits the Gaza Strip along a north-south axis, which would allow Palestinians, including Hamas, to freely return to the north. Israel has indicated that it’s willing to make concessions on this and other matters, but not on Hamas’ main demands, which include a permanent cease-fire, a permanent withdrawal of all Israeli forces in Gaza, and an end to the Israeli blockade of the territory.

→Israel has threatened to strike nuclear facilities and other critical infrastructure in Iran if Iran directly attacks Israel, according to a report in Elaph News cited in The Times of Israel. The report, sourced to a “Western security official,” said that Israel has been conducting Air Force drills to prepare for potential strikes inside Iran following Iranian threats to retaliate against Israel for its assassination of several top Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders in Damascus, Syria, last week. On Friday, a “senior [U.S.] administration official” told CNN that a “significant” Iranian attack against Israeli or U.S. forces was “inevitable,” but a U.S. intelligence official told CNN Monday that Iran is unlikely to strike American or Israeli targets for fear of reprisal.

→In addition to allowing millions of illegal immigrants to cross the southern border with Mexico, the Biden administration has flown hundreds of thousands of them directly into the United States via its “CHNV” or “Advanced Travel Authorization Program.” According to a recent report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), this quasi-legal program—based on a provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act allowing the president to grant temporary “humanitarian parole” to illegal border crossers on an emergency “case by case” basis—has allowed at least 386,000 unauthorized migrants to fly directly into the United States since January 2023, with 33,000 of those traveling on to New York City. A parallel program has “paroled” another 420,000 migrants into the country at land ports of entry over the same time period. According to a New York Post op-ed by Todd Bensman of CIS, the purpose of these programs is to “reduce the optics of thousands illegally crossing the land border at once”—by offering a chunk of the migrants a pseudo-legal avenue of entry. The administration claims that the migrants are “screened and vetted” against national security and public safety databases, but it’s doubtful that authorities can do much digging into 800,000 foreign nationals. In March, for instance, a 26-year-old Haitian national, Cory Alvarez, was charged with raping a developmentally disabled 15-year-old girl at a Massachusetts migrant hotel. He had been flown directly from Haiti to New York via the CHNV program the previous summer.

→President Biden on Monday released the details of a new student debt forgiveness plan that would forgive some or all student debt for nearly 30 million borrowers—if it survives legal challenges. Biden’s previous attempt to cancel $400 billion of student debt under the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act was struck down by the Supreme Court; the new plan, which does not have a price tag, is designed to operate under a different legal authority, the Higher Education Act, which the administration claims allows the secretary of education to waive certain types of student debt—even though the Supreme Court said that student loan forgiveness requires authorization from Congress. Here are the categories of borrowers affected by the new plan:

• Borrowers who owe more than they borrowed due to unpaid interest would see $20,000 canceled from their balance if they make at least $120,000 as a single adult or $240,000 as part of a married household. Borrowers making less would be eligible for more relief. The White House estimates that 23 million people would have their balances erased under this provision.

• Borrowers who are eligible for, but have not applied to, existing federal forgiveness programs would have their balances canceled.

• Borrowers with undergraduate debt who began paying 20 years ago and borrowers with graduate debt who began paying 25 years ago would have their balances canceled. 

• Borrowers who enrolled in “low-financial-value” degree programs that lost federal funding would have their debts erased.

• Borrowers experiencing “hardship in their daily lives”—which is not defined in the plan—would also receive relief.

According to The New York Times, Biden officials hope to begin handing out debt relief “as soon as this fall.” We assume that means before election day.

→Elizabeth Warren told a Boston-area mosque on Monday that she believes there is “ample evidence” that Israel’s Gaza war legally constitutes a genocide. In a question-and-answer session at the Boston Islamic Center, Warren was asked her opinion on South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. She responded, “If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they’ll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so.” But she also said she was less concerned with “labels” than with saying “what Israel is doing wrong.” It is “wrong,” Warren said, to “starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend your will [sic].” A spokesperson for the senator told Politico Monday night that Warren had “commented on the ongoing legal process at the ICJ, not sharing [sic] her views on whether genocide is occurring in Gaza.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said Tuesday, in response to Warren’s remarks, that “we don’t have any evidence of genocide being created.”

→The Russian Republic of Chechnya has banned music that is too fast or too slow. In a move widely perceived as a crackdown on pop and techno music in the Muslim-majority region, Minister of Culture Musa Dadaev announced Friday that all musical compositions will henceforth be limited to a tempo of between 80 and 116 beats per minute. The decision, backed by Chechen leader and Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov, is meant to ensure that all Chechen musical creations align with the “Chechen mentality and musical rhythm,” according to Dadaev. That means the Creedence Clearwater Revival’s cover of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which clocks in at 118 bpm, is now banned in Chechnya:

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TODAY IN TABLET: 

The New Defenders of the Faith, by Sheluyang Peng

Authors need to stop relying on victim narratives to sell books—not only because it tokenizes minorities, but also because it makes one dependent on the whims of liberal elites who are quick to adopt new pets

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SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that  you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.

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Horror and Humiliation in Gaza

The outpouring of hatred for Jews and Israel after October 7 is rooted in the fear of extinction shared by post-Christian and Islamic tribes

By David P. Goldman

Like the Nazis, Islamist terrorism weaponized horror to demoralize the West. Christianity has a soft underbelly: It struggles to reconcile belief in a God who so loved the world that He sacrificed Himself for its salvation with the suffering of innocents. That was the nub of Voltaire’s attack on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake killed 12,000 in 1755, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s protest that “if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”

The post-Christian world, which eschews the mystery of Divine Providence in favor of a squeamish urge for earthly salvation, is all the more vulnerable to the theater of horror. The post-Christian West has become paralyzed by the fear that the world is beset by forces hostile to humankind, which J.R.R. Tolkien called “the black breath.”

All too well have the Western-educated, multilingual leaders of Hamas gauged the spiritual state of the West, and invented an atrocious way of conducting war in order to psychically paralyze it. Hamas cannot win a war against Israel, but it has sufficient power to force Israel to fight a war that cost many civilian lives. Whether the civilian death toll is the 32,000 that Hamas claims or the 18,000 estimated by pro-Israeli analysts is of minor importance.

During the U.S. Marines’ siege of Fallujah 20 years ago, I wrote that the battle for that city brought into focus the vulnerabilities of both the Americans and the Sunni resistance. Horror—the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end—is lethal to the West, which cannot endure without faith in a loving Heavenly Father. For the Islamic world, meanwhile, humiliation—the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it—is beyond its capacity to endure.

The Muslim world said nothing when between 9,000 and 40,000 civilians died in the 2016-17 campaign against ISIS in Mosul. That involved Muslims (the Iraqi Army with American support) killing Muslims. But Gaza is not merely a slaughter but also a humiliation, the reduction of Hamas, and the displacement of most of the Gaza population. Muslims can accept Muslims killing Muslims, but they can’t abide Jews humiliating Muslims.

This toxic combination of horror and humiliation poisons world opinion against Israel. There is no near-term remedy. Horror elicits irrational responses. Never mind that Hamas forced an urban war upon Israel through unspeakable acts of brutality against Israeli civilians, and that it embeds terrorists in hospitals, schools, and other civilian installations to maximize casualties among its own civilians. Never mind that Israel’s response has occasioned fewer civilian casualties in urban combat than any other fighting force on record. As West Point urban warfare expert John Spencer wrote in Newsweek:

The UN, EU, and other sources estimate that civilians usually account for 80 percent to 90 percent of casualties, or a 1:9 ratio, in modern war (though this does mix all types of wars). In the 2016-2017 Battle of Mosul, a battle supervised by the U.S. that used the world's most powerful airpower resources, some 10,000 civilians were killed compared to roughly 4,000 ISIS terrorists.

Russia and China denounce Israel simply because it is an ally of the United States, and many former colonies of the West, prominently South Africa, shoehorn the Gaza war into their own traumatic narrative of national liberation. That’s to be expected.

What’s new and dangerous is the extent to which the Hamas theater of horror has demoralized the remnants of the Christian world. Support for Israel in the United States has dropped to 36% in March from 50% in November, according to the Gallup Poll.

America has been the last bastion of Christian faith in the industrial world, with 63% professing the religion. Sixty-eight percent of American Christians say that religion is very important in their lives, while most of Europe responds in single digits or teens.

Support for Israel among American Christians varies with religious commitment: Committed evangelicals and conservative Catholics were steadfast supporters of the Jewish state—until recently. “As of late 2021, only 33.6% of young Evangelicals under 30 support Israel, compared to 67.9% in 2018. At the same time, in 2021, 24.3% of young Evangelicals said they support the Palestinians, compared to only 5% three years before,” according to a recent book by Motti Inbari and Kirill Bumin cited by The Jerusalem Post.

Young evangelicals are less religious than their parents. One of the book's authors noted that younger evangelicals “see the Jewish people and the state of Israel as no longer necessary in the fulfillment of God’s plan for the second coming of Jesus Christ and the End Times.” The mark of Cain of fading faith among younger evangelicals is a drastic decline in childbearing. A generation ago, evangelicals and Hispanics kept America’s total fertility rate just at the replacement level of 2.1, while mainline Protestant fertility fell to European levels. By 2020, evangelical fertility had fallen to the same low level as the older liberal denominations. A century ago, the mainline denominations abandoned Christianity’s eschatological vision for the Social Gospel, the progressive doctrine of salvation in this world. Evangelical numbers surged in the 1970s and 1980s in response. Now, it appears, younger evangelicals are being drawn to a Social Gospel of their own, with similar results.

Why are young Americans—even the children of Israel’s evangelical supporters—so obsessed with the Palestinian problem? We don’t need John Donne’s reminder that the bell tolls for us. No people in human history are more self-obsessed than the lost souls of the post-Christian world. They abhor the supposedly racist and misogynist past, and eschew a future that requires raising children. Futureless, they are condemned to wander in a purgatorial present of identity cultivation, in a perpetual state of existential trauma. Not since late Hellenism has a cultivated, technologically sophisticated society simply chosen to pass out of existence.

Religion and its carrier wave, traditional culture, offer mortal individuals the hope that some trace of their personhood will survive their physical demise. Whether one expects an eternal reward singing psalms in heaven, or hopes to live on in the hearts of one’s countrymen, the prospect of immortality is what makes mortality tolerable. Of all living creatures, only human beings are sentient of their mortality. “Death is a mocking fate which awaits us all, a trauma of human helplessness which disturbs our existential serenity. It is an absurdity which undoes all of man’s rational planning, his dreams and hopes,” wrote R. Joseph Soloveitchik about the parah adumah, the purification ritual for contamination from a human corpse.

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Post-Christian culture is obsessed with death. Psychiatry, the counterreligion of the 20th century, tried to wish away the fear of death. Freud wrote, “We cannot, indeed, imagine our own death; whenever we try to do so we find that we survive ourselves as spectators. The school of psychoanalysis could thus assert that at bottom no one believes in his own death, which amounts to saying: in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his immortality.” He neglected to add that if we can’t imagine ourselves actually dead, we nonetheless can imagine ourselves as insentient rotting flesh. Mortality horrifies us as deeply as it did our ancestors. Instead of fighting it, we wallow in it.

If Freud kicked the fear of death out the front door, it crept back in through the windows and chimney. Popular culture is taken up with perpetual youth and horrified by images of death. Once marginal, the horror genre is almost as popular as comedy. When Universal Studios released its classic monster films in the 1930s, one out of 300 Hollywood features was a supernatural thriller. By 2013 the proportion was one in eight, by my rough count using the IMDB database. Statista in 2023 found that 45% of Americans streamed horror films, almost as much as thrillers, at 51%.

Consider our fixation with zombies, notionally the most repetitive and least interesting of all horror genres. Michael Jackson, the most popular entertainer of the past half-century, brought zombies into the mainstream with Thriller, still the most popular album of all time with 70 million copies sold. The Walking Dead at its peak was the most-watched item on television. Strictly speaking, zombie films are death porn, with anonymous actors doing the same thing over and over again.

More than any figure of popular culture in the past century, Jackson embodied the burning desire of his generation never to grow up. If you have no hope of some form of continuity of your life after death, the next best thing is to stretch out your youth as long as possible. Jackson’s nose decayed after numerous plastic surgeries like the portrait of Dorian Gray. But his search for perpetual youth endeared him to Americans on the same futile quest. Throughout his failed surgeries and reports of his pederasty, he remained a god.

There is nothing new in the now-ubiquitous horror genre. Horror was the prevailing affect of the god-haunted pagan world, a creation indifferent or even hostile to humankind. No Hollywood screenwriter invented a monster more horrible than Lucan’s Erichtho, the Thessalian witch who divined the future by reviving fresh corpses, not to mention Grendel in Beowulf.

The source of pagan horror is the prospect of ethnic extinction. “The love of the Gentiles for their own ethnicity is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death,” wrote the German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. They “foresee a time when their land with its rivers and mountains still lies under heaven as it does today, but other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their laws and customers have lost their living power.” Their gods are immortal but not eternal; Zeus knew that his nemesis would arrive as surely as he overthrew his father Chronos, and the Norse gods awaited their twilight in Ragnarok.

Pagan life is bitter, as the demigod Silenus told King Midas, because it is futile. As the Chorus tells Oedipus, and Silenus told Midas, the best thing is "not to be born, not to be, to be nothing," as Nietzsche quoted the tale. The second best is to die as soon as possible. “The Olympian magic mountain opens, as it were, to our view and shows us its roots. The Greek knew and felt the terrors and horrors of existence,” he added.

Nietzsche’s “horrors of existence” haunt the post-Christian world, which has rejected the past and abandoned the future by refusing to have children. It can find purpose only in the concoction of identity in the present, and it does this with the obsessiveness of religious fanatics. That is what explains such anomalies as “Queers for Palestine,” a label that first appeared in a 5,000-person march in Berlin in 2019. At a Jan. 6 event near Wellesley College, “Transgender Palestinian poet and activist Yaffa … queer Palestinian-American performance artist Juliet Olivier, and queer Palestinian-American author and activist Hannah Moushabeck spoke about how indigenous peoples around the world were queer before colonists brought homophobia to their societies.”

Radical queer activists and Islamic militants have a deeper affinity, though: They know they have no future. The identitarian terrorism of the tide-pool tribes left behind by the great transformation of the world resonates with Westerners who also have no past and no future—only the tepid consolations of self-invention. Never mind that Hamas beheads gay Palestinians on the West Bank and ISIS throws gay men off buildings. The solidarity of the doomed is stronger than the survival instinct.

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The above considerations help explain why the post-Christian world is so easily horrified, but they do not explain why it is especially horrified by the Jews.

In October 2016, the Iraqi Army under U.S. direction laid siege to Mosul, a city of 2 million in northern Iraq occupied by ISIS fighters in 2014. ISIS seized from the Iraqi Army enough American munitions to equip three divisions and indulged in an orgy of rape and murder. The Iraqi Army liberated the city after seven months of fighting in which 9,000 to 11,000 civilians died by the most common estimate. The high estimate of civilian deaths is 40,000. The U.S.-led coalition destroyed entire neighborhoods with airstrikes—without dropping leaflets, placing phone calls of warning, or using dummy bombs, as do the Israelis. A U.S. Army report estimates that 40,000 homes were destroyed and 800,000 survivors fled to displaced persons camps.

Yet internet searches reveal not a single mention of “genocide” in the context of Mosul during and in the two years after the siege. Amnesty International scolded the coalition for inadequate protection of civilians but attributed war crimes to ISIS alone. The parallels between Hamas and Islamic Jihad are striking: The use of civilian shields is a war crime per se, and rockets fired from Gaza at Israeli cities may have killed as many or more Arab civilians than Israelis. Jihadists fired 4,360 rockets at civilian targets in Israel between May 10 and May 21, 2021, Human Rights Watch reported, killing 10 Israeli civilians. Six-hundred-forty of these fell back into Gaza, according to the Israeli military. A single misfire documented by the rights organization killed seven Gazan civilians, and it is likely that there were many more.

Some instances of large-scale civilian death horrify the post-Christian West more than others. Images of burned-out homes and dead children evoke the horror of mortality that haunts the post-Christian world. But perversely, images of Jews defending themselves ruthlessly are even more troubling.

The immortality of the Jewish people is a reproach to the gentiles who know that their culture has a use-by date. This can be an inspiration to Christians, who may see the fulfillment of God’s promise to the Jews as proof that there is a God who fulfills His promises. To the self-doomed, infertile, futureless post-Christians, Jewish continuity is a reproach. Antisemitism is the grudge against the living borne by the soon-to-be dead.

If the ancient pagan was overcome with horror at mortality, ancient Israel trembled in dread (pachad) of the Infinite. Jacob (Genesis 31:42) refers to God as “the dread of Isaac,” and R. Soloveitchik explains: “Man has never regained complete peace with God after the sin of eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Even the greatest personalities could not free themselves from that sinister feeling of tremor and terror. God claims the entirety of the human being. God gave a son to his chosen one, Abraham—and demanded him back. God is called Pachad Yitzhak, the horror of Isaac, for the latter’s destiny was interwoven with that of Divine ‘animosity’ at the Akeidah [Binding].”

Pachad in the Bible is mainly a response to the manifestation of the Divine, except in two instances in the Bible in which pachad appears not as an attribute of God, but as a quality with which God endows Israel. In these cases, God’s people themselves partake of the dread of God. As we prepared to cross the Jordan (Deut. 11) Moses told us: “There shall no man be able to stand before you: for the Lord your God shall lay the fear of you and the dread [pachad] of you upon all the land that ye shall tread upon, as he hath said unto you.” And again in the Purim story as recounted in Esther 8:17: “And in every province and in every city, when the king’s command and decree arrived, there was gladness and joy among the Jews, a feast and a holiday. And many of the people of the land professed to be Jews, for the fear [pachad] of the Jews had fallen upon them.”

Dread, or horror, is double-edged in Judaism. God left Creation incomplete, and parts of the primal chaos can burst back into the unfinished work: That chaos, as R. Soloveitchik said, is Amalek. Man is called to be God’s co-creator and perfect the work, by extirpating Amalek. Repelling Amalek emulates God’s creation of the world, and is an act of imitatio dei. When Jews arise to fight Amalek, God’s pachad is laid upon us.

God was manifest in our march into Canaan and hidden in the Book of Esther, but His presence nonetheless was felt in the pachad that fell upon the subject peoples of Persia. Far be it from me to read the workings of Providence into current events. But facts are facts: Israel reduced Hamas in Gaza with a fraction of the military casualties that Western urban warfare specialists predicted, and a fraction of the civilian casualties caused by similar operations in Iraq. Israel continues to strike Iranian assets in Syria with impunity, and Iran fears to respond. Hezbollah failed to launch the expected second front against Israel after Netanyahu’s warning that “what we are doing in Gaza, we can do in Beirut.”

The dread of the Jews has fallen upon the rest of the world. That is not what we asked for, and it has also called forth hate. But we have been there before, and it is not altogether the worst outcome.