THANKFUL - AND YET......

     Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends and family and to all my readers from he various countries of the world who are gracious enough to follow me.
     I am thankful for my family, for my friends, for the gift of writing, for my very life. I am thankful to be living here in Florida in the USA. And yet, there are dark clouds hanging around. So be happy today but remember there are those who have less than we do. Today I am putting on two articles written by excellent writers, written from the heart and perhaps they will help us understand the meaning of being grateful and the meaning of loss of surety of life. Please read both, long, but very important and well worth the time.

WHY I AM A BAD JEW
This was written by Rami Kaminski, MD, founder and director of the Institute for Integrative Psychiatry in New York City.

His credentials are at the end of the piece.

For centuries, we lived in Berdichev. In the brutal Ukrainian winter of 1941, SS soldiers arrived there and rounded up eighty-seven members of my family – babies, young adults, octogenarians – stripped them naked, marched them to a nearby ditch, and executed them. Their lifeless bodies fell
silently into a mass grave.

Like most Jews in Europe, my family "cooperated" with the Final Solution.
They did not resist or fight back. Six million Jews were slaughtered in a
period of four years. They received little sympathy while they were still
alive and hunted down like animals. There was no public outcry because the
Holocaust fit the world's narrative for Jews during the past 2000 years: a
people destined to be persecuted and slaughtered.

During their two millennia in the Diaspora, Jews were not known to resist.
There are few recorded instances in which Jews turned against their host
nations or retaliated against their murderers. Instead, the survivors – if
there were any – were expelled or left  for another place. The murdered were
regarded as "good" Jews. They accepted their fate helplessly, without
resistance.

This narrative of the Jews has played out on the historical stage with
boring monotony: Jews get killed because they are Jews. Nothing novel about
it. After the Holocaust, however, the world, disgusted by this particularly
ghoulish period of history, accorded some sympathy for the Jews.

Media commentary about the ongoing Gaza War reveals the world has now
reverted to its pre-Holocaust perspective. Today, the only good Jew is a
powerless Jew willing to become a dead one. The Zionist Revolution is to
blame. It changed everything. Jews re-created their own country. The Arabs
attacked the new Jewish state the day after independence and promised to
complete Hitler's genocide. In succeeding decades, the Arabs attacked again
and again. Strangely, the Jews, many of them refugees from Arab nations,
adopted a surprising, new tactic: they fought back.

With Zionism, the Jews stubbornly refused to follow the centuries-old
script. They refuse to be killed without resistance. As a result, the world
has become increasingly enraged at their impertinence.

The recent events in Gaza and Mumbai make this plain. In 2005, Israel
eliminated all Jewish presence in Gaza making it "Judenrein," and handed it
over to the Palestinians. Left behind were synagogues and thriving green
houses. The Arabs looted and destroyed them literally the day after Israel's
withdrawal was complete. Where these structures once stood, the Palestinians
built military bases and installed rocket launchers to shell Israeli
civilians. To date, some 7,000 missiles have fallen on Israeli cities and
towns, killing and maiming dozens, and sowing widespread terror. Medical
studies reveal nearly all Jewish children in the communities bordering Gaza
suffer from serious, trauma-induced illness.

The Gazan Palestinians then elected Hamas to lead them. Hamas proceeded to
kill or imprison their political rivals, and its leaders, true to the Hamas
charter, were unabashed in clearly stating their aims: they will not stop
until they achieve their Final Solution, kill all the Jews, take over the
land of Israel, and establish a theocracy governed by Islamic law.

As killing Jews for being Jews has been a national sport for centuries,
Islamic militants are justified in believing they are merely fulfilling
historical tradition in Argentina, India and Gaza. Surely the Jews in Mumbai
did not occupy Gaza. They were tortured and killed just for being Jews. And
predictably, in the eyes of the world, they immediately became good Jews,
just like my murdered family in Bertishev.

Good Jews would wait until Hamas has weapons enabling its members to achieve
their ultimate goal of absolute mass murder. Those enraged by Israel's
defensive military action insist Hamas uses only "crude" rockets, as if
Qassams were BB guns, and military inferiority were somehow equivalent with
moral superiority. In fact, Hamas now has Iranian-supplied Grad missiles
which have landed on Be'er Sheva and the outskirts of Tel Aviv.

Westerners have had only sporadic exposure to the indiscriminant killing in
the name of "holy war" which Israel has lived with for years. Memories of
9-11, Madrid, and London have dimmed. This is not because the Islamic
militants made a careful choice of weapons. They simply have not yet
acquired nuclear bombs. Once they do, the West will develop a less detached
view about the Islamists' professed intentions for the "infidels."

The only enlightened people in the civilized world who actually get it are
the Israelis. They've not had time for detached philosophical ponderings.
They've been too busy confronting the reality of Islamic fundamentalism.

Soon, Iran will have nuclear weapons. It will give them to Hezbollah and
Hamas. Today, Jews must take a position: either be "good" Jews willing to be
slaughtered without resistance, or be "bad" Jews who defend themselves at
the cost of being pariahs of our enlightened world. Good Jews would wait for
another six million to be murdered, and pick up to leave for another country
to start the cycle again. The bad ones refuse to go calmly into the ditch.I confess: I'm a bad Jew.
=========================

Rami Kaminski, MD, is Director and Founder of the Institute for
Integrative Psychiatry in New York, a not-for-profit organization aimed at
evaluating current psychiatric services and how they integrate with
medicine, such as the mutual effects between medical and psychiatric
conditions. Prior to that, Dr. Kaminkski was the Commissioner's Liaison to
Families and Community and Medical Director of Operations at the New York
State Office of Mental Health. Dr. Kaminski also holds an academic position
as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He earned
recognition in 1990 from Mt. Sinai Hospital as Physician of the Year, and
received the Exemplary Psychiatrist Awards from the National Alliance for
the Mentally Ill. Dr. Kaminski's research explores neuropsychiatric aspects
of brain disorders, such as Alzheimer and Parkinson's disease and movement
disorders, as well as psychopharmacology of schizophrenia and other
psychotic disorders. He was for many years Director of The Schizophrenia
research Unit at Mount Sinai Hospital in NYC. Dr. Kaminiski also served as
the Medical Director of the PMHP and consultant to the committee in charge
of developing the Special Needs Program.

Total in Israel for October, November:  24 dead, 199 wounded, 82 for shock. From the elderly to the young, Jew and even some Arabs  being killed in these attacks, stabbed, hacked, axed, shot, rammed by cars. And the attacks continue, thankfully avoiding more killing and wounding.