This past Thursday was my saddest day since October 7th, 2023.
I watched in horror as the bodies of Jewish hostages held by the terrorists in Gaza, were returned to Israel.
Pure evil was on full display in Gaza.
My heart was ripped apart as the coffins of Oded Lifshitz, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, and what we all thought were the remains of their mother, Shiri Bibas, were paraded in a grotesque, macabre spectacle choreographed by Hamas. Festive music blared and crowds cheered. Thousands of men, women and children smiled, laughed and cheered. So many people who put death before life.
I have no words to add to what we all saw. You really cannot describe the indescribable.
But, in what world does any sane person believe peace can be made with those Gazan monsters? In what world does anyone believe Israel can allow Gaza to exist the way it did pre-October 7th? In what world can decent women and men watch the sub-humans who celebrated the cold-blooded murder of two redheaded boys, and then demand that Israel make the Palestinians whole?
For me, this past Thursday was my saddest day since October 7th 2023, and that’s all I have to say.
Also on full display this past week was the ignorance of the host of CBS’s Face the Nation.
Last Sunday morning, Margaret Brennan had Secretary of State Marco Rubio as her guest.
Her questioning got around to asking Rubio about Vice President J.D. Vance’s scathing speech in Germany at the Munich Security Conference.
Vance unloaded on the Europeans, denouncing them for suppressing free speech.
He called out Germany, for its crackdown on offensive speech, where it seems you can be arrested for merely insulting someone on social media.
Whether his speech was good or bad, whether it was a much-needed wake up call for Europe, or a monumental display of arrogance, is not my call. I’m no foreign policy guru. But I know, as you know, the basics of modern world history. And that brings me back to CBS’s Brennan.
While interviewing Secretary Rubio, Brennan tried to question him about Vance’s attack on Germany’s crackdown on offensive speech. She bizarrely linked freedom of speech to the Nazis and the Holocaust. She said Vance “was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.”
Rubio jumped in and interrupted her, pointing out that there was no free speech in Nazi Germany, that it was a totalitarian state with no political opposition.
He made the point clearly and succinctly that the genocide of six million Jews and other non-aryans in World War II, was due to the Nazi’s racist ideology.
How the host of Face the Nation, who BTW, is also CBS’s chief foreign correspondent, believes that the extermination of European Jewry during World War II was due to the “weaponization” of free speech, is astoundingly and shockingly mind boggling.
Brennan’s remark shows an utter and frightening deficit of historical knowledge, but I think it also has a sinister side to it.
Progressives love to use this concept of “weaponization”. Words can be weaponized. Dirty looks can be weaponized. Left turns, if given the chance, can be weaponized.
Brennan’s comment or question or whatever it was, also smacks of nascent Holocaust denialism. It implies that the Jews weren’t targeted for genocide by people who hated their very existence, but were merely victims of free speech gone haywire. It blurs the real reasons Hitler targeted the Jews of Europe for genocide.
Oh, the Holocaust wasn’t about the Nazi racist ideology that claimed Jews were the source of everything bad, it was due to how Adolph Hitler mastered that skill of “weaponization.”
I guess words, not actual Jew haters, were weaponized to build Auschwitz, Dachau and Treblinka. I guess speech, not virulent antisemitism, was weaponized to build gas chambers and crematoria. I guess Hitler’s words, not his deeds, were weaponized to try to exterminate Europe’s Jews.
What makes Margaret Brennan’s dumb-ass statement even worse, is that it cannot be viewed as a one-off.
I laid out for you in October in my column, A Jew at CBS about CBS’s Jewish problem.
With Margaret Brennan making stuff up about the Holocaust, with 60 Minutes airing one-side reports against Israel like the one I wrote about last month in CBS, Hamas and Israel, and with the public flogging of Tony Dokoupil, their only Jewish anchor, over his legitimate interview with the Israel-hating author Ta-Nehisi Coates, what other conclusion can you draw?
Dokoupil was castigated by his bosses for merely asking challenging questions. They said they had to do it to preserve “the legacy of neutrality and objectivity that is CBS News.”
Well then, how about calling out Margaret Brennan when she makes a claim that perverts history and reduces the Holocaust to an issue of hate speech?
Here’s the truth.
If you want to talk about a real weaponization for nefarious purposes, just look at what took place on Thursday in Gaza.
Hamas used its murder of innocent Jewish children and the return of their bodies, to weaponize their radical, fanatical Islam and reinforce their profound and deep hatred of Israel and Jews.
But forget Hama’s cruelty, it just plays into their sordid hands. And forget about CBS’s stupidity, that news division is in its death spiral.
Here’s what we must focus on. We must keep Yarden Bibas, husband to Shiri and father to little Ariel and Kfir, in our thoughts and prayers.
Yarden’s Hamas hostage hell ended after 484 days in captivity. But those monsters have created an everlasting hell for him. A hell that no one should be made to endure.
May all the murdered hostages be remembered and may all their memories be blessings.
Well said. CBS is in line with BBC for the worst reporting ever
It's important to understand that this weaponization is a tool of the left. You need to understand their goal is chaos and destruction. You need to understand that when we talk about the left we include the Nazis and the Soviets and the Socialists and the Communists. The left wants more government and people to be drones to do what the political Elite tell them to do and not question. Read 1984 if you haven't. The right wants freedom of the individual. The right to make your own choices. The responsibility for your words and actions. A responsibility to rational thought and reality. I am always willing to answer questions. After 30 years of teaching I'm getting fairly good at it. I believe in Merit and rational thought. I always point out errors of judgment as well as errors of reality. I welcome questions and discussions.