opinion

An armed Jew is a safer Jew and not a perpetual victim. Just ask young Israelis: Opinion

Though I live in Pennsylvania, I am a Jew and therefore I share an equal stake in the outcome of Delaware's ridiculous and now partisan debate about whether Jews should be the world's constant victims, or not.

I vote for "not."

State Sen. Dave Lawson correctly stated a simple belief held by many American Jews, namely that an armed Jew is a safer Jew. If the Jews of Europe held on to firearms, they could have more easily conducted tactical retreats to safer places (America, Israel, Russia, eastern Poland) in the early parts of the Nazi extermination program, as well as more effective subsequent partisan resistance from the forests of Poland.

Lawson also has ample company with many young Israelis, whose initial response to "holocaust education" is to ask, "Why didn't you get guns to defend yourselves?" Among the world's most-armed Jews today, purposefully defenseless victim Jews is an incomprehensible choice, a dereliction of duty to survive, to resist.

Opposing view: More guns wouldn't have helped Jews fight entire society filled with racism, hate

Plenty of historians, especially military historians, would support Lawson's contention that armed minorities are safer minorities. At Penn State University I was an undergraduate intern in classes about the history of Nazism and fascism with Professor Jackson Spielvogel and Modern Middle East History with professor Arthur Goldschmidt.

In my opinion, the study of the Nazi Holocaust, basic Jewish history, as well as American history supports Lawson's concerns. Not to mention the more modern case studies of Rwanda, the Balkans, modern Ukraine and other places, where disarmed minorities have had few options but to die on their knees or in their beds.

Despite annually celebrating the intensely militaristic Jewish holidays of Purim and Chanuka, which both laud the successes of heavily armed Jewish soldiers and Jewish civilian militias against overwhelming force, liberal American Jews have ironically chosen the path of perennial victimhood.

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In politically correct America if you aren't some sort of victim, you aren't anything. So a lot of liberal Jews have sought to cast all Jews as the victim par excellence, disarmed and completely devoid of any manly or defensive abilities.

Well, not in my name, you don't!

Liberal Jews and liberal politicians do not speak for me, and not just because their political views are completely the opposite of what our Torah says and what the US Constitution says.

As an American, I am offended that they would strip me and my Christian neighbors of our Second Amendment freedoms, brilliantly designed in 1787 for the express purpose of preventing government-led pogroms against freedom-loving citizens.

Lawson is correct that disarming Jews only makes us more vulnerable to future tyrants, because if today's politically correct tyrants have their way, all civil liberties will be removed.

The only barrier to that is an armed citizenry.

One Sen. Lawson alone is a better friend to American Jews than all of the liberal Jewish establishment leaders combined together because they would have us all be sad victims dead on our knees, while Lawson would have us be free men.

— Josh First, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania