JD Vance answering a question from a self-identified Pro-Life member of the audience at a Turning Points USA event at the University of Mississippi in October:
Somebody asked me earlier about my Christian values, and one of the points I made is that when the settlers came to the New World they found very widespread child sacrifice. I imagine there are some people who don't agree with my view on the pro life issue let me just make an observation. If you go to historical archeological sites where there were brothels and the two oldest businesses in the world are gambling and prostitution so there were brothels even in very ancient civilizations. If you go back to ancient brothels and you dig up the bones of the women who were working in these places you will very often find a lot of children who were buried with them. And the answer is that whenever a society decides to discard innocent babies, they also don't treat their women very well. And whenever a society mistreats its women it is very often its the babies who come right after that. There is a reason why Christian civilization ended the practice of child sacrifice all over the world and it's one of the great accomplishments of Christian civilization.
If your first thought about what this has to do with White House policy is, "Wait, whuuut..??!" you're not wrong. Strangely this was the second time in the evening that Vance raised the topic of child sacrifice in the New World leading me to believe he picked up something viral on the topic from the internet. It's hard to know where to begin with it. Certainly some instances of human sacrifice in the Americas, particularly Central and South America (as in many other parts of the planet including Europe and the Holy Land) have been documented by historians and archaeologists. What put an end to them was not so much the insistence of the Christian European invaders who had come not to spread the good news of Christ (the Human Sacrifice to end all human sacrifices) but primarily to take the land of the indigenous people here, but rather the violent termination of those indigenous civilizations by the Europeans. It had next to nothing to do with the European conquest of what came to be the United States. In essence, child sacrifice is a post hoc rationalization for genocide. What's more, give one moment of thought to it, and it's not at all hard to come up with a myriad ways that Christian civilization continues to sacrifice children. Let's start with sending 18 year olds to die in foreign wars of choice. How about the conservatively thousands of children killed by US bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, to say nothing of the potentially millions starved by US policies such as sanctions and Trump's own cessation of USAID's promised and earmarked shipments of grains to the third world. Charlie Kirk, late Christian extraordinaire and the honoree of Vance's appearance famously said the victims of gun violence were perhaps a decent exchange for the freedom of their murderers to purchase weaponry.
This is not even to mention the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed or injured since October 7 2023 by US funded Israeli bombs, artillery and gunfire (and now starvation). That was the unspoken subject of remarks-- instructive in their otherwise meticulous articulation-- given by former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz speaking in a plenary to the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of America in Washington recently:
Today, we have social media which is a global medium. Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don't really love Jews and so while in the 1990's you know a young person probably wasn't going to find Al-Jazeera or someone like Nick Fuentes, today those media outlets find them. They find them on their phones. It's also this increasingly post-literate media-- less and less text; more and more videos. So you have TikTok just smashing our young people's brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza and this is why so many of us can't have a sane conversation with younger Jews because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I want to give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage and I sound obscene.
But it isn't just foreign non-Zionist video journalism that's the problem, but ironically the "smart bet" that Jewish cultural leaders made on "Holocaust education to serve as anti-Semitism education" which "may be confusing some of our young people about anti-Semitism":
,.. because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews and they think, "Oh, anti-Semitism is like anti-black racism, right? Powerful white people against powerless black people." So when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it's not surprising that they think, ''Oh, I know! The lesson of the Holocaust is that you fight Israel. You fight the big, powerful people hurting the weak people."
The problem:
That's not how the Holocaust happened. We all know that. We all know that it happened because the Germans insisted that the Jews-- 1% of the population-- were responsible for all their problems just like people insist that Israel-- the size of New Jersey-- is responsible for all the world's problems today. But that's not really what you take away from Holocaust education. You take away the images of Power - Powerless. And you also don't really learn about Islamist anti-Semitism and Soviet Anti-Zionism which is so much of what i'm seeing especially on campus with young people today.
The origin of the problem according to Hurwitz (besides apparently inadequate training in discerning who are the right kind of Nazis) is the vestiges of a 250 year old strategy of assimilation by relegating Jewishness to a "protestant style religion" to enable Jews to adopt the identity of the countries they found themselves in with the rise of Nationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The once smart strategy has outlived its usefulness.
The problem is, we're not just a religion, right? ... We are a nation, a civilization, a tribe, peoplehood, but most of all we're a family and so if you are a young person raised in America that thinks Judaism is a protestant style religion, then the 7 million Jews in Israel are merely your co-religionists so like if my co-religionists, I look at them and if they're not practicing my religion of social justice and certain prophetic values then what do I have to do with them?
That's a category error. The 7 million people in Israel they are not my co-religionists. They are my siblings. But I think if you think of them as merely your co-religionists it's very easy to slide into Anti-Zionism. You don't necessarily have that connection to them. And you know I have to say, I think, to conclude it's becoming increasingly clear that the kind of contentless bagel and lox, Jewish mother joke identity that many American Jews have, it just doesn't cut it anymore.You know when your Jewish identity is a big empty void with a few ethnic jokes rattling around in it, it will be filled by what is around you. And if what is around you is anti-Semitism you will be helpless to fight back.
You will not be able to take advantage of the billions in financial and military aid bestowed on Israel by the government you pay taxes to.
Hurwitz concludes:
If someone tells you that the Jewish G-d is violent and vengeful and Judaism is a legalistic unloving religion and you know nothing about Jewish tradition then what will you say? Tikkun olam? You know it's not a great answer. If they say Israel is a genocidal racist state and you know nothing about Jewish history or Israel but are like 'I like Seinfeld?' it doesn't work. You know we need to know our Jewish story in a way that when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s I didn't really; I could get away with that identity. Young people who have that empty Jewish identity today, it is being filled by anti-Semitism and we need to give them the content to protect them.
I am not a Jew, but I am a 66 year old American (22 years older than Sarah Hurwitz) and I would call my position on Israel until 2 years ago Soft Zionism. My views were formed not from a place of informed consideration, but by osmosis of the prevailing pro-Israel atmosphere of post-Holocaust America.* Essentially I believed that Israel represented a legitimate reparation for the evils of the Hitler's Germany. Never again forever. Being essentially a softie and a natural sympathizer with the underdog, I was not a fan of what Israel had become under 16 years of on and off Benjamin Netanyahu leadership, but all of my presuppositions about Israel's right to existence and to a kind of legitimate special pleading regardless of its apartheid abuse of the Palestianians whose homeland Europe bestowed to Zionist Jews were called into question by Israel's egregious asymmetrical response to the October 7 attack by Hamas fighters who had breached Israel's Iron Dome. I felt then and feel now that I was late to a proper understanding of Israel as the last imposition of Western European colonialism on the non-European world. Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism. I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters who reject the claim of European Israeli supremacist Zionists on their Jewishness, especially as a means of implicating them in Israel's elective extermination of the Palestinian population-- not least of them, its women and children-- it is aiming to replace.
Thank you, Sarah Hurwitz for your eloquent, and JD Vance for your clumsy self-exposures.
~~~~~
* Which Hurwitz's ideological sibling and recently appointed head of CBS News Bari Weiss has announced she is determined for CBS News to revive.
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