NEW: DVDs with Rabbi Kahane’s lectures in Hebrew, English, and Russian.

DVD 1
DVD 2
DVD 3
DVD 4

Brandeis
National Press Club
Beverly
Alan Dershowitz
Yeshiva University
Thunderbird Motel
Why Be Jewish? Part 1
Why Be Jewish? Part 2
Why Be Jewish? Part 3
Sonya Friedman
Minnesota University
60 minutes
Axelrod
Congregation Shaar HaShamayim
Greenberg
Kach annual dinner
Kach promotion
Linkolnwood
State of Judea
Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea
Young Israel

The video and audio quality is considerably better than what is available on YouTube. The files are large, so use a download manager such as FlashGet.

You can also view small-screen copies on Google Video:

Yeshiva University
Debates with Alan Dershowitz
National Press Club
Beverly
Brandeis University
Why be Jewish? Part 1
Why be Jewish? Part 2
Why be Jewish? Part 3

This is a very important book by Rabbi Meir Kahane: Uncomfortable Questions for Comfortable Jews

A must-read for every Jewish family: What makes Bernie run?

Transcript of the dummy debate of Rabbi Kahane with leftist “rabbi” Michael Lerner.

Also, in עברית and по-русски.

We invest considerable resources in bringing you Rabbi Meir Kahane’s heritage. Please spread the word.

Meir Kahane was one of the most illustrious Jewish figures of the twentieth century. A follower of Zhabotinsky, Meir Kahane started his political career in childhood by leading a march to protest the anti-Semitic policies of a British politician, Ernest Bevin.

Meir Kahane received rabbinical ordination from the famed Mir Yeshiva in New York. Kahane became prominent in the United States after he founded the Jewish Defense League, which protected elderly Jews and American Jewish institutions against anti-Semites. In his pursuit of Jewish interests, Meir Kahane had no qualms about cooperating with anyone, from Italian mobsters to the FBI; for the rabbi, the overarching goal of Jewish safety trumped moral concerns. Rabbi Kahane had no problem using firearms and explosives to protect his fellow Jews.

After substantially curbing anti-Semitic violence, Kahane’s JDL broke the spell of silence over the fate of Soviet Jewry. American Jewish leaders, given to “quiet diplomacy”—so quiet as to make it undetectable—immediately condemned Meir Kahane’s activism. By a campaign of bombings against Soviet offices in America, Kahane threatened the US-USSR detente and brought the topic of oppressed Soviet Jewry to the front pages of American media. The Russians were forced to negotiate. Thanks to Rabbi Kahane, tens of thousands of Russian Jews were allowed to leave the USSR. The American Jewish establishment took over Meir Kahane’s campaign, and the floodgates opened with a million-strong aliyah.

Rabbi Meir Kahane moved to Israel where he campaigned under the slogan, “I’m saying what you’re thinking.” Kahane’s Kach (Thus!) party advocated population exchanges with Arab countries, annexing Judea and Samaria, and introducing basic elements of Judaism as Israeli laws. After a series of electoral defeats, Meir Kahane entered the Knesset. The leftist Israeli media went berserk with a Kahane-bashing campaign. Likud and Shas joined the anti-Kahane efforts because their voters massively went over to Rabbi Meir. Polls predicted for Kahane’s party an increase from one to thirteen seats. At that point, the Israeli Supreme Court banned Kach for racism despite the fact that Israeli law explicitly removes religious arguments from the definition of racism, and Rabbi Kahane’s every statement was firmly rooted in Jewish law, halacha.

Undeterred, Meir Kahane led a referendum to transfer Israeli Arabs to a state of their own, annex Judea and Samaria, and ban anti-Jewish parties. Maariv published a report that Mossad planned the assassination of Rabbi Kahane. He also received similar threats from Shabak. In 1990, Meir Kahane was assassinated during a speech in New York. The Arab accused of murdering Rabbi Kahane was acquitted, as the weapon lacked his fingerprints; the real assassin remains unknown.

After Meir Kahane’s death, the Kach Party was banned over the Baruch Goldstein incident. The first open Kahanist, Michael Ben Ari, has entered the Knesset in the 2009 elections, and renegade Kahanist Avigdor Lieberman became the Israeli parliament’s permanent feature. Several splinter groups claim to be guided by Meir Kahane’s principles; the most active among them is Baruch Marzel’s Jewish National Front party.

Meir Kahane left us several books, thousands of articles, and a few video lectures. Israeli Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu praised Rabbi Kahane’s seminal work The Jewish Idea as an outstanding achievement in religious scholarship. In the book, Rabbi Kahane explained the contemporary political relevance of traditional Jewish concepts.

Learning Rabbi Meir Kahane’s heritage is indispensable for any person interested in Jewish or Israeli matters.

After the WWII, international jurists were still reasonable. The Nuremberg trials prosecuted those responsible on the grand scale and left it to German courts to prosecute individual war criminals. That legal balance was eminently sensible because it discounted individual crimes and focused on the overall criminality of the particular war enterprise. The standard of government’s criminality was very high: only unspeakable atrocities figured in the convictions. Such issues as human shields, restrictions on relief aid, curtailing of human rights, and non-lethal collective punishment were ignored. Indeed, if a war is genocidal, then those technicalities are insignificant, and if the war is justified, then those unpleasantries are unavoidable. In both cases, investigating them on the international macro level is superfluous.

After the international tribunal established the overall criminality of German war intent, domestic courts slowly and thoroughly investigated individual crimes. Except for a few incidents, the Allies did not prosecute their own war crimes – out of the victor’s justice, for sure, but also because those were isolated events, sometimes justifiable by military necessity, such as carpet-bombings or shootings of POWs where internment had been impossible.

To a large extent, ends justify the means. We would condemn a bank robber generally, but not when he has no other option for feeding his hungry family. British bombing of Dresden is different from Nazi bombing of Coventry.

Soldiers are not automatons. The enterprise of war-making is so different from civil life that applying peacetime norms of criminality to it is meaningless. States deliberately induce hatred of enemies through propaganda, and cannot cry wolf when soldiers act on that hatred.

Human rights might be natural, but their restriction during wars is similarly natural. Applying the same standard of human rights to America’s peaceful Middle West and the Middle East’s war zone is unreasonable, especially if the wartime restrictions are short-lived. Most military theorists recognize that the double effect doctrine only protects civilian life rather than property or vaguely defined dignity. It would be unrealistic to expect that a country that feels offended to such an extent that it goes to war, risks its soldiers, and expends vast material resources, would care of houses and other property which belong to the enemy government’s voters and taxpayers. Indeed, the very dissociation of population from government is a feat of idealism which might hold in a monarchy but not a responsive democracy where people elect their governments and are responsible for its actions. Nor is it possible to fight any war without inflicting substantial damage on the population, both as a matter of collateral damage in attacks on possible (rather than, as Goldstone contends, probable) military targets and in a deliberate squeeze on the population to warn it off supporting the hostile government. Though Goldstone decries it, the squeeze doctrine is perfectly compatible with the double effect standard.

The bottom line is, you cannot wage war the way police enforce law domestically. There is no way to single out fighters in urban areas. Many factories produce dual-use goods which aid the enemy’s war effort indirectly, at the very least – by paying taxes; those apparently civilians installations must be destroyed to crush the enemy. Even when individual fighters and factories can be pinpointed, attacking them with smart munitions is not feasible; Israel spent more than $2 million per a killed Palestinian in the Gaza war, much more than the government allocates to Israeli Health Ministry to save Jews.

War crimes were thought of as something egregious to the point of barbarity. As Israeli Supreme Court put it after the Kfar Qasem debacle, “The distinguishing mark of a manifestly illegal order is that above such an order should fly, like a black flag, a warning saying: ‘Prohibited!’.” Certainly, human conscience does not revolt at the events Goldstone details as war crimes, nor is it possible to fight a war while respecting his safeguards.

Six decades ago, when military jurisprudence has not been yet taken over by idealists, a US tribunal acquitted Nazis of an alleged war crime of the Siege of Leningrad, which left hundreds of thousands civilians dead. According to cruel logic of war, starving the enemy population was a legitimate military tactics. The Geneva conventions moderated that a bit to allow food supplies to women and children. But who can ascertain that the food won’t end up with war-fit males? After being confronted with obvious impracticality of such approach, in 1977 leftists changed the law in one swoop by banning starvation as a method of warfare. By such standard, every single war in human history was illegal.

Goldstone builds his accusations on two contradictory approaches. In order to condemn Israel for the alleged starvation of Gazans, he frames the conflict as international war to bring it under the jurisdiction of Geneva conventions. But in the same document, he claims Israeli occupation of stateless Gaza, which reduces the issue of starvation to Israel’s domestic matter where Geneva conventions do not apply.

Since the absolute prohibition of starving civilians is laid down in subsequent protocols rather than the 1949 Conventions, the ICC’s power to prosecute them is in doubt. The Extraordinary Chambers set up for Cambodia, for example, had an explicit authority to prosecute grave breaches of the Conventions, but not of the protocols. The difference is not accidental as the protocols were recognized as idealistic pronouncements rather than law.

Moreover, prosecution under the Fourth Convention is only possible if the starvation is explicitly related to the international armed conflict. This is hardly a case because both Egypt and Israel limited cargo supplies to Gaza before the Qassam war has started. The current round of cargo restrictions started with abduction of an Israeli soldier which was arguable an act of kidnapping rather than taking POWs, if only because he is not treated as a POW or held by a recognized army. There is a strong argument that Israeli cargo restrictions against Gaza are not strictly related to armed conflicts, even less an inter-state conflict.

There is no judicial way to interpret the Fourth Geneva Convention as criminalizing restrictions in free passage of food to besieged territory. Thу Convention details various crimes, but does not list border restrictions among them. The omission is deliberate: it is inconceivable for any fighting army to allow free movement of the allegedly humanitarian goods to the battle zone. Inspecting them all in heat of the battle or ascertaining delivery to civilians only is impossible, and they would greatly strengthen the enemy.

The allegations of genocide in Gaza are similarly unsubstantiated. The genocide law does not apply to social or political groups for a reason: actions against them are often militarily or politically sensible, they lack the wanton brutality of destroying ethnic, national, or religious groups. Clearly, Israel is not up to destroying hundreds of millions Arabs or a billion Muslims, in whole or in part. At any rate, hard evidence of Israeli intent to destroy Arabs as a national group is lacking.

Recognizing the weakness of genocide charges, Goldstone circumvents the “social or political group” exception by claiming crimes against humanity. He would have a hard time arguing that Israel has an intent to kill Gazans as a political group when in fact the Gazan population increased by almost six times in the last forty years. The ICC’s Statute clarifies that deprivation of food only constitutes a crime against humanity if it is “calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population.” Looking at the absence of deaths from starvation, no such calculation took place. Goldstone ignores that the UN delivered to Gaza all the essential foodstuffs it wanted, so even if some starvation occurred, it had not been preventable by Israel.

Both in Cambodia and Rwanda tribunals, starvation was only viewed as a means for large-scale killing. Goldstone’s attempt to lower that standard to criminalize starvation which only leads to suffering rather than death is not built upon the international law and is unlikely top be adopted as it criminalizes boycotts and sanctions, as well.

Israel harmed herself when framing the operation as anti-terrorist rather than war. We were attacked by a Palestinian government whose parliament unanimously support fighting Israel. In the war, the Palestinian government utilized state resources: police and government-funded militias, taxes, hospitals, and diplomatic efforts. That was not an anti-terrorist operation of the kind that Britain performed against domestic terrorists of the IRA. By wartime standards, Israel would be accorded more rights and less obligations to protect our enemy’s rights.

Israel also did a disservice to other armies by establishing a new, ultra-high benchmark for caring about the enemy population: warning them to flee with phone calls. Americans tried something similar in Vietnam where they distributed warning leaflets and announcements before attacks, a policy which greatly contributed to their inefficiency. Israel pushed that approach over the edge: while Americans were content with destroying empty villages, Israel did not destroy the emptied town districts but merely combed them in urban combat. Soon, everyone will forget that Israel was fighting a minuscule conflict in Gaza, and demand application of such standards in large-scale wars.
It remains to be seen whether the common sense would triumph over the idealism, or the leftist will succeed in tying the hands of Western militaries to put them on equal footing with terrorists.

Though the world responded in its usual anti-Semitic manner and applied pressure to end the violence only when Israel took action against it, so far the condemnations have been remarkably mild—and would have been still milder had Israel paid no attention to them. Instead, sensitive Jews listen to countries like Russia, which bombed Chechen and Georgian towns while rejecting any criticism, but lashed out against Israel.

The world’s mild response doesn’t indicate that it accepts Israel’s right to defense. Nor is the world concerned about rising Islamic militancy (Hezbollah is well received in European capitals). Rather, the political establishments of European and Arab countries alike oppose Hamas because it is a true revolutionary movement. Unlike various putschists and Latin-American partisans, Hamas seeks to bring a real change: an honest government based on non-Western principles. Unlike European parties which buy their way to power with media ads and don’t differ from each other in practice, Hamas is genuinely different—and popular. Now, one might not like the Taliban-style Palestinian leaders, but by any moral gauge they stand head and shoulders above corrupt European politicians and Fatah gangsters.

Egypt is isolated in the Arab world for its all-out collusion with Israel against Hamas. Mubarak’s government leans to Israel because Hosni needs American approval to pass the reins to his son Gamal, suppress the Muslim Brotherhood, and prevent democratic elections which would bring the Islamist group to power.

The two-state solution is increasingly recognized as obsolete. World leaders realize that Hamas cannot be eradicated. If the Egyptian government failed to extirpate the Muslim Brotherhood with all kinds of unseemly measures, Israel has still fewer chances with its offshoot Hamas. Dependent on Iran and true to Muslim values, Hamas will neither settle with Israel any time soon, nor allow Fatah to do so. Since Bush Sr., and especially Clinton, the American political bureaucracy has dispensed with Carteresque ideas of Palestinian freedom-fighters and increasingly sees them as vile terrorists, incapable of diplomacy. The Palestinian issue continues to lose popularity among liberals, and Jewish liberals seem to realize that “two states for two peoples” equates Jewish people with insignificant Levantine Arabs.

Saudi Arabia, the biggest lobbyist for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, has enough worries with nuclear Iran and pays scarce attention to the Levant. The Jewish government realizes that Israeli Arabs—a third of Israel’s young—are no less a demographic threat than the West Bank Arabs, and disengagement from Judea and Samaria solves nothing. Negotiations with Fatah over the settlement blocs are deadlocked: evacuating the 150,000 Jews is politically impossible, and Jewish and Arab villages are so interspersed that separating them with a border is infeasible.

Israel has a small hope to be left alone and for the status quo to continue.

Huge empires like China have traditionally tolerated lawlessness in their remote border areas. In the information age, border infringements are publicized and interpreted as weakness, diminishing the affected state’s reputation and endangering it. Suddenly, needing to secure its borders, China has to cooperate with Vietnam, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, and Central Asia—the world’s trouble zone. Learning from the US blockade of Japan in WWII, China works hard to secure oil supplies and diversify its export markets. The Chinese diaspora in many countries offers an opportunity to expand Chinese influence too tempting to forgo.

China will not attack the US. Neither did Japan intend to invade the Continental US when it attacked Pearl Harbor. China, like Japan before WWII, is simply a great menace. Nuclear proliferation, arms sales, pragmatic foreign alliances without regard to the consequences for other countries, oil and gas purchases from rogue regimes, the circumvention of sanctions on pariah states, and institutional hostility toward America make China dangerous.

Still, the West finances China by doing business with it, and provides China with access to international capital markets instead of cutting that lifeline. Most importantly it allows China to steal Western products and technologies. Everyone knows that China engages in the worst form of robbery—the piracy of hi-tech goods and technologies—but the West tolerates the theft. The West provides China with free access to the most valuable franchise—knowledge. Western parents and taxpayers finance universities, and Western consumers pay for corporate research by purchasing new products. China obtains the fruits of Western theoretical and applied research for the price of subscription to scientific magazines.

The West’s lamentations over its inability to counter China’s massive theft of intellectual property are unwarranted. Though China cannot be sent to conventional jail like any other thief, it could be imprisoned by economic blockade.

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