Thank you Edith,

It is summer and hot outside, the regular pace of life slows down, the newspapers are boring, when we don't watch the date, it all seems as a repeat of old events. Even the President took off for a whole month. A nightmare for a commentator.

Still, we live in a Hurricane endangered period. And in Ireland - the peace process goes in the style of "peace-processes" where people hate each other and even from Israel we hear only the daily routine. Palestinians kill another Jew, which is no problem and only when a Jew fights back the world is in arms and condemns it. The Arabs fight for their freedom, the world wraps itself in a fake mantle of righteousness and the Jew just has to open the book of its history of the last 2000 years and to see that actually no great change has occurred. So why the excitement

It is true - no great changes for the world - yet great changes for the Jews have taken place. And it is hard for the Jew to change and to slip into a comfortable feeling of "I," or "me," or "we." We were used, to not find justice and assistance by world authorities and our only appeal for help was to our God. The Torah we revered and studied taught us how to be honest. The rules where rules of love and justice but nowhere where we taught to fight. In nature we can see, how even the lion teaches it's offspring's to fight for its life. No fight no life. The whole jungle would be dead.

The indescribable tragedy of the Holocaust forced the Jew to fight. On one hand, the Jewish laws of ethics did not prepare the Jew to kill and on the other side the trauma of the Holocaust pained the Jew with unanswerable questions. Yet it was God's indisputable command to fight and to regain the Promised land. The children of Israel acted accordingly.

Now, the world's conceptions about the Jews had to change. It is hard for them to accept that the Jews have the same right as any other people. The Jew was the big loser in the world's game of "musical chairs," and thus has no right so sit anywhere.

Next week in Durban South Africa the United Nations will hold a conference dealing with racism. A proposed resolution is, to equate Zionism with racism. The UN already accepted this infamy once before and later rescinded. But the shocking thing is, that this proposal is sure to be accepted this time and only the United States of America expressed strong opposition.

If this, or any other malevolent anti-Jewish condemnations will be postulated, it may produce serious international consequences. But we may not accept these hostile rules, we have to fight them. We have to fight for our rightful and God-given place under the sun.

We know that it is not the Jewish way to fight, to kill and maim. Golda Meir said: "I may be able to forgive the Arabs from shooting at us, but I will never be able to forgive them to have forced us to kill.

Eventually the world will have to adjust to the fact that also the Jews have the right to live as a free people. And also we will have to adjust to our new situation, to stand up for our right and fight for it. The victory will be our determination and God's will.

I am Barry Cohen

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