Rabinfest 2013: Yuval Rabin and His Father's Legacy

It's that time of year again! Today is the Yahrzeit of Yitzhak Rabin, according to the Jewish calendar. From last Saturday night and until the 4th of November (the day Rabin died according to the Gregorian calendar) , the Israeli Left and the Israeli MSM will be celebrating Rabinfest.

What would a festival be without a clown? Although I have not seen the Rabinfest organizers hiring professional clowns, there is always a leftist who is willing to beclown himself/herself for free. This year's festival has just begun, and it already has its first gratis clown, who is none other than the late Prime Minister's son, Yuval Rabin.

No, Yuval was not trying to be funny. He was absolutely serious. However, when one says ridiculous things with a straight face, it can be comical:

He then launched into criticism of those who link Oslo to terrorism. “To argue that terrorism happened because of Oslo is cynical and deliberately wicked,” he accused. “The escalation of terrorism is an ongoing process, and various factors did ‘contribute’ to it, but one thing is consistently clear – those who commit terrorism are against compromise.”

No good deed should go unrecognized, so I would like to thank Yuval Rabin for bringing a smile to my face. Who in the world are you trying to fool, Yuval Rabin? You cannot fool me, for I have been here in Israel long before the Oslo Accords. I remember Israel before the accords and after. Nobody claims or claimed that there was not terrorism before the Oslo Agreements. However, only a buffoon can claim they did not cause a sharp rise in terrorism. As the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted way back in 1998:

More Israelis have been killed by Palestinian terrorists in the 5 years since the first Oslo agreement was signed in September 1993 than in the 15 preceding years, the Government Press Office (GPO) has announced.

A total of 279 men, women and children have been killed in 92 lethal attacks by Palestinian terrorists since the signing of the Oslo Accords. This does not include victims of attacks launched by Lebanese-based terror organizations or incidents along Israel's borders.

So who is Yuval Rabin trying to fool? He cannot fool God. He cannot fool me either! If he is trying to fool himself....well, never mind.

Yuval Rabin did not always make me smile. In fact, one time I was truly embarrassed for him. It happened during his father's funeral. I was sitting at my desk at work in downtown Jerusalem, listening to the funeral on the radio. It was time for the son to recite Kaddish. Yuval Rabin totally mangled it, apparently thinking that the Aramaic words in the prayer were in Hebrew. His stuttered rendition was even more garbled than that of a second generation American Jew in a Conservative Temple reading the transliteration from the Silverman siddur. Yes, the thought that the entire nation and Jews all over the world heard this made me cringe in my seat. The son of the slain Prime Minister, ostensibly an educated man, does not even know how to say Kaddish!

This was the true legacy of Yitzchak Rabin and so many other secular Zionists: children woefully ignorant of their own heritage. Thousands of years of Torah and ethics were traded in for a dry nationalism combined with socialism, army service and speaking Hebrew: an Israeli version of "bagels and lox" Judaism, which like its American cousin has gradually evolved into a bizarre combination of liberalism and crass materialisim. What a sad joke!

May God save us such clowns and their [self] deceptions.