I think all strongly identifying in-groups have similar messages to their kids — that outsiders are dangerous. I don’t think there is anything unique here.
Christians learn from their religion negative teachings about Jews and Jews learn negative teachings about Christians from their Judaism and Muslims learn negative teachings about Christians and Jews from Islam.
If you strongly identify with your religion, other religions appear wacky if not evil. If you are a sincere Christian, then Jews look bad. If you believe in Judaism, then Christianity looks like idolatry.
Jews have a lower crime rate than whites, latinos and blacks, so I don’t think that these Satmar kids are a threat to grow up to kill goyim.
Chaim Amalek: “The Brits are too weak to touch them. A race that invites in Paki men to rape their daughters and then looks the other way when confronted by their cries is not going to bother doing anything about this.”
“If English goyim had thought about outsiders the way the Satmars think about goyim, perhaps their daughters would not have been subjected to decades of rape at the hands of Paki men in Rotherham.”
British three-year-olds have been told “the non-Jews” are “evil” in a Kindergarten worksheet handed out at ultra-Orthodox Jewish schools in north London, it can be revealed.
Documents seen by The Independent show children are taught about the horrors of the Holocaust when they are still in kindergarten at the Beis Rochel boys’ school in north London.
A whistle-blower, who wished to remain anonymous, has shown The Independent a worksheet given to boys aged three and four at the school. In it, children were asked to complete questions related to the holiday of 21 Kislev, observed by Satmer Jews as the day its founder and holy Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, escaped the Nazis…
Independently translated from Yiddish for The Independent, the worksheet’s first question reads: “What have the evil goyim (non-Jews) done with the synagogues and cheders [Jewish primary schools]?” The answer in the completed worksheet reads: “Burned them.”
Another question asks: “What did the goyim want to do with all the Jews?” – to which the answer, according to the worksheet, is: “Kill them.”.
“It doesn’t explicitly refer to the Holocaust,” the source said. “It’s a document that teaches very young children to be very afraid and treat non-Jews very suspiciously because of what they did to us in the past.
“It’s not a history lesson – you can’t say that. It’s a parable that is actively teaching the children extremism, hatred and a fear for the outside world.”
A spokesperson for Beis Rochel said that the worksheets would be amended and apologised for any offence. However they argued the phrase “goyim” was not offensive and accusations that they were indoctrinating children were “without basis”. “The language we used was not in any way intended to cause offence, now this has been brought to our attention, we will endeavour to use more precise language in the future.”
Mondoweiss: If they were anti-Zionist because of a concern for the rights of Palestinians, then yes, that would be important. If the opposition is for some religious reason and they couldn’t care less about the rights of Palestinians, then no, it’s not important.
Here’s a fascinating piece in Haaretz on Satmar Jewish attitudes, stemming from the recent murder of a Brooklyn landlord named Menachem Stark, 39, who is said to have been generous inside the Satmar community but ruthless outside it, treating tenants and others with contempt. (The New York Post angered many in the Satmar community by headlining a piece on Stark, “Who wouldn’t want this man dead?”) The Haaretz reporter is Debra Nussbaum Cohen:
Sources say that in fact there is no contradiction between the role Stark played in his Satmar community of Williamsburg, and how some tenants and legal documents say he behaved outside it.
“What you do to the goyim is not the same as what you do to Jews,” said Samuel Heilman, an expert on Hasidic communities like Satmar. Heilman, author of “Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry” and a distinguished professor of sociology at Queens College, is currently at work on a book about succession battles in Hasidic courts.
That attitude stems from days when Jews were actively persecuted, he said. “Part of the collective mind-set in the crucible of history when this part of Jewry was formed, the outside world was filled with anti-Semitism and persecutors. The whole understanding of that was that you need to keep a distance from them, that they are a different level of human being,” Heilman told Haaretz.
According to Samuel Katz, who was brought up as a Satmar but later became secular, boys in the community are taught that non-Jews aren’t quite human. Speaking from Berlin, where he is doing biomedical research on a Fulbright fellowship, Katz explained that growing up in such a community, “you don’t see commonality with people who aren’t Jewish. There is a completely different taxonomy of people. There are Jews and then there are non-Jews, who don’t have souls.”
When the messiah comes, “every boy is taught that the bad goyim will be killed and the good gentiles will have the privilege of serving us, of being our slaves,” he told Haaretz. “The way Stark dealt with tenants is part of that world view… It’s not taking advantage of them, [rather] that is the world order you’re taught to expect.”
“It informs your moral compass. Like all good people Stark was benevolent and generous to the people who he saw were like himself,” but not to other people, added Katz. “There’s an empathy ‘blind spot’ that imbues the Haredi outlook.”
P.S. I generally avoid pieces about nutty Orthodox teachings because I think all religious fundamentalists are crazy; but as Tolstoy said, every family is unhappy in its own way, and one Jewish issue I struggle with here is exceptionalism, superiority. Also note that one of Max Blumenthal’s alleged sins in his landmark investigation, Goliath, was the chapter title, “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People” describing an Orthodox tract in Israel laying out the circumstances under which it is permissible to kill non-Jews.
