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Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #185 (5/4/2024): THREE CHEERS FOR THE NYPD

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #185 (5/4/2024): Three Cheers for the NYPD

airs May 4, 2024 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube video:

Shalom Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for early May 2024.

Credit where credit is due. And I don’t mean the credit cards where I owe 30 percent interest on a sofa I bought in 2014. No, I’m talking about: let’s applaud a job well done in a tremendously difficult situation.

Ever since George Floyd — you know, the drug addict, thief, armed robber, and counterfeiter who was horribly murdered by overzealous law enforcement — ever since that subject for statues became a symbol for systemic racism, cops have been betwixt and between. On the one hand, they face loathing from communities where, admittedly, they behaved badly for decades. On the other, they’re expected to be models of self-control while putting their lives on the line. Picture trying to do your job when the very people you are tasked to protect are shouting to defund you. Imagine that you take pride in serving the Big Apple, yet you’re automatically lumped in with the bad apples.

And now imagine that you’ve been called to a college campus where hundreds of deluded 20-somethings — whose age alone would mark them as enemies of authority — imagine that these liberal loonies and BIPOC buttheads have overtaken a major American university. As part of their tantrum, they’ve camped out on the lawn, blocked access to thoroughfares, and even vandalized a building. The school President has hithered and dithered, not wanting to spark violence or squelch free speech, but terrified to lose benefactors who might balk at endowing a university whose main export has become anti-Semitism.

By the time Columbia’s leader, Minouche Shafik, realized things had gotten out of control, things had gotten out of control. What to do? What to do? Let the monkeys run amok? Surrender Hamilton Hall, Lewisohn Hall, Kravis Hall, the ironically named “Harmony Hall” — all to a bunch of tent-pitching yahoos who couldn’t find Gaza on a map, a map in a bookstore, a bookstore in a city, and a city on their non-stop TikTok feeds?

At a certain point, order must be restored. It doesn’t matter that the disrupters were non-violent, and it wouldn’t matter if they were there supportingIsrael against the demons of Hamas. They were asked to leave and refused. They were commanded to leave, and instead, smashed windows and home-invaded the administration building.

That’s when you send in the cops. With riot gear.

And that, finally, is what President Shafik did. After a week of letting the hyenas run the zoo, she called in the NYPD who, with exceptional restraint and by-the-book behavior, broke up Hamas on the Hudson. Crying sophomores, shrieking professors, double-talking outside agitators — rounded up, plunked on paddy wagons, and slapped on the wrists, alas, but at least temporarily out of commission.

This, my friends, is how it’s done. Because, God knows, the cops showed more self-control than I would have to these Morningside morons. The first one to shout “Free Gaza” would have to do it through a mouth full of broken teeth. The first holding a “Divest” sign would have to hoist it with cracked knuckles. And the first Jew tweeting “Cease Fire Now!” would have so much mace sprayed in her face, her eyes would turn all four colors of the Palestinian flag.

This is why I am not a cop. This is also why the New York Police Department — and every Blue brigade that’s been summoned to these conflagrations — deserves oodles of kudos for the job they did and the way they did it. I’m sure many of these officers agreed with the protesters — we’re not talking Einsteins here, on either side of the grass — but they followed reasonable directions in a professional manner, and they deserve our gratitude and admiration.

And when the green-tent vermin swarm back onto the lawns of Columbia, NYU, Yale, UCLA, or any other ivy-choked nest of minacious radicalism, let the liars on the left be met head on by what’s right.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches in Great Neck, New York.

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=69590

Dave’s Gone By #752 (6/27/2020): CANCEL THIS!

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Here is the 752nd episode of the long-running radio show/podcast, Dave’s Gone By, which aired live on Facebook Saturday, June 27, 2020. Info: davesgoneby.com.

Host: Dave Lefkowitz

Guest: Dave’s wife Joyce

Featuring: Greeley Crimes & Old Times, Colorado Limerick of the Damned (Prowers), Wretched Pun of Destiny (tornado), Dave’s Gone Canceling (Joni Mitchell), Inside Broadway, Today/Yesterday (June 27).

00:00:01 DAVE GOES IN w/ Joyce (cancel culture, racist cops, Covid continues, thermometer, new toothbrush!)
01:25:00 GREELEY CRIMES & OLD TIMES
01:50:00 INSIDE BROADWAY
02:17:00 TODAY/YESTERDAY (June 27)
02:53:00 DAVE’S GONE CANCELING (Joni Mitchell)
03:03:00 Friends of the Daverhood
03:09:30 THE WRETCHED PUN OF DESTINY #74 (tornado)
03:13:00 COLORADO LIMERICK OF THE DAMNED (Prowers)
03:16:00 DAVE GOES OUT

June 27, 2020 Playlist: “You’ve Been Canceled” (03:00:00; Dan Bull).

Dave’s Gone By Skit: RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #26 (10/22/2011): Occupied

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RABBI SOL SOLOMON’S RABBINICAL REFLECTION #28 (10/22/2011): Occupied

Aired Oct. 22, 2011 on Dave’s Gone By. Youtube clip: Occupied

Shalom, Dammit! This is Rabbi Sol Solomon with a Rabbinical Reflection for the week of October 23rd, 2011.

So all these people without an occupation are busy occupying. They’re occupying Wall Street, they’re inhabiting Zuccotti Park, they’re occupying cities and colleges across America because the have-nots are getting a bissel sick and tired of the haves.

It was ever thus, people. Before we all were born, a handful of upper-class hoity-toities looked down on the rest of us. If they were in a generous and tax-deductible mood, they donated a library or slipped a few bucks to charity.

Everyone hates the rich because…they’re rich. And we’re not. Life sucks, then you die.

But now we have a growing segment of the population who are fed up with the status quo and think they can change it by…showing up somewhere and not leaving. Hey, it beats violence, and protests certainly did have an impact on the Vietnam War, racial segregation and the roll-out of New Coke.

Still, I am bothered by two aspects of this “Occupy Somewhere” movement. The first is the “and then what?” factor. Okay, so you shout at the rich, you rail at the corporations, you run the CEOs out of town on a rail – well, more likely a Lear Jet. And then what? What do you replace them with?

If the protesters are saying, “make college affordable, or at least make it so I’m not paying off my student loan with my Medicare and reverse mortgage.” Okay.

If the protesters are saying, “change the tax code,” fine, I’m all for it. Tax the rich until they’re poor, tax the poor until they’re dead, and give the middle class a break for once.

If the protesters are saying, “don’t let stockbrokers, bankers and corporate bigwigs get away with rampant fraud,” I’m for that, too. Let them get away with just enough fraud so that they keep jobs in America instead of farming them out to Uttar Pradesh.

The problem is we don’t know WHAT the protesters are saying except, “we can’t get jobs, the jobs we get don’t pay anything, and the pay we get goes to buy imported crap because we don’t make anything.” Republicans and social conservatives keep wanting to liken the occupiers to Soviet Communists. Well, guess what? Those old Russians were rebelling against the gentry and landowners who controlled everything and gave nothing back. Sound familiar? Communism didn’t happen because the poor wanted to give Fox News talking points, it happened because the peasants found it unpleasant watching the czars eat pheasant.

These hippies and democrats and college kids and ukelele players, they don’t care about words like Marxism or capitalism. They just want their piece of the pie, and they’re not blind; they know that out of ten slices, nine have been gobbled up before the pizza even gets delivered.

So if you ask where my sympathy lies, it is with these demonstrators, even if the only thing they’re demonstrating is how easy it is to get really grimy after three days sleeping in a park.

What I do take issue with is the whole theme of the protest – “occupying.” The organizers took their motif from the so-called Arab spring. You know, where young Arabs got tired of their corrupt, totalitarian leaders so they staged relatively peaceful rebellions that will ultimately bring in corrupt, fundamentalist Muslim leaders? Anytime you look to the Arabs for a moral compass, you’re pretty much gonna float into an iceberg.

The anti-Semitic undertones of this movement are very minor, but they’re there. From the usual grievance that Jews comprise the evil one percent oppressing the other 99 to the idea of that loaded word: “occupation.” Even though the protesters are, themselves, the occupiers, you can bet many of them are weeping for the Palestinians supposedly displaced from the sliver of Israeli land they absolutely have to live on.

And yet, and yet. There is a positive impulse here, and I hope President Obama – and whatever clown the Republicans pull out of their sidecar – I hope they listen to these rebels and take to heart the idea that American wealth, enterprise and future security have been stolen by a handful of families and corporations.

When everybody gets to eat, but some people eat a lot better – so it goes, that’s the world. When people are starving and Marie Antoinette is still eating cake, that’s when the knives come out. Or worse, in this case – the bongs and bongos.

This has been a Rabbinical Reflection from Rabbi Sol Solomon, Temple Sons of Bitches.

–> https://davesgoneby.net/?p=29993