Guest Editorial: God, Guns and Judas Goats

FOREWORD: Here's another profound missive from Mike Vanderboegh, one he says will be the last for a while "Unless something else gets me worked up."

God, Guns and Judas Goats
Mike Vanderboegh

"Gun-control laws do not control crime because crimes are not committed by guns; they are committed by criminals. Criminals will always have guns because they do not obey laws, including anti-gun laws. Those without guns are easy prey for criminals with guns. Gun control encourages crime. The right to bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights, not to deter crime, but to deter oppressive government. Just governments honor and protect the right to bear arms. Oppressive governments fear and prohibit the right to bear arms. Guns are dangerous. The only thing more dangerous is not having them." -- G. Edward Griffin

"To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them." -- George Mason

10 April 2007
TO: Errol Louis
Editorial Page, New York Daily News

Dear Errol,

I have titled my response to your recent editorial ("Time to put our faith in ending gun scourge", NY Daily News, 8 April 07) God, Guns and Judas Goats. As you hold degrees from Harvard, Yale and Brooklyn Law School, and thus are an educated man, I will assume your familiarity with the concepts of both God and firearms. But as a lifelong "New Yarker" you may not know what a Judas Goat is. Since I know that Wikipedia is one of your favorite on-line resources, I have chosen its definition:

"A Judas goat is a trained goat used at a slaughterhouse and in general animal herding. The Judas goat is trained to associate with sheep or cattle, leading them to a specific destination. In stockyards, a Judas goat will lead sheep to slaughter, while its own life is spared. Judas goats are also used to lead other animals to specific pens and on to trucks. The term is a reference to the biblical traitor Judas Iscariot. The phrase has also been used to describe a goat that is used to find feral goats that are targeted for eradication. In many ecosystems goats introduced there mostly by European colonists are a pest or can outcompete endemic endangered species. The Judas goat is outfitted with a transmitter, painted in red and then released. The goat then finds the remaining herds of feral goats, allowing hunters to exterminate them."

I was reminded of the Judas goat by your editorial which praised the new effort from the hoplophobic Brady Center called the "God Not Guns Coalition." As the website describes it:

"The God Not Guns Coalition seeks to raise awareness of gun violence as a spiritual and moral crisis. We call on every congregation, synagogue, mosque, and gathering of people of faith to work toward a peaceable society where all children have the opportunity to grow and prosper, and where everyone can live without fear of being cut down by firearm violence. We invite every faithful individual and faith-based group to join us as we work to prevent the tragic toll of gun violence."

To which you replied, "Amen to that." And on the face of it, who can be for "gun violence"? If you mean by that imprecise term violent criminals killing folks with handguns, then you bet, I'm agin' it as they say in Blount County, Alabama. Hey, that's why I own firearms-- to keep me, my family, my friends and even my anti-gun neighbors safe from both criminals and predatory governments. I'm a big opponent of "gun violence" IF that's what you mean. But of course that's not exactly what the Brady Center has in mind, and I suspect you know that too.

What the Brady Center is interested in and has been assiduously working toward for decades is the disarmament of the American citizenry. They believe that criminals will be cut off from the supply of firearms when the law-abiding are. Yeah, that's worked real well for the drug epidemic, I'm sure it will work in the kumbaya future envisioned by the Brady Bunch. (As a writer I'm sure you recognize both irony and sarcasm when you read it.)

Strict gun control laws have worked real well in NYC haven't they? You cite several recent incidents in Gotham in your editorial as reason to join the Brady bandwagon, but I can only assume that as the son of an NYPD policeman you HAVE heard of the Sullivan Act? So, because of the failure of you New Yorkers to control your own criminal element with strict gun laws, we should all give up our guns to see if that will work? Pardon me if I don't jump on that bandwagon just yet. But that's not really the main point of my critique. Judas goats are.

The Brady Bunch has been chafing at the bit now that the largely anti-firearm Democrat Party controls both houses of Congress. But because the presidency is up for grabs in a year and a half the marching orders have gone out: "no anti-gun legislation until we've got the whole enchilada." Of course some Dems aren't persuaded, hence you have embarrassing gun-grabbing bills introduced like H.B. 1022. But the Brady Bunch knows that they will be marking time legislatively until January, 2009, so they have to have something else to keep them busy, burnish their image among the weak-minded and, not coincidentally, help them raise funds for the gargantuan legislative gun-grabs to come.

And so we have the God Not Guns Coalition (hereinafter referred to as the GNGC). I read through the list of religious organizations of various faiths that have signed onto this project, and was relieved when I didn't see a Baptist among 'em. I'm sure if the Bradys look hard enough they'll find one eventually, there are fools everywhere and I've met my share of them in the Baptist congregations I've belonged to over the years. Lots of the GNGC were organizations that I expected to see, as they have declared themselves before on the issue of the Second Amendment (they're agin' it). I even knew that the Presbyterians had gone all wobbly on the gun issue, no doubt making their ancestors of "The Black Regiment" -- the British term for Presbyterian ministers who preached revolution in the 1770s-- spin like tops in their New England graveyards.

I take note that several prominent Muslim organizations have signed onto the GNGC, and this is to be applauded I suppose, for the simple fact that so few of their co-religionists seem interested in gun control as it applies to global Jihad. This is a step in the right direction, thus proving that every cloud has a silver lining.

The AME Zion Church of Maryland surprised me though, for reasons that I will deal with further down the page. But the fact that the top leadership of Reform Judaism endorses citizen disarmament is certainly no surprise, and here is where we begin to deal with the subject of Judas goats.

You quote, with approval, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, who you say, "put his finger on the spiritual dimension of the crisis at an anti-gun rally in 2000."

"'The indiscriminate distribution of guns is an offense against God and humanity,' he said. 'Our gun-flooded society has turned weapons into idols, and the worship of idols must be recognized for what it is - blasphemy.'"

Well, now. Using the "B" word is tough stuff in any religion. I have my own opinions as to what constitutes blasphemy and idolatry in present day America, but as a confessed rabid Second Amendment advocate, guns don't meet the test with me. Firearms are tools, like any other. They are value neutral. If an evil man uses a gun to kill, the man is evil, not the gun. Likewise, if the firearm is used to defend against criminal attack or tyranny, the justified good intentions accrue to the man who wields it and not the object itself. There is, I'm sure Reb Yoffie would agree, an oft-quoted rabbinic legal dictum, "Im ba l'hargekha, hashkem l'hargo," "If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him (first)." Firearms faciliate the dispensing of that justice.

Now, as I said, I'm a Baptist and so it might seem that I'm out of my league in dispensing the following analysis. But hey, some of my best friends are observant Jews and we've had long conversations about the self-defense dictums of Judaism and how they were ignored during the Holocaust. The Talmudic discussion of the classic Jewish principle of self-defense cited above is plain. "If there is homicidal intent, self-defense is more than permitted; it is required. This is a common principle of all legal systems, America's included." ("If Someone Comes to Kill You, Rise Up and Kill Him First" by Noam E. Marans, Associate Director, Contemporary Jewish Life Department, American Jewish Committee, available on AJC's website www.ajc.org.)

My brother-in-arms Aaron Zelman of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership once told me: “If every Jewish and anti-nazi family in Germany had owned a Mauser rifle and twenty rounds of ammunition AND THE WILL TO USE IT, Adolf Hitler would be a little-known footnote to the history of the Weimar Republic.”

And this has always puzzled me. Why didn't the Jews resist the Holocaust more violently and directly, given "Im ba l'hargekha, hashkem l'hargo"? It wasn't like Hitler didn't tell them what was coming. Enter the Judas Goats.

"Listen and believe this, even though it happened here, even though it seems so odd, so distant, so strange." -- From the account of Josef Zelkowicz, September, 1942, Lodz Ghetto (Died, Auschwitz, 1944.)

They came in many colors, many forms, some unwitting, some coldly calculating. Some were mere "useful idiots", to use Lenin's term, who figuratively sold the Nazis the rope with which they themselves were hanged. In one place it was the Rabbi who, having read Mein Kampf, urged his faithful to patience, remembering all the other anti-semitic storms which his community had weathered for a thousand years. In another place it was the "assimilated" Jews who had played such a vital role in the Weimar Republic that preceded the "nightmare years" as William Shirer called them, who laid the bureaucratic basis for the Nazi terror with things like gun registration laws. (Proponents of the Patriot Act take note.) In yet another it was leaders of the Reichsbanner, a paramilitary corps for the defense of the Republic, Jewish and Gentile alike, who held back their followers who burned to confront the Nazis with guns, waiting for orders from the faltering republican government in Berlin. Waiting for orders that never came. Waiting, in fact, for the Gestapo raids that scooped them up individually and sent them to Dachau, when collectively they could have killed the Nazi experiment in its Devil's cradle.

As the darkness deepened, the Judas goats of deception and denial became those of collaboration. These opportunists like Mordechai Rumkowski, dubbed by the Nazis "the Eldest of Jews" of the Lodz Ghetto, sold themselves and their people, urging compliance, assisting in the death machine, sending their own to die (at least in Rumkowski's case) with eyes wide open. (See Lodz Ghetto by Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides.) As one survivor put it: "Without Jewish collaborators, the Nazis would not have succeeded!" (See "Kapo", Winner of the 2000 International EMMY Award for Best Documentary.)

But there were other Judas goats who had less excuse, because of their own margin of safety. These were American Jews, leaders of their communities, who didn't do enough to help their co-religionists under the Nazi boot, who didn't demand enough of the American government which could have done more, who fought amongst themselves for "leadership" and hampered efforts like those Peter Bergson to save as many as possible. (See While Six Million Died by Arthur D. Morse and especially Shake Heaven and Earth: Peter Bergson and the Struggle to Rescue the Jews of Europe by Louis Rapoport.)

In the politically correct, sanitized memory of the Holocaust today, the intellectual descendants of Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise (who hampered Bergson's efforts) remember and venerate the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the escape from Sobibor and the Jewish partisans who wreaked vengeance on the Nazis. This is good. But they conveniently forget about the Judas goats whose complacency, complicity and pacifism enabled the Nazis to commit the horror. And they also have forgotten that most crucial element of resistance: guns. The survivors of the death camps learned this lesson, indelibly imprinted upon their souls. What was the difference between the herded victims at the Auschwitz gate, shuffling to their deaths, and the proud founding of the state of Israel? Guns, and the will to use them against deadly enemies.

How American Jews can miss this lesson is frankly baffling to me. As far as I can see, any American Jews like Rabbi Yoffie who urge citizen disarmament are merely the Judas goats of a future Holocaust. And if you think it can't happen here, Errol, you're whistling past the graveyard of history. As an African American, you should know this. It wasn't that long ago that the Deacons for Defense and Justice rose up in a perilous time and faced down their own would-be murderers with guns in their hands.

"Who or what could control the haters? The governor? The president? The spirit of Gandhi? Or the barrel of a gun!" (Civil Rights pioneer James Farmer, in his book Lay Bare the Heart)

This is why it surprises me that the AME Zion Church of Maryland signed onto the GNGC load of gun baloney. They should know better. I commend to their reading list, and yours, Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement by Lance Hill. Professor Hill tells the often ignored story of the Deacons for Defense and Justice. To quote again from your favorite source, Wikipedia:

"(The Deacons for Defense and Justice were) a group of African American men in Jonesboro, Louisiana led by Earnest 'Chilly Willy' Thomas and Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick founded the group in November of 1964 to protect civil rights workers against the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. Most of them were war veterans with combat experience from the Korean War and World War II. The Jonesboro chapter later organized a Deacons chapter in Bogalusa, Louisiana led by Charles Sims, A.Z. Young and Robert Hicks. The Jonesboro chapter initiated a regional organizing campaign and eventually formed 21 chapters in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The militant Deacons confrontation with the Klan in Bogalusa was instrumental in forcing the federal government to invervene on behalf of the black community and enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act and neutralize the Klan."

James Farmer slept well when he visited Bogalusa, he later reported, because the house he slept in was guarded by Deacons carrying M-1 rifles, carbines and .45 automatic pistols. According to former Ohio secretary of State Ken Blackwell:

"As legendary civil rights leader Roy Innis recently said to me, the Deacons forced the Klan to re-evaluate their actions and often change their undergarments." (See "Second Amendment Freedoms Aided the Civil Rights Movement" at www.townhall.com/columnists/KenBlackwell)

If you require a thumbnail history of the Deacons on-line, Errol, you may go to Larry Pratt's article, "Deacons For Defense," dated August, 2004 at http://www.gunowners.org/op0438.htm. Larry also has another excellent essay on Christians and self defense at the same site. Interestingly, Condi Rice's father was said to be a Deacon in the Birmingham chapter.

Yet the Deacons merely formalized in an organization what had actually been happening for some time as the tide of Klan violence rose.

"More typically, efforts to provide physical protection for movement leaders and activists were discreet and unaccompanied by ideological claims. Devotees of nonviolence in CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee–and indeed Martin Luther King Jr. himself–were all aware that many of the local activists with whom they worked carried guns, and they often quietly accepted the protection these guns afforded." (See Mike Marqusee, http://www.mikemarqusee.com)

Which brings me back to the hypocrisy of you and the Brady Bunch using that quote from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., "who warned in 1963 that 'by our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movies and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing ... we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes.'" Considering that MLK was himself guarded by men with guns, it seems in retrospect to be a little, well, hypocritical, don't you think?

And speaking of hypocrisy, let's conclude by talking about the current Judas goat under examination, one Errol Louis. What do you suppose the Deacons would say to you for casting your lot with the citizen disarmament crowd? They fought and bled to secure your right to equal treatment under law and to keep and bear arms against tyrannical government. Do you believe that the current way of things will always be? What is to prevent some American Hitler in the future from deciding on a "Final Solution to the Negro Problem"?

I'll tell you who will prevent it. Me and my friends will-- white and black, Christian and Jewish, all the colors and creeds of the American rainbow. The gunnies will. The despised "gun nuts" whom the Brady Bunch seeks to disarm. We will. No thanks to Judas goats like you, the calculating Brady Bunch and the well-intentioned but foolish clerics of the God Not Guns Coalition who, purposefully or not, are enabling future tyrants and smoothing the path for the next Holocaust.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776ATaol.com

Previous guest editorials at WarOnGuns by Mike Vanderboegh:

• Hoplophobia: "Crazy Is As Crazy Does."
• You Can't Repeal the Law of Unintended Consequences