We have often pointed out that science fiction and fantasy societies are based on real human societies, and the one in Battlestar Galactica is no exception. We suspect that it is an alternate history in which Michael Lerner of Tikkun.org and Eric Yoffie of the United “American” “Hebrew” Congregations (now the Center for Reform Judaism) were in charge of the Jewish people when the Greeks demanded that the Jews worship the Greek idols. As stated by Yoffie at the Million Mom March rally in 2000,

We’re going to find out who’s getting NRA funds, and benefiting from NRA ads, and we’re going to vote for the other guy. The American people, I believe, are ready for a leader who will take on the fanatics and support sensible gun control. …Controlling guns is not only a political matter, it is a solemn religious obligation. Our gun-flooded society has turned weapons into idols, and the worship of idols must be recognized for what it is-blasphemy.

With “Jewish” leadership like this, of course, the Maccabees–who would probably have been jailed by the Yoffie-led Hebrews for owning unlicensed and unregistered swords–would have lost the war, and the ex-Jews would then have ended up worshipping genuine honest-to-the-gods graven images. The result would have been a space-faring civilization like that in Battlestar Galactica, where spaceship pilots carry little Greek idols to which they pray on a regular basis. Jesus would then have been an idol-worshipper like everyone else, and the Christian religion would have never existed.

Hanukkah is therefore about defending one’s home, family, and country: a concept totally repugnant to the Kumbaya-singers. The war between the Maccabees and the Greeks was only the first in which Jews had to fight for their survival.

# Two thousand or so years later, Minutemen used privately-owned firearms in the American War of Independence to create a country with freedom of religion. Many Jews emigrated from Europe and came to America so they could practice Judaism without having to worry about pogroms by Inquisitions, Cossacks, and the like.
# In 1943, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto revolted against the Nazis. “The first armed resistance occurred when a 17- year-old [”idolator” and “fanatic” per Eric Yoffie] named Emily Landau flung a grenade into a cluster of SS men from a rooftop on Gesia Street, killing or wounding a dozen of them. The SS promptly assaulted the building with submachine guns blazing, only to be met by a volley of return fire that felled four or five Germans and drove the rest back in disorder. Emily Landau was bending down to recover a pistol from a slain SS officer when she was struck by a bullet fired by a German rifleman covering his comrades’ retreat. [She died trying to recover an “idol,” which proves her a fanatic, right, UAHC?] The first to fight, she was also the first to die” (Jon Guttmann, “Genocide Delayed”).
# In 1947, Jews founded the Nation of Israel in the face of immense hardships. Its Arab neighbors invaded so the “idolators and fanatics” fought back desperately with whatever firearms they could buy, beg, borrow, or steal. If it had been up to Yoffie and the Union of “American” “Hebrew” Congregations, the Arabs would have overrun the Jews and thrown them into the sea. (Recommended viewing: “Cast a Giant Shadow” with Kirk Douglas as Col. Mickey Marcus.)

Physical cowardice and elitism are the elephants in the gun controllers’ living room, the ones that everyone knows about but no one wants to acknowledge. Ownership of a weapon requires the implicit acceptance of the idea that one may have to fight and possibly die to protect oneself or those for whose safety one is responsible: an idea that is repugnant to the typical gun control supporter or Kumbaya-singer (and the two usually go hand in hand).
This position is reinforced by the fact that some societies actually required their gentry to carry or at least own weapons, as an explicit symbol of their responsibility to defend that society. We therefore recommend that the gun control movement replace its handgun with a red line through it with a white feather, a rabbit with a yellow stripe down its back, or the French Tricoleur. (All three have essentially the same meaning.)

The bottom line was stated in a movie about the life of Jesus: “Those who live by the sword kill those who have no swords and go on living.” History’s most vicious conquerers and genocidal maniacs have indeed lived quite well by the sword unless and until they picked a fight with the wrong people, who invariably also had swords as opposed to flowers and peace signs.

Some gun control supporters are, however, former police officers and soldiers; people who are obviously not afraid to bear arms. Their position is apparently that of elitist medieval overlords who wanted a monopoly on the means of violence. There were times when feudal Japan banned commoners from owning even knives–not to control crime, of which there is relatively little in Japanese society, but to prevent the commoners from defending themselves against sword-wielding samurai. Medieval knights similarly hated the crossbow, which allowed a commoner to shoot even the bluest-blooded nobleman from his saddle.

Finally we have elitist cowards like Ted Kennedy and Rosie O’Donnell. Both employ armed bodyguards while demanding strict gun laws for commoners. As elitists, they want a monopoly on the means of violence. As cowards, they are unwilling to bear arms themselves. Niccolo Machievelli wrote a long time ago that you cannot pay a man enough to die for you, but O’Donnell and Kennedy apparently think otherwise.

On a larger scale, the Kumbaya-singers want to disarm the world’s democracies to avoid “threatening” tin-pot dictatorships like North Korea and Iran. The Kumbaya-singers think it’s fine and dandy for those dictatorships to have the means of killing millions of innocent people, because they assume that Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are Kumbaya-singers just like Jimmy Carter and themselves. This is of course a manifestation of their personal cowardice, because they are afraid to even think that Kim Jong Il and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might actually set off a nuclear weapon in New York City or Los Angeles. As Herman Kahn wrote of nuclear war, refusal to think about the unthinkable makes the unthinkable not only thinkable, but likely.

A large number of Christians are starting to point out that Christmas is not about shopping malls, plastic Santas, and so on. It is past time for Jews to remember what Hanukkah is really about, and it has very little to do with anything the Jewish Left represents.