As I was reading the thoughts of poet Yehonatan Geffen, in which he sang a song of praise for Ahed Tamimi, who assaulted an IDF officer, giving her equal status to Anne Frank, Hannah Szenes, or Joan of Arc, I felt tired of the man who raised an "armed generation" that dodged military service. The forgotten poet, who once wrote poems and songs for our children, is now parading around his garden naked, wrapped in a "literary" cloak and provocatively – as an exhibitionist – showing his intellectual nether regions in a desperate attempt to scrape up some relevancy.
Geffen trampled the dead symbols of our people – part of an attempt by some of the twisted members of the pantheon of the Left, who feel that if they are not in charge, we are all doomed.
Although I tried, I could find no similarities between Ahed Tamimi (a member of the same family as the murderer Ahlam Tamimi, who was an accessory in the suicide bombing at the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem – who are apparently converts to Islam with Jewish ancestry), who made sure she was caught on camera hitting IDF soldiers, knowing that she win popularity among her people and the perverts in Israel, and Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who hid from the Nazi threat until she was caught and died a miserable death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, leaving behind her famous diary.
I had to overcome my gag reflex at Geffen's comparison of Ahed, who "nobly" exploited the soldier and the IDF regulations that required him to exercise restraint, to the red-headed King David, who risked his life to kill Goliath. With a stroke of his pen, Geffen turned the blonde Ahed into a redhead simply for the sake of the idiotic comparison. David put his life on the line, but Ahed knew that in prison she would receive everything from bandages to groceries, dental care, family visits, and possibly even a college degree.
Geffen, the author of the famous children's book "The Sixteenth Sheep," is weak on history. Any comparison between Miss Nabi Saleh and Joan of Arc – the "virgin of Orleans," is baseless. Joan heard "holy voices," undertook to lead an army in the battles between two feudal houses in France and England, and was burned on the cross at the orders of the church as a devil worshipper; whereas Ahed, who is sitting safely in an Israeli prison, was acting as a minor provocateur serving the terrorist machine: no sword, no horse, and no heroic acts. Just a camera as she slapped and clawed at an Israeli officer who was acting correctly.
Before my father, the late Nahman Berko, passed away, we traveled to Budapest to see where our family came from. My dad, who lost most of his family in the Holocaust, insisted on having ice cream at one particular café near the river. There, he explained to me that under Nazi rule, there had been a sign there that read "Jews and dogs not allowed."
"Now I'm sitting here as an Israeli Jew, with my son," he said, speaking as a victor.
From there, we made our way to the Margaret Island on the gray Danube, whose freezing currents had carried the bodies of masses of Jews. My father was imprisoned on Margaret Island, near Hannah Szenes' cell, and tortured after the Hungarian Nazis caught him using false papers to carry news, weapons, and food to members of the Jewish underground, for which he was later honored by the Hungarian government.
The tranquility of the green island holds the cries of the paratrooper Szenes, who left her safe home in Kibbutz Sdot Yam and was dropped into Yugoslavia, from where she infiltrated Hungary, risking certain death, to save Jews. She was tortured, executed, and all that remains of her anguish is a memorial and a Hungarian exoneration of the charge of "treason" that appeases the consciences of the murderers of our people as well as Geffen, who is besmirching her memory.
