Banning the Torah? — Terror of The Woke Cancel Culture

No one understood the dynamics of ideological persecution and the failure of society better than German pastor Martin Niemoller. 

In his famous post-World War II confessional speech, he said (in paraphrase): 

“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a communist.   

Then they came for the socialists, then the trade unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist nor a trade unionist. 

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew. 

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.”  

Jump 80 years forward, and ask yourself this: After “canceling” one literary, musical, artistic, and theatrical classic after another, will be anybody left to speak for the Bible when the “woke” movement inevitably goes after the canonic text of Jewish (and Christian) civilization?

After all, isn’t there slavery in the Bible, alongside discrimination against women, the handicapped, and non-Jews? Isn’t there intolerance of gender-fluid identities and racism regarding certain nations? The Bible even calls for genocide against the seven Canaanite nations, and Amalek!

So why shouldn’t the small group of “intellectuals,” “progressives,” and radical kings-and-queens who rule today’s “cancel culture” approach the Bible censoriously too? What would better amplify their (illusion of) power than twitter-shaming all Bible-believers, or even burning entire chapters of that “culturally offensive” book? 

By David M Weinberg at https://www.jpost.com/opinion/could-the-bible-be-cancel-cultures-next-victim-opinion-661732

Also in the same article:

[…] Writing in The National Post of Canada, John Robson warns in Seussian verse of the curse at hand: 

“There is nothing, no nothing, that (the woke) find in the past, That they won’t burn to ash with a self-righteous blast.

When they’re done with their work then a wasteland you’ll see, Not a book will be standing, and not a movie.

There are some who once thought they could gain from PC, It will strike down my foes but it won’t target me.

Sadly now it is clear that its rage knows no bounds, And upon its old friends it will set its hell-hounds…

I’m no racist, no hater, but this I decree, Others too had their faults but all’s not well with me.

So please fix what you can and repent what you can’t, But don’t ever let loose with a paranoid rant.

That the past was a plot and that all things were wrong, Until history ended and you came along.

Thus to Seuss at the close of this poem I return, And I say with conviction his books must not burn.”

David M Weinberg is vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, jiss.org.il.