From "Finding God, and Nietzsche, in the Hamas Tunnels of Gaza/How Omer Shem Tov, who was 20 years old and not particularly religious when taken hostage, survived 505 days in captivity" (NYT)(free-access link).
10 జూన్, 2025
"Each morning, Shelly Shem Tov would enter her son’s empty bedroom and recite Chapter 20 from the biblical Book of Psalms, an ancient plea for deliverance."
"All the while she was unaware that her son, Omer Shem Tov, happened to be uttering the very same verses of Psalm 20 — 'May the Lord answer you on a day of distress.' He had adopted the same daily ritual about 130 feet underground, alone, in a Hamas tunnel in Gaza...."
From "Finding God, and Nietzsche, in the Hamas Tunnels of Gaza/How Omer Shem Tov, who was 20 years old and not particularly religious when taken hostage, survived 505 days in captivity" (NYT)(free-access link).
"A few days into his captivity, he said, he began to speak to God. He made vows. He began to bless whatever food he was given. And he had requests — some of which he believes were answered.... Some taken hostage said they found the will to go on in a motto they heard from Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli-American hostage, before he was killed by his captors. It was a version of a quotation... from the atheist German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and often echoed by Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor: 'He who has a why can bear with any how.'"
From "Finding God, and Nietzsche, in the Hamas Tunnels of Gaza/How Omer Shem Tov, who was 20 years old and not particularly religious when taken hostage, survived 505 days in captivity" (NYT)(free-access link).
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36 కామెంట్లు:
We should update the old saw about "No atheists in foxholes" to include Hamas tunnels.
Survivor bias…
Good lord. One Israeli victim gets a whole story. 40,000 dead Gazans get a paragraph. Can the NYT's be more biased?
Goldberg-Polin didn't have a why so he couldn't bear the how? Seems cruel to imply he wasn't mentally fit to live like the hardened Israeli whose God protected him but not the American... Do you even read what you write, ann?
ah - but those poor poor poor Palestinians - or "Gazans" - who cheer for dead Jews, who teach their young children to hate Jews from the earliest of age.
The globalists keep the Hamas leaders flush in billions - as they live high on the hog - someplace else.
Good lord. 40,000 dead Gazans and you spend your time commenting on a blog? See anyone can play that game.
Historically - Israelites and Jews have occupied those lands going back thousands of years. The Syrian Palestinians plunked in much later - so technically - it's not their land.
But because Palestinians are a-holes - nobody anywhere wants them.Globalists thrive off the Jew-hate machine.
There are lot of interesting, and indeed blood curdling, captive stories from when the Indians were trying to keep themselves from getting genocided, or at best, driven from their land, leaving their farms, orchards, fishing and hunting grounds behind, when they didn't have access to modern military technology when the other side did.. It didn't work out for them either. We Europeans would write poems like Gertrude of Wyoming, and the rest of us would shed such tears for poor Gertrude, and hatred of the Indians, whose land Gertrude's farm was on, based on some mark on a document made by some Indian who didn't have the authority and who was plied with firewater and had no real understanding of European law anyway.
The only legitimacy arises from military force. Israel looks to the Indian Wars for inspiration and a model. Ukraine was hoping to do the same thing to the Russians who fell within the boundary that the Soviets [and Hitler] drew for them, which is why they worship Bandera. The Gazans play out the same losing strategy the Indians did. Plus ca change...
That’s how you set the record straight, peachy @8:37AM !
I’m sure his Islamist captors did a lot of praying too—though at cross purposes, of course. All that praying over there…no wonder the Holy Land is so blessed by God.
Dead Antifa? I'd be happy.
No one needs Antifa - or Jew-hating fuck-heads.
No one needs the Women-subjugating Ayatollahs of Iran.
Except the scapegoat crowd, the Hamas propaganda eating crowd, the soros-type globalist liars, the historical bullshitters, the eternal victim machine, and the war machine.
Psalms is about the great wisdom that David realized at the end of his life,
it has been a rough neighborhood, Jonathan Cahn did an overview in his latest book, relating ancient texts to current events,
as a collection of settler states, ourselves we should be more understanding,
What we did to the Native American Indians was/is a tragedy of many horrors.
Slavery - of course not unique to the US - but nonetheless, is a stain on US history.
The Palestinians could co-exist - and many do as many as 25% of them live and work in Israel. Historically - they do not have claim to that land. Instead, Palestinians eat shit live breathe and die to hate and kill Jews.
"40,000 dead Gazans"
Why not 100,000? Why not a million, as long as we're making up numbers? Those who start a war don't get to determine how it ends. After all, the residents of Hiroshima didn't kill 100,000 Americans.
they did for a time until Haj Amin who the Brits foolishly nominated for leadership over the Mosques, about as smart as giving weapons to Ibn Saud,
The same crowd that controls the "Doomsday Clock" must be responsible for counting the dead Pali babies. Doomsday's been stuck at 5 minutes to midnight since I was 6 years old, and the dead babies of Gaza has been stuck at 40,000 since Day 1. At least they move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight when a Republican is elected president.
The Human Spirit can endure a lot. But it has to have something to focus on, in my experience. Psalms can be a great way to focus.
American propagandists and propaganda eaters- love the starving Gazans BS.
It's like that pile of bricks, downtown... always there when you need it.
the reality was jabotinsky knew better from his experience in odessa, that co existence was unlikely,
It's interesting how people under stress put aside religious doubts that they had under normal conditions. Perhaps the stresses historically associated with poverty, famine, disease, random horror, and victimization made people more convinced that there was a higher realm and an organizing set of principles issued by the Great Organizer(s) of Everything.
I get annoyed when Nietzche is called an "atheist". He never said he didn't believe in God, he merely said that "God is dead". It's a subtle difference, but actually a very crucial one to Nietzche's philosophy, and understanding it.
Echoes of this in the New Testament:
"And what more shall I say? For time will fail me if I tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets, who by faith conquered kingdoms, performed acts of righteousness, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, quenched the power of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, from weakness were made strong, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women received back their dead by resurrection; and others were tortured, not accepting their release, so that they might obtain a better resurrection; 36 and others experienced mockings and scourgings, yes, also chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two,]they were tempted, they were put to death with the sword; they went about in sheepskins, in goatskins, being destitute, afflicted, ill-treated (men of whom the world was not worthy), wandering in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground."
"
Atheism is a creed that only the rich can afford.
Greta will soon save those poor poor Jew haters... who must kill Jews to survive.
When we came to America the natives were very glad to see us—because they realized that we could help them kill the neighboring tribe and take their land. Native tribes had been genociding and enslaving each other for over 10,000 years; they knew how it worked. They just didn’t understand how much better this new white tribe would be at it. Good luck tracing back through millennia of conquests and reconquests to find the “rightful” owners. Whoever they were, they were driven out long ago, and whatever tribe occupies the land now is a usurper.
Greta is a propagandized tool.
Palestinian keffiyeh = the symbol of a fuckhead.
Peachy said...
"What we did to the Native American Indians was/is a tragedy of many horrors."
What the native Americans did to each other was even worse.
Often, 'genocide' is just a way to spell history differently.
thanks for sharing that one, AA
and props to the NYT for publishing it
made my eyes water
I know hostages are valuable
But I also know Hamas hates the Jews, defines them as sub-human, and wants to kill them all.
So it's miraculous than any Jew survives capture by Hamas.
Especially when there are food shortages, because of the Israeli blockade. People are going without food. And every day, Hamas feeds this Jew, and keep him alive. Maybe not every day. But they're giving him water, and enough food to live.
I would have guessed that no hostages would have survived, that all of them would have died. I'm sure a lot of hostages died, feeling that God had abandoned them. Mark 15:34.
For whatever reason, when this man prayed, over and over, the holy spirit showed him a way. He prayed. Maybe his captors were impressed by that. He humbly thanked them for feeding him. And he lived. Amazing.
"So it's miraculous than any Jew survives capture by Hamas. Especially when there are food shortages, because of the Israeli blockade. People are going without food. And every day, Hamas feeds this Jew, and keep him alive. Maybe not every day. But they're giving him water, and enough food to live."
Saint Croix doesn't realize that Hamas has been stealing aid to use for their own soldiers and as a tool to recruit more soldiers and to sell in markets to improve their cash flow. It's not a miracle that hostages have been kept alive, even though they are hated because they are the only leverage Hamas has to pressure Israel to agree to a cease fire while Hamas remains in power.
There is testimony by hostages that they witnessed stockpiles of food and Hamas soldiers were enjoying regular meals while the hostages were deliberately starved. We saw for ourselves in the Hamas hostage release ceremonies that the Hamas soldiers looked well fed and well dressed in pressed uniforms while the hostages looked emaciated.
See: ‘Hamas eats like kings while hostages starve,’ Eli Sharabi tells UN
Saint Croix doesn't realize that Hamas has been stealing aid to use for their own soldiers and as a tool to recruit more soldiers and to sell in markets to improve their cash flow.
I do realize that.
It's not a miracle that hostages have been kept alive, even though they are hated because they are the only leverage Hamas has to pressure Israel to agree to a cease fire while Hamas remains in power.
That was the first thing I said, that hostages have value. I recognize there is a secular reason Hamas kept him alive.
My point is that I believe his prayers helped him. I think the holy spirit answered his prayers. Hamas murdered almost every hostage they took (despite their value), out of hatred and insanity. But this guy managed to make it. I know there's such a thing as survivor guilt, but I don't think he should feel that. It was not his time to die.
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