Introduction
If there’s one American tradition that’s lasted well over one century, it is the persistent, serious, subtle, highly organized, and even insidious attack on Christmas. As we read the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper archives from 1907, we discover a full page devoted to this subject, and an article titled “Church Mass Meeting Wants Christmas Songs”, which frames a reactionary measure by the Christian community to defend the singing of Christmas songs in the public schools. When we read characterization of the meeting as “radical anti-Semitic addresses [by two of the reverends]…which betokened discomfort and dissent”, it is not surprising that this paragraph ends, “This feeling was finally voiced by Dr. Cadman, who admonished the speakers that the meeting was not intended as an attack on the Jews”. For it was Jews in the spotlight of school boards, engaged on a mission to enforce separation of church and state. We invite the reader to enter a time capsule, and discover the controversy here:
https://www.newspapers.com/clip/49250485/the-brooklyn-daily-eagle/
Even as late as 1907, this particular Brooklyn community considered themselves culturally a Christian nation, where the Christian religion and lessons of Christ grounded their people with wholesome morals and values. They would soon find that their First Amendment would be their Achilles’ heel, a tool for Jews to perform Nikkur (deveining performed in kosher slaughter) on all matters Christmas-related in the public institutions and square.1
Indulge our perceptive curiosity: We do not easily find leaders from the Hindu community raising a stink. With all the U.S. propaganda that China is an imminent threat, we do not hear voracious calls from the Taoist or Buddhist community challenging the festivities of the winter season. And even after the 9/11 attack on our homeland, we do not detect loud reverberating echoes of Muslims denouncing the last vestiges of Christian culture that may still be present. Instead, the relentless siege appears almost exclusively a “kosher affair”, and when the activists are atheists or agnostics, often they too are ethnically Jewish. In fact, we must conclude that the predominance of Jews challenging Christmas in the American media correlates to a time honored tradition that is probably part of their greater service to humanity, Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. The rumblings within the public Boards of Education in 1907 have graduated to the cultural acceptance of mainstream comedy hammering away, like the 2005 standup act by Sarah Silverman stating that “I hope the Jews did kill Christ! I’d [expletive] do it again in a second!”, to HBO’s reprehensible desecration of Christmas found in the heavily Jewish production “Santa Inc.”, a cartoon TV series that undoubtedly will corrupt some children along the way. We are witnessing today the “progress” that Rev. Allan Douglas Carille and Rev. James M. Farrar feared most. Can you blame them?
Parallels
But an interesting development paralleled this siege on Christmas. You see, there was no such thing as mass kosher certification in 1907, and there was no circled “U” kosher seal (Hebrew: “hekhsher”) stamping the products of most everything purchased for sustenance. There were “blue laws” restricting commercial activities on Sundays, granting a day of rest, and making it pretty damn difficult to buy goods or services on that day. That was a Christian thing. But one hundred and fourteen years later we find ubiquitous kosher seals in our marketplace and everything and anything open for business on Sunday, with the exception of Chick-Fil-A.2 For anyone familiar with old, culturally Christian America, this swap signifies quite an impressive display of power, influence and change.
Other developments with predominantly Jewish influence included the motion picture industry, television, advertising, consumerism, sports, entertainment, gambling, “civil rights”, “social justice”, and even legalized pornography. The train had left the station while taking in mass immigration, and it wasn’t long before easy divorce, even easier abortions, drug-infested youths, organized crime, Sackler family-aided opioid destruction, and total war would affect our families and transform our nation further. It’s as if the software to our Christian culture had been hacked. America was hijacked!
We’ve previously highlighted “The Double Standards of Kosher” that prevail in the labels and certification seals found on our packaged food at “secular” supermarkets vis-à-vis the typical kosher markets.3 Kosher certification is so dominant that our supermarkets may as well be renamed koshermarkets. We’ve also posted social media challenges to the ongoing use of tax payer dollars funding kosher (and halal) programs in the public schools, ironically in the same city where purging Christmas began in 1907.
In fact, we challenge any American parent out there to produce a milk carton from a public school that IS NOT under rabbinical control, NOT bearing a kosher seal! And so it is becoming blatantly clear that double standards and hypocrisy are not things that the Jewish community are concerned about. We have found that when we have ironclad examples that “embarrass”, the trolls simply go away, and they employ censorship or silent treatment to maintain the status quo and quash our awareness efforts. Any Christian constituency looking for fair treatment should themselves reflect that even in this old newspaper article it was mentioned that the Christians were greatly divided. That is the score: a disunited Majority against a persistent Minority. Today, all we can do is document our grievance. So let this essay be a lesson for our collective future.
Winter Solstice
Winter Solstice has bequeathed a warm and cozy feeling to the cultural heritage of Europeans, complete with all the Yuletide spirit that celebrated the return of the sun in pagan traditions. Evergreen boughs reminded the ancient Europeans of everlasting life, or of all the green plants that would flourish in the summer. The transition to a Christian Europe would keep intact these early cultural practices in December. Yuletide festivities would not only remain, but even grow. Evergreen trees would soon be brought into the homes, and those who claim Europe as their ancestral homeland probably consider these traditions the most cherished of all. The majority of Americans fall into this group, and one man from Maine found inspiration from this winter decor.
“When Merrill Worcester, a wreath-maker from Maine, started a tradition of placing thousands of wreaths on veterans’ headstones in Arlington National Cemetery nearly 30 years ago, he couldn’t have known that out of his sense of honor and duty this mission would be born”, starts Karen Worcester, Executive Director of Wreaths Across America (WAA), as she welcomes new supporters and thanks them for taking interest in her organization. For in all the verbiage explaining the details of WAA, there is no hint of a religious association.
Instead, we see the following:
The Siege Continues: Christian Gang Signs
With all the preceding as a background, it should be no surprise that we come across one Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, President of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), featured on a Fox News story dated December 14, 2021: “Religious Freedom Groups Says Wreaths Across America Violating Veteran Religious Liberties”. Mr. Weinstein, “a Jewish agnostic who prays three times a day in Hebrew”,4 is an Air Force Academy graduate and former JAG attorney who has been very active taking on cases that enforce the separation of church and state within the military. While his Senior Research Director at MRFF and Contributor to HuffPost, Chris Rodda, exclaims that their organization is not conducting a “war on Christmas”,5 a perusal of his major cases appear to involve Christians.
From the Fox News story, Mr. Weinstein: “Fine if you want your wreath, but then you make sure that you’ve either requested one from Wreaths Across America or that…Wreaths Across America has had express or explicit approval to do it. We’re not saying you can’t, but you cannot blanket it like that! That’s like carpet bombing! And to many of us that are not Christians and our clients, you know we don’t look for this ourselves, that looks like a Christian gang sign…that you’re creating territory, that is a Christian territory.”
Mr. Weinstein continues:
“Our view is that if you want to put a wreath on veteran’s grave, that’s fine. But then you must first request that, or you make sure that (in this case) Wreaths Across America has absolute empirical and express approval to do so.”
Karen Worcester, Executive Director of WAA (2018 reportable compensation for her 40 hours per week: $0) defends her mission in this Fox News story:
“You have to be respectful for other people’s culture…and come together and teach our children. Our children are watching us. It’s important to teach with respect and that’s part of our mission: to teach kids to care and to learn the history and heritage.”
And Ms. Worcester continues: “We’ve always had a policy since the first wreaths were laid in 1992 to not place wreaths on the graves with the Star of David to show respect.”
And that’s where Mr. Weinstein is shown insinuating that WAA is nothing but a grift. Ms. Worcester responds:
“We have been audited by the IRS several times. We’re up to snuff. We are probably the most transparent organization you’ll ever see!”
So in the course of this video interview on mainstream “conservative” television, we have witnessed the continued siege on Christmas, this time within the military milieu. Wreaths are equated to Christian gang signs. Wreath laying on gravestones is equated to carpet bombing, and a popular national non-profit is hinted as being a less-than-transparent racket of some sorts.
The KosChertified Take
Since 1923, the food, kitchen supply, and detergent industry has been inundated with obscure kosher seals. We counted 635 agencies in the United States alone, and many of them use trademarked certification symbols that are mysterious to most shoppers. Our surveys indicate that maybe as few as ten percent savvy shoppers can even recognize the most popular hekhsher, that of OU Kosher, which certifies over one million items as “fit and proper for Jews”. There may be plenty of lawyers of Weinstein’s ilk ready to defend this pervasive practice despite our consumer research pointing it to a deceptive trade practice, but when we look at how the scheme has pervaded the military commissary, we find ourselves wondering if Mr. Weinstein would call these mysterious symbols Judaic gang signs?
Large wreaths placed on the front of military grave stones are a very transparent activity, allowing MRFF an easy time to analyze which graves have received the seasonal accents, in case there was a mistake. But our Quantitative Study on Kosher Certification revealed that on thirty percent of labeling with kosher seals, the certification was found on the back or sides, not readily apparent to consumers. Since the military commissary sells mostly mainstream brands, we would expect the same results there. Transparency was the primary focus of our research, and we doubt that many young recruits can spot kosher seals found where they least expect one, such as inedible detergents, or without the use of a magnifying glass! Yes, we have shown that the hekhshers found on package labels sharing other certification seals (e.g. NON-GMO, Gluten-Free, Good Housekeeping, etc.) average just ten percent the measurable seal area of the others.
We have surveyed several large sections of packaged food found at the commissaries, and too many were 100% kosher-certified! Take for instance the dry pasta section, where we found the military offering the following: Barilla, Mueller’s, Ancient Harvest, Ronzoni, and Freedom’s Choice. Given that each and every brand listed was under rabbinical control and supervision, the only choices for the service member or their family would be kosher certified or certified kosher! This is hardly a choice that reflects freedom of religion in a government operation that is not supposed to show bias towards any one religion, in this case Judaism. It is especially surprising that the Freedom’s Choice brand, a Defense Commissary Agency product, would not be neutral to religious oversight of food, as kosher certification submits to the Torah and Talmud, granting rabbis the ultimate say over ingredients, sourcing, and production methods…even the machinery lubrication!
The same religious bias was found in canned vegetables at the commissary, a product that would likely be considered a common or essential purchase for many consumers. And when we examined the kosher seal on the government agency’s Freedom’s Choice (all certified by OU Kosher), what did we find? Suspiciously low symbol transparency! Can they print that hekhsher with any fainter ink? We would ask Mr. Weinstein if MRFF considered this an unfair scheme for our soldiers and sailors to decipher? It appears that rejecting indirect contributions to Jewish programs and inconspicuous strange markings is not practical, or even feasible on a military base.
OU Kosher (as seen on their
Twitter page)
Now we get to the juicy part where we know MRFF will jump in with patriotic fervor to bring justice. Yes, we know that the manufacturers are complicit in hiring these kosher agencies for their religious services, and so this would equate to Mr. Weinstein insisting that WAA receive “express or explicit approval to do it.” But the difference we make is with the end user: Wreath laying is extremely transparent, deceased soldiers can’t check a box on a Terms of Service, and finding their living family members may prove impossible. Meanwhile, the existing kosher scheme keeps commissary consumers unaware of the religious stranglehold over their purchases. And where does all that kosher revenue flow? We just don’t know for sure because the IRS grants exemptions for disclosing the accounting numbers for such religious organizations. We may never know how much the directors at OU Kosher earn in this current system, but we’ll presume it’s not as high as Mr. Weinstein’s 2018 compensation at MRFF: $368,393. This president, putting in 105 hours per week (i.e. 15 hours per day, seven days per week) is one hard working guy! With type “A” motivation like that, we are sure he will help our cause to bring true separation of church and state when it is revealed that OU Kosher’s umbrella group, the Orthodox Union of Jewish Congregations, was resolutely supporting the most damaging spy our nation has convicted in recent times!
We must wonder how our military service members would feel if they knew that government commissary agencies were wholeheartedly patronizing non-profits that support those that subverted our nation? And if they are staunch advocates of convicted spies, are they currently supporting spies that haven’t been caught yet?
We would be curious if Mr. Weinstein, growing up in a Jewish family, was always well aware of how pervasive kosher certification had become in the general supermarket? And while Gentile or Christian Americans, regular citizens or military personnel have much of this phenomena concealed from easy noticing, the same industry in Israel has fallen under great scrutiny for its high levels of corruption.6 Can we assume the same is happening on U.S. soil?
Conclusion
In our opinion, religious freedom begins with the living, not the dead! While MRFF can arouse mainstream media to give them a platform to chip away at Christmas amidst cemeteries and wreaths, we have brought to light important religious freedom issues that affect our currently serving troops and veterans every day. We agree that countless American Jews might cringe at the thought of a wreath accidentally placed before the gravestone of their deceased war veteran. Similarly, Non-Jews may want their First Amendment freedom to avoid kosher certification for the myriad reasons we’ve listed, and the intrigue of kosher certification serves as a slap in the face to our patriots who may be too naive, too apolitical, unconcerned, or simply not informed enough to objectively analyze the products that are offered on a military base. They deserve a choice of products that are religiously neutral. Lastly, rabbis have been collecting great sums of money for these kosher certification services for nearly one century, and we are long overdue to witness a public audit! Consumers are afforded absolutely zero transparency in the kosher costs and money flow, and so calling this underhanded enterprise “the ultimate grift” would not be beyond the pale. Wreaths Across America, on the other hand, looks like Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity in comparison! We applaud their benevolent volunteerism and beautifying of our military cemeteries.
Mr. Weinstein continues his people’s time-honored tradition, one that began no later than 1907, and Christmas is further eroded by means of pilpul, losing its authentic meaning while the season sheds more of its evergreen needles and European ties to nature. We invite the Military Religious Freedom Foundation to take up our case with government authorities, helping defend our military troops against the carpet bombing by kosher seals (and yes, you can quote us on that). But as a modicum of compromise, perhaps MRFF can force the military to issue, along with their rifle, one Kosher Supervision Guide and the KosChertified? App for every enlistment. Anything otherwise might be tacit approval of Kosher Supremacy, ceding every military base to Judaic rule, creating ever more Jewish territory.
military troops and their families identify
any of the hundreds of obscure symbols they may come across
The Kosher Question, and offers a unique database of NKC products – NOT Kosher Certified – so our military troops and their families can “Exercise Their Dietary Free Will”
1Nikkur: The procedure contained within the Jewish practice of Shechita of removing the major blood vessels, nerves, and forbidden fats from a kosher-slaughtered animal. In Yiddish, this process is called “treibering”. The basis for this practice is found in Leviticus 7:23, and it is usually performed by the Shochet. Due to the particularism of Jewish law, “Only about 30 percent of slaughtered animals can be used for kosher distribution.” (Source: https://kosherquest.org/is-it-kosher/shechita/)
2http://thekosherquestion.com/#!our-blog/chick-fil-a-cares
3https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/09/24/the-double-standards-of-kosher/
4https://www.huffpost.com/entry/no-megyn-kelly-mikey-wein_b_5240896
5https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mikey-weinstein-a-traitor_b_1172823
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