On Being Moishe the Beadle

For those who have read Elie Wiesel's astonishing Holocaust biography, Night, Moishe the Beadle remains a powerful figure.  A spiritual man whom Elie Wiesel reveres in childhood, Moishe the Beadle is Wiesel's Kabbalah teacher, educating the young teen about the critical questions within Jewish mysticism.

Movingly, Moishe discloses that he prays "to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."

My prayer, from the time I was four years old, and for reasons that are mysterious to me, has always been that I may do God's will in all that I undertake.  

But Moishe's desire for the strength to ask the right questions provides a lens into our human frailties, suggesting that we are often not strong enough to ask the most pressing questions at hand.

I understand people's hesitancy to question the established order represented by something like the Phoenix Program.

How could segments of our three-letter agencies and our military prey upon the law-abiding American public?  And why would they do so?

Moishe becomes a remarkable harbinger for Wiesel's rural village in Hungary when, in 1944, he is one of the first to be taken away for a mass extermination in the deep woods of Europe.  But somehow, by miraculous means, Moishe doesn't die!  His bullet wound is superficial enough to allow him to climb out of the mass grave under cover of night and travel hundreds of miles to return to his hometown and extend his warning.

Moishe knows now what is happening to the Jews who are transported away from their homes in "resettlement programs."  They are being murdered, en masse, and all of Adolf Eichmann's meticulous regulations for the Hungarian Jews concerning their allowed luggage and their permitted number of accompanying relatives -- are a ruse, a ploy, a deception intended to persuade people to board the trains peaceably, compliantly, bound for their own demise.

I, for my part, have discovered the real intent and implementation of the Phoenix Program.  And it, like the Holocaust, is a horror.  Utilizing falsified law enforcement reporting as a means to mischaracterize virtuous Americans as "the enemy," the far right is taking their lives -- through haphazard but relentless means, which, if history is any guide, are bound to accelerate.

Moishe, in speaking the truth of the Holocaust's objectives to his townspeople, becomes, instead of a revered spiritual leader, an outcast, a pariah, someone whose words are feared.

As history would have it, Eichmann's henchmen do eventually arrive in Elie Wiesel's rural town, but by then, there is no further opportunity for contemplation.  Their orders to the villagers are to pack their bags and line up in the town square in an orderly fashion.  And right away.

We are never explicitly told what happens to Moishe the Beadle.  But we can guess.  As the one who kindles Elie Wiesel's faith in a benevolent God, he disappears from view in the masses on the trains, his wisdom lost to us a second time.

And yet, we still have his words.  "I pray to the God within me that He will give me the strength to ask Him the right questions."

What are the right questions in this moment?

For a mother and wife whose family has been wrongfully targeted by the Phoenix Program, they are How can I protect my husband and my children from this horror?  How can I shield them from the men who would seek to take their lives?  What place represents safe harbor for them, and how can I ensure that they reach it?  Who will protect them from false accusations?  And, in the case of my youngest son's coercion by Txx Lxxxx, who will shield us from the false witness statements Txx Lxxxx is still compelling him to make even now?

For a whistleblower of FBI malfeasance, the questions are somewhat more far reaching.  How many law-abiding Americans have lost their lives to the monstrous predations that Phoenix perpetrates against them?  Two million?  Five million?  How many?

And how can the perpetrators of Phoenix be led to understand that they are committing grievous human atrocities which counter every meaningful principle on which our nation was founded?

And will someone within the federal government care enough about us to contact us directly?  Or are we to remain isolated within a closed system of predation, in which Special Forces teams gain their exercise by scaling my roof each night, and contamination of a peaceable family's food and water are seen as "practice" and "training?"

It is surely always excruciating for any branch of government, and certainly three-letter agencies such as the FBI and CIA, to acknowledge that they have committed knowing wrongs against peaceable Americans.

Yet, they have.

And if our democracy is to survive, we must find the fortitude to say so, and to say so compellingly enough that the news cannot be ignored or postponed or discounted.

General Mark Millley should not be sending JSOC "ghost teams" onto my property at night wearing inkblot masks that look like this:

It is not Halloween, and these men are not trespassing in jest.

Rather, they are attempting to meet Phoenix quotas as these have been programmatically laid out for our agencies to fulfill.

The banality of evil comes down to accounting, and Phoenix has been chosen as the route the unelected wish to travel on the road to undeserved power.

We likely cannot stop them with our pleas for reason, fairness, or human rights.

The perpetrators of Phoenix already know they are committing atrocities.  They are not likely to thank us for privately reminding them.

Instead, the call to alarm must be amplified ten-thousand fold.

We must demand that Mark Milley and Christopher Wray publicly account for the "target of interest" program, the Phoenix Program, the "non-investigative subjects program," the "Signature Reduction Program.  

When we answer evil with silence, history has made clear, we are not doing enough.

Christopher Wray's decision, Tom Lyons' decision, Brandan Pesa's decision to render my family members seriously ill represent heinous wrongs that must be publicly addressed if we hope to halt the far right's covert war against the rest of us as peaceable Americans.

The atrocities of extremists are often hidden by nightfall, by black budgets, and by euphemistic terms such as "neutralize," "resettle," "evacuate," "extract," and "remove."

We cannot afford to ignore the reliance of the far right on defining these terms as evidence of American productivity, efficiency, talent, dominance or skill.

The truth is that our Constitution stipulates that the military should stand in defense of peaceable civilian life, not prey upon it with impunity to heighten the "readiness" of our battle forces toward a totalitarian objective.

A successful democracy requires our citizens' respect, truth, civility, honor, virtue, integrity, compassion, and concern for one another.

In the face of a concerted, intentional abrogation of human rights, it demands of all of us that we sound the alarm, and sound it loudly.

Otherwise, we will all become Moishe the Beadle, ultimately, bound for his train a second and final time.

Lane MacWilliams