In a speech to the National Press Club in 1997, Charlton Heston said, “Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder.”

Dr. Ben Carson started a firestorm of controversy with his comments about gun control in Nazi Germany. Here’s a simple question to a critic: “Do you believe that the community college students that were murdered in Oregon would have been better off with or without a gun to defend themselves?”

Here’s a follow-up question: “Do you believe that a potential murderer would rather pick a target of defenseless people or a target of armed people?”

Read more: “Gun Control in the Third Reich: Learn the Lesson.” 

“So-called ‘gun-free zones’ are lightning rods for mass murder. . . . In 2009 Islamist killer Nidal Malik Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others at Fort Hood, Texas. Fort Hood was a gun-free zone.” (H/T: Townhall)

The following article recounts a period of American history that, not surprisingly, I and most Americans are not aware of.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

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Ben Carson’s comments that armed Jews might have saved lives in the Holocaust by resisting Nazi terror have been met with condescending mockery from the left. The Jewish establishment, a network of wealthy non-profit organizations that claim to represent Jews without ever being chosen by them and while working against their interests, has reacted in the same way as their liberal brethren.

But this establishment has forgotten that it was built on providing guns to Jews.

Historical revisionism is what the left does best. American Jewish history in the last century is a revisionist history in which the heroes are the “establishment.” The truth lies buried in old papers and lost documents. And it’s a deeply compelling truth of how the left suppressed Jewish self-defense.

The Jewish Defense Association was the first time that uptown establishment German Jews and downtown Eastern Jewish immigrants came together. The JDA’s goal had little in common with the empty rubber chicken dinner agendas of what the establishment that grew out of it would become.

Instead the Jewish Defense Association’s mission was simple. Buy guns for Jews.

Its agenda, as reported by the New York Times was, “New massacres are preparing. Our people must be possessed of arms to defend themselves and their honor.”

The year was 1905. The slow bloody beginning of the Russian Revolution was underway. Much like the Syrian Civil War, brutal militias aligned with different factions from the left to the right would arise out of the violence. Like the Christians in Syria, the Jews were an isolated minority. Xenophobia allowed both Communists and Czarists to score populist points by massacring the Jews in violent pogroms.

The Jewish Defense Association responded with a call to arms. Its motto took a part of Hillel’s credo, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me.” Its membership encompassed the left and the right, Zionists and anti-Zionists, religious and secular Jews.

A march of 200,000 Jews to Union Square included 5,000 former Russian soldiers, the volunteer Zion Guards in blue uniforms carrying rifles and the young men of the Manhattan Rifles, begun in the Lower East Side’s Educational Alliance as the Alliance Cadets, which had been formed in imitation of the Jewish Lads Brigade, a group that had put thousands of Jewish boys in the UK through military training.

The final resolutions declared that, “Eternal vigilance is the price of the Jew’s life, and that we urge our people to take up arms against their assailants, and if need be to sell their lives most dearly.”

It concluded with the ringing challenge, “We call Jews everywhere toward the defense of the Jewish people.”

In the words of the New York Times, “A ripple went through the crowd like wind rising to a hurricane which roared “Aye!”

It was undoubtedly the most heavily armed Jewish rally in American history. The sight of all those guns, not to mention early versions of the Israeli flag, would give any modern establishment leader a fit.

Read the rest of the article at Front Page Magazine