By Debbie Schlussel
On this first day of Chanukah, my friend, the great patriot Ruth S. King, wrote an excellent piece on Chanukah and what our world leaders don’t get (but should) at Family Security Matters. An excerpt:

[O]n this Chanukah of 2007, there is a terrible irony. While we sing and celebrate in freedom in America, throughout the Islamic world the holiday is forbidden. And in Israel where this epic victory was won, the Jewish people again abandon their patrimony and faith in search of a delusional accommodation with enemies bent on erasing Israel. Even the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is being claimed by the same Moslem forces that ransacked and destroyed all non Moslem holy sites in Jerusalem from 1948 until 1967.

Jewish towns and cities in the Judean hills where the Maccabeans fought and won are being evacuated to make room for Jihadists whose intentions have been made very clear by the events in Gaza where synagogues and churches were burned and razed within days of the Israeli withdrawal. In the West Bank, in Nablus, in October 2002, under the indifferent eyes of the highly touted Palestinian Authority, Joseph’s Tomb mentioned in the book of Joshua, was looted by a Moslem mob that systematically destroyed and burned every remnant of the shrine and adjacent religious school into a heap of rubble, painted the remains green and declared it a “holy Moslem shrine.”
More recently in September 2007, the Waqf, the Muslim religious authorities who control the Temple Mount area, engaged in wanton destruction of Jewish antiquities on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Hebron, the cradle of the Jewish faith, is being turned over to the Moslems who fouled the holiest shrine, the Tombs of the Patriarchs.

Read the whole thing.
Esser Agaroth writes:

You asked where today’s Maccabbees are. Well, Chanukah is an extremely politically incorrect the holiday. . . . Bottom line? We won the battle because we were willing to fight Jewish Hellenists (read: assimilationists, leftists) as well.

As I’ve repeatedly written, today, the Jewish Hellenists are the uber-liberals who deign to speak for me and others–the ones who bend over backwards to reach out to Islamists on our soil here in America and in Israel.
He sends this article from Machon Shilo, which–while more appropriate for those knowledgeable of the Jewish religion–says it all in these excerpts:

For the hard-core [Jewish] Hellenists . . . Envisioning a New Middle East, they petitioned the king to adopt a program calculated to undermine Jewish life and culture. If their Jewish brethren did not recognize the ‘beauty’ of Greek ‘progress’ and insisted on remaining true to their G-d and His Torah – even at the price of being out of step with the rest of the Empire – they would simply have to help them to see the light.
[Greek King] Antiokhus was only too ready to comply and the new government policy was proclaimed. Circumcision, Shabbath observance and Torah study were outlawed. Women whose babies were discovered to be circumcised were put to death together with their sons. An idol of the Greek god Zeus was erected in the Miqdash (Temple); Torah scrolls were sought out and torched. . . .
This is the essential story of Hannukah: the successful revolt of God-fearing Jews, dedicated to the Torah of their forefathers, against those ‘Jews’ and non-Jews determined to eradicate their way of life.
The revolt succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Not only did they restore the primacy of Torah culture and practice in the State of Yehudah; for the first time in centuries, the Jewish nation was once again sovereign and able to determine its own destiny. The historic significance of this victory cannot be overstressed: it is quite likely that without the successful armed revolt led by Matithyahu and his sons, we would have disappeared as a people more than 2000 years ago.

And that is the other story of Chanukah: When it seems darkest, when all the odds are against us–as they are with 1.6 billion who hate and want to destroy us Jews, Christians, Hindus, Ba’hais, atheists, and others–things can always turn our way, if we only believe and fight for the just and right.
That is the message of Chanukah. And why I love the holiday.
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What Chanukah is NOT About: Aging Jewish hippies kowtowing at absurd “interfaith” Jewish-Muslim Rodney-King-Can’t-We-All-Get-Along “Hanukah” Fests like this crap session:

This guy is an example of what the Jewish Hellenists of yesteryear were like. The Maccabees would have done made swift work of him. Too much hashish in his potato pancakes and too much disconnect in his mind.