As for "those who took up the sword"... This is the special flavor of Purim – that the sword had not yet been taken by the Persians. The crime was planned, but was not carried out. Imagine that in the early 1930s, the European powers managed to put pressure on German President Hindenburg and he outlawed the Nazi Party. And for two days, everyone was allowed to kill anyone they suspected of sympathizing with Hitler... It is not "vengeance" that takes place on Purim. But a "preventive strike". Nowhere in these biblical texts do we see that crowds of pogromists first gathered, then they rushed to the Jewish quarters, and then the Jewish self-defense units fulfilled their duty... On the contrary: "the Jews gathered together to lay their hand on their ill-wishers" (Est. 9:2). Very precisely: a hand on the "wishers", death for an intention...

For the sake of revenge on Haman, it was enough to execute him. What do tens of thousands of people have to do with it? Yes, the people have the right to protection and even to revenge on guilty criminals. But why continue the murders after the elimination of the really guilty?

Imagine that the Soviet army, having already defeated Nazism, scheduled a total roundup of Germans who collaborated with the previous regime on one of the winter days of 1946... The German Communists were issued a letter of protection, under the guise of which they could shoot on the spot for two days without trial or investigation anyone who annoyed them in the old days. And as a result, 75 thousand already disarmed Germans were executed... Could it be that this pogrom would also be considered morally irreproachable?

Good: let revenge, let retribution... But what do children have to do with it? The children did not take a sword in their hands and did not dig a ditch... I have no doubt that Alexander Nezhny in other situations is not averse to talking about "the tear of an innocently tortured child". But how is it that he does not want to stay away from those who have been dancing joyfully for the 25th century in a row, remembering the murder of children (Est. 8:11)?

How can you celebrate the murder of 75,000 people (including children) every year?

It is good that today Jewish publicists are trying to pretend that children were not killed on Purim. "Mr. Kuraev considers Purim "a memory of a successful pogrom." In proving this thesis of his, Mr. Kuraev is lying, and unpretentiously, hoping, presumably, that no one will convict a clergyman of lying. Meanwhile, in the Book of Esther there is not a single word about the murder of women and children by the Jews – this is an invention of the deacon Kuraev. And what about the murder of Haman's children – and 9 months after the execution of their father (Est. 9:10)? And Est. 8:11 — "to destroy all the mighty in the people and in the region who are at enmity with them, children and women"?

There is a good feature in this brazen denial of the murder of children: it means that the conscience of modern Jews condemns the infanticide of the goyim. But there is also an alarming feature: these journalists allow themselves to lie for the sake of embellishing their national history.

I understand the holiday in honor of a military victory. It was an open and risky clash, and Victory Day is a manly and honest holiday. But how to celebrate the day of the pogrom? How to celebrate the day of the murder of thousands of children?

Is there any other people on earth that celebrates with joy the day of known unpunished massacres? Are there any such analogues? Then let me consider the vindictiveness of those who celebrate Purim unique.

Imagine that some group of "Russian patriots" began to openly and loudly celebrate the day of the burning of the "Judaizer heretics" as a Russian national and church holiday. What will the press say? [252]

It is so strange to celebrate this unpunished pogrom of unarmed neighbors that from ancient times some Jews felt the need to justify their vengeance in the face of the Gentiles.

The first step in this direction was made by the Alexandrian translators of the Tanakh into Greek. They gave a purely historical tradition a religious character, adding the dream of Mordecai and the prayers of Mordecai and Esther (the numbering of these additions to the Greek text in the Russian Synodal edition is indicated not by numbers, but by letters).

Then Josephus begins to add something that was not in either the Hebrew or the Greek biblical text: they say, in the king's decree written by Mordecai, it was said: "If the Jews on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar had to repel persons who would think of offending them on that day..." (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 11, Ch. 6, 12).

And today there are attempts to give those events at least some glimmer of military valor. The newspaper Segodnya, which together with NTV was part of the information empire of MOST-Bank, i.e., Mr. Gusinsky, then chairman of the Russian Jewish Congress, offered a new, more respectable version of the events of Purim: "As a result, the Persian anti-Semites were disarmed and utterly defeated. In the walled Susa (the Persian capital), the battles went on for two days."[254] In the book of Esther itself, there is no mention of battles. Not a word is said about whether there were casualties among the Jews. But, as we can see, even to the taste of modern Jews, the fact that the basis of the holiday is the slaughter of the unarmed is so obscene that you have to invent fights.