“Everyone knows that American Jews and Israel are drifting apart . . .”
Everyone does “not know” because it isn’t the truth.
I am an American of Jewish descent.
I don’t speak Hebrew, but I belong to a synagogue. While I am as interested in being an American without a hyphenate, and in the United States of America, that is possible, I am not only comfortable being Jewish but democratic, humanist, liberal, and pro-Zionist.
The propaganda that starts with an assumptive phrase, “Everyone knows” often goes on to “about the Jews”. Most American Jews well know the history of the invocation of such phrases and the persecution of the Jewish People that continues apace without regard to possession of the Hebrew language or religious passion (Hitler, I believe, set the mark for “genocide” for one-fifth “Jewish blood”).
I don’t really want to take on the genetics crowd, but Jewishness, believing (in God) “ethical monotheism” and appreciation of cultural customs and holidays and rituals appear all over the world, from Cuba to the Asian subcontinent (include China and Africa . . . everywhere) through the Jews. Regardless of real race — talk about “rainbow coalition” — the vast majority of Jews recognize the significance, promise fulfilled, and powerful function of the possession of a real spiritual — and functional and functioning — homeland. Our culture — our way, our ethics, morality, our arguments . . . in fact: no Moses — no Muhammad — knows the land from whence it came, and in that most all share.
Ask a Baloch, a Kurd, a Pashtun (“B’ni Israel”) about his relationship with the Land of The People.
The response may be no different for the Hebrew People and Jewish People of the global diaspora. We know the land from whence we’ve come — and we know what we have had to overcome to get there. We are not drifting from that land: we are drifting the world closer to it.
So Jews argue (and the cliche goes: “two Jews, three opinions”).
Call what we do intellectual freedom combined with the ambition to learn and explore ethics, law, and psychology and much else without limits.
We’re not drifting apart: we’re drifting more together, and not only the Jews, but with the same “mixed multitude” that Moses led out of Egypt.
As regards the business of establishing a “Palestinian state” — and BackChannels’ editor endorses a two-state solution or, if unachievable, suzerainty — resides with the creaking old absolute-power enthusiasts: the PLO / PA and Hamas, both apparently incapable of change (on this blog, have a look at “Why the Jews“) and chained themselves (by money most of all) to the Moscow-Tehran axis, post-Soviet, neo-feudal, and relentlessly piratical, both of them.
The opener, “PROPAGANDA ALERT” may have ironic meaning for some (bigots), but it refers to the tack taken in the first paragraph of the Abrams review and might apply to liberal gloss throughout lauds the excessive criticism of Israel as programmatic in “saving Israel” (from those blasted far right wingers) while barely touching on the perfidy of the Jewish State’s sworn enemies –and not the Palestinians but the Palestinian leadership.
This page may turn out a work in civilizational regress as so many leftward and youthful peacocks climb the virtual barricades “in solidarity” with the Palestinians, eliminating economic development and jobs, fostering Arab apartheid politics (check out those holding pens called “camps” in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria), and serving Hamas billionaires, among others, along their disinformed way (ah, but that’s what youth is for).
I can’t endorse the sentiment, ______, having taken a moderate course, but I hope that more and more Arabs will take note of the abuse of the refugees at the hands of their leaders and the medieval disinformation and manipulation campaigns that have led to The Preoccupation not only with the Jews but their own self-concept and status in the world. Too many fathers like al-Husseini have put them on the worst imaginable track, i.e., the emulation of Hitler and the Nazis. Some who have embraced that most may be due to wake up from the nightmare within them that has long masqueraded as their dream.
BackChannels now has plenty of information as to how the Israelis, the west, the refugees of 1948 and their generations, got to this unpretty pass. The themes erupting in WWII — that Stalin-Hitler thing — have been sustained in the middle east conflict; the Soviet promotion of anti-Semitism in the middle east and the concomitant terrorism of the PLO and PFLP have been similarly and perhaps exhaustively covered; the formation and presence of what has been referred to here as “Syndicate Red Brown Green”; the self-dissolve of the Soviet on December 26, 1991 also has been remarked in these virtual pages, as have the feudal kleptocracies kept floating along in its place and around it; less has been remarked as regards the post-Cold War Era around the world, but BackChannels believes we’re in that realm as this is being posted.
All in all, and with Khamenei pressing for Israel’s destruction while a smattering of Sunni-majority states brand Hezbollah as a terrorist organization (that move took a while plus some “war by proxy” on Iran’s part), the world, even in one of its most medieval appearances, appears to want to move forward, not backward — and forward would seem toward the classical liberalism of the west.
The comment to which the excerpt responds called for the realization al-Husseini’s manipulative lie: the Jews haven’t any desire to “take over” Al Aqsa Mosque — never did and never will — because while being Jewish involves attending to self defense, it also involves being about and for others, and that includes the Arab brother and sister.
Two of Hillel the Elder’s most famous statements ring down through the ages: “That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another.” That is an idea predicated on the concept of human self-restraint. Israel may produce harm when harmed itself, but it does not have to prove its power through making others suffer with impunity. If met with the force that would do that to people, including its own people, then it may answer in kind.
The second of Hillel’s language-based corrals: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?”
Some Palestinians may be surprised to find Israelis for them in peace, but peace is needed as part of a sea change in the character of our humanity.
. . . it (anti-Semitism) doesn’t go away because the Jews and the mixed multitude that left Egypt with them perpetually represent an affront and rebuke to “absolute power”. God proves greater than Pharaoh, is completely separated from man and moved beyond the solar system to somewhere beyond the universe. It’s a good program, for we see what men do when they confuse themselves with God.
From the tyrant in the family to the one that heads a state, their own messianism and narcissism work them into committing crimes from which they cannot retreat, and from that point, they loath the Jews for the threat presented to their own unbridled impulses. In the medieval mode, the clever whip the crowds for their own affirmation and as prelude to theft and murder on an unheralded scale.
It’s never only the Jews: note what Assad has done to Syria and the Syrians, who have been culturally programmed to hate the Jews and hate the west without understanding that they themselves have been the targets of, again, the absolute power of the dictator.
Modern Arabs and Muslims for Jews and Israel frequently encounter the defensiveness and xenophobia inspired by the complex history of Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism, which story in Muslim-Jewish relations is not the only story, only the one over which people are rightly most sensitive. The prompt for what follows emerged in a very small online workgroup on anti-Semitism — and kept restricted in headcount to keep the same manageable and progressing — and it involved the issue of Jewish defense accompanied by the familiar blanketing animosity that accompanies conflict between ethnically-identified rivals. Diffusing that focus requires a very different view of intercultural politics and political reality.
For BackChannels, today’s greatest struggle, and it’s a long one, is that between the medieval apprehension of the world and the realities of the modern world and its greater potential for humanity.
With some wandering, this “From the Awesome Conversation (FTAC)” moves from simple apology for hurt toward a much greater theme: civilizational transitioning.
Although the BackChannels style has been to italicize such posts — and put this “further explanation” at the bottom of the piece — that approach has been reversed for length and greater ease of reading.
Above: bolding added.
I’d like to see reconciliation even while noting that context — “rhetorical situation” — shapes our conversations here and elsewhere.
There may be “component parts” and “knee jerk reactions” that just bring out the worst in us.
There are certainly impolitic thoughts swirling through our heads as passing events “get to us” and we “go off”.
And there are strong defenses involved in meeting criticisms that may go deep and turn a little meditation into a searing event.
There’s an old high school joke: “Time exists so that everything doesn’t happen at once; space exists so that everything doesn’t happen to you.” 🙂
Today, and because of our handle on the material necessities in life — no one starves for lack of food but rather lack of access to the same — “space” has become less important than “time” and how we live in Time is what all the arguing comes down to. The Jews, and I am certain in response to miseries, found their point of departure from the tyrannical and disordered — probably some Qaddafi-type of 6,000 years ago. “Pharaoh” gets the blame (and Egyptian women credit for rescuing Moses) . . . and we have all gotten a different start on a different civilizational path. It’s good to revisit the basics and perhaps as a different expanded base for something needed tomorrow. Time gives us time to play with time.
One more thing as regards bigotry in general: disaggregate.
I don’t think the future needs a politics defined by, say, “Arabs and Jews”, but rather, at this time, the Medieval of Mind and the Modern. To get to a more modern world, a more mutually survivable world (at least) or more thriving (at best), some elements seem needed to get the “medieval of mind” through the barriers to the modern world.
In the peace crowd, it’s common to the point of cliche to talk about “building bridges”, i.e., “common ground”, and perhaps cultivated bonding.
The invisible sieve concept is different. It’s about massive positive filtering toward a more comfortable, peaceful, and prosperous world. Some Out There with Baghdadi and ISIS may not make it. Quite a few among leaders, sad to say, don’t want it because their power is invested in the perpetuation of medieval absolutism. Putin’s display of this was brilliant: $52 billion for the Winter Olympics at Sochi : $0.00 for Syrian Relief + the incubation of ISIS, which serves his medieval / neo-feudal worldview — and that of Assad and Khamenei as well.
Notably, this as an aside, I may regard the promotion of anti-Semitism as an artifact of the medieval world. It ranks right up there with the history of the use of the accusation of heresy in the Christian church as a means of leveraging wealth from competitors or the hapless, and in Muslim-majority states today, the “takfiri” have put on display the same political mechanics.
In other forums and following the Jewish mythos of a journey to a river, I’ve referred to a “river in time” that requires on the banks of the past a novel “forming up”. It sounds simple, but any brief reflection on the economic and social systems within and around clans, families, and tribes in their real politics tells that political reality proves anything but simple. While Khamenei has Revolutionary Guard forces in Iraq’s more sectarian Shiite militia, the state of Iraq itself struggles but nonetheless produces a more balanced official army, and one duly chastened by its route from Mosul and the ensuing slaughter visited upon its troops by ISIS. That the Iraqi defense forces have come back at all seems to me nothing short of miraculous, but now they’re doing their work.
The Syrian migration issue that has so fueled the arguments that divide the west (in chess: a fork) between cultural self-defense and the promotion of its Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian values — to which Islam may contribute or adjust, but ejection of al-Qaeda is certain — involves simply in-filtering good people while rejecting the infiltration of fascist-minded subversives who may be so by way of habits of mind or the adoption of ungodly ambitions.
The modern world is not altogether a good world. It can be deeply impersonal and “depersonalizing”; it can drop people from many kinds of inclusion, including economic, that neither churches nor families (or clans) are guaranteed to rescue or redeem; it can support criminals in the board rooms and in public offices: however, it strives continuously to be better than its current state as reflected in its state of affairs. Modernity involves ideas about cultural and social progress and produces systems — accountable, responsible, responsive — that produce, overall, a better state of being or life experience across the board.
The medieval want for themselves alone, and that with low regard for others.
Egypt may have an authoritarian politics in place today, but it’s modern and appears transitional; the wildly popular rejection and ejection of the Muslim Brotherhood signals, at least to me, a broad cultural recognition and sea change in response to a confrontation with a representative of the medieval world. Egyptians have chosen a march forward into something else — something modern.
Forgive my rambling.
Suffice it to say this forum may be as much about broad cultural change and preservation as much or more than anti-Semitism.
The experience may be likened to looking through a very small window out onto a much larger world, and, in the words presented here, “Tiimescape”.
“He was brainwashed and manipulated to the point where he spared no one. He didn’t spare the wife, he didn’t spare the child, he didn’t spare the rabbi. He killed the husband, attacked the wife, the child, and the rabbi until the police came and shot him dead.”
Related Online
During the past week terrorist attacks, which had been concentrated in greater Jerusalem, spread to other locations in Israel, including Kiryat Gat in the south, Tel Aviv, Afula in the north, and Gan Shmuel (near Hadera) and Raanana (in the center of the country). The attacks have been carried out by young lone terrorists, most of them from east Jerusalem, and some from Judea and Samaria. There were also two Israeli Arabs (from Nazareth and Um el-Fahm), Palestinians staying in Israel illegally, two women and two children. They were motivated for the most part by the lie spread by the Palestinian media that Israel allegedly threatened Al-Aqsa mosque, as well as by the frustration, desperation and anger of the younger generation. Generally speaking, the terrorists have not been operatives of any established terrorist organization, and the current wave of terrorism has not been directed by any organization, but rather is directly inspired by the intensive incitement accompanying it.
“The aggressive and growing Israeli attack against our people, land and holy places undermine peace and stability,” Abbas said in a televised speech, according to the official WAFA news agency. “This attack threatens to ignite the fuse of a religious war, which will burn everything — not only in the region (but) perhaps in the entire world.”
Political blackmail — intimidation, threat — may be expected from a leader who no longer has anything, not even peace, to offer the people he purports to represent, much less his counterparts in the west.
The centrist leader Yair Lapid, otherwise stridently secular, has found inspiration in Talmudic precepts: “The rabbis teach that if someone comes up against you to kill you, you should kill him first,” he said. “That should be our working model.” He added, “Don’t hesitate. Even at the start of an attack, shooting to kill is correct. If someone is brandishing a knife, shoot him. It’s part of Israel’s deterrence.”
About a month ago, Russian President Putin’s “Special Representative for the Middle East and Deputy Foreign Minister” Mikhail Bogdanov met with representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and discussed, among other things, the stalled delivery of Russian S-300 missiles to Syria in 2012. Two days ago, the issue resurfaced in the news with the message that the delivery would go through.
Ahmed Meligy, speaking from the Egyptian historic and national experience, appears to understand the power words may have to sway large swaths of population, never mind that such words may be untrue. The medieval world may have found itself unburdened by the spreading of viciously absurd blood libels; this one between appears to deal instead in the more subtle aspects of disingenuous speech: sins of omission (as in the reporting of Israeli arrests but not the conspiracies or crimes that provoked them); emphasis on the death and injury of Palestinian miscreants and de-emphasis on the assaults that drew both an appropriate and narrowed response.
You can see what the New York Times is attempting from the headline.
“The Dueling Narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” is an attempt to provide journalistic “balance” on a story where none exists.
We could say a lot about the article, with its lopsided reliance on Palestinian sources and reference to Hanan Ashrawi’s charge that police had planted knives to frame innocent Palestinians (a charge she even admitted she had “no evidence” to back up.)
The PLO, Fatah and the Palestinian Authority have for decades used children as fodder to throw rocks, fireworks and explosives at soldiers, as bombers, as lookouts and couriers. Hamas has been even more brazen, publicizing its recruitment of an army of child soldiers. In the current wave of terrorism in Israel and Palestine, we have seen attackers as young as 13 years old.
In one of the most shocking examples, the mother of a Palestinian terrorist who was killed during an attack on a Jerusalem bus earlier this month pulled out a knife during a television interview and threatened to follow her son’s example.
“I am concealing this weapon for Israel. Watch out, Israel! Watch out!” exclaimed Umm Muhammad Shamasne while making stabbing gestures in an Oct. 22 interview on the Lebanese Al-Quds TV station.
The Institute for Palestine Studies published a detailed report on Gaza’s Tunnel Phenomenon in the summer of 2012. It reported that tunnel construction in Gaza has resulted in a large number of child deaths.
“At least 160 children have been killed in the tunnels, according to Hamas officials”
The author, Nicolas Pelham, explains that Hamas uses child laborers to build their terror tunnels because, “much as in Victorian coal mines, they are prized for their nimble bodies”.
During the first three weeks of October 2015, ten Israelis were killed and 112 wounded — eleven of them seriously — in 40 stabbing attacks, four shootings, and five vehicular attacks that took place throughout the country.
On October 23, however, BBC News told its audiences that Israelis are suffering from either a collective psychosis “characterised by delusions of persecution” or “unjustified suspicion and mistrust of other people” — depending on which definition of the word “paranoia” BBC editors intended with their headline that read: “Paranoia deepens wedge between Israelis and Palestinians.”
On Phillip Weiss’s contribution to anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist propaganda.
I’ve made an occasional reference to Weiss or the blog he founded, Mondoweiss, since then. Mondweiss is basically one-stop shopping for anti-Israel news. Anything bad that goes on in Israel will be publicized and exaggerated at Mondoweiss. If you want to know the far-left anti-Israel party line on any recent event, Mondoweiss is the place to go.
It’s more than possible these days to trace in the English language the intellectual seams of the New Old Now Old Far Out and Lost Left, the Left that died a little when the Soviet dissolved and is dying a lot as a feudal revanch as Putin’s buddy Assad drops barrel bombs on all non-combatant Syrians he thinks might oppose his dictatorship.
Kirkpatrick invariably seeks out the same poisonous wells. In the case of this article, these are: Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization in search of funds. Through attempting to interpret the facts about the New Egypt to fit its own theoretical notions of what constitutes the upholding of human rights. It is a private corporation in search of aggression through intervening in internal affairs via the human rights pearly gate. Ignoring that in countries in transition, like Egypt, the collective rights of the populace trump the rights of the individual.
BackChannels appreciates Dr. El-Ayouti’s piece as not being about Israel but about post-Islamist Egypt under al-Sisi and reporting favoring the Muslim Brotherhood and biased against the modernizing efforts of the central power of the state.
1. Anti-Semitism serves feudal power. It is a tool for the manipulation and direction of mobs. Note: Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal are billionaires today, which begs the question: who has really occupied what? The PLO and PFLP have been Moscow projects from the beginning and the encouragement of an anti-Semitic middle east a major part of the Soviet program, which medieval / oligarchal phantoms we are fighting today.
2. Nationalism tends toward fascism (ask any of the more western-oriented opposition in Hungary about that). In Israel, the Hebrews, +5,000 years together, are back in the Land of the Hebrews, and they have been taught a long lesson by way of the leaders and fans of the “International Solidarity” and “Palestinian Solidarity” garbage (that’s the word for them): the complaint about Israel has never been about Israel — it has been always about Jewish existence itself, not only in Israel but anywhere on the planet.
3. Go back to Moses the Lawgiver and go forward to Hillel the Elder who to accommodate the restive of a decaying Rome made Judaism more about principle than ritual and more accessible to converts. Then: Jesus, Paul, Constantine; then: Muhammad. Those who really hate the Jews hate the law and humanity. The may hate themselves. Boco Haram, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah: call them the “God Mob” because intimidation, theft, and murder on one side and pandering and patronage on the other appears to be what each has best demonstrated in organizational lives short and long.
As much verbiage as BackChannels spools onto the threads of The Awesome Conversation, the social network chatyping fest, it wonders who compressed it may make a packet of thought.
Anti-Semitism : Feudal Mentality
Perhaps that should be enough.
It has been deeply disappointing watching some Syrians (for the most part, not friends, but others the “friends of friends”) refuse to struggle with the anti-Semitic expression that not only accompanies their suffering but plays directly into hands of the medieval troika, Putin – Assad – Khamenei, each of whom have pegged their survival on irrational mob behavior and, indeed, feudal wars that for being so intellectually bereft that they cannot resolve through violence.
Some prefer the engines of war to the machinery of peace.
A moderate Syrian opposition site had played a cartoon showing Putin, Khamenei, and Netanyahu in bed together while Assad lay on the floor. Never mind the nonsense in which the leader of an open democracy shares the same mattress as the two despots, the intent to harm Israel absent of reason stands signal of the too familiar sickness and the fascism to which it connects.
Anti-Semitic hate contributes directly to the medieval worldview promoted by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. Israel’s arrangements with Russia over Syria have been defensive and perfunctory. Before the Soviet Union dissolved (December 1991), this is how it manipulated latent Jew Hate in the middle east into the Baathist dictatorships — from one of which Assad has descended. In fact, Assad is counting on Syrian anti-Semitism to contribute to his stay in power. https://conflict-backchannels.com/…/ftac-tip-to-the…/
The attached cartoon was generated by Putin’s former KGB culture and inserted (with many like it, also many field agents, and thousands of Party trained Russian workers) into the middle east to promote Arab anti-Semitism. It’s something to keep in mind with regard to historic relations between Moscow and Tel Aviv. The directing of anger and hate toward a convenient target suits a certain kind of criminal power and its will to manipulate and poison “masses”.
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The promotion of the Great Leader, the destruction of the individual, and the development of controlled media, pervasive propaganda, and political theater seem to BackChannels themes familiar to all dictatorships. Those operating in Syria today seem to BackChannels only the most recently hyperdestructive.
The cartoons were passed to BackChannels more than a year ago.
As always, “The Russian Section” of this blog’s library provides plenty of background as regards the political atmosphere and psychological mechanisms associated with the Soviet and the Soviet Era.
In context of The Awesome Conversation, encounters with anti-Semitic expression in the press of the post- or pseudo-communist “Solidarity” organizations and in numerous chat forums online seems unavoidable, but one may point out to the injured and angered the true source of their own indoctrination and manipulation in “helping” them bend to the will of a malign leadership.
While many observations may be made of anti-Semites — some criminally anti-authoritarian and anti-law of any kind but their own; some so obsessed as to suggest mental illness as a foundation for their rants — the idea that suggested content, like the above cartoons, has been conveniently packaged and made easy to swallow by the ugly among the powerful should tell the bigoted something about their own gullibility or intellectual vulnerability.
Related URLs on BackChannels
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/12/02/quote-manipulation-about-the-plo-leader-pacepa-and-rychlak-2013/ This provides a key example of Soviet meddling in middle eastern politics that resonates today with Mahmoud Abbas’s deeply anti-Semitic stance and the less remarked financial piracy that has made him wealthy ($100 million in estimated portfolio — of course, Hamas rivals Ismail Haniyeh and Khaled Mashaal have developed reputations as billionaires, all made on the backs of Palestinians and their suffering).
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/09/01/ftac-soviet-to-syria-now/ As bloggers may, BackChannels daily surveying of the news across the web — and it’s human labor here, not machine — occassionally gets ahead of the story. Mention was made of some Russian military incursion in Syria on this post (thanks to another source) and, lo and behold, it’s big news today.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2014/03/19/its-hard-helping-you-when-you-are-anti-semitic-among-other-things/ – 3/19/2014. In agony, Syrians have reached out to the world for rescue, but some in the political arena have surfaced with a problem: they hate Jews and they hate the west — and that animosity and beliefs and attitudes related to it has isolated them. As Assad, Putin, and Khamenei afford only the lengthening of their own medieval misdirection, subjugation, and enslavement — and too much of horror has been delivered by Assad for going back — Syrians chained and hobbled by anti-Semitism and related hatred of the west will have to remove those chains — habits of mind — themselves. In North America — no problems: the diaspora Syrian community may be as modern and plural as suits life in the United States and Canada. As regards life in the war zones of Syria, the matter of belief — about anything — would seem complicated by whatever force happens to be in town on any given day.
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/ – 10/2/2015. Only the superficial news reader perceives of ISIS as entirely an autonomous movement, a scourge independent of other powers, but other powers, as in those now olden 20th Century days, have meddled to produce a piece of political theater: “Assad vs The Terrorists” or, as presented to the open democracies of the west, “Assad OR The Terrorists”!
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/06/02/assad-or-burn-it-assad-burns-it/ – 6/2/2015. The quotation more common online goes, “Assad, Or We Burn the Country”. It’s the same thing and goes back to the political blackmail “Assad OR The Terrorists.” Either Assad (Putin and Khamenei) continue to control (and plunder) Syria or the west gets the Black Flag Hornet’s Nest (of implied evil puns there has been no end since 9/11).
BackChannels may compile news and comment on it, but it has yet to acquire a crystal ball.
The links are probably not comprehensive but representative of the thought developed on this blog. There’s always more to look up on this blog, and probably, despite the author’s desire for brevity and compression, more to say about many “conflict, culture, language, and psychology” related things.
BackChannels 