Category Archives: Religion

FTAC – On Comparisons Between Jewish Success and the Perception of Underachievement in Islam

07 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics, Religion

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For the record, Alfred Nobel was a Lutheran Christian and the prize he created from making a fortune on dynamite he ordered administered by a Norwegian Nobel Peace Price Committee. (See my point)?

I have always battled this analogy between the comparatively small global community of Jews, fewer than 14 million worldwide, and the astoundingly large and varied community of Muslims, the Ummah comprising a subscription of about 1.6 billion.

Although Moses flees Egypt with the Jews and a “mixed multitude” — a note given much consideration by those who study the Torah — the fact from the beginning is the doctrine is defensive, not expansive, the people gathered out of necessity (perhaps opposition to Pharaoh may be likened to opposition to Bashar al-Assad) and existing as a people together in common cause, together in history and scattered by history, cannot be compared to either the myriad societies courted or conquered by generals Constantine and Muhammad and their like through the generations (world Christian population: 2.18 billion according to the Pew Forum).

About 1.7 million Israelis live in poverty, which in turn lends Israel the distinction of sustaining one of the highest — if not the highest — poverty rate in the developed world.

So much for having produced great wealth and disproportionate numbers in Nobel laureates: imagine 1.3 billion Jews and extrapolate accordingly if other factors were not to be brought into play.

If one is to assess a “global state of affairs for Muslims” with contemporary Jewish achievement and fortitude in mind, one may be well advised to revisit the wellspring of Jewish thought plus the near 0 CE revolution in Jewish argument and law explored by Hillel the Elder. If Jewish energies seem both more confident in the world, more resilient in the shadows of immense disasters, more free to argue, discuss, research, and discern how things work in many fields, and less obsessed with other means to power and status, it may have to do not only with intellectual behavior traced from before Moses to Hillel to Maimonides but with the progressive temperament and smaller numbers to suit or facilitate that growth.

Oppression, ironically, also places a premium on what may be carried in the mind — knowledge and relationships — and what must be abandoned (in materials, workshops, and stores) from time to time and place to place.

The embrace of humanity and values that propel Jewish accomplishment, so I believe Hillel would be the first to note, are not exclusive.

Hillel the Elder has been noted as living between 35 BCE and 10 CE but precise dates vary.

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The premise for the response “from the awesome conversation” (FTAC) seems voiced regularly from within Islam as encouragement and goad supporting education and modernization within the Ummah.  While one may suppose jealousy and resentment powerful motivators of ambitions shaped to suit individual and national self-concepts, and those emotions fit the pattern of the statement that is essentially “Jews win more Nobel Prizes than Muslims”, the comparison itself bears examining, and so I whip something together like the above (pointing out the disparities in numbers and the character of the communities involved) and the rest adds its very small dot to contemporary cultural and political influence.

My conclusion echoes what I’ve invented — distilled, proposed — and written into the column to the left: the Jews are a global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and its soul invested in the body of the Land of Israel.

More or less.

Moreover, the Jewish People share a mythos that is ancient and not “overwritten” by whatever johnny-come-lately plus ambitious writer-leaders arrived to in essence scoop up more loose human energy from the sea of humanity surrounding them in their time.

The Romans were a mixed lot by the time Jesus-Paul-Constantine arrived (over time too, but not so much by millennial standards) to sweep through the continent and establish Rome as capital of a Christian civilization.

Perhaps centuries later, Muhammad conceived of a more difficult and sudden task, i.e., the imparting of some facets of Jewish spirit as if the Jews were decadent impious cheats and himself the voice of God on Earth, perhaps fair reason, fair license, to develop pretext to inveigle, murder, and plunder the Banu Qurayza for arms, women, and the pleasure of their silence.

Jewish rejection of the new monotheist religions, each in their time, sets the stage in each for enterprise-wide supersession to be leveraged by anti-Semitic libel and slander accompanied by discrimination in law and other persecutions aided by clever (like “dhimmi status”) devices.

For squabblers (and a few malevolent narcissistic sadists) beating each other’s brains out over the matter of God’s favor, the gentle Hillel the Elder — whose life overall precedes the Christian concept and rise of Christianity but also at 0 CE — at the end of his life — approximates its inception — effectively challenges rote observance within Judaism and expands the space in law and in social relationships given to good principle founded in knowledge of the Torah.

Perhaps all of the rest has been bloody commentary as well.

Reference

Wikipedia: Hillel the Elder.

Jewish Virtual Library.  “Hillel and Shammai”.

Jewish Encyclopedia.  “Hillel”.

Telushkin, Joseph.  If Not Now, When?  Schocken, 2010.

Possibly Hillel’s Four Most Telling Epigrammatic Statements

“That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another.  That is the whole of Torah.  All of the rest is commentary.  Now go and study.”

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“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  If I am not for others, what am I?  If not now, when?”

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“Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

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“Be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving your fellow creatures and drawing them near to the Law.”

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FTAC – A Note on Perceiving Hillel the Elder and Encouraging Greater All-for-All Inclusion in Global Politics

01 Thursday May 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Religion

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“All for All” is a better deal the “All Against All”.

The spirits of each monotheist construction — taken as divine, oral history, written history, scholarly poetics, etc. — have each their ways of talking out of both sides of their mouths.

In the bloody American civil war, both sides held their Bible high.

To help everyone get off the self-destroying triangle and on to a better interlock (I’m about to change the popular perception of the Star of David, lol), I refer often to the intellectual who challenged, revolutionized, and revitalized the Judaism of his day and whose thought set the stage for Jesus, Paul, and Constantine and later Muhammad: Hillel the Elder.

http://www.amazon.com/Hillel-Not-When-Jewish-Encounters/dp/0805242813

I can take myself — mind and spirit — more deeply into this area only with funding that covers the specialization, as much in this area (reading-writing) and other parts of my life absorb greater time and energy. So far, we don’t have robust mechanisms for getting beneath independent scholarship. So I’m kind of stuck. Nonetheless, I hope a few will venture into Hillel’s thought not merely as a rabbi but a mortal “Everyman” of his era intent on developing wisdom within the sphere of divinity, as the conversations we have with one another may be also perceived as part of humanity’s great conversation with God, nature, and the universe.

Our survival as a species may also encourage greater emphasis on greater bonding over universalized principles and values, e.g., “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” against those who would degrade or negate them.

Such has been part of my reasoning when aggregating “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” as a unit representing autocratic absolutism that by its nature indulges in and promotes kleptocratic state-exploiting and state-based theft serving the grandiose aspirations or needs of the “great leader”.

Dictatorship.

The bands of this theme, the despotic vs the democratic, the malignantly narcissistic vs a still boisterous humanity but one capable of containing itself and keeping itself within bounds as regards the exploitation and subjugation of others, are global.

Putiin-Assad and others at polar extremes have wanted to cast their conflict set as “secular vs religious” or, in their own eyes, perhaps, “Heroic Secularism” vs “Heroic Religiosity”.

That’s a small war, generally, and for many reasons having to do with the appeal of the cause and true motivation of the individual.  In light of such, I’ve called the current set of conflicts infused with religious dogma and confused by it “The Islamic Small Wars”; however, the same may not comprise The War — shall I type “The True War”? — which is the defense of a varied humanity overall — a creative and gregarious species supporting about 6,980 languages and the cultural perception and self-concept each represents — from greater subjugation by the despotic through he set of mafia-type methods and systems — first, they make you shut up (state control of the press): then deceit, flattery, intimidation, patronage, and murder — that produce and sustain idolatrous totalitarianism.

That’s the bare bones script I see.

The story to come is what the reader writes in the course of the political aspect of his living.

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Partial Guest Post by Tolga Yildiz – My Name is Tolga Yldiz – On Political Sentiment in Turkey

26 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Politics, Religion

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My name is Tolga Yıldız.

I am interested in global policy and diplomacy.

Turkey’s geopolitics status is very important in the Middle-East and Caucasia. Middle-east is very important with strategic and energy power. Today we need new politic, social and economic strategies for new World System. There are many social, economic, political problems in the World. I am a citizen of the Turkish Republic.

Today Middle East is Islamic area.

Turkey is secular country in the Middle-East. Turkey is an important country between East and West. Turkey is first Secular Muslim Country in the Middle east. Today Turkish government(AK Party) is Islamic government. AKP want to moderate islamic administration in Turkey. But Turkish Nation know that Turkey is Atatürk’s secular country not islamic arab country.

We will always defend secular system and Democracy.

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I’ve made minor grammatical corrections and added paragraphs to what was a two paragraph submission.

In correspondence, Tolga described the above as “short but gist important article“.

“Gist important” — I like that!

Is it an article?

Is it important?

The passage contains is an important message for Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP: “We will always defend secular system and Democracy.”

As regards, “Today Middle East is Islamic area” . . . well, it is a Muslim-majority region, but it is not entirely Islamic: it is a little bit Jewish too, or perhaps more Jewish than it knows considering the changes Hillel the Elder brought to the Jewish community, by extension Israel, and the world re-envisioned by both Jesus-Paul-Constantine and General Muhammad.

America’s Founding Fathers, perhaps intent on avoiding the kind of religious warfare that ran amok across Europe set forth in principle and constitution a system enabling belief and faith of every kind, most connected to some version of metaphysics, a few rejecting metaphysics altogether.  The purpose: whatever it is in the head, let’s not fight over it — we’d rather a society, and by the mid-20th Century “One nation under God” notwithstanding, purposed toward the well being of its inhabitants, and at that, inclusively, without regard to race, creed, religion, origin, gender, or sexual orientation.

Done.

Knowing President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s vision for Turkey, Tolga Yildiz would appear to understand the connection between secular democracy and the assertion and confirmation of human dignity and freedom guaranteed by equality under the law.

No dhimmi.

No caliphate.

No dictator.

No scapegoats.

Instead: equal stature — again, under the law — and the freedom to speak and vote and to experience being — and voting — within a society free of coercion and cynical manipulation.

That’s quite a message.

From Turkey.

Thank you, Tolga Yildiz.

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FTAC – A Remark on Brandeis Reneging on Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Honorary Degree

09 Wednesday Apr 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Politics, Religion

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Ambivalence is built into the challenge, which is arriving at an Islam in greater totality bereft of “Islamist Jihad” (I can put in “etc.” right away because the terminology has not been clarified or sharpened as to who the political terrorist is within Islam), its taking of license without limits, and its motivation in language.  Abandonment and apostasy, humanism, reformation, revisionism — we talk and think about this a lot but know one knows the channel ahead: we do know that Muslims and everyone else expects and indeed should have an inherent right to security in their daily rounds, from mosque to open market, and that security has been deformed not only in the name of the religion but by way of language behaviors — deflection of responsibility; willful deception to name two — associated with it.

I’m just calling it as I see it.

Related Reference: “Brandeis University withdraws planned honorary degree for Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali,” Fox News, April 9, 2014.

Some friends compare Islam to the Borg Collective and expect it to rise “as one man”; others throw Rumi, an expansive humanist-universalist poet, on to their walls along with photographs of bright and dashing New York and Tehran designed Muslim woman’s wear (see, for example, Kavakci Couture).  Dredged out of Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan come pictures of colonial and post-colonial western-spirited days, a reminder that what the Islamic space looks like in some quarters today is not what it was in a still recent yesterday.

Nonetheless, all that noted, recent headlines have become wearying in their familiarity: Islamabad Market Bomb Kills at Least 22; Series of deadly car bombs hits Iraqi capital; Photojournalist Anja Niedringhaus Killed in Afghanistan; ISIS’ ‘Southern Division’ praises foreign suicide bombers; European jihadists form ISIS brigades in Syria; and so on.

Across Syria as I type, Jew-hating Arab nationalists and Jew-hating Islamic zealots are busy killing one another over dreams and desires that have become as archaic as they may be romantic, but it’s out of that bloody mire that one hopes will come a glimmer of sanity for a new era in Islam, whatever is to be, and then foreign affairs, and, finally, human relationships in general.

The revolution on the inside, reactive to despots, secular and theocratic, has yet to surface and bond.

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Related: Brandeis won’t give honorary degree to Islam critic.

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West Papua – Indonesian Child Trafficking for Islam – Mass Graves

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Papua New Guinea, Politics, Regions, Religion, South Pacific

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Their story is more evidence that Christian children are being taken from West Papua and converted to Islam – a practice officially denied after being revealed in Fairfax Media’s Good Weekend magazine last year. It also makes clear for the first time that knowledge of the practice reaches high into the upper echelons of Indonesia’s political elite.

The religious conversion of any young child is illegal in Indonesia, and the United Nations deems any transfer of a minor, even for education, as trafficking.

Papuan children taken to Jakarta to be converted to Islam – 3/2/2014.

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West_Papua_Mass_Grave

Posted on Facebook by the Free West Papua Campaign, March 3, 2014: “Indonesian police and plainclothes police can be seen taking sickening “trophy photos” of the corpses of West Papuan people they have just stripped and murdered and thrown into a drainage ditch used as a makeshift mass grave in the middle of a highlands village.
According to sources, this is in the Central Highlands of West Papua, possibly the Puncak Jaya region and was taken relatively recently.
What appears to be the National flag of West Papua, the Morning Star can be seen raised behind the horror. The raising of this flag has been made illegal by Indonesia and carries a 15 year jail sentence.
As this photo has just emerged, we are currently finding out as much as possible about the details and cannot yet verify the exact date and location but what is for sure is that this photo, taken in the highlands of West Papua is 100% real and genuine, hard evidence of Indonesia’s 21st century apartheid and genocide in West Papua.”

I have yet to download a conflict photo loaded with EXIF/IPTC verbal data identifying the camera used, the photographer, and photographer’s title and caption.  Most often too, these incendiary images come out of the special interest press representing religious denominations and organizations that repeat their use or transpose images taken in one place to captions representing another event.  The Free West Papua Campaign, however, insists itself on locating the specific photographer who took it, when, and where.  It believes in the veracity of the image enough to question its exact provenance, and therefore I believe in its accuracy too.

UPDATE, OCTOBER 16, 2017: for those coming off third-party sites using the above photograph — one has actually disinformed its public by putting “Rohingya Muslims” in place of West Papuans in its headline — I’m no longer certain of the forensic quality of the photograph: the bodies look related in hands-behind-head security postures; the police could just be checking ID in a most humiliating manner; or there could be some mix of dead and living.  One had to be there, of course, and the one who was there to take the picture has not apparently distributed the same with captioning data intact. 

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How BackChannels views the West Papua Conflict: on the border between the Muslim and Christian worlds, the indigenous of West Papua struggle to keep their culture and land intact, refusing forced conversion and assimilation to the Muslim-majority state whose international boundary has overrun their property.

As is common and familiar to Muslim-majority states worldwide, the tack pursued with regard to West Papuans has been than of cultural annihilation and political suppression.

Coming from an American of European descent, this layout of the story would seem hypocritical, for as West Papuans may be to Indonesia, so Native Americans would seem to have been to European colonizing forces.  However, these days, the Native Americans of the United States have title to reservation as well private properties, the freedom to arrange themselves and worship as they see fit, and in all other aspects to own businesses and enjoy or hate the American tapestry as they see fit within the bounds of the common law, which codes revolve most around the freedom and security of all persons.

America’s Native Americans are not getting their continent back, of course, but they are supported in their endeavors related to the defense of culture, family, property, and religion, the same as any, and every, American.

Coming from a Jewish background that includes lending attention to Israel as the unique cultural, political, and religious homeland of the Jews, the bond between the true indigenous of a land and indigenous elsewhere might apply, albeit in the progressive Jewish manner with adaptation toward modernity — some things will stay with the people forever in freedom, and some (like cannibalism) may recede into history.

In the larger scheme, our planet supports 6,900+ living languages, and it loses a few each month: it should be sustaining those few and perhaps working to encourage separable language evolution or new language development although natural language behavior is not like biology: we’re just not going to ship a healthy population of humans to an island, cut them off from social commerce, and visit them again in a thousand years (if they have survived their own company).

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JONAH WENDA (voiceover): They were picked from different places like school, gardens, on the road and even taken from their home and kill them and throw them in the bush.

PM – More details emerge on West Papua massacre allegation 28/05/2013

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In May, Indonesia’s human rights record was assessed under the UN Universal Periodic Review. The government rejected key recommendations to review specific laws and decrees which restrict the rights to freedom of expression and thought, conscience and religion. In July, Indonesia reported to the CEDAW Committee. In November, Indonesia adopted the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, despite serious concerns that it fell short of international standards.

Amnesty International | Working to Protect Human Rights, n.d.

Additional Reference

Alleged mass killings in West Papua – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – 5/24/2013: “Shootings have become so frequent that locals have taken to calling it the ‘Gaza Strip’.” / Indonesian counter-terrorist unit accused of mass killing in disputed Papua province – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – 5/24/2013.

Indonesia rejects Papua mass killing accusations – Australia Network News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) – 5/27/2014.

PM – More details emerge on West Papua massacre allegation 28/05/2013: “The Indonesian Embassy in Canberra has issued a blanket denial, describing the reported violence as rumours and lies. / But the ABC has been provided further information that tells a different story, as Peter Lloyd reports.”

Related to the history of the West Papua Conflict: Searching for the truth about a massacre in West Papua – 16/12/2013

(3) Free West Papua Campaign (Facebook).

Free West Papua – Campaign for a free and independent West Papua

Wamena – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia / Communal conflict in Wamena kills four | The Jakarta Post – 5/31/2014 / Mako Tabuni – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia / Approach on Papua slammed – 6/16/2012: “Meanwhile, Tabuni’s family collected the activist’s body from the Bhayangkara Police Hospital, ahead of the burial planned for Saturday in Wamena.” / Police urged to publicise the photo of Mako Tabuni’s bag | West Papua Media Alerts – 6/26/2012 /

A Message To The United Nations From The Family Of Opinus Tabuni – YouTube – 12/29/2012: “An estimated 100,000 Papuans having died since the Indonesian government took control of the disputed province in what is widely considered a sham 1969 United Nations observed referendum.”

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FTAC – Insert: Humanism

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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In my last note, I’ve mentioned one of the “hate-peace peace groups” that might serve as a gateway to so many others. If you want chit-chat with Greta Berlin, one of the organizers of the Gaza Flotilla, she’s around; if with my generally conservative buddies. they’re in the mix too; if a whole other set, we might get it. “Humanism” — shall I refer to Felix Adler and “Ethical Culture” — provides a common thread across religious and state boundaries; however, it would support, if we’re really going to be good about this, cultural polyphony. The Roma should not be so abused! Nor the Jews. Nor the Rohingya of Burma. Wahhabi imperialism, Islamic expansionism — especially as the “Islamists” would have it, resurgent nationalisms (which has Hungarian Jobbik relating to Iranian roots, for pete’s sake), ensure we’re going to be in trouble for a while. Even so, we may pay more attention to autonomy, degrees of freedom, human dignity, human rights, and qualities of living — physical, psychological, and spiritual, across our 6,900 or so language cultures and adjust for co-evolution.

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I’m not the only one who tires of addressing, confronting, and arguing the issues (and the facts) of the “middle east conflict” (i.e., that would be the one involving The Jews, as the others, I suppose, want for less attention).

Felix Adler (professor) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I caught my second wind 🙂 in the 1980s with my “discovery” of Abraham Maslow while working on a Masters in “Outdoor Recreation Resources Management”.  Perhaps for this venue, Maslow’s suggestion that if one is to pursue greater health (with actualization), one ought to study healthy people as much as those beset by pathology.

The radical Jews — whoever gathered in the desert more than 5,000 years ago — produced a religion in which one God had dominion over all and no man — not even Moses, not even Abraham — was like Him.

God, from the Jewish beginning, was “Master of the Universe”.

Many, by comparison, could barely master his own emotions.

Anti-deification and conflation with God characterizes a Jewish approach to scripture, every passage of which enjoys close reading and vigorous ethical and moral argument.  Even “The Akedah” splits between the (option one) promotion of obedience and (option two) the call to speak back to God, which we today we refer to as “speaking truth to power.”

Jewish, Christian, Islamic humanism, social humanism, atheist humanism, secular humanism, etc. all suggest that while God has plans, we are none of us God, and if we wish to live in peace, a common peace, a peace for the democratic (small “D”) man, a peace for the Pacific Islander as well as the Iraqi, we’re going to have to help one another and, perhaps, quiet some of the egotism and noise, most ambitious and inventive, coursing through our minds, the gift of languages invented to cope with survival in bounded systems.

I can never too highly recommend reading Daniel Everett’s Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes or this thoughts in Language: The Cultural Tool.

We’re a wild species, but our war technologies have exceeded many natural limitations, and they really can destroy humankind, while our advanced technologies have become comparatively fragile, “glass” plates beneath a blazing sun converting light to electricity.

We have a way to go, but, whatever we do, we’re going to go there together — and we’re not going to outwit God, nature, or the universe along the way.

Additional Reference

Linguistic Society of America | Advancing the Scientific Study of Language

World Council of Anthropological Associations – WCAA

Our Story | Esalen

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FTAC – Israel – Response to Remarks Delegitmizing Israel

02 Sunday Mar 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion

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“Arabs were made to pay for the crimes of the Europeans by the creation of Israel.”

I know that is what has been heard and the fiction constructed around it total, but Zionism predates WWII, and thousands of Arabs were drawn before it to the agricultural fields of the nascent Jewish state.

If you believe statehood in the name of religion must go, then Rome must go, as must Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — well, actually all Islamic kingdoms and dictatorships — as the same have become “real headaches for the entire civilized world, completely engulfed in injustice and violence.”

The only “inescapable issue” in the reconstruction that is the modern State of Israel is the 5,000+ year existence of Jews and Jewish culture — beliefs, calendar, customs, language, religion — on the land and continuously. Ancient Israel, the Roman “Palestine”, and modern Israel have never been “Judenrein” (as some might wish).

Jews don’t “deserve a homeland” — Jews have a homeland.

Regarding terrorism, have a look independently into war and low-intensity conflict across 2,000 years.

Regarding genocide, let’s keep these two buddies in mind: http://www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com/…/2-mufti2_jpg… (Hussaini-Hitler handshake).

Also, you may want to look into how Ben Gurion crushed the terrorist Irgun at the earliest opportunity.

Your emphasis tells where you want to go (anti-Semitic / anti- Ziionist, actually, anti-justice) but the deeply poisonous programming and scripting that got you there has to this hour stayed out of the picture.

I beg you for patient new introspection and scholarship, for fresh ears and eyes, for skepticism in regard to a destructive loyalty.

I ask no less of myself and do read, say, Ma’an and look into issues having to do with the refugees of 1948 and their humanity, which one may believe better than that of their leaders who build and disseminate libels for a living.

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The response was to a writer in India who ran through the common anti-Semites screen, from declaring the State of Israel a colonial project directly and only corresponding to the destruction of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust of World War II to suggesting the entire state should have been constructed elsewhere.

What a load of fictional crapola one wakes to if participating the “middle east conflict”, which has weirdly become the signifier for Israel’s conflict with the Arab world while the same Arab world melts down in conflicts within its portion of the Islamic Small Wars (e.g., signaled by political violence in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria).

Nowhere is the “Religion of Peace”, nor the states founded on it, at peace, and not even within themselves, the Muslim Brotherhood gangs ever threatening established state power, the same state power incompletely in control of powerful families willing to back al-Qaeda and its affiliates and likenesses.

Additional Reference

Amin Al Husseini: Nazi Father of Jihad, Al Qaeda, Arafat, Saddam Hussein and the Muslim Brotherhood – Tell The Children The Truth – Homepage

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Welcome to Israel! Travel Writing Sponsored by The Carter Center

14 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Israel, Middle East, North America, Poetry, Political Psychology, Politics, Regions, Religion, United States of America

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She examined my passport again, “Do know any Palestinians?” she asked.

I smirked and lied, “No.”

I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ | Ferrari Sheppard – 2/10/2014; also posted: I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ – Stop Being Famous – 1/24/2014.

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Carter taught Christian students in Plains Georgia that Judaism teaches Jews to feel superior to non-Jews, that Jewish religious practices are tricks to enhance wealth, and that current Israeli policy toward Palestinians is based on these “Jewish” values and practices.

Carter at Cardozo: It’s Not the “New-Anti-Semitism” — It’s the Older Kind | FrontPage Magazine – 4/10/2013.

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How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised?

Non believer?

And what?

Unclean, what?

They called them DOGS! That’s true.

Jimmy Carter’s Bible Class as Transcribed and Commented Upon by Michael Miller, 8/15/07 | Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors – 8/15/2007; posted 4/1//2013.

That was a long time ago, Mr. Carter.

Related: Is Bible Teacher Jimmy Carter an Old-Fashioned Jew-Hater?: But How Can a True Christian… :: The Phyllis Chesler Organization – 11/15/2007.

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The history of Palestinians was something I was familiar with as well, only because in high school, my friend’s parents were Moroccan Jews with staunch right-wing Zionist views. They’d go on about how Palestinians were worth shit and how they were sucking off the land they stole, and how they were not from Palestine, but Jordan. Truth be told, my friend’s parents’ passion about their ‘homeland’ made me sick. As a black person living in the United States, I could not relate to their love for their proclaimed homeland because I never had one. My ancestors were captured from various regions of Africa and forced onto ships bound for the Americas. Therefore, when questioned about the geographic origins of my ancestors, my answers were as vague as Africa is big.

I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ | Ferrari Sheppard – 2/10/2014.

It appears the young celebrity creating his celebrity flew to Israel on The Carter Center’s dime (“In the weeks preceding my departure from Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport to Tel Aviv, I received travel warnings from The Carter Center, the organization responsible for sponsoring my trip”) with a reactive and retributive attitude forged in self-righteous alienation, never mind that, for example, about 1.7 million Israelis live in the same funky poverty for which he would claim to stand in the interest of social justice.

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Crying Isn’t a Weakness: StyleLikeU’s Closet Profile on Ferrari Sheppard – YouTube – 11/19/2013.

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The Genius Of The Crowd: Charles Bukowski – YouTube – Posted 12/19/2007.  Related text: The Genius Of The Crowd by Charles Bukowski — Hello Poetry

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Related on this blog (a whole section): Anthropolitical Psychology | BackChannels

Our worlds are as small or as large as the information we acquire about them, and they are also as false or honest as the methods we use to comprehend whole issues and the integrity and curiosity with which we pursue them.

I get a little “Jewed out” myself, sometimes, and somewhere between the ever present clouds of the Holocaust and constant distributed cheerleading (deserved) and defense (also deserved) of Israel.  Nonetheless, riding beside my own brand of international humanism (thanks, Felix Adler and Abraham Maslow — two more Jews), Judaism itself and its call to conscience (yo, Jimmuh: Jesus was Jewish!) remains for me an integral part of seeking social justice and what is good in living individually and communally.

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Despite months of lobbying by anti-Israel activists and a desperate last minute petition drive, the 141st APHA annual meeting and exposition held in Boston. defeated an anti-Israel resolution by 74 to 36 votes. The resolution was discussed by the association’s Joint Policy Committee. The anti-Israel campaign was led by activists of BDS, the global movement for a campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, which was initiated by Palestinians in 2005 and is coordinated by the Palestinian BDS National Committee established two years later.

Pro-Israeli activists defeat anti-Israel resolution on Palestinian health issues | JPost | Israel News – 11/10/2013

The forces of Jew Hate, a term earthier and less sanitized than “anti-Semitism”, have created on-campus and political bubble environments sufficient to enclose the “open-minded”, who may not be as much so as presumed, nor more cagey than vulnerable.

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As I stood in line at JFK waiting to be interrogated by security agents prior to boarding a flight to Tel Aviv last January, I thought of all the reasons why I didn’t belong there. I’m only half Jewish, for starters – and it’s the wrong half. I only know a couple of Hebrew words. I have a lot of what an Un-Jewish Activities Committee might call “Palestinian sympathies.”

Learning from Israeli Secularism | The Humanist Community Project – 5/29/2013.

Jewish ethnicity and the embrace and expression of faith may vary quite within the Jewish community, but it may not be possible these days to escape the influence of the wisdom of Hillel the Elder, himself quite possibly the elder contemporary of Jesus, from any contemporary stance.  One might also go back a little farther in time to “The Akedah” and the undefined test given Abraham, a test either of obedience, which children believe without question, or of conscience, which adults may perceive with penetration – and perceive as Abraham failing (God never speaks to him again; an emissary in the form of an angel has to intercede in the murder; a substitute ram is made to appear for the knife Abraham would have too willingly used on Isaac: had he only spoken up, or, in the modern vernacular, spoken truth to power on behalf of Isaac and Sarah).

Israel provides a broad suite of basic services, including the training of Abbas’s police force, to the generations of refugees who remained on the land after the Arab war of annihilation in 1948.  When the hate recedes, when the threat of violence against Jews fades on to the pages of history, the Jews and other Israelis — Christians, Muslims, and others — will prove as helpful as can be, but those days seem always set farther away by smears.

Reference

American Task Force on Palestine

Annual report shows 1.7 million Israelis living below poverty line | JPost | Israel News – 12/17/2013.

Campus Watch

Hillel: If Not Now, When? (Jewish Encounters): Joseph Telushkin: 9780805242812: Amazon.com: Books

Hillel – Israel & Judaism Studies

Increase in Palestinians Treated in Israeli Hospitals | Jewish & Israel News Algemeiner.com – 8/2/2013.

Is Bible Teacher Jimmy Carter an Old-Fashioned Jew-Hater?: But How Can a True Christian… :: The Phyllis Chesler Organization – 11/15/2007.

International Solidarity Movement | Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom.

International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – NGO Monitor – 2/27/2012.  Related: CAMERA: Whitewashing ISM – 9/1/2004.

Israel arrests Al-Qaida recruits trying to bomb U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv – Diplomacy and Defense Israel News | Haaretz – 1/22/2014.

Israel – Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT)

I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ – Stop Being Famous – 1/24/2014; I Traveled to Palestine-Israel And Discovered There is no ‘Palestinian-Israeli Conflict’ | Ferrari Sheppard – 2/10/2014.

Jimmy Carter’s Bible Class as Transcribed and Commented Upon by Michael Miller, 8/15/07 | Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors – 8/15/2007; excerpt re-posted to present site 4/11/2013.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/08/jimmy_carters_human_rights_dis.html – 8/26/2007 (added here 10/9/2014).

Learning from Israeli Secularism | The Humanist Community Project – 5/29/2013.

List of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel, 2013 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Suicide and Other Bombing Attacks in Israel Since the Declaration of Principles (Sept 1993) – List: 1994 – 2012 – Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Carter Center: Advancing Human Rights and Alleviating Suffering

The Genius Of The Crowd by Charles Bukowski — Hello Poetry – n.d.

Which crowd?

Addendum

Since posting the above blog, this gem has been published in the New York Observer: Boteach, Rabbi Shmuley.  “The Moral Disintegration of Jimmy Carter.”  August 11, 2014:

Mr. Carter’s underdog obsession is what motivated him to legitimize Fidel Castro and take his side in a bio-weapons dispute with the United States and to praise North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung with the words: “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent,…and in charge of the decisions about this country.” This is the Korean dictator who, together with the tyrannical son who succeeded him, starved to death about 3 million of their own people. Carter added absurdly, “I don’t see that they [the North Koreans] are an outlaw nation.” He also hailed Marshal Joseph Tito as “a man who believes in human rights,” and said of murderous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, “Our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe in enhancing human rights.” Carter told Haitian dictator Raul Cédras that he was “ashamed of what my country has done to your country,” which made most Americans ashamed of Jimmy Carter.

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