We touched on this theme briefly at a synagogue planning meeting last night. In addition to reaching communities at the edges of our regional service area and bringing in also unaffiliated Jews, there was mention of the want of the passion to promote the distinctive wonderful qualities of the Jews as a community.
Not yet approached but on my mind very much as the very stamp of the “secularized” (in truth, I believe) American Jew: I want a Judaism and Jewish ethos more easily accessed and enjoyed on a more universalized basis. I’m not particularly Christian-friendly in this and also flatly reject Muhammad’s all-of-the-prophets-were-Muslim confusion, but as Judaism promotes a deep ethical and moral conversation between man and God and man and man, it may be a beacon beyond itself.
Generals Constantine and Muhammad built empires on the backbone of the Torah, but perhaps they did not build a better backbone in thought themselves.
With that said, “Jewish rejectionism” (of other faiths) also inspires anti-Semitic sentiment. A more welcoming religion might offset that.
A “beacon beyond itself’ — Judaism and the great conversation it invokes has been that, the basis for three great religions and inseparable from them.
No Moses?
No Muhammad.
It’s that simple.
Why not revisit the qualities of the base?
I’m a little more than half way through Fassihi’s book on Iraq — it seems I have mostly experienced the world through the technology of the the book, thousands of them — and when I’m done, I may well trim back to a second tour through the Torah.
In the process of this thinking out loud, I shared the draft with multifaith chaplain and writer Diane Weber Bederman, who then responded in this way:
I don’t see Judaism as rejectionist. I see it as a religion that says, believe in your God. The Noachide laws. It is a trusting religion that trusts in your beliefs. Unlike others who demean other religions we accept them That is the revolutionary change that Jews brought out of the desert. Caring for the other. Not by changing the other but by accepting the other. Which must not be confused with moral and cultural relativism
The “Gaza Boat Show” and Mavi Marmara incident trace back to deeply anti-Semitic and terrorist enthusiasms, and not only should there not have been a “compensation package” — plain political extortion! — drawn from Israel, but this drift in Turkish politics should have been stopped cold by the Turks themselves exactly when and where it started. God willing, most will understand the only true axis in conflict and conflicted Islamic-majority state politics has to do with the despotic vs the democratic. What PM Erdogan’s government and courts have done: despotic. Evil.
In politics, anti-Semitism has become the signal of the criminal and weak: it’s expressed through disingenuous speech enforced, when it can be, by the tactics of political mafia. In Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan has been tripped in his tracks a time or two by a passionate Kamalist and otherwise mixed opposition, but when the heat in the streets diminishes, he returns to the comfort of his script.
Appeasement fails to appease the needs of such a personality, and, in fact, encourages its development.
Speaking to the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations forum in Vienna on Wednesday, Erdoğan made the following remark: “Just as with Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it has become impossible not to see Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”
Whatever Prime Minister Erdogan may be thinking, and that may include possession of the favor of God as affirmed by Turkish realpolitik, his personality would seem to be asking a fair political question: why stop if not stopped?
SLAVIANSK – Pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine said on Tuesday they were holding an American-Israeli journalist in the city of Slaviansk and the online news site Vice News said it was trying to secure the safety of its reporter Simon Ostrovsky.
The president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress narrowly escaped with his life on Monday after he was targeted in an assassination attempt in central Kiev.
A local rabbi said the last time he saw a message like this one was in 1941, when Nazi armies occupied Donetsk. It is painful, he told a reporter, to be used by “cynical politicians” who see Jews “as an instrument of their political games.” Secretary of State John Kerry called it “grotesque.”
“As a Jew, what impacts me is how the anti-Semitism that prevailed in that part of the world seems to still be in the gut of some people in that community,” said Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress.
“Sixty eight years hasn’t changed much,” said Rosen, whose parents were Holocaust survivors.
I think 68 years have changed the world quite a bit, but deeply seeded beliefs and attitudes toward Jews have been distributed across space and down through generations. Anti-Semitism remains a pervasive presence in contemporary political life. Not only in Ukraine or across the arcs of the Arab and Muslim worlds have cultural communications and actions laid out this truth, but even from the heartland of the most inclusive of democratic open societies, the Untied States of America, has come this expression of ever vacuous rage.
(Reuters) – The suspect in the Passover Eve killings of three people at two Jewish community centers near Kansas City is a former Ku Klux Klan leader with a history of spewing vitriol against Jews, law enforcement officials said on Monday.
In numbers — Incidents x (character + intensity) / place + time — what does anti-Semitism look like spatially?
What is the character of the spillover into an aggregated bigotry, the sort signaled by the canard, “What starts with the Jews never ends with the Jews”?
Journalists better funded than I — my beat is broadband; my most cherished resource is my library — may be urged to look into this question about now because the answers may presage greater conflict (or be used to head it off) encouraged by an appeasing diminishment of the significance of anti-Semitic acts, rhetoric, and tactics.
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. . . Ukraine’s prime minister, anxious to maintain U.S. support against Russia, issued a statement accusing Moscow and told a U.S. TV channel he would find the “bastards” responsible.
The righteous of the world — of any creed, ethnicity, race, or religion — need to know more about this kind of hatred NOW, post-WWII, post-Holocaust, and its distribution and intensity in the industrialized world.
In the wake of last week’s Eastern Ukrainian flyer imbroglio — briefly: a flyer bearing the “symbols of both Russia and the People’s Republic of Donetsk”and distributed outside a synagogue by men wearing balaclavas had asked the region’s Jews to register with the government and declare their property — I was tempted to compose a piece titled “Is Putin Playing for Jerusalem?”, as the Russian President may be accused of many things but never anti-Semitism.
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Above: posted to YouTube by JewishLife, June 26, 2012.
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“As you know, Judaism is one of the four traditional religions in our nation . . . .” (0:25).
So, hate the haters, political anti- anti-Semitism has become the symbol of virtue, and the other: that’s the tar with which to spatter one’s enemies.
However, in our convoluted topsy-turvy atmosphere complicated by facsimile bipolar political sociopathy and the license taken to exploit deceit in the cause of an immense but fragile “egotism”, it’s hard saying who, actually, is the anti-Semite and whom the anti- anti-Semite.
Or the call might be easy: neither – no one (normal) at heart.
The truth is as regards all but an emotionally arrested and purple political fringe — one that should stop holding its collective breath for validation of (choose any combination) white / black / Muslim / Aryan / Internationalist / (simpleton) / etc. supremacy — the Jews are off the examining table for any majority of concern and have been since Auschwitz reopened as a museum.
Nonetheless, the higher one climbs on the ladder of power, the more valuable the “anti- anti-Semite” and “anti-Semite” chips become.
The two political rhetorical objects — one claiming (“I am an anti- anti-Semite”), the other accusing (“You are an anti-Semite”) — may have nothing to do with modern Jewry, Judaism, Jewish culture and life, Jews, or Jewish anything else — but these two objects in social currency have power in service to the will to control others, and for a certain kind of political personality and temperament, that’s all that matters.
1. Donetsk could have published the flyer earnestly and backpedaled, possibly with a rebuke from Moscow. That would be the simplest explanation.
2. Ukrainian nationalists masquerading as Russians distributed the flyer to make break-away Russian nationalists look bad.
Now it gets interesting.
3. Putin may have suggested creating and distributing the flyer in Russian incognito to suggest just how low Ukrainian nationals would go in overturning the Moscow-aligned Yanukovych government.
Notably, and much to the credit of the Jewish community in Ukraine, Jews receiving the flyers asked the men distributing them to take off their face masks.
Guess who ran away?
The possession of integrity should not be so difficult.
However, comfort, defense, and refuge may be taken in lying given a certain kind of leader and leadership plus follower and following.
Update!
As JewishPress.com pointed out, it’s not going to stop at threatening letters. At 2 AM, Saturday morning, the Nikolayev synagogue in Ukraine was firebombed multiple times, as the anti-Semitism escalates.
Unfortunately, it appears the flyer and the emphasis on political rhetoric has not sufficed for either amusement or manipulation.
Posted to YouTube April 20, 2014.
However, I have a problem with the video: the weather in south Ukraine appears to have been above freezing last night: where has the snow come from? The looks of another synagogue firebombed in February look quite different from the building of interest, and the building of interest appears on the web elsewhere as a single story unit, not the two required for camera placement as the video would suggest.
Should anyone with a smart phone care to report in on the story, which has made the rounds on the Jewish press, please do.
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“It is part Soviet theme park, part wacky anti-western wonderland.”
“I’m asking those behind this not to make us tools in this game,” he said. Anti-Semitic incidents in the Russian-speaking east were “rare, unlike in Kiev and western Ukraine,” he said.
I used to call the “Islamic Small Wars” wars for detectives and poets — everything that happens has been planned in private and the motivation is all in the head suspended there by language. It’s disturbing seeing the same mode become ascendant in eastern Europe. Without claim for the crime, there’s no known criminal, and the finger-pointing goes in every direction.
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The traditional political cultivation of an anti-Jewish animus in services to institutional development and greed has been at least socially explicable. One understand the poison and its applications. The application of “anti- anti-Semitism” and “anti-Semitism” in Ukraine may signal a brand of cynicism and manipulation that has less to do with hating Jews than with tarring one’s political enemies.
However . . . Russian desk expert Luke Harding published this gem yesterday: http://www.theguardian.com/…/ukraine-donetsk-pro-russia… It could be the “kiddies” after all, and, God help them, if they’re demonstrably anti-Semitic, Putin will jettison them.
Attitude-belief systems have organic qualities. The Assad regime believes it owns Syria and Syrians on an absolute autocratic and kleptocratic basis; opposition leadership within the Syrian National Coalition, however, carries forward the intellectual poison that is anti-Semitism masked as anti-Zionism plus, reverse engineer it, an Islamic contempt for the world that isn’t itself, i.e., other than Muslim. To traverse the distance from the defensive position they’re in (as trapped between Putin-Assad-Khamenei and assorted bands with varying affiliation or affinity or practical alliance with Islamic Jihad, they have got to do some things within their own poetics or intellectual programming. While they discover, mull, or wait on that, they’re living through a hell that will not recede if either Assad or Islamic Jihad ascend to clear “victory” of any kind.
If attitudes (about others) are predicated on beliefs, which have affect (+/-) and structure in terms of primacy — some beliefs are more fundamental to self-concept than others — then revisiting the earliest linguistic “wiring” or programming demands effort on the part of the soul so slowly but with certainty poisoned.
With extremes provided by a tyrant on one hand and Islamic Jihad on the other, the state of affairs on the field seems impossibly inverted: one would think an inclusive, responsive, and responsible democratic way would have been embraced and pursued by most Syrian, but even if embraced, most Syrians caught unprepared for civil war have fled the fighting and those remaining “in-country” may not dare to speak so, again, captive between armies and uncertain as regards who might prevail.
In Syria, the center simply did not hold.
Of late, some online have conflated the inhumanity of the Assad regime with “genocide” even though the Assad cause is Assad and not particularly focused on any single ethnic, racial, or religious community. The bastards — the dictator “Putin-Assad-Khamenei” — stand together against the aspiring democratic forces (we could have a talk about that phrase as well) that would undo them and their type permanently.
While the revolution in the field bogs down with some escalation in firepower — Russian tanks vs American TOWs — the revolution in the heart seems barely to have gotten a start.
To my Syrian friends, whether established or latent, I would suggest this epigram (doctors write prescriptions –poets must make do with witty remarks): “The whole world may be against what you are against; however, the whole world may be also against what you are for.”
What does Syrian liberation mean . . . now?
What are “moderate” Syrian forces for?
It’s not ping-pong (although I do my sharing of “pinging”) going on in Syria or in Washington’s diplomatic circles. These matters in political psychology — about national and personal self-concept, about motivation, about attitude-belief systems and their suspension within language and its social grammar — may have an as yet unformed weight as powerful as barrel bombs and Russian tanks.
“The crime of antisemitism is an ageless one . . . .” — no, it isn’t. I may be above 2,000 years old, approximately, and Wistrich is more exact, but it has been very much a part of political rhetoric tuned to theft. Where Jews have done for others and reaped the rewards of service to others; where Jewish numbers have grown and Jewish wealth accumulated accordingly; where Jews, whether for ambition, divine guidance, or just the accumulated wisdom of the ages, have done well in myriad dimensions, someone has wanted to take it from them. The next day: they have killed Jesus; there are are too many of them; all that is evil may be ascribed to their presence (even when they’re completely absent from political space).
I have learned that with a confirmed anti-Semite, reason left that mind a long time ago and in its place is, indeed, the playing out of a “social grammar” probably internalized in infancy, the word “Jew” having possibly been heard and envenomed often over time sufficing for summoning a bad feeling.
“Poisoned ears” may have an epidemiology and etiology all their own, and I would expect the countermeasures for embedded anti-Semitism, bigotry, and xenophobia to emerge from approaches in psycholinguistics that focus on attitude, belief, and behavior formation.
Although Charles Asher Small warns against bad mouthing the Jew as one might about bad mouthing the Muslim or anyone else, “political correctness” is not what is wanted with either anti-Semites or bigots: what is wanted is clarity with regard to the health of whole language atmospheres and then the encouragement of decency and mutual regard across divisions, and that with the mothers, perhaps, foremost on the lines defending democratic “all-for-all” social systems.
Here too, as with previous of today’s remarks, I may go a little further: America’s free speech concept specifically sets out to protect unpopular speech, the sort of speech we may not wish to hear, and while hoping for great and much needed revolutionary speech (come election time), it well includes hate speech. Given so capacious a freedom, we leave it to social response to shape the intellectual environment of the state: e.g., we leave David Duke to do his thing from American soil, but, for the most part, we leave him a comparatively isolated figure in American politics and his followers equally isolated as political and social fringe.
If we fail to address and alter the language behaviors that embed in the very young the kernels of a bigoted social grammar, then, indeed, our open society states, our all-for-all democracies, will face greater challenges to their internal coherence and cohesion.
However, as has always been the case even in the darkest chapters of human history, there have been the noble few to whom “never again” was a promise to be kept regardless of the cost, and who have risen above the prevalent apathy and helped those in most need. Despite having their resources and capabilities stretched to the breaking point, for three years neither Jordan nor Lebanon ever closed their borders to the multitude of Syrian refugees. Refugees who managed to reach Turkey found a country and people whose hospitality and generosity knew no limits.
And despite having every reason to hunker down behind a big fence or wall, Israel did no such thing when it came to helping Syrians in need, and thousands of Syrian lives were saved by Israeli medical assistance on the Golan.
My two cents on global sluggishness and resistance to settling the Syrian Civil War with an influx of weapons and manpower sufficient to defeat both Bashar al-Assad and the Al-Qaeda affiliates now operating throughout the battlespace.
Endemic Syrian anti-westernism bolstered by a present if not embraced expanding “Islamism” (Islamic Jihad) may dampen enthusiasm for long-term adversary that needs immediate assistance.
Arab and Arab-Syrian anti-Semitism, of which this blog has taken note, would seem to prove that the revolution would rather fail and die then alter its alignment against the “criminal genocidal imperial colonialist Zionazi entity”.
The Great Dictator Putin-Assad-Khamenei lies, misleads, steals (from its own people) and a third of it is a known nuclear power.
My advice to the “moderate” Syrian revolutionary leadership: lose the anti-Semitic, anti-Western contempt and hate, so that I may remove the quotation marks around “moderate” and others may reevaluate how to meet Russian President Putin’s gambit in Syria and the Middle East for re-founding and sustaining a Greater Russian Empire.
“Either [you accept] the Zionists and everything they want, or else it is war,” Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi said in a 2010 interview posted recently by the Middle East Media Research Institute. “This is what these occupiers of the land of Palestine know — these blood-suckers, who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”
“We will remember in a few days the 70th anniversary of the deportation of the Jews of Rome,” said the Holy Father, according to Vatican Radio. “We will remember and pray for the many innocent victims of human barbarity, for their families.”
“It will also be an opportunity to keep vigilant so that, under any pretext, any forms of intolerance and anti-Semitism in Rome and the rest of the world not come back to life.”
Pope Francis emphasized that Christianity and anti-Semitism are incompatible.
There it is. The assumption that because I am Palestinian, I harbor animosity toward Jews—and not just Israeli Jews, but all Jews, all the time, everywhere.
The culprits responsible for this genocidal campaign to subdue and enslave the Iraqi people are not the CEOs of American oil companies as some disingenuous commentators on the Left have claimed. President George W. Bush’s foreign policy in the Middle East was not his own nor that of the oil lobby, but was the brainchild of the neoconservative conspirators behind the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and other Zionist-oriented think tanks that dominated the Washington Beltway.
KUWAIT CITY – Arab leaders said Wednesday they will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, blaming it for a lack of progress in the Mideast peace process.
Of the many forms of narcissistic contempt and hate for others, anti-Semitism would seem to prove reliably the most self-defeating, self-destructive, and unnatural.
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The Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations was dedicated on Holocaust Remembrance Day, May 1, 1962. The Israeli government was represented by Foreign Minister Golda Meir, and the first eleven trees were planted along the path leading to the Hall of Remembrance on the bare hill of the Mount of Remembrance. The trees were placed in the ground by rescuers from different countries as well as by their Israeli hosts – the Jews they had rescued.
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