Here is a shocking speech made by Sen. Joe Lieberman last week to the new Israel lobby group: Christians United For Israel. Shocking because it is so filled with religious talk about the Biblical covenant between God and the Jews.
By standing with Israel today, each of you has joined that journey and taken up the torch that was lit in God’s promise to Abraham 4,000 years ago, and carrying it forward to spread that light. I believe that Israel’s rebirth in 1948 was divinely inspired by God…
When Ronald Reagan talked about God in politics, or when Muslims talk about God’s hand in human events, we all get the heeby-jeebys. Why isn’t Lieberman’s language concerning?
Something else: Lieberman describes the foundation of Israel in 1948 as a "miracle." It is interesting that Lieberman’s view is unreconstructed. In March this year, Anita Shapira, an Israeli Zionist speaking at Columbia, conceded (to Saif Ammous) that the foundation of Israel, or the expulsion of Arabs anyway, was a "tragedy." Hillel Halkin, an Israeli Zionist columnist at the Forward, uses similar language in discussing Jews’ "unavoidably violent return" to Israel in his 1977 book, Letters to an American Jewish Friend:
Has not modern Zionist settlement in Palestine done all it could from the beginning, if only for the sake of its own morale and conscience, to turn a blind eye to the truly tragic nature of a conflict in which an ancient and hounded people was able…to regain its lost homeland, yet only by displacing another innocent people whose land it was too?
Lately, too, the Israeli Education Ministry has approved textbooks for third-grade Israeli Arabs that describe the Naqba, or Catastrophe of 1948, and say that the foundation of the Jewish state was a tragedy for Arabs.
This is an American tragedy. Israelis can speak openly of the Naqba. A leading American senator dare not entertain the idea. This is, at bottom, the great threat posed by Walt and Mearsheimer’s forthcoming book: that it will revise the historical narrative in this country.
[My earlier version of this post gave Anita Shapira's first name as Judith. Apologies!]
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{ 15 comments }
Not that complicated, some people believe in God and want to see the Jeweish people continue, and realize that Israel is the best guarantee of that, like Joe Lieberman, People like Phil Weiss and most of the other posters here just don't. They want to see a moslem caliphate there and the end of the Jewish people. Some things are just simple.
I think H. L. Mencken would have really gotten a kick out of how the Israel lobby has seduced the Evangelical Christians that he ridiculed so tirelessly. It is soooo brilliant, so post-modern, to recruit the "last days" bunch and the creationists, historically some of America's most notorious boobies as political infantry to defend Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Israel. Really, doing it is so truly American in the line of P.T. Barnum's, "Never give a sucker an even break" that one has to laugh. I think what turns these people who are traditionally total antisemites on most, is how the Israelis are able to mistreat people of color with total impunity. To have some sort of biblical justification for doing so must be orgasmic for these folks.
Chapeaux!
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/
For a long time Mencken didn't think Hitler was such a bad guy either. Using him has an authority on anything is a little disingenuos. Look, Dave , I know you think Spain is a morally superior society not in the thrall of the Jewish cabal and Christian evangelicals but I have yet to meet an antisemitic Christian evangelical, unlike left wingers or Moslems. Also, most Jews in Israel are Sephardic, has dark has anybody from Casablanca to Karachi, And I wouldn't call Ethiopian Jews white.
Quick note: Nakba vs. Naqba
(I welcome correction from someone with a better command of the languages.)
The word for catastrophe has a kaf (closed "a" as in cat) sound like English "k." Usually it is transliterated into Modern Israeli Hebrew with a koph/qoph because MIH speakers might otherwise read Nakhbah. I usually transliterate with a kaph with a dagesh forte. Nakba is probably the better transliteration.
The word for half-veil of the sort with which Maid Marian is sometimes depicted has a qaf (open "a" as in father) sound which is a "k" said further back in the throat. It is cognate with the Hebrew word for female nekevah/neqevah. Naqba is probably the better transliteration.
H. L. Mencken's place in American letters and journalism is undisputed. As to his being totally unqualified to judge American quirks and follies for not having got Hitler's number right off the bat is absurd. Very few people really knew Hitler was Hitler till Hitler actually became Hitler, perhaps even Hitler himself… in fact the idea is that it is forbidden to compare Hitler and what he did to anything that ever happened before or will ever happen in the future, so it would have been impossible to have known.
In fact any survivor of the death camps would surely tell you that if he or she had any idea that Hitler was ever really going to do any of the things he threatened in Mein Kampf they would have left Europe even if they had to walk to Timbuktu.
So Bill, your argument, a "Stalinist", ad-hominem attack on one of America's greatest journalists, is just par for the course in the Dershowitz school of debate.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/
In the Phila Inq blog (linked below), the respected political columnist Dick Polman, displays his fear of the Lobby. His article is about the DEM debate and Obama's statement that he would open dialogue with the leaders of Cuba, Syria, Iran, etc …
Polman states that Hillary will use Obama's statement as a cudgel against Obama with Cuban-Americans in FLA. What a joke! Everyone knows that Cubans in FLA vote Repub, let alone that Hillary is married to the man who repatriated Elian Gonzalez.
Polman lacks the courage to print the truth. Hillary will paint Obama as soft on Israel's enemies. American politicians, to be elected, must tow the Israeli line… and Americans must die in futile wars in the Middle East.
http://dickpolman.blogspot.com/2007/07/obamas-bambi-problem.html
Joachim
The issue of pronunciation of Nakba has just been hashed over in the Realistic Dove comments. You're absolutely right – in Arabic the word is Nakba. Naqba, as you note, could mean a woman who wears Niqab (the face-veil) or a fissure/hole. Nakba means catastrophe.
http://www.realisticdove.org/archives/149#comments
Thanks for raising this point.
The Right of Return of the Jewish People
By Bradley Burston
To my Palestinian friends, on the anniversary of the Nakba of the Jews:
Let us take this opportunity to talk about the Right of Return. Yours and also ours.
It is only fitting that it was this week – the week of the 9th of the Hebrew month of Av, the anniversary of the expulsions of Jews from the Holy Land into exile – that Israel's Education Ministry announced that it had approved a controversial textbook for Israeli Arab third-graders. The book teaches that some Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes and became refugees in 1948, and that some Arab villages in the new state of Israel were destroyed during and after the war.
There are many among us Jews who think it obscene, masochistic, defeatist, that on this anniversary of a succession of calamities that befell the Jews, the textbook also notes that Arabs use the word Nakba, or catastrophe, to describe the 1948 war.
They should think again.
It is only right and just that the Jews begin to acknowledge the pain and the dismemberment and the loss which Palestinians feel over the war that gave birth to Israel and in the course of which thousands and thousands of Palestinians lost their homes, some because they fled, hoping soon to return, others because they were forced from them.
Just as we should begin to expect that you, the Palestinians, begin to acknowledge the open wounds of the Jews.
There is no topic which causes our peoples more discomfort. The wounds run so deep, that we tend to see only our own pain, our own people's catastrophe.
When Jews listen to Palestinians describe their loss of home and loss of lives, we too often roll our eyes and dismiss their grief as exaggerated, predicated on myth, tailored to political motives, false.
Our Palestinian friends, meanwhile, have grown inured, even contemptuous of, our agony over the Holocaust and our mourning of the victims of terrorism and war.
It is time, on this, our Nakba Day, to ask you to think again as well.
Three generations after your Nakba, you hold out hope that the rusting keys you treasure will someday hang again in the homes you keep in your hearts.
It may not be reasonable, but it is necessary, to accept that 130 generations after our Nakba at the hands of Babylon, and 100 generations after our Nakba at the hands of Rome, we still hold a key of our own.
Those of you who cannot bring yourselves to acknowledge the pain of the Jews, those of you who console yourselves by deciding that today's Jews are not the descendants of ancient Israel, those of you who take comfort in rejecting the notion that Jews have valid claims to this land, should know this:
This is our home. Exactly as it is yours. Your Noble Sanctuary is our Har-Habayit, the Mountain of our Home, the very center of Judaism for 3,000 years. It is that very compound that is our home, not that vestige below it, that souvenir, that Wailing Wall, that mere retaining buttress, that you watch us visit as you stand above us.
Our home is that home, and you are occupying it. You are occupying the most sacred ground we have.
Secular, religious, exiled to six continents, we have carried the rusted key to that Home wherever we have gone. If you can't see it, it's because we carry it in our bones, our memory, our hearts, the darkness in our souls.
Belittle this at your peril. Deny this to your detriment. This is what you need to know about the Right of Return, ours as well as yours, and about holy men, ours as well as yours:
There is no knowable justice in this world. Not for you, and not for us. Keep the right of return where it belongs. It is a part of you. But it is not a part of this world.
Our right of return is no more realizable than yours. It is a right to nothing more than memory. Our right of return is the legacy of a Home which no longer exists in a kindom which no longer exists, yours the legacy of a home which no longer exists in a village which no longer exists.
This one God of ours does not offer the Jews and the Palestinians justice. This one God of offers our two peoples life, if we choose to find a way to swallow our right to return to all that was once ours, and act, for once, as adults.
****** For Bill *****
You can trash a lot of people for not recognising what Hitler was going to do Bill. I mean, sure, hindsight is great, but did you know Bill that Hitler was Time magazine's Man of the Year for 1938?
http://www.time.com/time/subscriber/personoftheyear/archive/stories/1938.html
And there is of course lots of correspondence between Jewish and Zionist organizations and the Nazis, acknowledging common goals, like preventing the mix of races, assimilation etc. There is even the famous Lehi (Stern Gang) proposal to actively take part in the war on Germany's side (1940-41)! And guess who was a member of this group? Yitzhak Shamir, future Prime Minister of Israel, one of your heroes!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_%28group%29#Contact_with_Nazi_authorities
Clearly, if Shamir's Stern Gang and even Time magazine didn't think Hitler was too much of a bad guy, you shouldn't be trashing H. L. Mencken. At least he wasn't a wannabe Nazi collaborator destined to become an Israeli Prime Minister!
The usual crap from Burston. So I presume, given that every Jew, or ersatz Jew, is allowed unfettered migration to Israel, that Burston will be lobbying for the Palestinian right of return to square the circle. No, he will continue to deny the Nakba in practice and the millions of Palestinians that surround him living in intolerable circumstances so that he can live in comfort and prattle on about an irrelevant ancient history.
I am of
The usual crap from Burston. So I presume, given that every Jew, or ersatz Jew, is allowed unfettered migration to Israel, that Burston will be lobbying for the Palestinian right of return to square the circle. No, he will continue to deny the Nakba in practice and the millions of Palestinians that surround him living in intolerable circumstances so that he can live in comfort and prattle on about an irrelevant ancient history.
I am of
Wearing a Niqab
Actually a woman, who wears a niqab, is a muntaqaba (منتقبة). A woman that wears a hijab is a muhajaba.
The common American mispronunciation of important Arabic words according to Modern Israeli Hebrew phonemic patterns is indicative of a serious problem with US journalism.
Many too many reporters are learning about the Middle East through media update sessions help throughout the country by Jewish communal organizations.
As a fairly regular attendee, I can safely assert that the material presented to journalists is almost invariably erroneous, misleading, false, Islamophobic, or Arabophobic.
If I were an editor, I would probably forbid my reporters from attending.
Perhaps the ADL needs to send a copy of an earlier letter to Lieberman – just as a reminder:
August 28, 2000
The Honorable Joseph I. Lieberman
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Lieberman:
We are writing to express concern about your statements yesterday to the congregation of Detroit's Fellowship Chapel which, according to various news accounts, included extensive reflections on religious values and expressions of faith.
Candidates should feel comfortable explaining their religious convictions to voters. At the same time, however, the Anti-Defamation League believes there is a point at which an emphasis on religion in a political campaign becomes inappropriate and even unsettling in a religiously diverse society such as ours.
Thus, in particular, we were troubled by your suggestion that, "As a people we need to reaffirm our faith and renew the dedication of our nation and ourselves to God and God's purpose" and your argument not to indulge the supposition "that morality can be maintained without religion." To even suggest that one cannot be a moral person without being a religious person is an affront to many highly ethical citizens.
Moreover, language such as this risks alienating the American people. We feel very strongly, and we hope you would agree, that appealing along religious lines, or belief in God, is contrary to the American ideal. The First Amendment requires that government neither support one religion over another nor the religious over the non-religious. The United States is made up of many different types of people from different backgrounds and different faiths — including individuals who do not believe in any god — and none of our citizens, including atheistic Americans, should be made to feel outside of the electoral or political process.
Although you cautioned "those who may neither believe nor observe … that we share with them the core values of America, that our faith is not inconsistent with their freedom, and that our mission is not one of intolerance but one of love," your comments still may serve to unsettle many Americans. Americans should not be made to feel inferior, or left out of the process, because they are in a religious minority.
As this campaign unfolds, we urge you to keep in mind that public profession of religious beliefs should not be an elemental part of this or any other political campaign.
Sincerely,
Howard P. Berkowitz
National Chairman Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Joachim
Not that it matters much, but yes, mutinaqiba is in the same root patter as muhajibba… but naqba has two meanings, one of which (also) means the wearing niqab, another is a hole or breech. The bottom line we agree on: naqba is a different word than nakba. What happened in 1948 is called the nakba.
But we absolutely agree that the proliferation among Anglophone reporters and commentators of Hebrew pronunciations of Arabic words is a symptom of the intermediation of Zionist sources in narrating the history of the conflict/region. Naqba, Khamas, Khizbullah and other Hebraizations of Arabic the words Nakba, Hamas, Hizbullah crop up on television, radio and even in print all the time.
Watch this brief video to the end.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rixkck8QnjY&eurl=
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