The Washington Post is a hotbed of secularism. In yesterday’s paper, Richard Cohen attacked Mike Huckabee for "his obdurate and narrow-minded religious beliefs"–his positions on abortion, stem cells, gun control. Today the Post editorial page justifiably lands on Mitt Romney for saying that there is no freedom without religion.
So far, so good. But when is the Post going to scrutinize the role of religion in American Jews’ support for Israel? Ed Koch has said that Israelis "have the right to live on the West Bank." The Jewish Forward prints Hillel Halkin’s columns notwithstanding the fact that Halkin says that the Bible is a deed to the West Bank for Jews (and he has lately written in Commentary on "the achievement" of the settlements). These religious attitudes are also "obdurate and narrow-minded," and unlike abortion and stem-cells, they are inflaming the Muslim world and distorting our politics (c.f. Hillary’s antediluvian position on Jerusalem).
There are two reasons, one political and one cultural, why the Post doesn’t focus on the religious left. 1, The religious left has pitched its tent mainly in the Democratic Party of Lieberman, Hillary, Lantos and Schumer, and the Post shares that political persuasion. 2, Liberal Jews like Cohen and myself are all over the media and we know many, many Jews who share these feelings. We’re even related to some of them. Dan Schorr’s mother was a Zionist, my mom’s best friend made aliyah in ‘68, Nathan Klugman’s aunt sent money to Palestine (in Goodbye, Columbus, the Roth novel). It’s part of our culture, unlike the stem-cell-hating megachurches, that we see on television. It’s a lot easier to focus on the mote in someone else’s eye than the beam in your own.
Related posts:
- Shouldn’t we be getting religious crazies, like Eric Yoffie, out of our politics?
- Berman, Congressional Foreign Affairs Boss, Cites Israel as a Prime Motivator in His Politics, Then Calls Israel Lobby a ‘Total Canard’
- Specter hops from religious right’s party to the religious left’s
- The Media Slam Religion-n-Politics–When It’s Christian Republicans
- Now That the Religious Right Is History, Let’s Talk About the Religious Left (Which Claims to be Secular)
{ 19 comments }
What beam do you see in your own eye?
What is left wing about the Settlements? All the Left wing Jews and non-jews I know oppose them and most of the right wing Jews and non-jews that I know are fine with them.
As per Romney, Hitchens had a scathing review:
According to the admittedly very contradictory scriptures of the New Testament, Jesus of Nazareth warned his disciples and followers that they should expect to be ridiculed and mocked for their faith. After all, how likely was it that God had decided to reveal himself to only a few illiterate peasants in a barbarous backwater? Those who elected to believe this stuff were quite rightly told to expect a hard time, and the expression "fool for God" or "fool for Christ" has been with us ever since. That concept has some dignity and nobility. Entirely lacking in dignity or nobility (or average integrity) is the well-heeled son of a gold-plated church who wants to assume the pained look of martyrdom only when he is asked if he actually believes what he says. A long time ago, Romney took the decision to be a fool for Joseph Smith, a convicted fraud and serial practitioner of statutory rape who at times made war on the United States and whose cult has been made to amend itself several times in order to be considered American at all. We do not require pious lectures on the American founding from such a man, and we are still waiting for some straight answers from him.
Philip
Left wing publications like Counterpunch devote an extraordinary amount of coverage to issues like the Settlements and spend less time on other important global issues. Is there a similar dynamic occuring in these publications?
Philip,
The Washington Post "shares the political persuasion" of the Washington establishment, best exemplified (in the Senate) by John McCain and Joe Lieberman (who is, please note, no longer a member of the Democratic Party).
That consensus is contemptuous of fundamentalist rubes (as you identify) but it's moderate right and profoundly imperialist.
The Post's lack of interest in this issue is not at all shared liberalism; it's a lack of interest in exposing imperial misadventures, including those of our proxy states.
Go look around the liberal blogosphere for posts on the Post's gullible neo-con opinion editor Fred Hiatt to get some idea of how you've guessed wrong.
"All the Left wing Jews and non-jews I know oppose the settlements."
And Ariel Sharon was "a man of peace." But only in the sense that he wanted all opposition to Israeli dominance to end. In the same way, most American Jews oppose the settlements, but only in the sense that they want to stop being seen as moral pariahs. It's important to remember that they have never opposed the settlements enough to actually insist on ending them. (And don't even mention the subject of reparations.)
Why did it take two gentile professors to bring up the subject of the elephant in the room?
Israel considering strike on Iran despite US intelligence report
http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?p=402392#402392
Newt Gingrich Propagandist for Israel
http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2007/12/newt-gingrich-propagandist-for-israel.html
When is the New York Times going to be called out? Has anyone noticed the nonnews there? Or the outrageous book review section that is blatantly sympathetic to the neocons? One of the best books on what is currently happening to our country, Craig Unger's Fall of the House of Bush , got a ridiculous pan by Kakutani who didn't even seem to understand what it is about. This I see continually and pervasively. The idea that there are different points of view represented at the Times is absurd.
When is the New York Times going to be called out? Has anyone noticed the nonnews there? Or the outrageous book review section that is blatantly sympathetic to the neocons? One of the best books on what is currently happening to our country, Craig Unger's Fall of the House of Bush , got a ridiculous pan by Kakutani who didn't even seem to understand what it is about. This I see continually and pervasively. The idea that there are different points of view represented at the Times is absurd.
Phil, you gotta stop using this term "religious left" in your own idiosyncratic way. The term has a meaning and it doesn't mean what you want to make it mean. It refers to religious people, Christian and Jew (and maybe Muslim too, but I don't know), who are on the left side of the political spectrum. Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine, for instance, or Jim Wallis at Sojourners. Both of these guys want justice for the Palestinians.
I find the liberal left as disgusting in their flower child Pollyanna denial of reality as I find the right wing in their racist bible thumping stupidy.
This what America is cycling back to:
President Theodore Roosevelt once spoke about the importance of new immigrants giving up their old languages and allegiances in order to become equal partners in American democracy:
“We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good fellowship to every man, no matter what his creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good United States citizen like the rest of us. . . . Americanism is a question of spirit, conviction and purpose, not of creed or birthplace. The politician who bids for the Irish or German vote, or the Irishman or German who votes as an Irishman or German, is despicable, for all citizens of this commonwealth should vote solely as Americans.''
Now cry, whine, chant me,me,me,me and light candles to examine your protruding ethnic and religous navels all you want…and then wipe your narcissist slober off, quit sucking your f…… thumbs and thank God this is the only kind of blowback you are going to be subjected to.
"The politician who bids for the Irish or German vote, or the Irishman or German who votes as an Irishman or German, is despicable, for all citizens of this commonwealth should vote solely as Americans." (Theodore Roosevelt)
"There are no English, French, German or American Jews, but only Jews living in England, France, Germany or America." (Chaim Weizmann)
"Americanism is a question of spirit, conviction and purpose, not of creed or birthplace." (Theodore Roosevelt)
"A Jew brought up among Germans may assume German customs, German words. He may be wholly imbued with that German fluid but the nucleus of his spiritual structure will always remain Jewish, because his blood, his body, his physical racial type are Jewish." (Vladimir Jabotinsky)
I used to try to talk about Jewish support for Zionism and Zionist policies as some sort of Jewish fundamentalism comparable to Christian or Islamic fundamentalism, but I had a reasonably long talk on the subject with Professor Herb Kelman about Jabotinsky and his followers. Then I read Koonz book entitled "The Nazi Conscience."
Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim like ethnic Russians experienced a tremendous decline in religious feeling in the late 19th century. In fact the decline was probably more pronounced among ethnic Ashkenazim.
In its place a form of ethnic fundamentalism took hold in which good and evil are judge in terms of benefit or harm to the tribe.
Among Jews the real phenomenon is the 'Obdurate Narrowmindedness' of Pro-Israel ethnic fundamentalist Politics.
In general American Jews except for the most traditionalist sector, which does not include modern Orthodoxy of the Young Israel type, long ago replaced Jewish religion with a combination of ethnic narcissism, worship of the State of Israel, and Holocaust obsession.
When I wrote the Israel-Palestine portion of Jeff Fisher's 2004 Congressional campaign platform, I used the concept of ethnic fundamentalism even though I did not explicitly name it. See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/12/new-approach-to-palestine-israel.html .
Joachim,
Please clarify something for me. You say
"The mind-set that defines good and evil by benefit to the race or to the ethnic group is itself evil. The USA cannot accept a State of Israel that belongs only to Jews and not to its citizens. The USA cannot tolerate a State of Palestine that belongs only to Arabs or only to Muslims and not to its citizens."
But your wife, Maria Hussain reportedly wrote the following in "Observations on the Palestinian Solidarity Conference":
"Muslims … are not seeking peace. We get peace from Allah. In Palestine, we will stop only at victory, which will be, inshaAllah, in the end, a just implementation of Islamic religion. We have to guard against the Palestine movement being represented primarily by homosexuals and feminists."
In what ways do your positions disagree with one another?
CK – Piece on ethnic politics in Cleveland
http://www.clevescene.com/2007-12-05/news/the-king-of-spin/print
Mike,
If you have a problem with something my wife Karin Friedemann wrote, you should take it up with her.
The name Maria Hussain belongs to an earlier phase in her life when she first realized how evil Zionism is, was very angry at the Jewish community, and identified with its victims.
In that article she is dealing with a specific situation where a leftist pro-Palestinian group refused to work with Republicans.
Karin correctly believes that anti-Zionism is a cause for Americans and for humans in general.
Peace is not a goal. Everyone wants peace.
The issue in Palestine is justice.
Murderous genocidal Eastern European invaders and interlopers stole Palestine from the native population on the basis of an ideology that amounts to the belief that Jews have the right to plunder and kill non-Jews with impunity.
Zionism and German Nazism grew out of the same seeting cauldron of Central and Eastern European hatred, and the two ideologies borrowed considerably from each other.
Like German Nazism, which at its core was the belief that Aryans had the right to plunder and kill non-Aryans with impunity, Zionism must be eradicated, and the Zionist State must be abolished.
The Israel Lobby has done and is doing so much damage to the American system that here in the USA we have to start applying the tax code and the US criminal code consistently to neutralize to Israel Lobby.
Mr. Martillo,
You are so prone to hyperbole it's hard to read you without wondering if you're writing under the influence of a mild manic disorder. The multiple names you and your wife employ and your changing religions doesn't help your credibility either. That said, I'm interested in the truth of arguments regardless of the people who present them.
Aryan Nazis believed that they were a master race and untermenschen were expendable and killable. They wished to exterminate Jews, Gypsys, homosexuals, and any of a number of a people with disabilities because they believed they were cleansing their state which they planned to increase in size (lebensraum)through the hostile takeover of others lands. The Israelites didn't/don't have anything personal against the Palestinians. They just both happen to want the same land and both feel they have a claim to it. While there may be some horribly racist Israelis who behave in reprehensible racist ways, the underlying motives of zionism are not to deny Palestinians or force them to suffer, as the the underlying motives of Aryan Nazism are, but rather to gain for Jews what every other people in the world have – a homeland.
What the Israelites have in common with the Nazis and countless other countries, including our great USA, is they have sought to increase their territories. Like many countries in Europe they are highly sensitive to the significantly higher fertility rate of Muslims living in their democracies and the eventual radical impact this will have on their nation. This is not radically different to the alarm in the USA over the large number of hispanic immigrants (both legal and illegal) and their higher fertility rates. Israel can, and should be critiqued on their settlement policy which seeks to take away land from the Palestinians in violation of international law, but to equate them with the genocidal ambitions of the Nazis is intellectually incorrect.
If you had asked the Nazis if they would have been satisfied with simply kicking out all of the Jews in Germany to Poland, they would have said no – they needed to commit genocide and kill the Jews. The Israelites have not killed Palestinians on any sort of genocidal scale, and would be satisfied to just have the Palestinians relocate into a different area. While this is obviously still problematic it is still not the same as what we saw the Nazis and their allies attempt to do with the Jews, Gypsys, and others.
Your use of language – e.g., "Murderous, Genocidal East European Interlopers, is consistent with that of classic facists. I'm not familiar with your writings, but I'd bet money that you have critiqued others of the same.
Old joke: Q. What's the definition of "Zionism"? A. One Jew pays another Jew to send a third Jew to Israel. ;)
Carroll,
It seems as if your knowledge of both Nazi Germany and of present day Israel is quite rudimentary and incomplete. Nazi Germany originally sought to rid itself of Jews through ethnic cleansing, not genocide. In fact, the German Zionist organization was the only Jewish organization that was allow to exist during Nazi rule, because the Nazis and the Zionists shared a goal-the removal of Jews from Europe. It was only with the knowledge of their sure defeat in Eastern Europe at the hands of the Soviets that the Nazi goals deformed into something worse.
As for the comparison of present day Israel and Nazi Germany, you might want to read this article from 1991, comparing the actions of Israel over the years to the actions of pre-war Nazi Germany. Keep in mind that things have only gotten worse in the intervening 16 years since Father James Burtchaell wrote this:
http://www.ameu.org/page.asp?iid=125&aid=168&pg=1
Its 14 pages; I've given you the link to start at page one. I'm sure you'll learn details you don't know about how Israel has abused the Palestinians over the years. The devil is in the details.
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