Ralph Seliger writes:
If my feelings about Iraq were so centered on Israel, wouldn't I have continued to support the invasion even after the UN Security Council had voted against it? To me, the nightmare scenario is defining the Israeli-Arab conflict as
part of a religous war. There are well over one billion Muslims in the
world and a mere 15 million Jews. The last thing I want is any policy
that makes the struggle against Jihadi extremists seems like a war on
Islam, yet that's what the war in Iraq coupled with Bush's passivity regarding Israeli settlements has done.
Phil Weiss writes:
Has Israel, the Jewish state, played any part in the process of producing religious war in the Middle East?
Seliger: Of course Israel has, by its policies in expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and in not consistently working for peace and coexistence. But the concept of a "Jewish state" is meant to refer to the Jewish people and not to a religion. Israel is not a theocratic state in the ways that Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and even Iraq and Afghanistan (among others) are explicitly Islamic. Meretz USA and our friends in the Meretz party in Israel (please note that Meretz USA is not a "branch" of this political party) advocate a complete separation of religion and state.
Related posts:
- Hebrews 13: ‘Seliger/Weiss Yesterday, and Today, and Forever’
- Seliger Speaks of the ‘Oppression’ of Palestinians…
- Seliger Seems to Want to Be Apologist for Occupations of Palestine and Iraq
- Progressive Zionists and AIPAC Have Same Litmus Test for Candidates: Support Israel!
- Happy New Year (Jewish New Year–Apologies to Gentile Readers) to Seliger
{ 23 comments }
Please don't urge that the US abandon Israel, Phil, as you seem to be implying.
What did you think of my summary of Obama's position, and its merit?
Exactly Phil. Good question. Seliger was sure to get the requisite "Jihadi extremists" in there, but nothing about Jewish or Zionist extremists. And of course the usual imagery of a helpless minority is thrown in for good measure. Over a billion Muslims vs, 15 million Jews. Poor little Jewish folk. If one weren't aware of the brutal history of Israel from its founding to the present day, its undeclared nukes, its continued territorial expansion and inhumane policy against the Palestinians which ignores international law, world condemnation (sans U.S. condemnation due to the Lobby and folks like Seliger) and flies in the face of any and all sense of human decency…well, if one weren't aware of this, one might actually feel sorry for the "Jewish people." Oh, that's right: it's Seliger's job, and that of the Zionists, to keep people in the dark about such matters. Nevermind, he's right on cue.
higginslad, I think in that context the numbers do not suggest "the usual imagery of a helpless minority" but rather sanity.
Obviously there is a difference between Ralph Seliger and Mr. Faster Please, Ledeen & friends.
"There are well over one billion Muslims in the world and a mere 15 million Jews."
LMAO!
The elite of those 15 million Jews are playing "let's you and him fight" with the Muslim world and America.
"But the concept of a "Jewish state" is meant to refer to the Jewish people and not to a religion."
"Israel is not a theocratic state in the ways that Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and even Iraq and Afghanistan (among others) are explicitly Islamic."
The above two statements are an amazing display of gymnastics. How do you hold two opposing thoughts at once?
Moose,
Both statements are true, is how I can hold them both in my consciousness.
Altho 'Moose' is not innocent in asking this question, it is important to understand that the Jewish people have a history that goes back about 3,000 years, if not longer. The fact that Jews are also associated with a religion called Judaism, which many Jews neither believe in nor practice (while many other practice in a variety of denominations and ways) is a vestige of the fact that nations in classical ancient times each practiced their own unique religion. So being Jewish is both a religious category and an ethnic or cultural identification and not all Jews believe in the religion.
Ralph, there is a question on the table:
"Has Israel, the Jewish state, played any part in the process of producing religious war in the Middle East?"
Your response, please.
"So being Jewish is both a religious category and an ethnic or cultural identification and not all Jews believe in the religion."
Nor, I would add, do all Jews depend upon the state of Israel or the Zionist project for a sense of self-identity. And, as we know from much scholarship, most notably Shlomo Sand's recent Israeli bestseller, the idea of a "Jewish nation" is largely an invention of the past 100 or so years, and the majority of modern Jews who self-identify as such have no historical connection to the land called Israel. In fact, Palestinians are more "Jewish" in that respect than the people who are now slaughtering them under the guise of preserving their "Jewishness."
"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."
Higginslads: I've already answered this question directly to Phil: "Of course Israel has, by its policies in expanding settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and in not consistently working for peace and coexistence."
Some ancient Hebrews may well be present-day Arabs. But we Jews also believe that most of us have a direct ancient link with the Land of Israel. One does not rule out the other, nor does the tendencious work of a "scholar" or best-selling author (whom I've never heard of). The idea of the Jewish people is very old; the notion of reconstituting the Jewish nation as a sovereign community is little more than a century old.
Thank you Ralph. I wasn't aware you had answered Phil directly. When you say "We Jews," who do you mean? Who are you speaking for?
'Seliger was sure to get the requisite "Jihadi extremists" in there, but nothing about Jewish or Zionist extremists'
That is his whole schtick, but as several thousand other worker bees use it, it's hardly original. It's in the playbook – look at that other liberal Zionist Pollack's disgraceful Threatening Storm book – a warmongering document if ever there was one, an attempted casus belli in academic attire – it managed as Phil says to avoid mention of Israel almost entirely. I'd call that a clue.
Track back thru the Ralphiad here and you will see the same thing; a rigorous aversion to facts which aren't Israel-friendly that borders on the fanatical. He's no lone nut though, unfortunately.
The old trick: Now we are a religion, and/or now we are an ethnicity, and/or now we can be a race.
Now we are all of the above and now, we are none of the above.
We were here before everyone else and our ties go back to the Near East, and yet curiously we look just like other Eastern Europeans. It gets curiouser and curiouser.
Seliger: "So being Jewish is both a religious category and an ethnic or cultural identification and not all Jews believe in the religion."
Then why does the Israeli government use bloodlines to trace and assign Jewish citizenship rights?
Those who decide such matters in the Jewish Vatican, Israel, always have and continue to regard Judaism as a race, hence they will assign Jewish citizenship even to Jews who are atheists.
Anyone attempting to correctly understand Judaism and its cohesiveness must understand that a major component of its organizational essence is racialism, which makes those who continue to identify themselves as Jews who also profess to be opposed to institutional racialism either liars, hypocrites or dupes, who, if they practiced what they preached, would be forced to divorce themselves from Judaism altogether.
Excepting assimilating Jews, what most Jews who profess to be opposed to racialism are really opposed to is racialism amongst gentiles, but not amongst Jews. And the reason they oppose racialism amongst gentiles is because they understand what a powerful organizational tool it is. Their problem today is, with all the Nazi awareness in the wake of WWII continuing to this very day, the world also understands what a powerful organizational tool racialism is, and is increasingly less willing to give the Jews a pass for theirs.
All nationalism is similarly confusing.
As universalism is also confusing and conflicts with cardinal principles in its impositions (even thought it sounds perfect).
Not to worry. Yesterday I had a conversation with a dozen or so 40 to 70-year old college educated American gentiles–they all were astounded to hear that anyone had ever thought of viewing the term "Jew" or "Jewish" as referring to anything other than naming a pure religion in the same sense as Christian, Moslem, etc.
Ed is actually making my case (albeit in his typically hateful way) that Jewish identity has a strong ethnic component that has nothing to do with whether one is religiously Jewish or not. Anon is similarly arrogant in surveying non-Jews about Jewish identity; he then triumphantly comes up with the opposite conclusion than Ed that Jewish identity is "a pure religion." I'm trying to educate you on how Jews actually feel. Part of my point is that the dual ethnic/cultural and religious nature of Jewish identity is complex and unique (because it's a vestige of how nations in ancient times had uniquely national religions).
Seliger: "I'm trying to educate you on how Jews actually feel."
Diaspora American Jews like Seliger and Witty can do all the spinning they want. Living in the diaspora, they're Disneyland Jews anyway–childlike in their insistence on clinging to their idealistic fantasy of Judaism (perfect in every way) as opposed to the reality of Judaism that is Israel. The true essence of Judaism are the facts on the ground created by the Jewish collective in the place of their centuries-old longing.
Every Jew might have been able to make up their own fantasy of Judaism in their own mind before there was in Israel, and their own interpretation of "how Jews actually feel"; but now that Israel exists, Judaism can be documented and identified by real world, empirical standards, not the fantasies floating around in the heads of Disneyland Jews, and it is what it is.
This is why many ideological left-liberal Jews hate Israel and want to see it destroyed — because its reality conflicts with the fantasies in their heads about what Judaism is. Other liberal Jews in the vein of Witty and Seliger try to spin it into something more approximate to the collective liberal diaspora fantasy, just as diaspora Jewish Neocons have tried to redefine it as an American-style democracy.
I don't want to see Israel destroyed because I want it to live on as a constant reminder of the tribalism that Western civilization rejected when it embraced Christianity, but also out of a grudging respect for the milieu that produced Christianity as well.
Now who's the bigger anti-Semite: I, who wants true Judaism to live naturally, but contained in its own habitat, or liberal diaspora Jews who want to re-define it, re-form it, re-engineer it, and when all else fails, destroy it for not living up to their childish fantasies?
Ralph S, pls go back to what I wrote. You conclude: "Anon is similarly arrogant in surveying non-Jews about Jewish identity; he then triumphantly comes up with the opposite conclusion than Ed that Jewish identity is "a pure religion."
How is it arrogant to ask Gentiles what they think the term Jewish, or Jew means? My own conclusion was that the Gentiles I spoke to were amazed anyone thought of such terms as anything but purely religious in the same sense as being called a Christian was, for example. I have the same conclusion that Ed has about the Jewish Identity, that is, its a game of shells depending on what seems to serve best at the moment. The Gentiles I talked to viewed Jew Jews Jewish as merely referring to a religion, just like being a Christian–they had not a clue those terms were also used in an ethnic, tribal, racial or historical peoplehood sense.
Seliger: "I'm trying to educate you on how Jews actually feel."
No, Ralph, that's how YOU and SOME Jews feel, and you then extrapolate your feelings onto all people who in some way identify as Jewish. This is the horror of Zionism – the danger that was predicted many years ago in Zionism's infancy, and that has surely come to pass: people of all Jewish persuasion are lumped together as "Jews" by the Zionists and included in their racist ideology. And they go so far as to call those who don't buy into their racist mindset "self-hating Jews," or they embark on intellectual dissertations as to why they're not in fact Jewish at all. Disgusting, and nonsense, all of it.
"My one and only homeland is America. I am proud of my belief in the age-old Judaic concept of one God in Heaven and one Humanity here below. But my faith does not pull me into a feeling of narrowly tribal kinship with all others who worship God in this way. Whenever I read of Americans singing the Hatikvah, Israel's national anthem, or see youth groups raising Israel's flag beside the Stars and Stripes. I am outraged. For Israel's flag and anthem are symbols of a foreign state; ,they are not mine.
Anyone who tells me those foreign Jews are exclusively my people that I should be closer to them than to Bob McCormick, the kid on the block with whom I used to play ball: or to Nick Galbraith, who roomed next to me at Cornell; or Dave Du Vivier with whom I studied in law school—that man is talking dangerous nonsense. I have also learned, Mother, that when something. goes wrong in my relations with non-Jews. I avoid the habit of thinking that it happened just because I am a Jew. Such self-pity is comforting, but it is usually wrong and therefore dangerous."
BTW, not one of those Gentiles I talked to knew about the racial basis of the Israeli law of return, nor did they know about the
NAZI racial criteria. Again, they were all college educated. The issue came up in the context of American foreign policy in the Middle East. When I suggested it was less than balanced, and not always in the USA's interest, they immediately
blurted out, "Do you believe in the Holocaust?"
I replied that I did, and then asked, "Have you ever heard of the
NAKBA?"
None did–they looked at me like I was from Mars.
That's a slice of informed American citizens.
Foreign concepts to the Gentiles I talk to:
A jew can be an atheist yet a Jew.
A jew can be an agnostic yet a jew.
A jew can be against the formation and upkeep of the State Of Israel yet be a jew.
A jew can be a fascist.
A jew can be a racist.
A jew can be intolerant.
The Talmud, what's that?
Some Americans might be tribalists.
"When I suggested it was less than balanced, and not always in the USA's interest, they immediately blurted out, 'Do you believe in the Holocaust?'"
I've had the same exact thing happen to me. I've been questioned as to whether or not I believe that a holocaust of people of a Jewish persuasion took place simply because I attempt to engage in an open discussion on Israel.
'people of all Jewish persuasion are lumped together as "Jews" by the Zionists'
which of course makes it much easier for real anti-semites to do the same. Talk about the ultimate own goal.
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