“You can tell because Israel is still there.”
so is Hezbollah.
“The only possibility that really comes to mind is an Iranian nuclear weapon landing on Tel Aviv. “
Danielle Pletka: The Biggest Problem is an Iran that HAS Nukes but Does Not Use Them!
“The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you that Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately…” And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.
which is another way of saying, Iran will have chopped the moral high ground right out from under Israel and the USA.
Vladimir Jabotinsky spent the best years of his life in Rome, soaking up Mussolini, whom he greatly admired and emulated in creating the “muscular new Jew.”
Whose “our” are you talking about, Theo? I was not aware that Israeli soldiers were “fighting and dying in Iraq & Afghanistan right on the front.”
Unless you mean what Robert Kagan & ux, & Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Ledeen, Pipes, etc. do = fighting on the front lines.
All the time I was growing up I knew that my Dad had been injured in the war, but never gave it a moment’s thought. That was just the way it was; he lived his life well and never, ever mentioned what happened or what might have been.
After my parents died, as we were sorting their papers, we came across letters between my parents, just courting, and at the time Dad was injured. I learned about a part of my Dad — and Mother — that I had never realized before: a very lonely and uncertain young man, simultaneously injured, discharged, and orphaned (his father died while Dad was at war). He was 20 years when he had all that to handle. For several years I could not stop my soul from bleeding at the pain my Father had endured; I kept thinking of my own children at that age.
I’ve lately come to a spot where I’m glad Dad was injured when he was, and though it dashed all his hopes and dreams for what he thought he wanted his life to be, his injury got him out of a violent environment in which he might have turned into a moral monster; he might have been harmed in so much worse a way if he had had to live with the realization that he had killed an innocent man — a man who had hopes and dreams, and a wife and child — just like he did.
But I am even more fearful for my children; they are slowly slowly seduced and lured into a universe that, to bastardize the Bard, “Looks on homicide and is never shaken.” Killing, lying, and stealing to gain advantage have become far more than acceptable; they have become the new America, the New Jerusalem.
My Dad, and the thousands like him, and the founders of the US, did not put Their Lives, Their Fortunes, Their Sacred Honor, on the line to enable Hillary Clinton to go around the world hiring killers.
“And no she wasn’t interested in her Catholic Church’s complicity in the Holocaust. I didn’t even broach it.”
I was going to comment that for a woman who must have been at least 70 years old, she seemed attuned to current commercial activities (since she’d have to be about 70 to have present awareness of “her Catholic Church’s complicity in the Holocaust”), but I noticed that you said she is a “young woman.”
That being the case, did you discuss the complicity of Germany in facilitating Israeli belligerence against Iran by providing Israel with nuclear-capable submarines? How about any possible culpability of German corporation Siemens in the melt-down at Fukushima, given that Siemens provided the doorway for infecting Iranian computers with Stuxnet, and the virus got out.
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the subtle subtext is, Marc, in case it glides past you down a snow-covered Innsbruck slope, get over yourself.
Really.
“Good luck finding a source that meets your criteria.”
Most scholars of Judaism affirm that the central beliefs of Jews are “God, Torah, and Israel.”
Reading Torah might provide an appropriate “source.”
Ben Gurion relied on Torah.
Bnejamin Netanyahu is a passionate student of Hebrew scriptures, as is his son.
It seems reasonable to attempt to understand Jewish beliefs based upon celebrations in the Jewish calendar — Purim, Passover, Yom Kippur, etc.
It’s also instructive to observe how Israeli military operations are named for elements in Hebrew scripture; for example, Cast Lead, the assault on Gaza, is named for the “lots” cast in the festival of Purim; the Sampson option = mess with me and your temple goes down with me. Mike Evans and/or Joel Rosenberg (I forget which; both are Bibi’s acolytes) run the “David Project.”
It’s also useful to view Jewish mythos in bas relief against the myths/epics of other nations with whom Israel is in an adversarial relationship. The Iranian people have a yin-yang relationship with Islam: Islam was imposed on Persia; some Iranians are devout Muslims, others are not, others still seethe with resentment at the imposition of Arab-ness on the Persian character. But ALL Iranians are united around the Persian epic, The Shahnameh, which most Iranians can recite and which forms their inner architecture. The Shahnameh celebrates Zoroaster, the ethos at Persia’s heart. It’s enormously unifying. Superimpose the conflictful Israeli thinking about Torah, Talmud, etc. against Iran’s Shahnameh, and the gold goes to Iran, while Israelis argue over who will walk first in line on the way to the training camp.
(The US does not have a unifying mythos; that is its tragic flaw. Most people think “the bible” is the most meaningful & unifying thing that can be said about the US; the 23 busts in the US House of Representatives, and the painting in the Dome of the Capitol tell a much richer story. )
Klaus has an extremely important argument, in the realm of “ideas not people,” as Dennis Prager emphasizes in his books, that should be considered objectively and intelligently. Dennis Prager is allowed to interpret, judge, and condemn other people’s beliefs but those who subscribe to those beliefs are not permitted to defend their own beliefs without being slammed with “antisemite;” having their claims deliberately distorted as “racist,” and shut down, even imprisoned, as “neo-Nazis.” This has been going on for decades, perhaps centuries, and it affects not just Jewish-non-Jewish relations but also Christianity’s interpretation of itself.
The core of the conflict is seated in the meaning of — or thoughtless affirmation of — “monotheism”. The god of the Hebrew scriptures demands that his chosen people — and that does not include anyone other than Hebrews/Jews — worship hm alone, under pain of death to Jews under varying circumstances, and under a broad grant to Jews to take the lives of non-Jews for their failure to worship the “one god, yahweh.” In “Still the Best Hope,” Dennis Prager writes about what a “good thing it was” that Jews cleared out that cesspool in Canaan, where non-Yahweh was being worshipped. Canaanites might have a different pov.
Elijah gets props for killing the 450 priests of Ba’al. How is that act any different from a white supremacist killing priests and worshipers at a Sikh temple? Yet the work of Elijah is enshrined as a holy and to be emulated.
Monotheism is not the same as universalism. Abba Eban explains in “Heritage, Civilization & the Jews” how the god of the Hebrews becomes universalized: the Hebrew god acts in history. When, for example, the Egyptian people are seen to act in a harmful way toward Hebrews, the Hebrew process of interpreting religio-history casts Egyptians in the role of yahweh’s instrument to express yahweh’s posture toward his chosen people at the time. The Egyptian people are under the sway & control of yahweh — i.e. Yahweh has universal dominion over them — but they are decidedly not among his chosen people — by definition.
Some people object to being the tool of a jealous and particularist god who uses them — or kills them — in order to send one message or another to his chosen people.
Most Christians, however, endorse full incorporation of Hebrew scriptures in their own belief system, and necessarily, by extension, the right and duty of adherents to the Hebrew god to eradicate any who deviate from the ‘monotheistic’ path. Christians deal with the irrationality of this situation by claiming that Christians are the “new chosen people.” John Winthrop made that claim in staking the Massachusetts Bay colony as a Christian territory, destined to be a “light among the nations.” Roger Williams, a contemporary of Winthrop’s, held a different view, one more in line with the empirical ideas of Francis Bacon; although Thomas Jefferson, James Madison & Benjamin Franklin were closer to Williams’ view (and certainly to Bacon’s) than to Winthrop, the latter seems to have prevailed in the USA.
Abe Foxman has made it a personal mission to disabuse the Vatican and the Christian world of the view that Christians are the successor “chosen people.”
The British, at least from the colonial times of Winthrop, fully endorsed the incorporation of Hebrew scriptures into their mythos and ethos.
German churchmen did not. Martin Luther was harsh and intemperate in his critique of the god of Hebrew scriptures. Four centuries later, Walter Grundmann took a more irenic approach, treading ground that Thomas Jefferson and Ernest Renan had ploughed before him — sorting out the scriptural Jesus from the human Jesus, and detaching Christianity from a Hebrew matrix.
In “The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany,”Susannah Heschel distills the quest:
“Most members of the Institute [for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life], particularly its academic director, Walter Grundmann, professor of New Testament at the University of Jena, regarded their work as being in the theological avant-garde, addressing and resolving a problem that had long plagued Christian theology: how to establish clear and distinct boundaries between earliest Christianity and Judaism and eliminate all traces of Jewish influence from contemporary Christian theology and religious practice.” pp. 1-2
As Heschel notes, a large proportion of German scholars, preachers, and congregants supported Grundmann’s quest. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Karl Barth, and large and influential groups in the American Christian community condemned Grundmann’s “rationalization” of the “inerrant” bible, and Heschel, of course, condemned the Institute as “anti-semitic” and Nazi, after first twisting herself and logic all out of shape in order to be able to call the Institute “racist.”
At numerous junctures Heschel attacks Grundmann for “deviating from Christian tradition and doctrine.”
That leaves wide open the question: Of what concern is it to Heschel or to any Jewish person how Christians choose to define their beliefs, and whether they choose to separate what they consider Christian beliefs and scriptures from Hebrew beliefs and scriptures? Neither Heschel nor any Jewish person has any standing whatsoever to define Christianity to Christians, any more than Dennis Prager has standing to define–and condemn– Shari’a law for Muslims.
In the wake of the Colorado killings, a letter in a local newspaper declaimed on the necessity of “returning to God” to solve the ills manifest by the shooter’s acts.
I’m forced to ask, What god? The god who endorsed and enabled the killing of the first-born of Egyptians? The god who endorsed Elijah’s killing of the 450 priests of Ba’al? The god who affirmed the killing and plunder of the Canaanites and Jericho? I don’t want anything to do with that god. Aren’t the American people doing the same thing as that god — killing those who are not monotheistically committed to the same beliefs as we are?
Jefferson, Madison, Franklin established the United States Constitutional republic on notions that included the moral code of a de-scripturalized Jesus. I don’t find in that moral code of Jesus any endorsement of killing one’s enemies OR friends, real or imagined. I think that’s the Jesus Grundmann was trying to get at. Pity he did not succeed.
Grundmann and the thousands of German people who supported his views sought to diverge from that monotheistic path, in a principled and non-violent way.
“if you wanna help the jewish zionists in the holy lands, you should immediately and without wasting any further time, start figuring out how to raise reparation money on their behalf to pay for their vandalism and rape of Historic Palestine. “
got it covered
MKs Demand Reparations from Arabs
Today, Representatives Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Howard Berman (D-CA), Ted Poe (R-TX), Joe Crowley (D-NY), and Bob Turner (R-NY) introduced bipartisan legislation to ensure recognition of the plight of the nearly one million Jewish refugees who were displaced from countries in the Middle East, North Africa and the Persian Gulf as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict; it would also recognize Christian and other displaced populations. The bill would strongly encourage the President and representatives of the administration, when speaking on the issue of Middle Eastern refugees at international forums, to pair any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees with similar reference to Jewish and other refugee populations.
“The suffering and terrible injustices visited upon Jewish refugees in the Middle East needs to be acknowledged,” said Nadler. “It is simply wrong to recognize the rights of Palestinian refugees without recognizing the rights of nearly one million Jewish refugees, who suffered terrible outrages at the hands of their former compatriots. This no-nonsense legislation would help secure equal treatment of Palestinian and Jewish refugees.”
this has been going on for years.
I prepared a post that listed links to same kinds of resolutions in US Congress back to 2003 but the ethernet ate it. It was a thing of appalling beauty.
The turning of Turkey is of major importance.
According to Ramadani, Turkey has patched things up with Israel over Mavi Marmara; turned away from formerly friendly relations with Assad in exchange for warmer relations with Saudi Arabia; turned its back on Iran, primarily over the US Radar towers on Turkey’s soil that spy on Iran** in response to US-NATO pressure and in exchange for European promises for entry into EU organizations.
**Iran’s telecommunications used to route thru a Turkish-maintained tower, but in 2007-2008 Iran constructed a tower in Tehran to manage its own communications networks to eliminate the possibility of Turkish spying.