The hijacking of the Jewish faith

The creation of the Zionist entity has been based on what is described as the divine concept of the Promised Land. Interpreting the book of Genesis (17:7 - 9) of the Old Testament, Zionists say the land of Canaan forever belongs to the Jewish people.

"And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God."

"And God said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations."

These verses provide, in their opinion, the primary basis for the Promised Land concept. But this is not the view of all Jews. Many Orthodox Jews and groups such as the Neturei Karta object to the Zionist interpretation and state that the "covenant" was based solely upon the people's obedience to the Will of God.

Iran's Jewish community condems Gaza massacre

Members of the Iranian Jewish community protesting outside the UN offices in Tehran on Tuesday. (AP)

Iran's Jewish Community released a statement on Tuesday, saying that Israel's deliberate killing of Palestinians is in direct contradiction to Jewish principles and beliefs.

There is a difference between the great religion of Judaism and the psychopathic racist doctrine of Zionism...

The Hanukah Massacre on Gaza–Judaism in its Finest Hour

“When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are to possess and casts out the many peoples living there, you shall then slaughter them all and utterly destroy them…You shall make no agreements with them nor show them any mercy…You shall destroy their altars, break down their images, cut down their groves and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a holy people unto the LORD thy God and He has chosen you to be a special people above all others upon the face of the earth…”

–Book of Deuteronomy, 7:1-8

Sharp drop in Christians converting to Judaism

Year of 2008 sees significant decrease in number of Christians choosing to become Jewish. Drop also registered in number of Jews converting to Islam.

Jewish group wants Mormons to stop proxy baptisms

"We are not going to continue meeting with the Mormon Church," said Auschwitz survivor Ernest Michel, head of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, who has spearheaded efforts to scrub the Mormon lists since discovering in the 1990s that his parents were among 380,000 Holocaust victims having been baptized into the Christian faith.

Battle over Jewish symbol roils tony town

Rabbi Marc Schneier, who counts New York Gov. David Paterson among his friends, wants the Westhampton Beach mayor and village board to approve the placement of the religious boundary called an eruv, which would allow observant Jews to perform minor tasks on their Sabbath or on religious holidays like Rosh Hashana, which was observed on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Interview With President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

The question is really over Zionism. Zionism is not Judaism. It is a political party. It is a very secretive political party, which is the root cause of insecurity and wars. For 60 years in our region people have been killed, they have been threatened for 60 years, they have been aggressed upon for 60 years. Several large wars have occurred. A large number of territories there are occupied. More than five million people have been displaced and become refugees. Women and children are attacked in their own homes. They demolish homes over the heads of women and children with bulldozer, in their own house, in their own homeland. These are not crimes that one can shut ones eyes to. We disagree with these criminal acts and we announce it loud and clear. The anger of the U.S. government does not prevent us from saying loud and clear what we think about these acts. As long as these crimes are not rooted out we will continue voicing our concern.

The Jewish Experience

"Once we are brave enough to explore the Jewish question and Jewish identity we may be able to understand that Israeli apartheid is not just political circumstances, it is actually a natural outcome of a particular racially orientated tribal philosophy. The Israeli wall is not a political measure but rather a manifestation of an exclusive racist attitude that stands at the core of the Jewish notion of segregation. Once we stand up and insist upon interpreting Israeli/Zionist scrutinising of the Jewish question we may as well grasp why Senator Obama rushed to the AIPAC conference three hours after his nomination for the Democratic Party was secured. The set of promises made by Obama, Clinton and McCain in AIPAC a few days ago is in fact a true reflection of the contemporary Jewish experience. The senators feed the Jewish American prominent lobbyists exactly with the food they want to swallow. At the expense of the Palestinians, Iraqis, Syrians, Iranians and billion Muslims, American politicians openly promise that America will keep being biased. Seemingly, America prefers to appease its tiny Jewish minority instead of being an international mediator and a true genuine negotiator."

American Jewish Congress considers law suit over Cross on license plates

"The American Jewish Congress is considering a lawsuit against South Carolina for creating a license plate with a cross and the phrase "I Believe.""

Romney: No religious test for president

"Republican Mitt Romney declares in a speech being delivered Thursday that he shares "moral convictions" with Americans of all faiths, but should not have to explain his own religion just because he's striving to become the first Mormon elected president."

The more significant proposition here is not being addressed. This issue is being discussed in terms of "Christianity" but the real question is, would a "Christian" nation elect a "non-Christian" president? Of course, it may be assumed, at this point in time, that the "non-Christian" president would be Jewish. And, this leads to a much deeper question ~ would a "Christian" nation that holds Jesus as Saviour elect a president that attaches no particular significance to Jesus, and in some cases may deny his very existence?

Perhaps at this point, the "Christians" will finally realize how far apart Christianity and Judaism really is. After all, regarding Jesus, Christianity is much closer to Islam.

U.S. 'Marranos' unwelcome in Israel

"The authorities would probably call the 30 U.S. citizens who scoured the Negev last week Christian tourists. But the members of the group think of themselves as American Marranos, and they are determined to return to the faith they say their ancestors were forced to renounce and strike root in Israel."

Boston Jew and West Bank Muslim Build a Temple, and Bridges, in Arkansas

Bill Feldman, left, the president of Temple Shalom in Fayetteville, Ark., with Fadil Bayyari, a general contractor, on the site of a new temple. Mr. Bayyari, a Muslim, is donating his services.

by SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN - Oct 6, 2007

Just before the school year started in August 1971, Bill Feldman steered his Volvo amid the pickup trucks and horse trailers of small-town Arkansas, bound for his first job as a math professor. He was coming to the Bible Belt as a Jew reared in a Boston suburb, a scholar educated in Canada and Europe. To ease the culture shock, an uncle had given him three jars of kosher pickles for the trip.

The same month, 19-year-old Fadil Bayyari boarded the first plane of his life, carrying falafel from his mother for the journey from Tulkarem in the West Bank to Roosevelt University in Chicago. He handed a taxi driver at O’Hare the college’s address and was relieved of a month’s spending money when the cabby took the naïve newcomer downtown more or less by way of Indiana.

All these decades later, destiny or providence or something has delivered Mr. Feldman and Mr. Bayyari to the same acre of land at the bottom of one of Fayetteville’s many hills. There Mr. Bayyari, now a general contractor, will build the first permanent temple for the Reform Jewish congregation in Fayetteville, of which Mr. Feldman is president. And Mr. Bayyari, a Palestinian-American Muslim, is doing the job at no charge. Without his sacrifice, the congregation probably could not afford the project at all.

“To me, it’s a place of worship,” said Mr. Bayyari, 55. “In my mind and in my religion, I believe in Judaism as part of Islam. We believe in Abraham. We believe in Moses. In the Koran, there’s lots of talk about Isaac and Joseph. I am always fascinated by this, and I always feel I have a relationship with this faith. And knowing what’s happened in the Middle East, what better way to build bridges?”

For Mr. Feldman, the bond with Mr. Bayyari felt especially resonant during Rosh Hashana. One of the Torah readings told of God’s protection of Hagar and Ishmael in the desert, after Sarah had banished them as rivals for Abraham’s love. Muslims, of course, trace their lineage back through Ishmael.

“The humanity of it is thrilling,” Mr. Feldman, 62, said of Mr. Bayyari’s gesture. “We’re thinking not only of our temple but of continuing the relationships with Muslims. We hope to accomplish an understanding. We hope to ultimately bring peace.”

By coincidence, the congregation was named Temple Shalom — “peace” in Hebrew and linguistically close to “salaam” in Arabic — from the time of its founding in 1981. Now the Web site for its permanent building is atempleofpeace.com, and the congregation has committed to raising a million dollars to endow programs with an emphasis on interfaith efforts. Mr. Bayyari’s decision to forgo payment will save Temple Shalom at least $250,000.

The contractor’s charity reflects factors beyond a shared religious heritage. It also attests to the odyssey of two men and the transformation of this corner of the Ozarks. Mr. Feldman had never expected to stay in Fayetteville, and Mr. Bayyari had never expected to be here at all. And Fayetteville itself has grown and diversified in ways unimaginable when Mr. Feldman came here 36 years ago.

To his own surprise, Mr. Feldman has spent his entire career in the math department at the University of Arkansas, becoming tenured and serving a decade as chairman. He married a local woman, who converted to Judaism, and after a relatively unobservant youth became a member, an officer and even a Hebrew-school teacher in Temple Shalom.

As for Mr. Bayyari, he did not last long at Roosevelt, instead learning the fast-food industry at McDonald’s Hamburger University, running franchises in Los Angeles and Hawaii, then picking up construction skills during four years with a conglomerate in Bahrain. He and his wife decided to move back to the United States to raise a family, and she had fond memories of Arkansas from childhood vacations.

The Boston Jew and the West Bank Muslim experienced similar isolation at the start. A circuit-riding rabbi came through Fayetteville just one Shabbat a month. The nearest synagogue was 60 miles away in Fort Smith, and the closest kosher meat was two and a half hours west in Tulsa. Mr. Bayyari worshiped in rented rooms with a small group of Muslim students from abroad and had to drive 12 hours to Chicago for a halal butcher.

Isolation, though, was not tantamount to prejudice. With his thriving construction business, Mr. Bayyari wound up serving on a regional planning board, joining the Rotary Club and even having an elementary school in nearby Springdale named for him. While he heard one accusatory comment after the Oklahoma City bombing, in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, he said, he received many calls from friends making sure he had not been insulted or attacked.

Partly because it is a university town, partly because it sits 15 miles from Wal-Mart’s world headquarters, Fayetteville itself has grown into a surprisingly cosmopolitan place. Yes, the football fans still scream “Pig, sooooey!” and, yes, the annual motorcycle rally is called “Bikes, Blues and BBQ.” But Thai and Mexican restaurants flourish, educational levels stand high in national rankings and magazines like Forbes rate Fayetteville a highly desirable place to live.

With the growth in its membership from about 15 families in 1981 to nearly 60 early this decade, Temple Shalom resolved two years ago to buy or build its own sanctuary, rather than to keep renting space. The congregation’s effort to buy a locally famous home ran into opposition from neighbors, who said they objected to having more traffic in a residential area.

While the city zoning commission was wrestling with the case, Mr. Bayyari heard about it from one of his Rotary Club buddies, Ralph Nesson, a member of Temple Shalom. In solidarity, Mr. Bayyari attended several zoning meetings to support the temple’s plan.

By last fall, Mr. Feldman and other leaders had decided to withdraw the application rather than prolong the controversy. Attention then turned to a plot of land on Sang Road and a prospective capital campaign of $2.2 million. The congregation had a bequest of $500,000 from a member, Miriam Alford, and has been able to raise about $450,000 more, leaving a gap of $1.3 million for construction and programming.

So Mr. Bayyari’s offer to work without a fee proved essential. The site is already being leveled and a formal groundbreaking is set for Oct. 14.

Jeremy Hess, the head of Temple Shalom’s building committee, numbers himself among the dazzled.

“In the middle of the Bible Belt, why should Jews and Muslims, two small communities, be working together on this building?” he said. “We really want a sacred space for everyone. Why God chose us, who knows?”

The politics of faith

With faith like this who needs atheism?

by PAUL C. CAMPOS - Oct 17, 2007

The sociologist Peter Berger once observed that, if India is the world's most religious country and Sweden the least, the United States is a country of Indians ruled by Swedes.

He made this comment at a time when there was something of a consensus among our elites that religion was a basically private matter -- one which ought to play little or no role in public policy debates.

That consensus has broken down, to the point where it's routine for presidential candidates to parade their supposed piety, and even to claim it's important that the nation be led by, as Republican hopeful Mitt Romney recently put it, "a person of faith."

This view regarding the role of religion in American politics has given birth to its own set of rather bizarre orthodoxies. On this view, it's crucial that our political leaders be sincere religious believers. But apparently it's of no importance what religious beliefs they actually hold, as long as they have "faith."

When you think about it -- which is something people like Romney don't want you to do, for reasons that will become clear -- this makes no sense.

What would one think of someone who said that it was important for our leaders to be "persons of politics," while remaining indifferent to just what sort of political beliefs they held? Imagine taking the view that it made no difference whether one was a Maoist or a royalist or a Republican, as long as one's political beliefs were sincere.

Or consider a scientist who claims that, while he personally believes that global warming is going to destroy civilization, his opinion has no more value than that of a scientist who denies that global warming represents any sort of serious problem. The important thing, he says, isn't the truth or falsehood of their respective views, but rather that he and the holder of the diametrically opposed opinion are both "persons of science."

In the context of political or scientific belief such assertions would obviously be absurd on their face, but when it comes to religion people say things like this every day. Just look at what happened to Ann Coulter when she was impolitic enough to point out that, as a Christian, she thinks Christianity is true, and therefore by logical necessity truer than, among many other belief systems, Judaism.

Coulter has a long history of making comments that are as idiotic as they are inflammatory, but in this case much of the criticism aimed at her illustrates the weird etiquette that dominates our public discussion of religion. For example, American Jewish Congress president Richard Sideman claimed "Coulter's assertion that Jews are somehow religiously imperfect smacks of the most odious anti-Jewish sentiment."

In other words, religious belief is apparently a unique kind of belief, which requires believing that one's views regarding the most important questions in the world -- things that by comparison to which all political and scientific disputes are insignificant -- are no better or worse than anyone else's views regarding these questions of supposedly infinite importance.

Which brings me back to Mitt Romney, Person of Faith. Romney is a Mormon, which means that, to the extent he adheres to the tenets of his religion, he believes in various doctrines that, in the eyes of orthodox Christians, are abominable heresies.

Now according to Romney this should be a matter of indifference, because after all what counts is whether or not one has "faith."

In this way a disagreement about, for example, the divinity of Christ -- something which innumerable people have been burnt at the stake for denying -- is transformed into a trivial detail, of no real importance.

With "faith" like this, who needs atheism?

(Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado and can be reached at Paul.Campos(at)Colorado.edu.)

Whores in the Holy City

by Harmony Grant - Oct 16, 2007

The career of megastar “Madonna” has produced as much pornography as pop tracks. Her on-stage performances have included simulated masturbation, homosexual and S&M scenes, and endlessly lurid exploitation of the female body. She has also exploited the church. In her 2006 world tour the Material Girl hung from a cross, crowned with thorns. In a 1989 video, Madonna dances provocatively in front of burning crosses and shares an erotic kiss with a Christ figure.

Madonna was raised Roman Catholic. Today, unrepentant after decades of self-prostitution and corruption, what religion makes Madonna feel comfortable? She is in love with Judaism.
Since the late nineties, Madonna has been a devotee of the Kabbalah Centre, worn a red string bracelet and donated millions to a Kabbalah school for kids. She sparked a Kabbalism trend throughout Hollywood , stopped performing Friday nights at the start of the Jewish Sabbath, and helped popularize a thriving kosher restaurant in Manhattan.

Madonna might not embrace Judaism so eagerly had she realized the true content of its “sacred” literature. The Zohar is the most important text of Kabbalah. Written in medieval times, it is supposedly the commentary of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on the Torah (five books of Moses). Bar Yochai remains powerfully influential today. A yearly celebration at his burial site in Meron is the “single largest annual Jewish gathering of the entire year,” drawing 200,000. Such Kabbalists believe Bar Yochai’s Zohar is the "soul of the Bible."

This book describes God as the En Sof (That Which is Without Limit), as unknowable and inaccessible. Since He is not a personal Being whose will can be known, Kabbalism is not about ethics. It’s about the status of the Jewish people as the visible, physical manifestation of God in the world. Evidently, Madonna does not realize that the Zohar describes her—like all Gentiles—as a beast who must be subdued before proper Judaic “order” can be restored in the world. (See, The Jewish Kabbalah: Root of Mideast Violence)

Kabbalistic rabbis are willing to spread the myth that Kabbalism is so flexible anyone can apply it. Gentile devotees misguidedly call it their "blueprint for life,” and see it as a flexible eastern-style spirituality. Jerusalem Post calls the Kabbalah Center one of the two most statistically influential Jewish outreach organizations (along with Chabad Lubavitcher).

Madonna herself studies the Zohar with a private tutor and is discipled by Kabbalah Centre head Rabbi Philip Berg. She calls herself “an ambassador for Judaism.” She recently rang in the Jewish New Year in Jerusalem with Israeli President Shimon Peres. Local reporters said Madonna gave Peres a copy of The Book of Splendour, a guiding text of Kabbalah, while Peres presented her with a special volume of the Old Testament. Madonna was in the “ Holy City ” for a Kabbalah conference, along with film (read: porn) star Demi Moore and lesbian celebrity Rosie O’Donnell.

Don’t Israel-supporting evangelicals see the irony? Madonna—who has defiled every well-known symbol of our faith—is an ambassador of Judaism, and the president of the Jewish state welcomes her to say this.

Tragically, this is all too appropriate. Israel today is fittingly symbolized by this apostate, corrupt sex symbol sell-out—as her government and most of her citizens continue to reject Christ and oppress their Arab neighbors. The prophet Isaiah foresaw this day. He mourned, “See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice; righteousness used to dwell in her— but now murderers!” Isaiah was not talking about Tehran or even Washington D.C. He was describing Jerusalem —in our time. John the Revelator also foresaw Jerusalem as the “mother of harlots” and “ Sodom and Egypt ” (Rev. 11) because of Israel 's violent disobedience. Like the ancient Kabbalists, John prophesied that Jerusalem will someday rule the world. But she will not do it in righteousness or justice. ( See , Israel: On the Way to Empire in the Mideast)

Christians’ Blind Support

Today, Christian evangelicals are certainly the largest American support bloc of the Jewish state. They vastly outnumber American Jews, and many average churchgoers are more committed to Israel than average, left-leaning Jews. “We have to bless Israel ,” they say, “if we want to be blessed by God.” This simple and compelling idea drives millions to support—with both words and millions in cash—an increasingly powerful spiritual and political whore.

Christians must recognize the profound conflict between modern Judaism, which believes that a Christ-hating and -rejecting book (Kabbalah) is the Bible's soul, and their own deepest belief in Jesus Christ as the true Word and the message of Scripture.

Modern Judaism treats Christ as an imposter and Christians as idolaters. If the Zohar is truth, then Christians like me are idolaters. We worship an evil genius who somehow spoke and embodied the most profound moral truth heard on our planet.

Many Jews in Christ’s time, and today, refused to recognize their true Messiah, Jesus, because they hoped for a powerful political rebel to "repair the world" by overthrowing Gentiles and exalting religious Jews to social control. But Christ said, "My kingdom is not of this world." His kingdom is one of spiritual holiness, repentance from sin, and self-sacrificing love. The religious Jews, whose kingdom was very much of this world, couldn't stand His authority and His very spiritual message. Their religion was built on rituals, corruption of Scripture, human authority, and even black magic gotten from their 1600-year stay in Babylon , the occult center of the ancient world. (Watch The Other Israel)

Today, the Pharisees’ descendents still wait for the messiah. Madonna reportedly plans to buy a home near Safed, the “world center of Jewish mysticism,” where the Jewish messiah is expected to arrive.

In Israel today, Christ is referred to as a bastard, a magician, and a fraud. The Jewish Talmud says he is currently suffering in hell, writhing in boiling excrement. Religious Jews spit when they pass Christian churches. (See, Christians in Israel: An Endangered Species) Evangelicals, under the leadership of fanatics like John Hagee, fund a nation that continues to crucify the memory of Christ.

Modern Kabbalist Rav Berg, co-director of the Kabbalah Centre, says, "As goes Israel so goes the world." He is increasingly correct. Madonna’s Hollywood Kabbalah craze may be just another Tinseltown trend. But the power of the Israel lobby to drive us to war, the increasing and unbiblical Zionism of the American church, and the powerful grip of Jewish elites on American media—these are not fads. They indicate the prophesied power of world Judaism to eventually dominate Gentiles and fulfill Judaism’s own dark literature of vengeance and supremacism. (See, Coming Jewish 'Utopia' Ruled by Noahide Laws)

Source: Truthtellers.org

Jewish rabbis meet Ahmadinejad in NY

Press TV News - Sept 25, 2007

A number of Jewish rabbis carrying placards of "I'm a Jew, not a Zionist" have met President Ahmadinejad at his residence in New York.

The senior Jewish rabbi welcomed the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and called the meeting an extraordinary good fortune for the Jewish rabbis.

The senior Jewish rabbi said the memory of this meeting would never fade, adding that the Iranian President understands the Jews, and makes a distinction between the violent actions of the Zionists and Jewish religious belief which is of great importance for us.

President Ahmadinejad also expressed his delight at the meeting, saying, "All prophets share one mission, that is, the guidance of mankind. Today people of the world have come to realize the fact that Judaism is different from Zionism. Jews are followers of Moses and Zionists are seeking political opportunities."

The rabbis offered a silver cup to Iran's President in commemoration of Ahmadinejad's friendship toward the Jewish community.

Rabbis Say Iran Seeks Peace, Respects Judaism - Calls for True Dialogue With Ahmadinejad

Neturei Karta International- Sept 24, 2007

Press Release

Rabbi Yisroel Dovid Weiss, spokesman of Neturei Karta International, issued the following statement on the eve of the group's meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"It is always our pleasure to visit with President Ahmadinejad. This will be the third such meeting, in addition to our many visits to Iran in the past. We have each time emphasized to the Iranian leadership that, despite media hysteria and the statements of some misinformed Jews, we have found the Iranian people and their leaders to be friendly and respectful.

"Likewise, although we as Jews are not to be involved in politics, (According to Jewish law, Jewish people are required to be loyal citizens to the countries wherein they reside), We have found the Iranian President to be a deeply religious man, dedicated to a peaceful world, based on mutual respect, fairness and dialogue.

"Judaism seeks peace. Unfortunately, there are some Jews today, influenced by the barely century old, philosophy of Zionism, who feel that the proper Jewish response to enemies, be they real or fantasized, is aggression and calls for violence and unfortunately attempts to drag other nations down the path of war.

"It is sad that so few have actually attempted to speak to the Iranian President or seek the true opinion of Iranian Jewry who live in peace and practice their faith throughout that nation. We have met this man who has demonstrated time and again that he is sincerely interested in the well being of Iran's Jewish community and has deep respect for world Jewry and their Torah faith, The Zionist attempt to socially isolate this man and his people is immoral and disastrous.

"Zionism is antithetical to Torah beliefs. It believes in creating our own sovereign entity which is expressly forbidden due to the Divine decree of exile. This ideology leads to aggression against nations and is incarnated in the State of 'Israel.' This State continually oppresses other people in the name of Judaism and the entire Jewish people. This movement has exacerbated anti Semitism throughout the world. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understands this distinction between traditional Judaism and Zionist distortion.

"We view our approach to Iran as a model for all Jews and all mankind. The Torah is the Almighty's blueprint of mercy and justice for all creation. We have followed this modal in our dealings with the Iranian President and found in him an individual dedicated to these same ideals. There is much to be gained by talking and listening and everything to be lost by raising the rhetoric in the direction of war. The grave tragedy of our era is the inordinate power garnered by Zionism, whose acceptance of force as the only means to reconcile conflicts, has influenced some to abandon Torah fundamentals. We hope and pray that they too will adopt the traditional Jewish approach of dialogue, respect and reconciliation.

"War is a horrible thing. The dark clouds of a future conflict are now on the horizon in the Middle East. Torah Jewry hopes and prays that this may yet be averted."

In conclusion says rabbi Weiss, "Out of great respect to the Iranian Nation and their leadership we proudly welcome the Honorable President Ahmadinejad to New York, WELCOME!"

The Evilness of Jewish Chosenness

by Andrew Winkler, The Rebel Media Group - July 18, 2007

One of the biggest sources of frustration for human beings is the conflict between their childish need to blindly believe, and the realisation that they are all being lied to, even by those people they most trust. What - as a young child - is sometimes a necessity for survival, to believe, think and act as their parents, family, tribe are telling them, as a grown up often becomes a liability.

It isn’t always as harmless as believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy. There isn’t always a well-meaning person around warning not to make a fool of yourself. Believing that you are the prettiest little princess or the bravest and strongest boy on the planet might be cute and healthy for the fragile self-confidence of a young child, but quickly becomes unbearable for everyone else, if not corrected by a sense of reality as a young adult.

If an ethnic group is threatened, oppressed or exploited because of her ethnicity, developing a sense of pride in whatever makes this community different, can be vital for the survival of this group. However if the same community becomes the dominating group, this sense of specialness can quickly develop to a tool of ruthless oppression.

When the combined onslaught of the Vikings and the Mongols destroyed Khazaria, her ethnic Turk inhabitants of converts to Talmudism – the ancestors of today’s Ashkenazi Jews - were dispersed all over Europe. Holding on to their Jewish religion and tradition enabled them to preserve their ethnic identity and - 750 years later - regain statehood, a positive development, had it occured with the approval of the affected native population. The disregard and utter contempt for the rights and humanity of the Palestinian people is the result of a deadly cocktail of traditional Jewish Chosenness, considering themselves as being God’s preferred people, Talmudic racism, considering non-Jews as subhumans that can be killed, exploited and abused at will, and Western military superiority.

While Ashkenazi Jews, for the past two hundred years, have been at the forefront of almost every human and civil rights movement, they are routinely refusing the very same rights to anybody in the way of Jewish greed respectively the consolidation and expansion of the Jews-only state. Such hypocrisy raises suspicion that Jewish advocacy for human and civil rights were always more about protecting Jews from anti-Jewish forces than about protecting universal human values.

Jewish chosenness and supremacism can no longer be ignored. The same beliefs that helped Ashkenazis to survive as an ethnic group, is now threatening everybody else, due to the stranglehold today’s Ashkenazis have over the governments and societies of the world’s most powerful nations. No longer are these governments acting in the interest of their countries but are conducting wars that ruin their own economies, even poison their own troops with depleted uranium, all in the interest of Jewish profits and Israeli expansion.

Jewish Chosenness must be treated as a mental disorder. It is as dangerous for all of us as are schizophrenia and even psychopathy. It is a threat to the very survival of mankind.

Jewish History, Anti-Semitism, and the Challenge of Zionism

"Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism. So True - And, The Truth Will Set You Free! Unfortunately, most Americans don't know the difference."

Answer to Rosenfeld: Jewish History, Anti-Semitism, and the Challenge of Zionism - by Mark Braverman, Ph.D.

Prologue: Memory and History

When I was 8 years old my brother and I would occasionally stay at our grandparents’ house in South Philadelphia. South Philly in 1956 was an immigrant enclave – here lived primarily the Jews, the Irish, and the Italians. It was a bustling, colorful, tightly packed community. There were outdoor markets and synagogues and churches in abundance, all built on the models of the Old Country. The neighborhood smelled of cooking and garbage. Homeless cats and dogs owned the maze of alleys that ran behind the densely packed streets of row houses. My brother and I slept in a tiny back room. You could fall out the window and land in the neighbors’ shoebox of a backyard.

One summer night it was noisy. As we prepared for bed, my grandmother in her soft Yiddish accent called our attention to the scene just outside the window that looked out over the alley: “Goyim,” she said, pointing out the window at a small gathering of people talking loudly, laughing, and holding drinks. “They’re shikker,” she told us, and I knew without her saying that this meant that being drunk was their natural state –and that this apparently convivial, noisy, and collective condition was a shameful thing indeed. Continuing her lesson, my grandmother told us the story of the Jew and the Goy who had gone to work for the same boss. Over the years the Jew advanced to foreman, while the Goy remained a laborer. One day the Goy goes up to the Jew and says, Chaim, why is it that we both started here together, and you’re second in command and I’m still hauling bricks? The Jew looks at him, and, saying not a word, takes him to the Goy’s backyard and shows him the garbage can, which is full of empty liquor bottles. That’s the reason, says the Jew. The Goy’s response to this lesson is unknown. Presumably (and undoubtedly in my Grandmother’s mind) in his goyish condition he remained unreformed.

I remember the moment. The experience of shock for an 8 year old is not a well-delineated emotion. It’s a damp, heavy blanket that settles over the heart -- the colors of the world and the sharp lines of wonder at everyday experience are dulled, suffocating underneath its weight. I asked no questions in response to what she was telling me. But – I know now -- I didn’t buy it.

It is 2006, and I am in a large room in the Carnegie Endowment outside of Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. I am attending a panel entitled: Politics and Diplomacy: Next Steps in Arab-Israeli Peacemaking. There are eight men sitting at the front of the room, four Palestinians and four Israelis. A Palestinian speaks first, calling for – in plaintive tones, this is the only word for it – a resumption of negotiations before it is too late. The economic embargo of the newly elected Palestinian government with its Hamas majority has been in effect for five months. “We don’t have much time left!” he tells us. I am almost brought to tears by the sadness of his presentation, and a bit shocked, truth to tell, at his restraint as he describes the utter humiliation and desperation faced by his people. “I am a member of the Palestinian Authority legislative counsel,” he goes on, “and I haven’t been paid in 4 months. I am one of the privileged, and I don’t know how I’ll make ends meet in the coming year!” I sense the room darkening -- there is a silence. I feel shame, embarrassment, anger. Then it is the Israeli’s turn to speak. I hold my breath: what will he say? How does he follow this? A journalist for a popular Israeli daily and now ensconced at the Brookings Institution nearby, the Israeli sits back, smiles -- and opens with a joke. He is, for all the world, a man delivering an after-dinner speech, interested in providing a measured degree of enlightenment while entertaining us. Clearly, we are in the presence of the conqueror – the man holding all the cards. “We’ll talk to them when the violence stops,” he pontificates: it’s the old story. But it isn’t the words, it is the arrogance. No - it isn’t the arrogance, it is the blindness, the sweeping, crushing insensitivity to the emotional tone of the previous speaker. The Palestinian sitting next to him was invisible -- he simply didn’t count. And on it went. The other Palestinian panelists, leaning forward in their chairs, protested weakly that time was running out, pleading for a resumption of negotiations. The Israelis sat back, opining about how the Hamas victory rendered the prospects for negotiations negligible, talking about unilateral actions, i.e. their intention to simply do what they wanted, take what they wanted. Among them was a former Israeli General who, in this context, on this But, again, it wasn’t the words, it wasn’t the policies, shocking as they were – it was the negation, the utter, shocking, arrogant negation of the Other. panel – I am not making this up – spoke about the Jews’ Right to the Land.

The Legacy of Anti-Semitism

In 2006, the American Jewish Committee published "’Progressive’ Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism,” an essay by Alvin Rosenfeld, Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University. In this essay Rosenfeld attacks a number of Jewish writers who have voiced opposition to the policies of the State of Israel and who have raised questions about the legitimacy of Zionism itself as a political ideology. Rosenfeld’s piece was the latest salvo in the bitterly fought battle currently underway within the Jewish community on the subject of Israel. Since, as the title implies, I have written this piece to take issue with his charge that these Jews are anti-Semitic, why have I opened with these stories, which illustrate Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews? I have done so because the attitudes revealed in these two memories – experiences bracketing 50 years of modern Jewish history -- begin to explain why we as contemporary Jews are confronting the agonizing moral and political dilemma embodied by the State of Israel. The fear, insularity and brittle sense of superiority that my grandmother carried as the legacy of Europe lead directly to the blindness and arrogance of the Israeli statesmen, policy-makers and opinion shapers that I saw on display that day in Washington, and to the rigid attitudes of institutional American Jewry towards Israel represented by Rosenfeld’s essay . And what is the source for this behavior and this attitude if not anti-Semitism itself? For this is the Jewish narrative, the story we tell ourselves: “We have survived through the ages by shielding ourselves from a world that seeks our destruction. We have maintained our dignity in the face of marginalization, disenfranchisement and vilification by maintaining a fierce pride and sense of – yes - superiority over the ignorant, violent forces surrounding us.” Anti-Semitism, like all racist ideologies, is not simply an attack on the physical security or economic viability of a group. Rather, it assaults the dignity, the very humanity of its targets. Zionism was European Jewry’s response to the devastating effects of anti-Semitism and in particular to the despair at the failure of the enlightenment to confer rights and equality to the Jews of Europe. The colonial movement that was Zionism was driven by a fierce need, not so much for physical security, but for dignity and self-determination. Modern Israel is, more than anything, a source of pride for Jews: It is good to have survived, and Israel is the living proof of our survival. As such, Israel embodies an ideal – the desert made to bloom, the land reclaimed, the “new Jew,” tanned, proud, and strong, Jerusalem reclaimed. Challenge this ideal image, and you strike at the very heart of the deeply-rooted Jewish need for security and well being. You mobilize in us a fear so deep, so thoroughly internalized, that we have forgotten how much it drives us.

Rosenfeld’s attack on Jewish criticism of Israel and questioning of Zionism has its source in that fear. The Rosenfeld who takes his fellow Jews to task for their criticism of Israel is not only attacking ideas which he finds unacceptable or threatening to his world view -- for him, it’s personal. The Jews he wants to discredit are threatening to break through a powerful form of denial -- they are challenging the typically Jewish arrogance born of not wanting to see anything, not wanting to feel anything that challenges the powerful symbol of Israel as a source of power and security and -- it must be added -- of goodness and righteousness: Our wars are pure. Our actions are not only necessary but partake of the righteousness of the Zionist project. This is also the reason for the strongly ad hominem nature of his essay. I ask now and I will ask again at the conclusion of this piece: Given our history of persecution, disenfranchisement, displacement and humiliation, given the still pulsating pain in our collective heart of the experience of genocide itself -- where is the sadness, where is the pain, where indeed is the horror at what is being done to another people in our name by the State of Israel? Where is the recognition of our violence?

Old Faithful

Rosenfeld opens his paper in full fear-mongering mode by hauling out the specter of anti-Semitism. By his account, Europe is awash in a resurgence of Jew-hating, and world Islam is hawking Arabic translations Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on every street corner from Cairo to Islamabad in order to rouse the masses to exterminate the Zionist intruders. Rosenfeld even serves up the rumors of Jewish responsibility for the 9/11 attacks, the South Asia Tsunami, and the Kennedyassassination to make his point that anti-Semitism is on the rise. We must thus be vigilant, he implies, against any hint of anti-Jewish sentiment, in the present case as expressed in criticism of Israel. Having thus established who the enemy is, Rosenfeld then directs his ire against those fifth-column Jews who dare question Jewish moral superiority and entitlement. To question Israel is to remove the defenses against anti-Semitism, in effect to open the door to the destruction of the Jewish people.

Rosenfeld and those who agree with this philosophy are encountering strange but dangerously powerful bedfellows these days. At the recent (March 2007) conference of AIPAC - the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or so-called Israel Lobby -- in Washington, DC, Pastor John Hagee, leading Christian Zionist and founder of Christians United for Israel, received a rousing reception at the opening dinner. To thunderous applause, and according to one witness, “table thumping,” from the over 6,000 attendees, Hagee catered to the huge appetite for validation of this deep-seated Jewish fear. Referring to the newest threat to Jewish survival, Iran, whose leader “promises nothing less than a nuclear Holocaust," Hagee claimed that the situation is like 1938, only "Iran is Germany and [President Mahmoud] Ahmedinejad is the new Hitler." To drive home his point to the AIPAC audience, Hagee concluded that "we must stop Iran's nuclear threat and stop it now and stand boldly [with] Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East."

By publishing this piece, the American Jewish Committee is catering to the same appetite. Rosenfeld sets the stage by presenting a picture of anti-Semitism that will frighten Jewish readers and remind them of the need for vigilance (the specific argument in defense of Israel’s actions comes later). This is blatant, classic fear-mongering – in the USA we have recently learned only too well how effective this is. In this way, Rosenfeld has set up a classic straw man. Is he telling us something we don’t know? Of course anti-Semitism exists. Indeed it can be said that it is deeply rooted in Western civilization, with tragic consequences throughout modern history. But to use the accusation of anti-Semitism as a club to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel is short-sighted, misguided, and dangerous. It also is founded on distortions of history and fact, and on a number of fundamental fallacies. I will touch on several that I feel are the most serious.

Getting it backwards: Islamic Anti-Semitism

In his description of modern-day anti-Semitism in Europe, Rosenfeld presents an exaggerated picture based on isolated incidents. In the case of the Islamic world, he makes unsubstantiated claims, cynically trading on Western fear of Islam and the Arab world, claiming that although some “Muslim anger toward Israel” is due to “its treatment of the Palestinians, much of it predates the violence brought on by the recent intifadas and has roots within Arab Muslim culture.” (p 8) Rosenfeld simply drops this claim into the mix, as if it is established fact, without substantiation or further explanation.

In fact, the question of Islamic anti-Semitism is many-sided and nuanced. The consensus of modern scholarship seems to be that whereas Jews, along with other non-Muslims, were considered inferior to Muslims in some Islamic societies, they were granted a protected status in exchange for a special tax. Except for periodic outbursts of anti-Semitism, to be sure often murderous, Jews enjoyed better treatment overall from Muslims than they received from the Christian world. Indeed, during some periods, Jews flourished in Islamic society. There also is general agreement that the Kur’an contains statements both favorable and unfavorable to Jews. What is further agreed, and is significant for this discussion, is that to the extent that anti-Semitism existed in the Islamic world, it changed radically in the twentieth century, first as the result of post-Ottoman European colonialism in the Arab world, and then as the result of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Arabs experienced British post-WW I political and cultural imperialism as deeply humiliating. The carving up of the Arab world and the broken promises with regard to national self-determination fostered growing mistrust of the West. British support of Zionist aspirations early in the Twentieth Century added fuel to this fire. The 1947 United Nations decision to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, strongly supported by and ultimately pushed through by the powers of the West, and the subsequent establishment of the State of Israel were, needless to say, equally unacceptable and a source of great humiliation and frustration. It is thus in the 1920s and 30s that we first see racist Nazi ideology adopted by some Arab leaders. As Jewish immigration increased in the 30s and 40s, Arabs began to increasingly adopt “traditional” Western styles of anti-Semitism. The point is that this change in the nature and degree of Arab anti-Semitism was a response to events that affected Arabs and conditioned their attitudes toward Jews.

How Rosenfeld presents Islamic anti-Semitism points to a core problem in his argument: he has it backwards. He wants to posit that since anti-Semitism exists, it follows that it is the source of “vicious accusations against the Jewish state.” He goes so far as to state that “anti-Zionism is the form that much of today’s anti-Semitism takes.” (p 8) By setting up this logic, Rosenfeld delegitimizes criticism of Israel by equating it to anti-Semitism, and eliminates the possibility that in fact the reality is the opposite: that Israel’s actions may be creating anti-Jewish feeling where it did not exist before, or feeding and increasing anti-Jewish feeling where it was already festering or lying beneath the surface.

One of the most pernicious aspects of Rosenfeld’s evocation of anti-Semitism is the way that he uses hatred of Jews, which where it exists is as despicable as any form of racism or animus against a single people, as a way to discredit and invalidate the legitimate political and moral positions of some Jews with respect to Israel or the Zionist idea. Rosenfeld’s smearing of those who challenge the policies of Israel with the ugly charge of anti-Semitism is repugnant enough. But in so doing he also tries to show them as minimizing the potential threat of anti-Semitism or even denying that it is the ugly thing that it is. Jewish critics of Israel are not as a group anti-Semitic. Neither are they blind or naïve, no more than they are betrayers of their people, a charge which Rosenfeld levels near the end of his paper (p 25), or “self-hating Jews,” a charge which he does not explicitly voice but that is abundantly implicit in his overall attack.

The Fundamental Fallacies in Rosenfeld’s Argument

Rosenfeld holds that the goal of Israel’s critics is not Israel’s withdrawal from the Occupied Territories or a change in state policy toward its own Arab citizens, but “to force an end to the Jewish State itself.” This is the first fallacy. Rosenfeld selects quotes from a number of writers that challenge the state and Zionism on a fundamental level, and from this he reasons that these same writers seek the end of Israel, and thus the annihilation of the Jewish people. There are multiple deductive “leaps” here, too many to consider, but the logical flaws are apparent. The effect is to stifle – indeed to render totally impermissible -- any criticism of Israel on political, philosophical, historical, or ethical levels. It’s a slippery slope, he would seem to argue: anti-Israel equals anti-Semite, leading to the end of the Jewish people. Actually, Rosenfeld has set us on a slippery slope, but not the one he intends. Indeed, we see here, in full flower, the tyranny of the ideologue: the kind of thinking that leads to oppression in the name of God or of the Nation. For example, in his rant against any notion of economic sanctions or conditions that might be imposed on Israel, Rosenfeld lumps those who would hold Israel to human rights standards required by international law with those who call “into question Israel’s legitimacy and moral standing…[and] abets the views of those who demand an end to Jewish national existence altogether.” Again, the thrust is all too clear: We Are in the Right and If You Are Not With Us You Are Against Us. Criticizing Israel is helping the enemy. Criticism of any kind is forbidden. Even certain words are out of bounds: according to Rosenfeld, using words like “brutal, …oppressive, or racist” to describe Israel’s actions equals anti-Semitism and is simply not permitted.

This reasoning is not only logically flawed, it is dangerous. In Rosenfeld’s argument, permission is not granted to hold any views outside of what is commonly, and by the mainstream, termed “pro-Israel.” Indeed, to use his word, “behavior” such as identifying with the suffering of oppressed Palestinian people by wearing a pin of the Palestinian flag, or seeking to find a path to peace through an understanding of the root causes of the horror of suicide bombing, is “bizarre” and “grotesque.” (p 24).

In Rosenfeld’s stridentcall for a circling of the wagons, we see the tragedy of modern Jewry in its confrontation with the uncomfortable realities of Israel: the refusal to deal with anyone’s suffering but our own. To be sure, and as discussed above, there are historical reasons for this attitude, and we are doubtless not the only group to have been guilty of this willful blindness, this inexcusable sense of entitlement and specialness. But this tendency among many Jews today is so powerful and pervasive that it reaches the level of outright denial. Nowhere – nowhere in Rosenfeld’s piece is to be found even a gratuitous nod to the suffering of the Palestinians – not even the minimizing, grudging, disingenuous acknowledgment of the “unfortunate abuses” suffered by the occupied Palestinians that one sometimes hears from the “pro-Israel” camp. But even more important, and ultimately more disturbing and potentially tragic, is the absence of any consideration of the issue of justice. To be sure, Israel may be threatened – the future is uncertain, geopolitics are fickle. In the global arena, what gives you birth and supports you one day can turn against you the next – and to be sure, anti-Semitism is alive, and where not active it is very likely dormant – but where is Justice, what is the state of your conscience?

Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism

“Anti-Zionism” is another of Rosenfeld’s straw men. For Rosenfeld, to question Zionism is to be anti-Semitic. Indeed, it is not only actual criticism of Israel but almost any discussion that questions Israel’s present course that fails Rosenfeld’s loyalty test. This accusation is the favorite of the “my Israel right or wrong” camp, and its members wield it like a cudgel against Jews and non-Jews alike. But it is important to distinguish “anti-Zionism” from criticism of Israel stemming from horror, shame and outrage at the actions of the Jewish State. Zionism is an ideology – as such it can subscribed to and debated like any other. In contrast, the State of Israel is a political entity -- a nation state, that, like any other, should be held to standards of human rights, international law, fairness, and common decency. Indeed, one could argue that one can be an ardent Zionist and still feel horror at or at least feel grave concern about Israel’s policies and behavior, and be thus moved to voice your opinions or even to political activism. Does this point up the need for an updated definition of Zionism or indeed to address the question of whether the term is even relevant any longer? Do we need to begin a discussion about the need for a “Post-Zionism?”

Indeed, contemporary Jewish historians, social theorists and theologians have begun to weigh in on the implications of statehood for the Jewish religion itself. Benjamin Beit-Halahmi, an Israeli professor of social psychology, holds that for American Jews, Zionism has become a “’religion,’ kept by the class of high priests in Jewish organizations.” But, he writes, it is a “passive” religion, “more of an abstract faith than a plan of action.” Indeed, he continues, the actual actions of Israel are irrelevant to the role played by Israel in providing ideological content to make up for the decline in religious traditions and for the growing hunger among American Jews for spiritual fulfillment. Marc Ellis, the foremost proponent of Jewish Liberation Theology, has written that “mainstream Jewish life has evolved into a new form of Judaism, one that seeks and maintains empire, not unlike Constantinian Christianity.” Ellis also points out in his 2004 Toward a Jewish Theology of Liberation that prior to WW II the Reform Movement of Judaism in America was deeply split over the question of the Jewish State, but that following the Holocaust all dissent was effectively silenced. Thus it was that for me, born in 1948, Zionism – meaning unqualified love for and support of the State of Israel -- was inextricably intertwined with my religious education and practice. Once an ideology and a movement among some Jews, Zionism is now curiously inseparable from Judaism itself. What is striking is that the term is subject to use or misuse by extremists on both sides: by the “defenders” of Israel, ever vigilant against a possible threat to Jewish survival and ever watchful for the signs of an approaching holocaust, as well as by outright anti-Semites.

An Easy Target

Rosenfeld never directly discloses his right-wing leanings and how and why they condition his position on Israel. However, he repeatedly exposes his ideological bias, which in his case is expressed as an animus toward and indeed an outright vilification of any views or persons associated with the political Left. He discounts what he terms anti-Israel “hysteria” as “politically motivated” -- clearly code for “left-wing.” In other words, he reduces criticism of Israel as secondary to a political philosophy which requires opposition to the State of Israel as a litmus test. In one passage, using Jacqueline Rose as his poster child for the leftist anti-Zionist camp, he submits that “there are many like Rose today. Some are probably no more than ideological fellow travelers…” (p 25, emphasis mine). Having thus dismissed any such writers who may fall into this class, Rosenfeld argues that anti-Zionism is simply one more way for these people to “establish their leftist credentials.” Then, without missing a beat and in another characteristic thousand-league leap of logic, Rosenfeld alleges that “anti-Zionism…shares common features with anti-Jewish ideologies of the past…” What these ideologies are, or what are the “common features” shared with anti-Zionism are never made clear. The fact that these benighted ideologues do not see this connection, and the mortal danger it poses to the Jewish people, is, cries Rosenfeld, “more than just a pity – it is a betrayal.” (p25)

Rose is only one of the high-profile critics of Israel identified with the political Left singled out by Rosenfeld, but she is one of his favorites. A British academic, Rose is best known for her work on the relationship between psychoanalysis, feminism and literature. To be sure, Rose’s leftist credentials alone are enough to discount her entirely in Rosenfeld’s view, but, again, he uses her simply to set up his argument. In her writing about Zionism Rose has attempted, in her words, to “steer a clear path between an elated identification with the state’s own discourse and a string of insults.” (Nation as trauma, Zionism as question: Jacqueline Rose interviewed, Open Democracy, 2005 interview with Rosemary Bechler, 8/18/2005). But Rosenfeld will have nothing to do with nuance. He advances a shallow critique, taking aim at concepts like “messianism” which Rose introduces as part of a careful analysis but which Rosenfeld, incredibly and cynically, takes literally, charging that Rose believes the Zionists to have been inspired directly by Jewish Messianic madmen from medieval times. In like fashion, Rosenfeld seizes upon Rose’s use of the word “catastrophe” to describe the current state of affairs in Israel and Occupied Palestine. He, however, links it with the Arabic “Al Nakba” the Palestinian term for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1947 and 1949. He thus charges her with being “aligned… with this reading of history…[that] the creation of Israel led to a historic injustice against the Palestinians.” This is the damning charge? That she acknowledges that injustice has been done to the Palestinians? Here Rosenfeld again shows his true colors: flat-out denial of the injustices perpetrated by Israel. In other words, if you acknowledge this fact, you are his enemy and an enemy of the Jewish people, and as well a person who has abandoned all rational discourse. Jews do not have the right to criticize Israel, indeed to even entertain the notion that Israel is not perfect – or perfectly entitled to do as it wishes. Further on in his attack on Rose, Rosenfeld, in another fallacy-ridden argument, challenges her question, “How did one of the most persecuted peoples of the world come to embody some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state?” To this he responds: “Compared to the truly horrendous crimes of…Sudan, Cambodia…Serbia…or Chile – Israel’s record actually looks relatively good.” (p 11). By any standards of logical discourse and human decency, this is a despicable argument. It merits no further comment.

The Jewish Discussion

The problem is that we Jews are setting this up as a debate – each “camp” answering the other point for point. But, as I noted above, this discussion is not really about the facts -- for Rosenfeld, it’s clearly personal. And so it is for me. I am an American-born Jew with strong family ties to Israel - my grandfather was born in Palestine and the bulk of my family lives in modern-day Israel. I have lived in Israel and I love the land. I feel at a cellular level the unrelenting, throbbing pain of the Nazi Holocaust. I am realistic about the existence of anti-Semitism. For all these reasons, my recent first-hand experience of the reality of the Occupation and my encounter Palestinians living under its tyranny provoked not only horror and outrage. It was more than that: it broke my heart. Like me, all Jews who write and speak out about what they have seen and what they feel about this express themselves emotionally. It is personal: we were raised on a dream – a dream of freedom from oppression, a dream of self-determination – a dream that, when it became a (apparent) reality assumed the quality of the miraculous. But now, over the orange groves and white cities of our dream hangs the storm cloud of a disaster, a disaster that is in process for both peoples. To my fellow Jews I say: look under the covers. Cross the Green Line. Deal with the pain, feel the horror, confront the contradictions, grapple with the dilemmas. You betray nothing, you betray no one by your willingness to do this. Join the ranks of those who refuse to be represented, and indeed intellectually and emotionally bullied, by the “Jewish establishment:” the synagogues, Jewish Federations, lobbying organizations and the rest of the apparatus devoted to maintaining the mighty stream of financial and policy support for Israel from the US government and from private sources. We are growing in number, we represent many, many shades of opinion and conviction. What unites us is our willingness to question and our unwillingness to be driven by fear.

My Grandmother, Redux

I loved my grandmother. She was a sweet woman with a big heart. She brought her large family through the Great Depression and struggled her whole life with the personal legacy of a tyrannical father and an equally tyrannical husband. And, as illustrated by my opening story, she was very much a product of her time and our collective history. Among my many memories of her is a framed group portrait that hung in her house, a black and white photograph dating from the early 1950s. In it, my grandmother sits, with perhaps 60 other women in neat rows, drab dresses and sensible shoes, behind a banner proclaiming the local chapter of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America founded in 1912 by Henrietta Szold, the American Jewish scholar and activist. She looks out at us from the front row, clearly proud of her affiliation and steadfast in her commitment to the survival and health of the young Jewish State. Of course, for her there were no Palestinians and there was no Nakba. There was only this precious reality of Israel, this wondrous repository of Jewish culture, this bulwark against the Nations Who Seek to Destroy Us. She was a product of her upbringing and of her times -- and for the Jews of America these were simpler times. But the times have changed -- can we change with them?

Noted historian and author Tony Judt is a British Jew who has recently come under attack for his criticism of Israel’s policies and in particular of the destructive effects of aspects of Zionism on Jewish life in the Diaspora. Rosenfeld does not miss the opportunity to excoriate Judt for raising the question of whether the Jewish State as it now exists is the best solution to anti-Semitism, and whether, in fact, Israel’s actions may be contributing to anti-Semitism around the world. In a recent Washington Post/Newsweek Blog, Judt courageously placed the issue of Israel and American Jewish attitudes in the larger context of world affairs. He wrote: “I see the hysteria surrounding the ‘Israel issue’ in American life -- and the shameful silence about what actually happens in the territories Israel occupies – as one more symptom of the provincial ignorance and isolation of the U.S. in world affairs. We can continue assuring ourselves that the whole of the rest of the world is awash in inexplicable, atavistic, exterminationist anti-Semitism. Or – in this as in other matters – we can re-enter an international conversation and ask ourselves why (together with an Israeli political class recklessly embarked on the road to self-destruction) we alone see the world this way and whether we might be mistaken.” (Posted by Tony Judt on February 25, 2007 11:04 AM in “On Faith,” WP/Newsweek Blog)

I agree with Judt that the need for American Jews to emerge from our historical attitudes of insularity and self-protection is all the more urgent because of the implications of these attitudes for our world at large. As Jews, we can no longer afford to think only of ourselves -- seeing ourselves as victims, as a beleaguered minority. Indeed, this attitude and the behavior it engenders has not only put us at great risk -- it adds significantly to the peril of the entire world. If we are indeed to be a “light to the nations,” we must make common cause with the forces of progressivism and the advancement of human rights. As Jews, we must be part of the solution. Sadly – and Rosenfeld’s essay is but one indication of this fact – we are still learning how not to be part of the problem.

Conclusion: History and Memory

This has been one Jew’s “Answer to Rosenfeld.” But we must all – growing numbers of people of conscience, Jew and non-Jew alike – let our voices be heard in response to him and the attitudes he exemplifies. To remain silent – even silently contemptuous of ideas like his – is to be complicit in one of the most dangerous acts of madness of our time. The voices of outrage and resistance are growing stronger. Jewish organizations here and in Israel continue to bring the evils of the Occupation to the attention of the world, as well as to uncover the heretofore denied reality of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine carried out between 1947 and 1949. Interfaith organizations in the US, Israel and Palestine devoted to nonviolent resistance and reconciliation continue their courageous work of activism and education in the face of an intransigent Israeli government and an incompetent, cowardly US administration that is financing the illegal continuation of this ethnic cleansing. Forces within American churches continue to consider campaigns of divestment despite organized opposition from the Jewish establishment. Meanwhile, our best thinkers and writers keep producing. In spite of himself, Alvin Rosenfeld has made an important contribution to the cause: his “enemies list” provides those of us hungry for these courageous voices with a superb Recommended Reading List. One only wishes he had given more attention to the work of Sara Roy, daughter of Holocaust survivors and a Harvard Research Scholar, who we must count as one of our finest and most courageous thinkers and spokespersons. Rosenfeld dispatches Roy in two short sentences, citing a passage in which she comments on the “heresy” within the Jewish community of comparing the actions and policies of Israel with those of the Nazis (In the next paragraph, he effectively demonstrates her point by characterizing any comparison between today’s Jews and their former victimizers as “unseemly.”). Rosenfeld’s use of Roy as another of his straw men for daring to address the similarities between the actions of Nazi Germany and those of Israel in its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is perhaps the ultimate symbol of the frightening blindness and madness of his perspective with respect to Jewish history and the current crisis faced by Jews. Roy’s powerful evocation of the central meaning of the Holocaust in her personal history is a cornerstone of her human rights work. Along with the work of other Jewish writers such as Norman Finklestein, who have chronicled the distortion and misuse of the tragedy of the Holocaust, Roy calls on us to honestly confront our current predicament in the light of the incalculable significance of this chapter in our history, and, indeed, of two millennia of anti-Semitism. Indeed, she calls on us to draw from it the very moral clarity required to see our way forward.

I close with this passage from the preface to Roy’s recent book, Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

Why is it so difficult, even impossible to accommodate Palestinians into the Jewish understanding of history? Why is there so little perceived need to question our own narrative (for want of a better word) and the one we have given others, preferring instead to embrace beliefs and sentiments that remain inert? Why is it virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism, repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable, indeed, for some, an act of heresy – to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor? For many among us history and memory adhere to preclude reflection and tolerance, where “the enemy become, not people to be defeated, but embodiments of an idea to be exterminated.”

For us as Jews, and indeed for all Americans contemplating our relationship to the world at large and to the urgent human rights issues of our day, there can be no more important questions than the ones Roy asks here, and no more chilling conclusion that the one she articulates. Her quote from Northrop Frye is telling, the choice of the word “exterminated” pointed. As long as we allow our minds to be closed, our voices silenced, and our eyes shut before the injustices and horrors in plain view, there will be more conflict, more dispossession, and the deaths of countless more innocents. And there will be no peace – not in the Middle East, not in our own midst, and not in our hearts.

Mark Braverman is a member of the Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace and Jewish Voice for Peace. He serves on the Board of ICAHD-USA. Mark lives in Bethesda, MD. m_braverman@yahoo.com.

The Seeds of Global Tyranny

Written by Arthur Topham

Wednesday, 02 May 2007

With the onset of Spring imagery of renewal and the planting of new seed is present in the minds of gardeners everywhere. And, by extrapolation, a similar scenario exists for those of a philosophical nature who perpetually work the inner soils of their being, striving to reap new harvests of perspective and understanding. As one of those philosophers who enjoys the challenge of planting new ideas and hoeing inordinately long rows, my thoughts again shift to the perennial flow of unanswered queries surrounding “the Jewish question” and the unique part that this minor religious sect plays in the cosmic dance upon life’s stage.

Having spent another Winter pondering and debating this question with writers and thinkers, both Jewish and Gentile, there still remains a strong conviction in my mind that the greatest challenge to all the generations of people today, from individual citizens to sovereign nations, is the achievement of a clear consensus of mutual understanding regarding the paramount role that the Zionist Jews have historically played (and continue to play) in the ongoing drama of control and manipulation of the global economy, world politics and the socio-cultural, information paradigm now known euphemistically to seekers of truth as the Matrix.

There are few, if any, of us living today who were around when that fateful sprout we now know as Political Zionism formally burst through its Talmudic encased shell to poke its hydra head out from the fertile and fermenting soils of European society back in 1897. That was when Dr. Theodor Herzl, a Budapest-born Sephardic Jew and Viennese journalist, organized an international conference in Basel, Switzerland to discuss the age-old question of seeking a permanent “homeland” for the multitude of Jews who, ostensibly, had been wandering the earth since their banishment by Rome from Palestinian territory in 70 A.D. The conference took place one year after Herzl published his controversial book, The Jewish State, and it culminated in the formation of the World Zionist Organization, the first of many intentional “international” organizations designed to implement the Zionist’s plan for creating an instrument with which to overthrow and destroy every nation state upon the planet (with the exception of their own, i.e. Israel) and supplant them with a one world government.

The kernel of Political Zionism had lain dormant for centuries, confined, as the bulk of Jews themselves, within the hoary husk prison-cell of the Jewish Talmud – a massively ponderous tome of ongoing, manmade statutes and judgments first compiled by the Pharisees after their banishment from Jerusalem. The Talmud was, in essence, the indestructible, stainless steel canister within which the basic tenets of Abraham’s seed were contained and was recognized by the vast majority of Jews as the supreme “Law” over and above the Torah (the Pentateuch or Old Testament of the Christian Bible).

For thinkers of this present time to fathom the depth of relative importance that the Talmud has played in the formation of the Zionist mindset and grasp the overall intent of this chauvinist and racist mental outlook that developed over the past two thousand years is, I suggest, the greatest intellectual and spiritual challenge facing humankind today.

And what of this seed? What garden variety, bug resistant specimen of germ was inserted into the social, cultural and political ground that would, over time, take firm hold and produce such an abundance of mental and emotional foliage that even today – a century or more beyond the initial planting – the vast majority of thinkers are still blinded and confused by the conceptual camouflage that these premeditated, genetically modified plants have produced?

First, the Big Bucks

In order to deliberately set out to create a global mental monoculture composed of political, social and cultural paradigms the primary prerequisite, as every investor knows, is to have and to hold the generative “power of the purse”, a phrase coined and used by the Talmudic Zionist Jews. No endeavor of such proportions could possible have been contemplated on a serious level and then actually undertaken without first ensuring that the requisite financial resources were in place to cover all the potential contingencies that could, and would, arise in a venture of such magnitude. Analogous therefore to this creation of a world wide, intellectual landscape of mono-cultural thinking would be the notion of undertaking a similar project of an agricultural nature without the wherewithal to irrigate and fertilize such a massive scheme.

The capital therefore had to be securely in place beforehand for such a proposition to have any real chance of success and that fundamental factor of the Zionist formula for global dominance took formal root in the fields of Western society when the Jewish banking cartel headed by the Rothschild family of fine bankers finally, through wealth, wile and will, were able to establish their initial foundation for war, terror, strife and mind-control via the collusive devise known as the centralized banking system.

As an aside it ought to be born in mind that while many of today’s students of history are cognizant of the crucial role that the Jewish bankers have played in the unfolding of the Zionist agenda for creating a one world government the vast majority of people still remain ignorant of the fact that the Jews had been playing the money game with nation-states and their leaders for thousands of years, leaving a legacy to the world of nation after nation, destroyed and confounded, from Babylon to Egypt to Greece then Rome to Spain and eventually Russia in the beginnings of the 20th Century. From eastern Europe the Zionists then set their sights upon the New World, the USA in particular.

Using what is commonly known today to researchers on the subject as the fractional reserve banking system, a clandestine, alchemical process of creating gold, not out of lead but out of purely mental concepts, or as some say, “thin air”, was to prove, upon assay, to be the most fantastic, yet fruitfully usurious scheme ever devised by man to guarantee untold wealth and power for those whose hands held the strings of this literally bottomless purse.

Metaphorically speaking then this was the first Jewish Modified Organism (JMO) which the Talmudic Jewish Zionists created and from its renewable, revenue producing roots sprang forth a money tree within the boundaries of every sovereign nation of the Western world; a Trojan Horse of such magnanimity and subtleness that once firmly in place it then provided the wherewithal to begin the grand design of what I have referred to elsewhere as “the infrastructure of tyranny”* which became the foundation upon which the current era of terror now precariously rests.

The crowning glory of this conspiracy to conscript all mankind into an army of compliant, consumer slaves, after the Talmudic Jewish controlled “Russian” revolution of 1917, was the Rothschild scheme to create a private, central banking system in the United States of America. That feat was accomplished in 1913 when the so-called Federal Reserve banking system was established. With it the Zionist Jews now had a seed tree embedded in the richest soils of the world’s latest and greatest empire at the beginning of the 20th Century. That, as I have suggested, is when the project for the creation of a New World Order first took on a tangible form.

Then, the Mind Conditioning

As every gardener knows, after securing a plentiful water supply, the other essential ingredient necessary for producing an abundant crop is sunlight and to this end the Zionist Jews now turned their attention. With the money (water) in place to irrigate the fertile mental fields of America and the rest of the West the collaborators could now focus on new JMO seed varieties that would enhance their plans for world hegemony. The second of these JMOs was therefore a natural concomitant of the first and one meant to provide the means of communicating to the mass public a program of mind control designed to ensure feasibility of all that was planned for them.

It’s not by mere coincidence that many newspapers have the word “sun” included in their titles. As an example I use the newspaper most widely prominent here in British Columbia, Canada the province where I reside. It is called “The Vancouver Sun” named after B.C.’s largest city. It is a Jewish, pro-Zionist newspaper, one of many such Jewish newspapers across Canada owned and controlled by the Asper family, and for purposes of illustration, will do just nicely.

If we continue with the gardening metaphor it is easy to see the connection between sunlight (the mass media, or what I refer to as the M3, the Mainstream Mind-control Media), soil (the minds of the general public) and water (the Jewish-controlled money supply).

In order to cultivate crops (generations) of human seedlings which will bear the genetic (psychic) imprint of the specific variety of seed the fructifying influence of the light source must be established and controlled in order to obtain the highest yield possible within the shortest span of time. In order to accomplish this program the means of communication (the sunlight) must be concentrated in the hands of the gardener and like clockwork for these clandestine horrorculturalists the timers need to be set so that the maximum amount of light (mind-control propaganda) can be beamed down on the mental fields (tabula rasa) of young minds awaiting this negative, nurturing force.

If one is able, by inference, to visualize the process it quickly becomes apparent that the concentration and/or conglomeration of all the major sources of information contained within the media – television, newspapers, books, magazines, film, publishing houses – in Zionist Jew hands, is pivotal to their primary plan for the creation of a one world strategy of governance.

Just as the sun of nature nurtures her myriad number of offspring, so, from dawn until dusk, by analogy, the Zionist Jew “sun” of their communication networks does likewise and just as we witness the movement of nature’s sun across the sky and note the accompanying motion of the plant in the field that changes and bends its direction continuously so as to accommodate itself to the maximum degree of the given light source so is it possible to see this same phenomenon occurring within the minds of the general public as their collective consciousness is manipulated in one form or another by the degree of artificial light (in the form of “news”, “information”) which this sacrilegious source shines down upon the people daily (and, if we extend the notion of artificial lighting the process goes well beyond the daylight hours and is actually occurring on a 24-hour global growth cycle that never lets up!)

And finally, the crop

The end result of this conspiracy of conspiracies is what now lies before our eyes today. We see a world torn apart by war, domestic and international conflict, poverty, pollution, injustice and slavery to a capitalist/corporate/Jewish-run economic system that benefits only the obscenely rich Jews and their minority of elitist lackeys chosen from the horde of Gentile men and women who, due to the same spiritual malady of mammon-induced greed, have sold their souls to the highest bidder in a vain attempt to escape the inescapable.

Space forces me to confine this short essay to the highlights of such a metaphor of madness that has taken grip on the world. To document in detail the multitude of offshoots which have sprung forth from the initial seeds described above would take a full length book or more. Suffice it to say that the Jewish Modified Organism that we know today as Political Zionism has been altered and recreated, tested and modified and planted over and over for at least a hundred years or more within the laboratories of our social consciousness and political landscape and the varieties and their effects are so pervasive and powerfully inculcated into our daily lives and throughout our mental and material world that only a supreme effort on the part of researchers and thinkers everywhere will reveal the extent to which this phenomenon has developed.

To fall prey to the persuasive arguments which the pro-Zionist forces perpetuate on a routine basis is to be misled and self-deluded to one’s own and one’s neighbor’s detriment. To be consistently cognizant and steadfastly aware of the fact that our primary source of information, the mainstream media, upon which we vainly attempt to calculate and order our lives, is a duplicious mask of falsehood of such grotesque proportions that it boggles the mind upon initial contemplation, is to plant our foot upon a new threshold leading to a greater and more determined awareness of the magnitude of the problems that now beset us as a human race.

God grant that we all become gardeners of the soil of truth and that our collective efforts to extirpate this alien and destructive weed known as Political Zionism will eventually bear the fruit of victory thus allowing our beautiful planet to return to harmony and love, peace and brotherhood/sisterhood. These are the seeds of individual choice that we need to plant with each new Spring.

———–
Arthur Topham is the publisher/editor of The Radical Press http://www.radicalpress.com.

Zionism, Judaism and Anti-Semitism

Israel - A State Built on War and Occupation

Written by Abbie Baka

Tuesday, 05 June 2007

The name of this forum is “Not in Our Name: Jewish Voices Against Israel’s Wars”. As we speak, Israel continues campaign for increasing military threats against Iran, where Israel would be an active or leading ally. In the summer of 2006, Israel’s war on Lebanon left countless levels of death and destruction, in a campaign of slaughter that our own Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended as a “measured response.”

And the state of Israel, first under the leadership of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and now Ehud Olmert, has been among the most consistent allies of George Bush and the coalition of the killing in the so-called “war on terror”. This is a war against an ill-defined enemy of “terrorism”, that has carried out the occupation and attacks on Iraq - now approaching the fourth anniversary - and Afghanistan, and threatens to open up numerous other fronts including against Iran.

But it is important to note that the events of the summer of 2006 were no for the state of Israel something new. Wars not an aberration from otherwise peaceful and democratic policies. Israel is a state founded on war.

It was founded on wars of occupation against the indigenous Palestinian people, and defends its structures and borders through one of the most militarized economic and political systems in the world. It relies on the US for the largest per capita aid to any country in the world. And in the United Nations despite repeated violations of international law, it faces no sanctions or consequences.

One of the main reasons for the continuation of this blatant double standard in international law is that the state of Israel, in its foundational laws and policies, claims to represent the interest of another oppressed people, the Jewish people.

Israel claims to be a “Jewish state”, acting in the interests of Jews around the world specifically because they have experienced racist discrimination resulting from their Jewish identity, or anti-Semitism.

This claim is a lie.

We have to distinguish between word and deed, between rhetoric and reality.

Balfour Declaration: 1917 - 2007

Ninety years ago, in November of 1917, a former British Prime Minister and at the time Conservative Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur James Balfour, advocated the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by designating British support for the Zionist plan of Jewish “national home”.

This was in no way motivated by imperial Britain’s opposition to anti-Semitism. In fact, the one Jewish member of the British Parliament at the time, Lord Montagu, wrote a letter objecting to the arrangement as an expression of the anti-Semitism of the government.1

Britain was in no way altruistic towards the Jewish people. In fact, the British imperialist state was more concerned with managing the spoils of World War One, and the threat of expanded socialist revolution from Russia.

Israel was founded as a state in 1948, ultimately as part of the division of the spoils of the next war, World War Two. But this came only after Britain -and the US, Canada and every other so-called “democratic” state in the world -had refused to open their doors to even a limited number of the millions of Jews facing genocide in Germany and Eastern Europe under the Nazis.

Israel operates on one set of laws and institutions for those defined, according to specific racialized terms, as “Jewish”, and another set of laws and institutions for those who are not-Jewish, in their vast majority the indigenous Arabic Palestinian population.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, stated in 1951, just three years after creation of Israel as a “Jewish state”:

“Israel is to become the watchdog. There is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes of the US and Britain. But, if for any reasons the Western powers should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied upon to punish one or several neighboring states whose discourtesy to the West went beyond the bounds of the permissible.2

Judaism and Zionism are not the Same

Those who criticize the policies, practices and apartheid nature of the Israeli state are commonly attacked by Zionists for being anti-Semitic, in this case meaning propagating anti-Jewish racism. But this is to assume an equation between the Zionist ideology of the state of Israel and Judaism. There are no grounds for such an equation.

I, like all Jewish people, am not unfamiliar with anti-Semitism. We need no one to give us lessons on what it is or isn’t.

Judaism is a religion or a cultural identity. Like all religious doctrines it is subject to many interpretations among its adherents, and no one view can claim a monopoly or a direct claim to absolute “truth”. And like all cultural identities, cultures change and merge over time and place, fusing, altering and affecting other cultures and creating new cultural syntheses and forms of individual and group identity.

Zionism: Herzl’s Reactionary Legacy

Zionism is different. It is a political ideology and movement, the ideology that is at the heart of the Israeli state. Founded in its modern form by Viennese journalist Theodore Herzl, Zionism accepts fatalistically that anti-Semitism is inevitable in every country where Jews and non-Jews (or Gentiles), live together. This is another lie.

Herzl not only accepted anti-Semitism. He believed that the basis for this was fundamental to the characteristics of Jews themselves. He wrote in his book, The Jewish State, first published in Vienna in 1896:

“Anti-semitism increases day by day and hour by hour among the nations; indeed it is bound to increase, because the causes of its growth continue to exist and cannot be removed.”

The basis for anti-Semitism in Herzl’s view was based in the racially-specific characteristics of Jews themselves. He accepted anti-Semitic stereotypes, maintaining the immediate cause of prejudice:

“is our excessive production of mediocre intellects, who cannot find an outlet downwards or upwards -that is to say, no wholesome outlet or direction. When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties; at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse.”3

Zionism is the insistence on an ethnically-exclusive state for ethnically-defined Jewish people. In isolation, Zionism was a marginal and isolated view among European Jews. To challenge the racism they experienced, instead Jews in Europe responded as all oppressed minorities who resist have responded, by mass organization and seeking solidarity with non-Jewish allies in the trade union movement, the socialist movement, etc. Zionism thrives only in alliance with one or more imperialist powers, and this was envisioned in Herzl’s strategy. In the post-World War Two context, Zionism advanced on this basis.

There is no truth to the claim that Zionism was a movement for a people without land for a land without a people. Israel is an ethnically-exclusive state based on the forced removal and separation of the indigenous Palestinian people. To maintain this separation, it is necessarily anti-democratic, racist and backed by military force that is ranked among the most powerful in the world. It is also supported by a state ideology and institutions that reproduce the patterns of ethnically-cleansing -to preserve the occupation of land based on sustaining ethnic separation and hierarchy.

Israel is a Zionist state, an apartheid state, not a Jewish state. It is not a state that protects, advances, or defends the interests of Jewish people from anti-Semitism and racism.

Zionism is a divisive force. It is a reactionary response to anti-Jewish racism -and racism cannot challenge racism.

Solidarity

But solidarity can. Solidarity is a unifying force.

The Palestinian movement for self-determination in the Middle East, and internationally for the right of return to the lands that have been stolen by occupation, needs to be supported. And it needs to be supported firmly, and without apology. It is part of the movement against imperialism, against Islamophobia, against the so-called war on terror of George Bush and his right-hand man Stephen Harper.

And Jewish voices needed to be added to this movement. The hegemony of Zionism as voice for Jews internationally needs to be definitively and openly challenged. We need to build solidarity with the Palestinian people and all those who oppose imperialist war and occupation. We need to support and advance the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the state of Israel. Building real, genuine solidarity, has the potential to unite us, across differences of religion, race, nationality; to unite us as students and workers; to unite us as women and man, as lesbians, gays, transgendered and bisexuals and heterosexuals. We need to put aside differences that divide us and stand together in a mass movement that can win real peace and real democracy.

Notes:

1. Lord Montague, “A Dissenting Note on the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917: On the Anti-Semitism of the Present Government”, reprinted in Counterpunch, November 11, 2006.
2. Ha’aretz, 30 September 1951, as cited in John Rose, Israel: The Hijack State: America’s Watchdog in the Middle East (Socialist Workers’ Party UK Pamphlet: 1986).
3. Theodore Herzl, The Jewish State, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1988), pp. 90-91.

Source: Not In Our Name