The Mother of all Pretexts
Uri Avnery - 13/10/2007
WHY WAS the Zionist movement in need of excuses to justify the way it treated the Palestinian people?
At its birth, it was an idealistic movement. It laid great weight on its moral basis. Not just in order to convince the world, but above all in order to set its own conscience at rest... But this idealistic movement aimed at settling in a country inhabited by another people. How to bridge this contradiction between its sublime ideals and the fact that their realization necessitated the expulsion of the people of the land?
Only one of the Founding Fathers of the Zionist movement was courageous enough to call a spade a spade... We are white settlers colonizing the land of the native people, he said, and there is no chance whatsoever that the natives will resign themselves to this voluntarily. They will resist violently, like all the native peoples in the European colonies. Therefore we need an "Iron Wall" to protect the Zionist enterprise.
Most Zionists were not prepared to accept this force-oriented approach. They searched fervently for a moral justification they could live with.
Thus started the long quest for justifications - with each pretext supplanting the previous one, according to the changing spiritual fashions in the world.
World War II came to an end, to be followed by the 1948 war. Half of the vanquished Palestinian people became refugees...
It may be asked: why were the refugees not allowed to come back to their homes once the war was over? Well, it was they who in 1947 rejected the UN partition plan and started the war. If because of this they lost 78% of their country, they have only themselves to blame.
Then came the Cold War. We were, of course, on the side of the "Free World", while the great Arab leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, got his weapons from the Soviet bloc... It was quite clear: No use talking with the Arabs, because they support Communist tyranny.
But the Soviet bloc collapsed. "The terrorist organization called PLO", as Menachem Begin used to call it, recognized Israel and signed the Oslo agreement. A new justification had to be found for our unwillingness to give back the occupied territories to the Palestinian people.
The salvation came from America: a professor named Samuel Huntington wrote a book about the "Clash of Civilizations". And so we found the mother of all pretexts.
THE ARCH-ENEMY, according to this theory, is Islam. Western Civilization, Judeo-Christian, liberal, democratic, tolerant, is under attack from the Islamic monster, fanatical, terrorist, murderous.
Professor Huntington was not thinking about us in particular. His task was to satisfy a peculiar American craving: the American empire always needs a virtual, world-embracing enemy, a single enemy which includes all the opponents of the United States around the world....
When the Communist empire collapsed, America was suddenly left without a world-wide enemy. This vacuum has now been filled by the Muslims-Terrorists...
Thus the American world view rearranged itself: a good world (Western Civilization) and a bad world (Islamic civilization). Diplomats still take care to make a distinction between "radical Islamists" and "moderate Muslims", but that is only for appearances' sake. Between ourselves, we know of course that they are all Osama bin Ladens. They are all the same.
The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is no longer a conflict between the Zionist movement, which came to settle in this country, and the Palestinian people, which inhabited it. No, it has been from the very beginning a part of a world-wide struggle which does not stem from our aspirations and actions. The assault of terrorist Islam on the Western world did not start because of us. Our conscience can be entirely clean - we are among the good guys of this world.
IN HIS book "Der Judenstaat", Theodor Herzl, the official Israeli "Prophet of the State", prophesied this development, too.
This is what he wrote in 1896: "For Europe we shall constitute (in Palestine) a part of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as a vanguard of culture against barbarism."
Herzl was thinking of a metaphoric wall, but in the meantime we have put up a very real one. For many, this is not just a Separation Wall between Israel and Palestine. It is a part of the world-wide wall between the West and Islam, the front-line of the Clash of Civilizations...
Beyond the wall there are a billion terrorists, multitudes of blood-thirsty Muslims, who have only one desire in life: to throw us into the sea, simply because we are Jews, part of Judeo-Christian Civilization.
And what is left to us to do - to cry or to laugh?
Gush Shalom Website
Awaiting justice
Amid continual massacres perpetrated by the US occupation and its local allies, millions of Iraqis have fled their homes. From Damascus and Amman, Amanda Noureddine reports on the exodus
Since the US and UK forces invaded Iraq in 2003, an estimated 4.2 million Iraqis have fled their homes, the majority in the last two years.
Up to two million are estimated to have sought refuge outside Iraq, while the remainder has been displaced within the country. The exodus is the largest the region has witnessed since the Palestinian Nakba. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the flight of Iraqis continues at a rate of 60,000 per month.
IRAQIS SEEK REFUGE: With much of the West turned into forbidden ground, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis who have left their country since the invasion have sought refuge in neighbouring Arab states, namely Syria, Jordan, and to a far lesser but still significant extent, Egypt and Lebanon.
Syria has received by far the highest number of Iraqis, with current estimates running to approximately 1.5 million. According to UNHCR figures released August 2007, between 500,000 and 750,000 Iraqis are estimated to have fled to Jordan. Figures for Egypt are less clear...
It is impossible to estimate how many Iraqis still in Iraq may yet need to seek safety for their families away from the occupation and away from Iraq. The manner in which the occupation has sought to distort the composition of the Iraqi nation, causing the displacement of well over one sixth of Iraq's population, and principally its middle class, followed by predictable moves to trap the rest, as if to punish them for holding on, appears telling of US intent in Iraq.
WHAT COMES NEXT? According to AI, greater international commitment is required to improve the situation of Iraq's refugees. The AI report adds that existing pledges for assistance to governments hosting Iraqis must urgently be honoured. But beyond basic survival, it is not easy to determine the best way forward for Iraqi refugees barring the end of the US occupation...
It is telling that the states that led and participated in the illegal invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq publicly cited human rights as one of their pretexts while their actions amount to genocide, not only in the figure of one million Iraqis dead, but in the creation of the largest refugee crisis the region has seen since the establishment of Israel.
Just as the Nakba was essential to the attempted destruction of Palestine, the Iraqi refugee explosion is an integral part of the attempted destruction of the Iraqi nation.
Amanda Noureddine, Al-Ahram Weekly, 16-24 october 2007
Holocaust en Secularisering
Zionisten zijn mensen die de staat Israel zien als de moderne vertegenwoordiger van het zeer ouderwetse en volgens moderne normen fascistische Ezra-ime, dat alle eeuwen door bestreden werd door verlichte, humanistische denkers. Juist omdat het zionisme gebonden is aan primitief fascistisch groepsdenken ('eigen volk eerst') heeft men de wereld van 'de vijandige vreemdeling' de oorlog verklaard, hetgeen momenteel tot de vreemde situatie leidt dat men wereldwijd oorlogspropaganda aan het bedrijven is, met de bedoeling ons duidelijk te maken dat een oorlog met Iran gerechtvaardigd is.
Iran is binnen dat propagandaverhaal (net als Saddam Hussein, die Amerika door Irakese Khomeinisten heeft laten vermoorden) een vijand van 'de vrede'. Iran bedreigt daarenboven met massawapens ('de atoombom') de veiligheid van 'het vrije Westen' (net als 'de nieuwe Hitler' Saddam, die geen massawapens bleek te bezitten) en Iran steunt het verzet in Irak, waarmee dan de aanhangers van de door Saddam Hussein aan banden gelegde sji-ietische fundamentalisten worden bedoeld, precies die groep die Amerika in het jaar 2003 'een arme, door Saddam onderdrukte bevolkingsgroep' noemde, die door ons moest worden bevrijd.
Een feit is dat Iran geen vrede wil met een Israel dat geleid wordt door mensen die via het zionisme het door de Islam afgewezen Ezra-istische groepsegoïsme verdedigen. Iran stelt zich zeer principieel op door te stellen dat geen afstand gedaan mag worden van het rechtvaardigheidsbeginsel, hetgeen betekent dat men die mensen steunt die bereid zijn 'een rechtvaardige oorlog' te voeren, een oorlog die zionisten daarom antisemitisch en nazistisch noemen omdat ze de heilig verklaarde joodse groepsidentiteit bedreigen.
Over die heiligverklaring en het verlies van de eigen identiteit gaan de volgende tekstfragmenten die van de website JUDAISM ONLINE zijn gehaald. Hierin wordt joden gewezen op de bijbels-goddelijke opdracht die de joden als 'heilig volk' gekregen hebben, een opdracht die heel duidelijk wordt gekoppeld aan de schriftgeleerde EZRA, die volgens mensen die bereid zijn de geschiedenis op een rationele wijze te bestuderen gezien wordt als de echte stichter van wat wij nu 'het jodendom' noemen.
1. IN LOVE WITH A NON-JEW
Vragen:
Dear Rabbi, I am in love with a Catholic woman. I want to marry her. She loves me as much but religious beliefs are getting in the way. Please tell me what I should do, my parents say "no way." Help.
Dear Rabbi, I’m getting married in October to a girl who is not Jewish (she is Hindu, born in India) and we’re having a difficult time finding a Rabbi who
will marry us. Why is this? And do you have any recommendations for Rabbis that would consider performing the ceremony. It’s important to me and my family that we are married by a Rabbi. Thanks.
Antwoord:
For Jews, "marrying within the faith" isn't a cultural preference or prejudice. Rather, it is one the commandments G-d gave us at Mount Sinai. A Jew who marries a non-Jew transgresses a Torah prohibition.
The practice of not "intermarrying" is in fact one of the oldest features of Judaism. It dates back to Abraham telling Eliezer, his servant, not to find a wife for his son from the Canaanites. It continues with Isaac's command to his son Jacob not to marry the "daughters of the land." The practice is mentioned in the Bible as a legal prohibition, and is also part of the covenant that Ezra the scribe had the Jews make when they rebuilt the Temple after the Babylonian Exile.
In all the above cases the underlying idea of the prohibition seems to be ideological. As Jews, we have a unique identity that is connected to our purpose in the world. We are the "chosen people." We were chosen to propagate the ethical monotheism of Judaism. In the words of Leo Tolstoy:
"The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religious. The Jew is the pioneer of liberty. The Jew is the pioneer of civilization. The Jew is the emblem of eternity."
We were chosen as a permanent protest group against idolatry and immorality. Intermarriage is therefore antithetical to the Jewish purpose and to the Jewish identity.
Can we prove that we are chosen? Do we have evidence? Yes. In a brief look at history we can see the antiquity, survival and impact of the Jewish people as unique and remarkable. I don't think that I can put it better than Mark Twain, in his famous description of Jewish history, "An Essay Concerning the Jews":
"If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of; but he is heard of, has always been heard of...
The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendour, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other nations pass, but he remains..."
Intermarriage is a betrayal of our task and of our "choseness." It is also a guarantee against Jewish continuity.
Being Jewish isn't a cultural affiliation or a tradition. It's being part of the Chosen People. (Judaism Online)
Dat het traditonele denken in Amerika, dat in het Midden-Oosten de rol van joods-zionistische inquisiteur aan het spelen is (oorlog voeren met de vijanden van het bedreigde volk), steeds minder aanhang heeft binnen een wereld die conservatieven 'de joodse gemeenschap' noemen blijkt uit het citaat hieronder, een tekstfragment dat het zwaarbeladen begrip 'holocaust' koppelt aan het doodgewone, alledaagse verschijnsel van ontkerkelijking en secularisering:
2. INTERMARRIAGE STATISTICS
"Our grandparents prayed for a melting pot. What they got instead was a meltdown!" Rabbi Ephraim Buchwald
As the year 2000 fast approaches, North America's Jewish population faces a disturbing set of trends that threatens the viability of Judaism on this continent in the next century -- The J2K (Jewish 2000) Problem. Unlike the persecution that the Jewish people have endured by the hands of others for over 3,000 years, Jews on this continent now face a "silent holocaust" stemming from within their very own communities and their very own households.
Today, of the approximately 6 million Jews in the United States, about 2 out of 3, either do not identify themselves Jewishly or maintain an affiliation with a synagogue. This staggering portrait of American Jewish life is perpetuated by a host of disturbing national trends, including a quickly growing rate of Jewish intermarriage, an extraordinary low birth rate, and a sharp increase in the number of children being raised as non-Jews.
In the past, Jews rallied together around a core of religious and ethnic traditions, such as synagogue affiliation, lighting of Shabbat candles and giving charity to Jewish institutions. These practices were first learned in the home and were enhanced over a lifetime of familial and communal interaction.
However today, North America's Jewish population has experienced an internal breakdown of both the family unit and the concept of community, that have unified the Jewish people for so long. As these ancient practices and rituals disappear, so do the number of Jewish people on this continent who consider themselves Jewish. So powerful is this meltdown of Jewish life, that Judaism in America, as we have known it for the last 300 years, will likely cease to exist in the new millennium. (Judaism Online)
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We live in an apartment building where two other Iraqis are renting. The people in the floor above us are a Christian family from northern Iraq who got chased out of their village by Peshmerga and the family on our floor is a Kurdish family who lost their home in Baghdad to militias and were waiting for immigration to Sweden or Switzerland or some such European refugee haven.
Rudy Giuliani (belangrijkste Republikeinse presidentskandidaat) has made a "promise" not to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear capability, even if it requires U.S. military action. Though the U.S. Army is scrimping to meet recruitment goals, Rudy has pledged to add at least 10 new combat brigades.
Israel calls for sacking of IAEA's ElBaradei
De iraanse SJIA is in zekere zin een elitaire afwijking van het populistisch ingestelde Islamitische denken dat door de profeet Mohammed werd uitgedragen. Je zou kunnen stellen dat de SJIA op een heimelijke wijze heeft geprobeerd het priestergebonden Zoroastrisme in te bouwen in een Islamitische cultuur die in diepste wezen de wijand is van elke vorm van theocratisch of hogepriesterlijk denken (in de Koran worden mensen die priesters aanbidden - dus boven God plaatsen - vervloekt). 
TEHRAN (Christian Science Monitor)- Former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi are among several key Iranian public figures saying that only direct, unconditional talks with the U.S. can ease spiraling tensions.
LONDON (IRNA) -- The portrayal of Iran in the British print media is overtly negative and frequently misleading, according to a new survey. 
TEHRAN -- Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Monday that Iran was on the verge of normalizing diplomatic relations with Egypt after the ties have been cut for almost three decades.
Een van de belangrijkste kenmerken van de Iraanse revolutie in het jaar 1979 was de keuze voor het anti-Messiaanse principe van de wraak. Astrologisch gezien behoort dit antirationele en altijd tegen het recht gerichte principe bij het teken Schorpioen, dat in zijn negatieve gedaante gesymboliseerd wordt door een SLANG - die op zijn beurt een verwijzing is naar de oud-Perzische antigod AHRIMAN (op de afbeelding hiernaast afgebeeld als een Leeuw die omstrengeld wordt door een Slang).