It's Not Anti-semitism To Hate Israel.

krastner

more experienced than you
Joined
Oct 19, 2004
Posts
2,950
it seems that every time that I, or anyone else post something about Israel all I get are nasties from zionist Israeli supporters calling me an anti-semitic. That's like saying that a person that anyone who condemns Jeffery Dahmer is anti-American.

All I can say is that those people had better get used to it because the world is waking up to Isreal's real ugly face..

A short talk by Kennett Love:

He served (see biographical sketch below) as The New York Times' correspondent
in the Middle East from 1953-1956, in London until 1959, and at the United
Nations in New York until 1962. In these places he had access to the men who
shook the world. He is the author of the most definitive book on the Suez wars
-- SUEZ: The Twice-fought War--Published in 1969.

Queries? Send an E-mail to:
kennettlove@earthlink.net

June 19, 2004
Ladies & gentlemen, David Irving, Michael Santomauro, good evening.

You don't have to be an anti-Semite to despise and fear Ariel Sharon. You
don't have to be an anti-Semite to perceive that the United States of America has
lost control of its politics to a Jewish lobby that puts Israel's interests
above our own American interests. That loss would not be of paramount concern
if Israel's interests were the same as – or even vaguely similar to -- our
American interests. And you don't have to be an anti-Semite to oppose and fear
George W. Bush and the cruel war in Iraq into which he and the neo-cons and the
evangelical fundamentalist Christian cults have led America with lies.


I cite the victory of Zionist Jewish money in the defeat of popular
congressional incumbents in the Alabama and Georgia primaries for the national
elections. Worse yet, and more recently, I cite the Pavlovian pro-Israel foot-licking
adherence of John Kerrie to the pro-forma platform vows of the Bush
administrations -- father and son -- and the cowardly, continuing congressional caucus
touting their grossly partisan support for Israel against nearly the entire
Muslim world and in defiance of public opinion in Europe and the rest of the
Americas.


Israel's character and policies are criticized and courageously opposed by
many of its Jewish citizens. But Israel's character and policies are
diametrically opposed to American principles.


1. Israel is racist. Its law of return applies only to Jews born of Jewish
mothers. It is not the only democracy in the middle east because it is not a
democracy. The Arabs and other non-Jews under Israeli control are second
class citizens at best. We have abated our racism and we enforce severe laws
against it.

2. Israel is terrorist. It was founded on terror. It applied terror to
make Arabs flee, across unfixed and non-legal borders, and then declared them
to have forfeited their property and homes. Israel confiscated their
possessions after their terrified flight and shot many of them when they tried to
retrieve family jewelry. They were barred from return in favor of the influx of
Jews. One of Israel's most horrendous acts was the massacre of hundreds of
women, children, and old men at Deir Yasseen in the course of the war of conquest
which began to escalate in 1947. The bodies were thrown down the village
well. The young men were at work in the fields. The UN mediator, Count Folke
Bernadotte, was assassinated while trying to establish borders in accord with the
1947 UN partition of Palestine. The murder was never solved. Israel never
seriously investigated it. It was apparently an act of terror to get more
territory for Israel. Israel proclaimed itself an independent state in 1948 on May
15, as part of Israel's permanent campaign to kill or expel all non-Jews in
Palestine, -- Armenians, Greek orthodox Christians, and Roman Catholics among
them -- Sharon led an invasion into Lebanon in 1982 and personally shepherded
the massacre of nearly 1,000 Palestine refugees in the camps of Sabra and
Shatilla outside of Beirut. Only a few weeks ago a Sharon cabinet minister told the
New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg there were “innocent men among the
Palestinians, but they are collectively guilty; we will have to kill them all.”


This genocidal policy was born in 1897 in the mind of Theodore Herzl, author
of Der Judenstaat [the Jewish State] and the founder of modern political
Zionism. He used the term “transfer of populations”. That has been a constant
Israeli policy, resembling our own killings and forced relocations of native
Americans.

3. Israel is theocratic. Our tradition is to separate church and state.
Let me insert here that our traditions and our principles are often violated.
Our president is a born-again evangelical who claims god told him to attack
Saddam Hussein. He did -- with enormous bunker-busting bombs that inflicted
incalculable “collateral damage”. An estimated 10,000 Iraqis died, but we have
not counted.

4. Iraq was targeted at the prompting of the Jewish neo-cons because Iraq,
unlike Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon is still officially at war with Israel. Iraq
fired missiles at Israel in the gulf war of Bush the father. This war is
pre-emptive, a war of choice, not defense and now we are stuck with it.

5. Israel is a vigorous, anachronistic colonialist power. The world sees our
“special relationship” with Israel as a partnership in crusading, conquering
colonialism. We serve Israel as armorer, banker, diplomatic protector, and
relentless vetoer of UN efforts to curb Israel's violations of international
laws. The UN’s founding charter

in 1945 prohibited using force or the threat of force to acquire territory.
Just two years later Israel began doing just that in “liberating” Palestine
from hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in what it called its “war of
liberation” in 1947 – 1948 and in its stunning pre-emptive wars and massacres
against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967 and Lebanon in 1982. It seized upon its
triumph in 1967 to occupy the West Bank and Gaza. They kill and demolish
homes and institutions with appalling heartlessness and insultingly ignore our
timid remonstrances. They run the special alliance; we don’t. Some alliance!
They don't bother to make a pretense of loyalty nor even compromise out of
courtesy. They look the other way when we oppose at nuclear programs in Syria, Nor
th Korea, China, India, and Pakistan. They made us look the other way while
they built a formidable nuclear and missile armory of their own. They
corrupted an American citizen named Pollard to steal our secrets for years and
scolded us bitterly for sending him to prison for life instead of letting him
“return” to the Jewish State.


In their 1967 war they ambushed our electronic surveillance ship, the
“Liberty”, in broad daylight with aircraft guns and bombs, motor torpedo boats, even
a submarine, crippling the ship and killing some 35 of its crew and wounding
dozens more. Israel pressed the day-long attack in the face of oversize
American flags and radio identifications and may-days. Israel has given no
explanation or expression of regret

and has balked inquiry into the incident. And so have we. President Johnson
called off a rescue sortie by the sixth fleet. Survivors of the “liberty”
attack have stubbornly sought to learn the reasons why. It is time we ended the
“special relationship”. It hasn't even a name or agreement to govern its
conduct.

President George Washington warned against such a special alliance in his
farewell address, saying:

“the nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual
fondness is in some degree a slave. ... sympathy for the favorite nation,
facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real
common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays
the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter
without adequate inducement or justification.”

..."in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the
truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they
afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to
mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public councils! ... real
patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected
and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of
the people to surrender their interests.”


President Truman in 1947 broke the 150-year-old spell of president
Washington's warning against entangling alliances by launching the Marshall plan of aid
for Western Europe and the Truman Doctrine to block communist influence in
Greece and Turkey.


Israel is touchy about its “legitimate right to exist”, citing most
frequently the story of god's covenant with Abram, later Abraham, made before Abram
had departed from ur of the Chaldees, his ancestral birthplace in what is now
Iraq. The story begins with god's promise of his favor for Abram and his
descendants (genesis 12 passim):


“now the lord had said to Abram, get thee out of thy country, ... unto a land
that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, ...” when
Abram had reached Canaan, north of Palestine, god appeared to him again and said:
“unto thy seed will I give this land.” There was no mention of a covenant
until genesis 15:18, when the lord said to Abram: “unto thy seed have I given
this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the River Euphrates.”


The story has god giving land and other promises to Abram right and left.
The details differed widely from promise to promise. Years later Joshua, the
first conqueror of Palestine, quoted a surprisingly frank admission from god:


“I have given you a land for which ye did not labor, and cities which ye
built not, and ye dwell in them; of the vineyards and olive yards which ye planted
not do ye eat.”


I suggest that these stories came down in recitations from the days of
mythology, all of it folklore, through centuries when Zeus and Venus and Athena were
as real as Jehovah and Noah or Abraham or Moses – “an ancient time” as E.l.
Doctorow put it, “when no distinction was possible between fact and fiction,
... as in homer. As in genesis.”


Both parties to a covenant must be alive at the signing. When I covenanted
to buy an apartment in New York while I was in Egypt covering the 1973 war for
ABC my lawyer told me later that the deal was delayed until he thought to
listen to a radio to hear my live broadcast.


The Muslims, although abraham appears as Ibrahim in the qur’an, reject the
idea that the covenant has any legal standing giving the Jews any right to
trespass on the land of the Canaanites or the Palestinians or the Lebanese or the
Syrians and the Egyptians. There is no independent evidence that Abraham ever
existed, ever crossed the line between mythology and history. So the
Abrahamic covenant has no firm basis in law. Perhaps in tradition.


And the brutal colonialist conduct of Israel is certainly not an acceptable
underpinning for a “legitimate right to exist”. Our reputation in the world
has been tarred and feathered by our total and uncomplaining support of
Israel's illegal occupation of nearly all of Palestine.

===========

Queries? Send an E-mail to:
kennettlove@earthlink.net
 
It's not antisemitism to hate Israel.

But it is antisemitism to hate Israel because it's got a lot of Jews. And it's antisemtism if that's your real reason, with a fig leaf of dissembled accusations.
 
Krastner,

PM me.

I need someone to eat the shit out of my ass.
 
ubertroll said:
It's not antisemitism to hate Israel.

But it is antisemitism to hate Israel because it's got a lot of Jews. And it's antisemtism if that's your real reason, with a fig leaf of dissembled accusations.

I think what you're saying is that not all Israel-haters are anti-semites, but all anti-semites are Israel-haters. And we know where Kras falls in that equation, don't we?
 
Gringao said:
I think what you're saying is that not all Israel-haters are anti-semites, but all anti-semites are Israel-haters. And we know where Kras falls in that equation, don't we?
That, and that people who say false things that they're too smart to believe, and use those things as an excuse to express hatred of Israel, are also antisemites.
 
Aseret ha-Dibrot: The "Ten Commandments"
Level: Intermediate


According to Jewish tradition, G-d gave the Jewish people 613 mitzvot (commandments). All 613 of those mitzvot are equally sacred, equally binding and equally the word of G-d. All of these mitzvot are treated as equally important, because human beings, with our limited understanding of the universe, have no way of knowing which mitzvot are more important in the eyes of G-d. Pirkei Avot, a book of the Mishnah, teaches "Be as meticulous in performing a 'minor' mitzvah as you are with a 'major' one, because you don't know what kind of reward you'll get for various mitzvot." It also says, "Run after the most 'minor' mitzvah as you would after the most 'important' and flee from transgression, because doing one mitzvah draws you into doing another, and doing one transgression draws you into doing another, and because the reward for a mitzvah is a mitzvah and the punishment for a transgression is a transgression." In other words, every mitzvah is important, because even the most seemingly trivial mitzvot draw you into a pattern of leading your life in accordance with G-d's wishes, rather than in accordance with your own.

But what about the so-called "Ten Commandments," the words recorded in Exodus 20, the words that G-d Himself wrote on the two stone tablets that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai (Ex. 31:18), which Moses smashed upon seeing the idolatry of the golden calf (Ex. 32:19)? In the Torah, these words are never referred to as the Ten Commandments. In the Torah, they are called Aseret ha-D'vareem (Ex. 34:28, Deut. 4:13 and Deut. 10:4). In rabbinical texts, they are referred to as Aseret ha-Dibrot. The words d'vareem and dibrot come from the Hebrew root Dalet-Bet-Resh, meaning word, speak or thing; thus, the phrase is accurately translated as the Ten Sayings, the Ten Statements, the Ten Declarations, the Ten Words or even the Ten Things, but not as the Ten Commandments, which would be Aseret ha-Mitzvot.

The Aseret ha-Dibrot are not individual mitzvot; rather, they are categories or classifications of mitzvot. Each of the 613 mitzvot can be subsumed under one of these ten categories, some in more obvious ways than others. For example, the mitzvah not to work on shabbat rather obviously falls within the category of remembering the sabbath day and keeping it holy. The mitzvah to fast on Yom Kippur fits into that category somewhat less obviously: all holidays are in some sense a sabbath, and the category encompasses any mitzvah related to sacred time. The mitzvah not to stand aside while a person's life is in danger fits somewhat obviously into the category against murder. It is not particularly obvious, however, that the mitzvah not to embarass a person fits within the category against murder: it causes the blood to drain from your face thereby shedding blood.

List of the Aseret ha-Dibrot
According to Judaism, the Aseret ha-Dibrot identify the following ten categories of mitzvot. Other religions divide this passage differently. See The "Ten Commandments" Controversy below. Please remember that these are categories of the 613 mitzvot, which according to Jewish tradition are binding only upon Jews. The only mitzvot binding upon gentiles are the seven Noahic commandments.


1. Belief in G-d
This category is derived from the declaration in Ex. 20:2 beginning, "I am the L-rd, your G-d..."
2. Prohibition of Improper Worship
This category is derived from Ex. 20:3-6, beginning, "You shall not have other gods..." It encompasses within it the prohibition against the worship of other gods as well as the prohibition of improper forms of worship of the one true G-d.
3. Prohibition of Oaths
This category is derived from Ex. 20:7, beginning, "You shall not take the name of the L-rd your G-d in vain..." This includes prohibitions against perjury, breaking or delaying the performance of vows or promises, and speaking G-d's name or swearing unnecessarily.
4. Shabbat
This category is derived from Ex. 20:8-11, beginning, "Remember the sabbath day..." It encompasses all mitzvot related to shabbat, holidays, or sacred time.
5. Respect for Parents and Teachers
This category is derived from Ex. 20:12, beginning, "Honor your father and mother..."
6. Prohibition of Murder
This category is derived from Ex. 20:13, saying, "You shall not murder."
7. Prohibition of Adultery
This category is derived from Ex. 20:13, saying, "You shall not commit adultery."
8. Prohibition of Theft
This category is derived from Ex. 20:13, saying, "You shall not steal." It includes within it both outright robbery as well as various forms of theft by deception and unethical business practices. It also includes kidnapping.
9. Prohibition of False Witness
This category is derived from Ex. 20:13, saying, "You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor."
10. Prohibition of Coveting
This category is derived from Ex. 20:14, beginning, "You shall not covet your neighbor's house..."
The Two Tablets: Duties to G-d and Duties to People
Judaism teaches that the first tablet, containing the first five declarations, identifies duties regarding our relationship with G-d, while the second tablet, containing the last five declarations, identifies duties regarding our relationship with other people.

You may have noticed, however, that the fifth category, which is included in the first tablet, is the category to honor father and mother, which would seem to concern relationships between people. The rabbis teach that our parents are our creators and stand in a relationship to us akin to our relationship to G-d. Throughout Jewish liturgy, G-d is referred to as Avinu Malkeinu, our Father, our King. Disrespect to our biological creators is not merely an affront to them; it is also an insult to the Creator of the Universe. Accordingly, honor of father and mother is included on the tablet of duties to G-d.

These two tablets are parallel and equal: duties to G-d are not more important than duties to people, nor are duties to people more important than duties to G-d. However, if one must choose between fulfilling an obligation to G-d and fulfilling an obligation to a person, Judaism teaches that the obligation to a person should be fulfilled first. This principle is derived from the story in Genesis 18, where Abraham is communing with G-d and interrupts this meeting to fulfill the mitzvah of providing hospitality to strangers (the three men who appear). The Talmud gives another example, disapproving of a man who, engrossed in prayer, would ignore the cries of a drowning man. When forced to choose between our duties to a person and our duties to G-d, we must pursue our duties to the person, because the person needs our help, but G-d does not need our help.

The "Ten Commandments" Controversy
In the United States, a controversy has persisted for many years regarding the placement of the "Ten Commandments" in public schools and public buildings. But one critical question seems to have escaped most of the public dialog on the subject: Whose "Ten Commandments" should we post?

The general perception in this country is that the "Ten Commandments" are part of the common religious heritage of Judaism, Catholicism and Protestantism, part of the sacred scriptures that we all share, and should not be controversial. But most people involved in the debate seem to have missed the fact that these three religions divide up the commandments in different ways! Judaism, unlike Catholicism and Protestantism, considers "I am the L-rd, your G-d" to be the first "commandment." Catholicism, unlike Judaism and Protestantism, considers coveting property to be separate from coveting a spouse. Protestantism, unlike Judaism and Catholicism, considers the prohibition against idolatry to be separate from the prohibition against worshipping other gods. No two religions agree on a single list. So whose list should we post?

And once we decide on a list, what translation should we post? Should Judaism's sixth declaration be rendered as "Thou shalt not kill" as in the popular KJV translation, or as "Thou shalt not murder," which is a bit closer to the connotations of the original Hebrew though still not entirely accurate?

These may seem like trivial differences to some, but they are serious issues to those of us who take these words seriously. When a government agency chooses one version over another, it implicitly chooses one religion over another, something that the First Amendment prohibits. This is the heart of the controversy.

But there is an additional issue in this controversy that is of concern from a Jewish perspective. In Talmudic times, the rabbis consciously made a decision to exclude daily recitation of the Aseret ha-Dibrot from the liturgy because excessive emphasis on these statements might lead people to mistakenly believe that these were the only mitzvot or the most important mitzvot, and neglect the other 603. By posting these words prominently and referring to them as "The Ten Commandments," (as if there weren't any others, which is what many people think) schools and public buildings may be teaching a message that Judaism specifically and consciously rejected.



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© Copyright 5762 (2002), Tracey R Rich
 
Technically, this is correct. But lines like "a Jewish lobby that puts Israel's interests
above our own American interests" are textbook anti-Semitism.

If you really want to persuade people you're not anti-Semitic, try quoting from someone who doesn't bearhug David Irving next time.
 
Wrong Element said:
Technically, this is correct. But lines like "a Jewish lobby that puts Israel's interests
above our own American interests" are textbook anti-Semitism.

If you really want to persuade people you're not anti-Semitic, try quoting from someone who doesn't bearhug David Irving next time.

Since most of the zionist Israelis are not semitic people then it's not anti-semitism. I seem to recall that the large part of the populace of Israel who are against zionism have been labeled anti-semitic. That phrase is a catch all to slam anyone who ever tries to make a constructive remark about Israel. Jews and Arabs lived in peace and harmony for centuries till the zionist drove a hateful wedge between them..devide and conquer...

The best news I have heard lately is that the vets of the uss liberty is planning a lawsuit against Israel...hope they get the truth out..
 
"It is not anti-Semitic to criticize the policies of the state of Israel." – Colin Powell.
 
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