Quite true, all of it. Frankly, the "problem" with the Jews (not to be confused with the Nazi 'Jewish Problem') has to do more with culture than religion. Likewise Islam. Islamists are likewise persecuted because of xenophobia, not their religious beliefs. Just the big <sigh> here. What was it that Golda Meir said? "We will only have peace with the Arabs when they learn to love their children more than they hate us."
Hitler was not unusual. His attitude toward Judaism was close to the Central European norm, in a tradition going back centuries. Look at the anti-semitic writings of Martin Luther for example. Anyone writing such things today would be arrested for volkverhetzung.
The anti-semitic teachings of the Catholic church over hundreds of years set the stage for the extermination of the Jews. If there was any single root cause of Nazism, that was it. Hitler and almost all the Nazi leadership were brought up in the church and instructed in it’s teachings. They remained church members in good standing throughout their lives. In fact, when they had lost the war, many Nazis were helped to escape by the church, which hid them in monasteries and got them safe passage to South America, where they were granted refuge at the request of the Vatican.
Seen from the long viewpoint of history, Nazi anti-semitism was only the latest outbreak of the long-term program of the Catholic Church to rid Europe of the main competing religion. Nazism, like Lutheranism, was only a sect of the Christian culture that created it.
Fortunately, Europe since the war has rejected religion of all kinds and embarked on an experiment: the first truly secular society in history. An aggressive secularism, following the French model, is the best hope of avoiding any future holocausts.
A good book, disclosing the role of the Roman Catholic Church in setting the stage for the Nazis is
Historically, the Jews always got along better with the Moslems than with the Christians and were better off in Muslim countries than in Christian ones. In Spain during the Reconquista there were Jewish military mercenary companies that fought for the Moors against the Christians. Under Moslem rule the Jews were a prosperous and privileged middle class between the Moorish rulers and the Christian peasants. It was Muslim rulers who gave refuge to Jews expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, and there are still Jewish communities in some Islamic countries who speak Old Spanish at home.
It was the Christians, not the Moslems, who have always been the enemies of the Jews. The attitude of the Nazis toward the Jews was not something that came out of nowhere. It was the end result of centuries of anti-Jewish preaching by the Catholic Church, which laid the groundwork for it.
The Quran, on the other hand, urges followers to deal justly with the Jews because they are "People of the Book", from whom Mohamed took many of his teachings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book
Islam also orders followers to obey the laws of whatever country they live in, even if those laws are unjust, on the principle that anarchy is worse than tyranny.
And in real life, unlike in Hollywood movies, there are no "good guys" and "bad guys". No one side in a political dispute is all good or all bad. No group is completely in the right or completely in the wrong. Terrorism is a tactic that has been resorted to in every conflict throughout history. Guy Fawkes was a terrorist for the Roman Catholics. American Indians resisting the advance of white civilization in the 19th century were terrorists at that time. It is well-documented that right after the end of World War Two, a group of Jewish terrorists seriously proposed to poison the drinking water supply of the German city of Neurenberg for revenge against all Germans for what the Nazi regime had done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakam
Both sides have committed atrocities. That has nothing to do with their religion or culture. It is in the nature of political disputes that a minority will take them so seriously that they overstep the normal bounds of behavior. Inflammatory propaganda only contributes to that.
The current issue between Israelis and Palestinians is about real estate, not religion or culture. In fact, most of the population on both sides are fully secularized in their lifestyles and values and religion and traditional culture are not of great importance to them, regardless of how they may choose to identify themselves in today's overheated culture of identity politics.
Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have justified grievances, but they both have more in common than they admit. And most of the people who are strongly prejudiced against one of the two groups are also usually enemies of the other. Both sides would do well to keep that in mind.
"An aggressive secularism, following the French model, is the best hope of avoiding any future holocausts."
"The current issue between Israelis and Palestinians is about real estate, not religion or culture. In fact, most of the population on both sides are fully secularized"
Uh?? The Hamas pogrom on October 7 was about real estate? Not hatred of Jews as such? Not based on the virulent anti-semitism they are raised on and which is taught in schools to Palestinian children, which is embedded in their charter, and prompted the killers to cry Allah Akubar, to the world? That doesn't sound very 'secular' to me.
Only one side has shown any willingness at all to live in peace with the other, and that is the people of the only liberal democracy in the region where people of different faiths can live together and enjoy human rights. There is no equivalence here. At this point, it's clearly 'secular' vs. religious fanaticism driving apocalyptic hatred, your history notwithstanding.
The Palestinians and the Israelis both want the same thing: They both want to others to get out of their country and go away. The palestinians want the Jews to go back home to Europe where they belong and leave the Middle East. The Israelis want the Palestinians to go someplace else and leave the land they now inhabit to them.
If, instead of Britain giving part of the Palestine mandate to the Zionists to settle as a homeland for Europe's displaced Jews, the Americans had given the Zionist movement land in Mexico, we would now be hearing about Mexican terrorists. The root of the conflict is that at the time, in 1948, the dominant nations simply did not take into account the uncivilized natives who lived in the lands the Europeans controlled. I have heard from Americans for example, that ''When our ancestors first came to America they found an empty continent with nobody living here. All they had to do was get rid of the Indians and move in.''
This conflict has now gone on for three generations and will never end until one side or the other is driven out of the disputed land for good. The Palestinians regard the land that is now called Israel as theirs because their people had always lived there and the Jews regard the land now occupied by Palestinians as rightfully theirs because they think their remote ancestors lived there 2,000 years ago and were driven out by the Romans. This preposterous story is at the root of the Zionist claim to have a right to that land.
Right now it looks as if the Israelis will at last succeed in forcing the Palestinians to go away and live someplace else. But if the USA, for domestic political reasons, stopped supporting them, the rest of the world might invade Israel and drive the Israelis out instead.
Nothing is ever certain. The generally tolerant attitude towards Jews held by most Americans could change if, for example, Israel used a nuclear weapon against a civilian population center, or if Israel were defeated and the Jewish population fled the Middle East and wanted entry to America. 5,000,000 Jewish refugees from the Middle East would not be welcomed any more than would 5,000,000 refugees from anywhere else.
You are wrong on two counts. First, Israel does NOT want the Palestinians to get out of their country and go away. It's shown again and again that it is a tolerant liberal democracy willing to live with others. One, 20% of Israel is Arabs, who enjoy full human rights, participate in government and even sit on the Supreme Court. Two, until recent events, Israel had a program allowing up to 15,000 Palestinian workers from Gaza employment opportunities in Israel. Three, in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, stopped their occupation, and provided the infrastructure for the Palestinian people to make their own choices. That was the closest to a two state solution they ever came. Speaking of, at least FIVE times, Israel attempted to negotiate a two state solution, which was rejected by Palestinian authorities every time. All of this and more shows a genuine willingness to share the region with the Palestinian people. Anything from their side? Absolutely nothing. Any liberal democracy allowing Jews to live and work in ANY of 22!! Muslim/Arab led countries? None. Israel, in fact, is a MODEL of a how a nation state should be run.
Second, your history is a weak and wrong-headed attempt to paint Israel with the same brush as colonial empire building in the New World. It is NOT analogous in any way. Israels claim on the region as the ancestral or 'indigenous' homeland of the Jews is incontestable, not at all 'preposterous'. The Jews had settlements and kingdoms for at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ. All throughout the successive imperial powers that tried to drive the Jews out, they were able to maintain a presence there. It was never 'empty'. And your notion that the Europe is 'where they belong' is laughable. The whole point of the post-war negotiations that led to the creation of Israel was to legitimize a homeland where they can truly belong, as Europe, Russia, and virtually anywhere else was NOT it.
What about the Palestinians? Where do they belong? Well, there are 22 Muslim / Arab countries in the region where you'd think they might fit in, but no, NONE of those countries that cheer for their 'liberation' will lift a finger to help them. Why? Because they are all tribal, theocratic tyrannies who cannot abide the thought of a minority population within their borders. That's one reason. The other is purely strategic. They are being USED by their fellow Muslims (including Hamas) to foment a conflict that will mean the end of Israel. Especially Iran, but others, too, WANT the war as a proxy for their desire to destroy the state of Israel. If they lift one humanitarian finger to bring about peace in the Middle East, then Israel 'wins', and THAT cannot be allowed to happen. Palestinians are not the victims of Israel, they are the victims of every anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-Western, anti-liberal democracy force in the region. They are tragic scapegoats of history, second only to the Jews.
The modern European Jews are not descended from the Bibical Jews. They are descended from Europeans who converted to Judaism during the Middle Ages for various political / theological reasons.
I have been to Israel and seen the crowds in Tel Aviv. I saw people who had blue eyes and blond hair and looked like Northern Europeans. They or their parents or grandparents came from Germany, Poland, or the Baltitics and spoke Yiddish, which is a German dialect. I saw big, beefy individuals with red hair and Slavic features who came from Russia and look like other Russians. I saw short, dark people with Arab features who came from Yemen and looked like Yemenites.
To think all these differing groups have a common ancestry and are more closely related to each other than to the population of the countries they came from, whom they closely resemble, flies in the face of all that has ever been observed of genetics.
The idea to start a ''homeland'' for Europe's displaced Jews after WW2 was a bad mistake made possible only by Eurocentric hubris. The progressive response to the Nazi attempt at genocide to prevent a replay would have been to encourage assimilation and intermarriage into the mainstream of humanity so no future generations of Jews could be found. Zionism and the idea of a Jewish nation-state was the reactionary path and accepted the same theory of Judaism the Nazis had followed: that being Jewish was a matter of geneology, not faith and practices.
Many of the most religious Jews disagree with the Zionist ideology. They consider being a Jew a matter of beliefs and behavior, not geneology, and think Judaism is better seen as a major world religion with a universal message and needs a global presence to deliver it. These religious Jews consider a mostly secular state for ''Jews-by-geneology-only'' to be a travesty.
Before the formation of Israel most of the Middle Eastern countries had Jewish communities that had lived there for centuries without conflict. It is only because of the Israelis usurpation of the land of the Palestinians that those long lasting Jewish communities have mostly been subjected to hostility and have left their homes for either Israel or someplace else.
If Israel is so tolerant and liberal to non Jews, try to get a bus on a Friday afternoon, a civil wedding, or a civil divorce. None of which are possible because Israel does not allow anyone regardless of religion to disobey Jewish religious rules.
Wow. 'Attempt' at genocide? At least you're giving the Nazis credit for effort, if not achievement. You win the minimization of genocide award of the day. And it would be 'progressive' to encourage assimilation so that 'no future generations of Jews could be found'? That's strange. Every political progressive I know extols 'identity' above all else. Do progressives advocate the 'assimilation' of NA indigenous peoples or black Americans? Try it and be prepared to be called a far right white supremacist bigot! But I guess that's not important when the goal is to erase the Jews. Then, in clear contradiction, you seem to support the idea of Judaism being a world wide 'universal' religion where Jews just live anywhere. Don't know how that's going to work when the future generations of Jews have literally disappeared due to 'progressive' assimilation! As for Jewish communities in other Arab countries, you've all but admitted the blatant anti-semitism of the Muslims who upon Israel being established, blamed their Jewish neighbours and drove them out. That's essentially what racist America did to their neighbour Japanese Americans during WWII, try to drive them out because other Japanese behaved badly. You think that's justified?? And again, you are eliding the actual history of the original Jews who were NATIVE to the land long, long before the Palestinians. It's the Arabs who overtook the region, not the Jews. And it's funny, you paint a nice picture of a very multicultural (liberal) Tel Aviv as if it's something that just doesn't belong because it's just too European, ie. NOT Jewish enough, so, what? Go back to where they came from? Which is literally nowhere they were every accepted? They just can't win, can they? Sorry, the ridiculous twists and turns and incoherence in your thinking is as far as I can tell driven by an anti-Israel, anti-Jew agenda. That's it for me.
Humans are so easily fooled into tribalistic thinking. But we have to be better than that. Reason and critical thinking are the opposite of prejudice. Thanks for sharing!
It's astounding. You make a compelling case about the roots of unreasonable and unfair generalizations, and then you do it yourself: "This goes a long way to explaining the madness we have been witnessing on college campuses since October 7, in which left-wing students are celebrating the rape, murder, and mutilation of over 1400 Israeli women, men, and children by Hamas terrorists."
They aren't "celebrating the rape, murder, and mutilation." They're angered by Israel's policies -- as are many Israelis and many Jews around the world. They're especially angry that the Israeli response appears to be to kill everyone in Gaza and let God sort them out.
I say "appears to be." It might not be the case. Truth is the first casualty, yada yada yada, and we can pretty sure Hamas and not Israel blew up the hospital.
But when people sincerely believe in good faith that an entity is acting with reckless disregard for people it considers to be "others" -- and when our OWN country has legislation pending that would ban refugees from that "othered" population -- it's about time to look at the nuances.
My enemies are the people who need enemies. I don't care who they are or what entity they represent. Anyone who "others" groups of people, including the many people I know who regard Palestinians as less than human, is an enemy of humanity.
You aren't paying attention. Many indeed are celebrating. Quotes from activist leaders about the pogrom included 'awesome', 'exhilarating' (Cornell professor) 'amazing'. The chant 'from the river to the sea' is NOT a criticism of Israeli policies. It's a call for MORE of the same, a call for genocide. These people are very happy about the massacre. If you see 'Free Palestine' sign with an image of a paraglider, you know it comes from a celebrant who thought it was 'awesome' that they were able to mow down over 200 young people at a music festival. Policies my ass. Pure hatred.
Quite true, all of it. Frankly, the "problem" with the Jews (not to be confused with the Nazi 'Jewish Problem') has to do more with culture than religion. Likewise Islam. Islamists are likewise persecuted because of xenophobia, not their religious beliefs. Just the big <sigh> here. What was it that Golda Meir said? "We will only have peace with the Arabs when they learn to love their children more than they hate us."
"I am against my brother; My brother and I are against our cousin; My brother and my cousin and I are against the world."
Isn't that a Bedouin proverb? Great quote, it definitely applies here.
Yes, I believe so. After reading this piece I immediately thought about it because it invokes the nature of tribalism.
Hitler was not unusual. His attitude toward Judaism was close to the Central European norm, in a tradition going back centuries. Look at the anti-semitic writings of Martin Luther for example. Anyone writing such things today would be arrested for volkverhetzung.
The anti-semitic teachings of the Catholic church over hundreds of years set the stage for the extermination of the Jews. If there was any single root cause of Nazism, that was it. Hitler and almost all the Nazi leadership were brought up in the church and instructed in it’s teachings. They remained church members in good standing throughout their lives. In fact, when they had lost the war, many Nazis were helped to escape by the church, which hid them in monasteries and got them safe passage to South America, where they were granted refuge at the request of the Vatican.
Seen from the long viewpoint of history, Nazi anti-semitism was only the latest outbreak of the long-term program of the Catholic Church to rid Europe of the main competing religion. Nazism, like Lutheranism, was only a sect of the Christian culture that created it.
Fortunately, Europe since the war has rejected religion of all kinds and embarked on an experiment: the first truly secular society in history. An aggressive secularism, following the French model, is the best hope of avoiding any future holocausts.
A good book, disclosing the role of the Roman Catholic Church in setting the stage for the Nazis is
https://www.amazon.com/Popes-Against-Jews-Vaticans-Anti-Semitism/dp/0375706054
Historically, the Jews always got along better with the Moslems than with the Christians and were better off in Muslim countries than in Christian ones. In Spain during the Reconquista there were Jewish military mercenary companies that fought for the Moors against the Christians. Under Moslem rule the Jews were a prosperous and privileged middle class between the Moorish rulers and the Christian peasants. It was Muslim rulers who gave refuge to Jews expelled from Spain by the Inquisition, and there are still Jewish communities in some Islamic countries who speak Old Spanish at home.
It was the Christians, not the Moslems, who have always been the enemies of the Jews. The attitude of the Nazis toward the Jews was not something that came out of nowhere. It was the end result of centuries of anti-Jewish preaching by the Catholic Church, which laid the groundwork for it.
https://www.amazon.com/Popes-Against-Jews-Vaticans-Anti-Semitism/dp/0375406239
And the volkverhetzung anti-Jewish rantings of Martin Luther, founder of Protestantism, are also well-documented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_and_antisemitism
The Quran, on the other hand, urges followers to deal justly with the Jews because they are "People of the Book", from whom Mohamed took many of his teachings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_of_the_Book
Islam also orders followers to obey the laws of whatever country they live in, even if those laws are unjust, on the principle that anarchy is worse than tyranny.
And in real life, unlike in Hollywood movies, there are no "good guys" and "bad guys". No one side in a political dispute is all good or all bad. No group is completely in the right or completely in the wrong. Terrorism is a tactic that has been resorted to in every conflict throughout history. Guy Fawkes was a terrorist for the Roman Catholics. American Indians resisting the advance of white civilization in the 19th century were terrorists at that time. It is well-documented that right after the end of World War Two, a group of Jewish terrorists seriously proposed to poison the drinking water supply of the German city of Neurenberg for revenge against all Germans for what the Nazi regime had done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakam
And Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing more than 100 British Army officers who were staying there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing
Both sides have committed atrocities. That has nothing to do with their religion or culture. It is in the nature of political disputes that a minority will take them so seriously that they overstep the normal bounds of behavior. Inflammatory propaganda only contributes to that.
The current issue between Israelis and Palestinians is about real estate, not religion or culture. In fact, most of the population on both sides are fully secularized in their lifestyles and values and religion and traditional culture are not of great importance to them, regardless of how they may choose to identify themselves in today's overheated culture of identity politics.
Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have justified grievances, but they both have more in common than they admit. And most of the people who are strongly prejudiced against one of the two groups are also usually enemies of the other. Both sides would do well to keep that in mind.
"An aggressive secularism, following the French model, is the best hope of avoiding any future holocausts."
"The current issue between Israelis and Palestinians is about real estate, not religion or culture. In fact, most of the population on both sides are fully secularized"
Uh?? The Hamas pogrom on October 7 was about real estate? Not hatred of Jews as such? Not based on the virulent anti-semitism they are raised on and which is taught in schools to Palestinian children, which is embedded in their charter, and prompted the killers to cry Allah Akubar, to the world? That doesn't sound very 'secular' to me.
Only one side has shown any willingness at all to live in peace with the other, and that is the people of the only liberal democracy in the region where people of different faiths can live together and enjoy human rights. There is no equivalence here. At this point, it's clearly 'secular' vs. religious fanaticism driving apocalyptic hatred, your history notwithstanding.
The Palestinians and the Israelis both want the same thing: They both want to others to get out of their country and go away. The palestinians want the Jews to go back home to Europe where they belong and leave the Middle East. The Israelis want the Palestinians to go someplace else and leave the land they now inhabit to them.
If, instead of Britain giving part of the Palestine mandate to the Zionists to settle as a homeland for Europe's displaced Jews, the Americans had given the Zionist movement land in Mexico, we would now be hearing about Mexican terrorists. The root of the conflict is that at the time, in 1948, the dominant nations simply did not take into account the uncivilized natives who lived in the lands the Europeans controlled. I have heard from Americans for example, that ''When our ancestors first came to America they found an empty continent with nobody living here. All they had to do was get rid of the Indians and move in.''
This conflict has now gone on for three generations and will never end until one side or the other is driven out of the disputed land for good. The Palestinians regard the land that is now called Israel as theirs because their people had always lived there and the Jews regard the land now occupied by Palestinians as rightfully theirs because they think their remote ancestors lived there 2,000 years ago and were driven out by the Romans. This preposterous story is at the root of the Zionist claim to have a right to that land.
Right now it looks as if the Israelis will at last succeed in forcing the Palestinians to go away and live someplace else. But if the USA, for domestic political reasons, stopped supporting them, the rest of the world might invade Israel and drive the Israelis out instead.
Nothing is ever certain. The generally tolerant attitude towards Jews held by most Americans could change if, for example, Israel used a nuclear weapon against a civilian population center, or if Israel were defeated and the Jewish population fled the Middle East and wanted entry to America. 5,000,000 Jewish refugees from the Middle East would not be welcomed any more than would 5,000,000 refugees from anywhere else.
You are wrong on two counts. First, Israel does NOT want the Palestinians to get out of their country and go away. It's shown again and again that it is a tolerant liberal democracy willing to live with others. One, 20% of Israel is Arabs, who enjoy full human rights, participate in government and even sit on the Supreme Court. Two, until recent events, Israel had a program allowing up to 15,000 Palestinian workers from Gaza employment opportunities in Israel. Three, in 2005, Israel withdrew from Gaza, stopped their occupation, and provided the infrastructure for the Palestinian people to make their own choices. That was the closest to a two state solution they ever came. Speaking of, at least FIVE times, Israel attempted to negotiate a two state solution, which was rejected by Palestinian authorities every time. All of this and more shows a genuine willingness to share the region with the Palestinian people. Anything from their side? Absolutely nothing. Any liberal democracy allowing Jews to live and work in ANY of 22!! Muslim/Arab led countries? None. Israel, in fact, is a MODEL of a how a nation state should be run.
Second, your history is a weak and wrong-headed attempt to paint Israel with the same brush as colonial empire building in the New World. It is NOT analogous in any way. Israels claim on the region as the ancestral or 'indigenous' homeland of the Jews is incontestable, not at all 'preposterous'. The Jews had settlements and kingdoms for at least a thousand years before the birth of Christ. All throughout the successive imperial powers that tried to drive the Jews out, they were able to maintain a presence there. It was never 'empty'. And your notion that the Europe is 'where they belong' is laughable. The whole point of the post-war negotiations that led to the creation of Israel was to legitimize a homeland where they can truly belong, as Europe, Russia, and virtually anywhere else was NOT it.
What about the Palestinians? Where do they belong? Well, there are 22 Muslim / Arab countries in the region where you'd think they might fit in, but no, NONE of those countries that cheer for their 'liberation' will lift a finger to help them. Why? Because they are all tribal, theocratic tyrannies who cannot abide the thought of a minority population within their borders. That's one reason. The other is purely strategic. They are being USED by their fellow Muslims (including Hamas) to foment a conflict that will mean the end of Israel. Especially Iran, but others, too, WANT the war as a proxy for their desire to destroy the state of Israel. If they lift one humanitarian finger to bring about peace in the Middle East, then Israel 'wins', and THAT cannot be allowed to happen. Palestinians are not the victims of Israel, they are the victims of every anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, anti-Western, anti-liberal democracy force in the region. They are tragic scapegoats of history, second only to the Jews.
The modern European Jews are not descended from the Bibical Jews. They are descended from Europeans who converted to Judaism during the Middle Ages for various political / theological reasons.
I have been to Israel and seen the crowds in Tel Aviv. I saw people who had blue eyes and blond hair and looked like Northern Europeans. They or their parents or grandparents came from Germany, Poland, or the Baltitics and spoke Yiddish, which is a German dialect. I saw big, beefy individuals with red hair and Slavic features who came from Russia and look like other Russians. I saw short, dark people with Arab features who came from Yemen and looked like Yemenites.
To think all these differing groups have a common ancestry and are more closely related to each other than to the population of the countries they came from, whom they closely resemble, flies in the face of all that has ever been observed of genetics.
The idea to start a ''homeland'' for Europe's displaced Jews after WW2 was a bad mistake made possible only by Eurocentric hubris. The progressive response to the Nazi attempt at genocide to prevent a replay would have been to encourage assimilation and intermarriage into the mainstream of humanity so no future generations of Jews could be found. Zionism and the idea of a Jewish nation-state was the reactionary path and accepted the same theory of Judaism the Nazis had followed: that being Jewish was a matter of geneology, not faith and practices.
Many of the most religious Jews disagree with the Zionist ideology. They consider being a Jew a matter of beliefs and behavior, not geneology, and think Judaism is better seen as a major world religion with a universal message and needs a global presence to deliver it. These religious Jews consider a mostly secular state for ''Jews-by-geneology-only'' to be a travesty.
Before the formation of Israel most of the Middle Eastern countries had Jewish communities that had lived there for centuries without conflict. It is only because of the Israelis usurpation of the land of the Palestinians that those long lasting Jewish communities have mostly been subjected to hostility and have left their homes for either Israel or someplace else.
If Israel is so tolerant and liberal to non Jews, try to get a bus on a Friday afternoon, a civil wedding, or a civil divorce. None of which are possible because Israel does not allow anyone regardless of religion to disobey Jewish religious rules.
Wow. 'Attempt' at genocide? At least you're giving the Nazis credit for effort, if not achievement. You win the minimization of genocide award of the day. And it would be 'progressive' to encourage assimilation so that 'no future generations of Jews could be found'? That's strange. Every political progressive I know extols 'identity' above all else. Do progressives advocate the 'assimilation' of NA indigenous peoples or black Americans? Try it and be prepared to be called a far right white supremacist bigot! But I guess that's not important when the goal is to erase the Jews. Then, in clear contradiction, you seem to support the idea of Judaism being a world wide 'universal' religion where Jews just live anywhere. Don't know how that's going to work when the future generations of Jews have literally disappeared due to 'progressive' assimilation! As for Jewish communities in other Arab countries, you've all but admitted the blatant anti-semitism of the Muslims who upon Israel being established, blamed their Jewish neighbours and drove them out. That's essentially what racist America did to their neighbour Japanese Americans during WWII, try to drive them out because other Japanese behaved badly. You think that's justified?? And again, you are eliding the actual history of the original Jews who were NATIVE to the land long, long before the Palestinians. It's the Arabs who overtook the region, not the Jews. And it's funny, you paint a nice picture of a very multicultural (liberal) Tel Aviv as if it's something that just doesn't belong because it's just too European, ie. NOT Jewish enough, so, what? Go back to where they came from? Which is literally nowhere they were every accepted? They just can't win, can they? Sorry, the ridiculous twists and turns and incoherence in your thinking is as far as I can tell driven by an anti-Israel, anti-Jew agenda. That's it for me.
🤡
Humans are so easily fooled into tribalistic thinking. But we have to be better than that. Reason and critical thinking are the opposite of prejudice. Thanks for sharing!
It's astounding. You make a compelling case about the roots of unreasonable and unfair generalizations, and then you do it yourself: "This goes a long way to explaining the madness we have been witnessing on college campuses since October 7, in which left-wing students are celebrating the rape, murder, and mutilation of over 1400 Israeli women, men, and children by Hamas terrorists."
They aren't "celebrating the rape, murder, and mutilation." They're angered by Israel's policies -- as are many Israelis and many Jews around the world. They're especially angry that the Israeli response appears to be to kill everyone in Gaza and let God sort them out.
I say "appears to be." It might not be the case. Truth is the first casualty, yada yada yada, and we can pretty sure Hamas and not Israel blew up the hospital.
But when people sincerely believe in good faith that an entity is acting with reckless disregard for people it considers to be "others" -- and when our OWN country has legislation pending that would ban refugees from that "othered" population -- it's about time to look at the nuances.
My enemies are the people who need enemies. I don't care who they are or what entity they represent. Anyone who "others" groups of people, including the many people I know who regard Palestinians as less than human, is an enemy of humanity.
You aren't paying attention. Many indeed are celebrating. Quotes from activist leaders about the pogrom included 'awesome', 'exhilarating' (Cornell professor) 'amazing'. The chant 'from the river to the sea' is NOT a criticism of Israeli policies. It's a call for MORE of the same, a call for genocide. These people are very happy about the massacre. If you see 'Free Palestine' sign with an image of a paraglider, you know it comes from a celebrant who thought it was 'awesome' that they were able to mow down over 200 young people at a music festival. Policies my ass. Pure hatred.