The Invention of the Jewish People is a book written by Shlomo Sand, an Israeli professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv.
The author wasn’t probing a belief system but Zionist fabrications of a spurious common lineage for people of the Jewish faith.
Sand argues that the idea of Jews having a common ethnic identity is implausible because, as with Christianity and Islam, Judaism was originally a “proselytising religion”.
The notion of Judaism as a “race”, rather than a religion of various races, is without foundation. The results of a recently published study by Israeli-American geneticist Dr Eran Elhaik at John Hopkins University have scientifically and genetically validated Sand’s research.
Modern political Zionism, which otherwise rejects the Christian Bible, adopted the untested story of “Jewish exile” to establish a mythical linkage between European Jews and the Middle East.
The idea of a “nation race” was progressively developed and reinforced over centuries among segregated Jewish communities in Europe.
With the rise of German nationalism in the 19th century, Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz “retrospectively” crafted a discrete identity for the ghettoized people – mapping their origin to an old kingdom and wandering exiles.
The exiles tales transpired from a Christian myth of “divine punishment” imposed on Jews for rejecting the new religion.
The parable is likely to have originated from the Old Testament story of Jews wandering the desert for disobeying God and worshipping a golden calf.
Christians propagated the concept of exile to lure “disobeying” Jews to the new religion, becoming their saviour from another eternal banishment.
Modern political Zionism, which otherwise rejects the Christian Bible, adopted the untested story of “Jewish exile” to establish a mythical linkage between European Jews and the Middle East.
But Jewish history tells us that the Romans did not expel the original Jews from Palestine when they crushed the Simon bar Kokhba revolt in 136 AD but instead barred them only from city of Jerusalem – and even then they were allowed to visit it during Tisha B’Av, the annual fasting day on the ninth day of the month of Av in the Hebrew calendar.
Under Christianity and during the Roman Empire a large number of native Jews converted to Christianity and, with the advent of Islam, most adopted the new religion and assimilated under the new power.
Followers of the first monotheistic religion continued to have a presence in Palestine hundreds of years after the waning of the Roman Empire.
The last recorded history of an autonomous Jewish entity was under the tutelage of the Persian Empire in 614 AD, before it was dismantled by Byzantine forces in 625 AD.
A little over 10 years later Palestine was conquered by the Muslims and became part of the new Arab and Muslim community.
Under Christianity and during the Roman Empire a large number of native Jews converted to Christianity and, with the advent of Islam, most adopted the new religion and assimilated under the new power.
In addition to the descendants of the Canaanites, the original denizens before patriarch Abraham’s arrival from Mesopotamia, Sand concludes that today’s Muslim and Christian Palestinians are actually the true progenies of the original Jews.
So if there was no exile, where did European Jews come from?
Sand suggested that most of today’s Jews did not originate from the Middle East.
He argues that the European (Ashkenazi) Jewish ancestry can be traced back to the Caucasus region.
Founded on a mélange of myths and manufactured historical tales, Israel has failed the archaeological test of time and is now exposed by DNA science.
In the 8th century, the Khazars’ subjects and subordinate tribes experienced the largest religious conversion in the history of Judaism.
The recent study by John Hopkins geneticist Dr Elhaik confirms that the common genome structure of the European Jew gravitated towards an origin in old Khazaria.
“The majority of Jews do not have Middle Eastern genetic component,” he told Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Founded on a mélange of myths and manufactured historical tales, Israel has failed the archaeological test of time and is now exposed by DNA science.
Today’s genetics prove unequivocally that in 1948 “the children of the original Jews” were replaced by 8th century converts with no roots in the Middle East.
A version of this article was first published in the Gulf Daily News. The version here is published by permission of Jamal Kanj
River toSeaUprooted Palestinian The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
Recently while visiting the blog Wake Up From Your Slumber I came across the interview with E. Michael Jones that you can hear in the four videos embedded below. I had actually read Jones’ book, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, a year or two back and had for a long time now been intending to post something on it. Problem is where do you begin? The book is 1200 pages long and covers some 2000 years of history. How do you condense all that down to a single blog post? But after listening to the interview below, I finally decided to give it a whirl.
Of course it always helps to know where people are coming from, so I’ll mention right off the bat that Jones is a Roman Catholic, and one of the focuses of his book, perhaps the main one, is the gradual erosion, over a number of centuries, of the Church’s power and authority in Europe, a process in which Jews, as the author shows, played very key and very active roles every step of the way (along with the help of willing Christians), and the eventual displacement of that authority by the rising tide of Jewish power. This is an extremely important area of study because for many, many centuries it was the Catholic Church that kept Jewish power in check. Today the Church no longer plays that role, leaving a void that Islam, fortunately, has stepped in to fill, and while Islam has not been able, at least thus far, to thoroughly check Jewish power as successfully as Christianity once did, it nonetheless stands as one of the only major remaining obstacles to total global domination by Jewish Zionists, which is why Christians and Muslims, now more than ever, need to unite (but I’m getting a bit off topic here).
Initially upon picking up Jones’ book, it was hard for me to wrap my mind around the word “revolutionary” insofar as his use of the term. Having grown up in the sixties, I was accustomed to thinking of revolutionaries as the good guys (think Che Guevara, etc.), and the word has always had, for me, a positive, rather than negative, connotation. But what Jones refers to is that process I described in the previous paragraph, i.e. of overthrowing the power of the Catholic Church and replacing it with Jewish power. Or, to look at it another way (since Jones is a Catholic), the overthrow of God. That’s of course one that secular-minded Westerners would probably choke on their food laughing over, but consider the term Moharebeh. A concept found in Islamic law, the word means “waging war against God.” The fact that no comparable word exists in the English language (or even a comparable idea of such) is probably testimony to the extent of the collapse of the church’s moral authority and the widespread feelings of alienation and powerlessness that permeate Western society today. No such collapse has occurred in the Muslim world, though of course the Zionists are doing their damnedest to engineer it—in Libya, Syria, Iran, and elsewhere.
So in a sense—from Jones’ standpoint, and certainly this is true in the West—the “revolution” has already occurred, and at this point what we are waging—that is to say those of us who oppose Israel and seek to restrain the power of Jewish lobbies in our respective countries—is a counterrevolution. It’s good to understand this, and to make this distinction, when considering the areas into which Jones ventures in this book.
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit has a total of 32 chapters, but in this review, I’ll focus mainly on three—the third chapter, entitled “Rome Discovers the Talmud”; Chapter number 7, “Reuchlin vs. Pfefferkorn”; and the 24th chapter, “The Second Vatican Council Begins.” Chapter 24, along with a subsequent related chapter, covers the Church’s passage of Nostra Aetate, the 1965 document that resulted in a capitulation to Jewish power and ushered in the modern era of “interfaith dialogue”—efforts that have led to little other than Christians being spat upon in Israel and their faith ridiculed in American media.
Rome Discovers the Talmud
Believe it or not, the Church first became acquainted with the contents of the Talmud way back in the year 1236. Before this, the collection of rabbinical writings was virtually unknown among Christians. Its discovery came about when a Jew named Nicholas Donin converted to Christianity and went public with what it contained. As you may imagine, Church leaders were not too thrilled. The church at this time had long operated under Sicut Judaeis non, a policy that had been articulated by Pope Gregory the Great, under which Jews were not to be harmed—but at the same time were to be given no positions of influence. The pope in power at the time Donin made his disclosures was Gregory IX. According to Jones:
He was shocked by what he discovered, but he did not abrogate Sicut Judaeis non and its prohibition against harming the Jew. What changed was his understanding of what the Jews believed and how they acted on those beliefs.
On June 9, 1239, Pope Gregory responded to Donin’s 35 petitions by dispatching him with a letter to William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris. His letter substantiates the changed perception of Jews after discovery of the Talmud. The Jews, Gregory wrote, “so we have heard, are not content with the Old Law which God gave to Moses in writing: they even ignore it completely and affirm that God gave another Law which is called ‘Talmud,’ that is ‘Teaching,’ handed down to Moses orally…In this is contained matter so abusive and so unspeakable that it arouses shame in those who mention it and horror in those who hear it.” The offenses are so great that Gregory uses the word “crime” to describe them. He also claims the Talmud is “the chief cause that holds the Jews obstinate in their perfidy.” He ordered “on the first Saturday of Lent to come, in the morning which the Jews are gathered in the synagogues, you shall, by our order seize all the books of the Jews who live in your districts and have those books carefully guarded in the possession of the Dominican and Franciscan friars.” If the friars found the books offensive, they were to burn them.
Eventually a commission was convened to study the books, its members ultimately finding them “full of innumerable errors, abuses, blasphemies and wickedness.” The panel concluded that the books “cannot be tolerated in the name of God without injury to the Christian faith.” Blasphemies against Christ in the Talmud, along with its injunctions about defrauding unsuspecting goyim, threatened “the conditions under which Jews were tolerated,” as Jones notes, and also “called for rethinking the whole social compact.” The debate raged for several years until finally, in June of 1240, a public forum, under royal auspices, was held, featuring Donin in a debate with a Rabbi Yehiel ben Joseph:
One Jewish commentator claims “the entire event epitomized the declining status of Jews in that century and their transformation in Christian minds into little more than embodiments of blasphemous doctrine.” The rabbi was dumbfounded that he had to defend Jewish esoteric writings in a hostile environment. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Rabbi Yehiel, lacking precedent for conducting a disputation of this sort, didn’t know how to respond. When asked whether it were true that the Talmud claimed “Jesus was condemned to an eternity in hell, immersed in ‘boiling excrement’” and Mary, his mother, was a whore, the Rabbi could only respond, yes, those passages were in the Talmud but they did not refer to “that” Jesus or “that” Mary. “Not every Louis born in France is the king of France,” Yehiel maintained, giving new meaning to the term “chutzpah.” “Has it not happened,” he continued, “that two men were born in the same city, had the same name, and died in the same manner? There are many such cases.” One Jewish historian referred to Rabbi Yehiel’s denial as the birth of Jewish humor. A Christian account of the debate, however, failed to see the humor in his statement, “Concerning this Jesus, he confessed that he was born out of adultery and that he is punished in hell in boiling excrement and that he lived at the time of Titus.” But Rabbi Yehiel said, “this Jesus is different from our Jesus. However, he is unable to say who he was, whence it is clear that he lied.”
Having exploded his own credibility, Yehiel could do little to refute Donin’s claim that the Talmud sanctioned criminal behavior, including “murder, theft, and religious intolerance.” The Talmud also “included strictures against trusting Gentiles, honoring them or even returning a lost piece of property to them.”
The result of the debate was a public burning of the Talmud in Paris, and as Jones remarks, “The Jewish religion was now clearly seen not as biblical Judaism, but rather as a heretical deviation from the Old Testament.” This is an extremely important point, because by 1962 and the convening of the Second Vatican Council, the contents of the Talmud would substantially disappear down the memory hole and Jews once again would be seen as merely carrying on the tradition of biblical Judaism.
Following the discovery of the Talmud, the Church made Jewish conversions a top priority, yet at the same time, Jews came under closer scrutiny by the Inquisition. In terms of public opinion, “they became revolutionaries, outlaws, and subversives, and by the end of the 13th century, they were universally recognized as such,” says Jones. “The expulsions that followed were the official recognition of status that had its roots in the discovery of the Talmud.” Yet in spite of this, “the Church never changed its position that no one had the right to harm the Jew,” and when Jews came under attack by angry mobs, “the popes were their first defenders.” In fact, the protection they enjoyed from the popes was often viewed critically by kings and princes, who regarded the Jews as subversives. And while there was a “crescendo of conversions,” a number of expulsions also took place. Jews were expelled from Cologne in 1424, from Speyer in 1435, from Mainz in 1438, and finally, in 1492, came the granddaddy of them all—the expulsion of the Jews from Spain by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella.
Reuchlin vs. Pfefferkorn
Some 270 years after Nicholas Donin, history basically repeated itself when yet another Jew, Josef Pfefferkorn, converted to Christianity and—once again—made public disclosures about the Talmud. By this time, however, as Jones relates, “times had changed” in Europe. The Reformation was in its early years, the Hussite Rebellion had occurred in Bohemia, and cracks had begun to appear in the edifice of Church authority. Furthermore, a process of “Judaizing” of the Christian faith was underway in some areas. As described by the author, “The temptation to look for heaven on earth was known as Judaizing, which took messianic inspiration from a distorted interpretation of the Old Testament.” And Christian “reformers” working to undermine Church authority—often aided and abetted by Jews (as was the case in the Hussite revolt)—saw themselves as modern embodiments of the Jews of the Old Testament. As may be expected, millennialism played a major role in their thinking (not unlike Christian Zionists of today). Heinrich Graetz, a Jewish historian quoted by Jones, puts it this way: “Whenever a party in Christendom opposes itself to the ruling church, it assumes a tinge of the Old Testament, not to say Jewish spirit.” The result being, of course, a de-emphasis on the teachings of Christ in favor of the violence and bloodshed of the Old Testament—certainly the case in the matter of the Hussite Rebellion of the early 15th century, as Jones explains:
Inspired by Israelite genocide in the Old Testament, the Hussite warriors of God earned a reputation for cruelty…Newman claims the Hussites had “personal associations with individual Jews and Jewish communities in their country.” He also claims “Jewish groups participated[ed] actively and publicly in the rise and spread of the [Hussite] movement. According to Newman, Jewish support of heretical movements, especially when they threatened to spill over into political revolutions, “run like dark threads through the history of nearly every movement of reform in European Christendom.”
This pattern, i.e. of Jews lending their support to the Christian Judaizers, was to continue over the next few centuries, and as Jones notes, “before long the trajectory was predictable”—the Judaizers would discard the teachings of Jesus in favor of the Old Testament, rising up against the established Church and urging “reform,” taking up the sword in an effort to “bring about heaven on earth.” And every step of the way the Jews were essentially playing them like a violin. Does any of this sound familiar?
Living much of his life in Cologne, Pfefferkorn (1469-1523) was a prolific writer who produced a number of books and pamphlets on Judaism, or what we might today call “Jewish identity.” Like Donin, he “knew Judaism from the inside out,” Jones tells us. In one pamphlet, Ich bin ain Buchlinn der Juden veindt ist mein namen, or The Enemy of the Jews (1509) he discussed the blasphemies against Jesus, Mary and the apostles, as well as the curses against Christians that Jews would incorporate into their daily prayers:
The Jews, said Pfefferkorn, utter “various insults and shameless words…every day against God, Mary, his most worthy mother, and the whole heavenly host.” The Jews call Jesus “mamser ben hanido,” which is to say, “one born from an unclean union.” Although Pfefferkorn doesn’t say so, “mamser” is traditionally translated “bastard.” The Jews are similarly vehement in denouncing Christ’s mother, callher her a “sono,” which Pfefferkorn translates as “a notorious sinner.” Again Pfefferkorn is discrete; the word means “whore.” Pfefferkorn says the Jews call Christian churches “mosschoff” or “beskisse,” that is [latrines or] shithouses.” Additionally, the Jews “hate the sign of the holy cross and find it quite unbearable. If they see pieces of wood or straw on the ground that are by chance arranged roughly in the shape of a cross, they push it apart with their feet that they may no longer have to look at it.” If a Jew “knowingly crosses a churchyard or listens to an organ,” he “believes that his prayers will not be heard by God for 30 days.”
Pfefferkorn converted to Christianity in 1504, along with his wife and child (whereupon he changed his first name from Josef to Johannes), and in one of his earliest writings, Der Juden Spiegel, or Mirror of the Jews, he attacked usury, confessing that prior to his conversion he had earned money from the practice. “I was born in the Jewish faith and am now, by the grace of God, a Christian,” he wrote. “If I continued to associate with Jews and continued to take usury, what would you say other than that I was in serious sin and that I never really became a Christian, and everyone would condemn me by saying that the blood and suffering of Christ had been lost on me.”
As may be expected, Pfefferkorn came under heavy attack from the Jews of his day. He was accused of criminal activity, and especially noteworthy were the charges found in a document that has been traced to a group of Jews in Regensburg: “Among its milder statements was the claim he (Pfefferkorn)was an illiterate butcher,” remarks Jones. “He was neither illiterate nor was he a butcher, an occupation morally less reprehensible than that of moneylender.”
But it wasn’t only the Jews of Pfefferkorn’s own day. Jones quotes a number of Jewish historians whose works have provided accounts of the time, among these the aforementioned Graetz—a 19th century Jew who became one of the first scholars of the modern era to write a compendious history of the Jewish people:
In his groundbreaking History of the Jews, Heinrich Graetz recites the slanders (against Pfefferkorn) faithfully and uncritically and adds a few of his own, calling Pfefferkorn “an ignorant, thoroughly vile creature,” as well as “the scum of the Jewish people,” and a “noisome insect” who was a tool of the “ignorant and fanatical Dominicans” of Cologne, a city known to be “an owls’ nest of light-shunning swaggerers, who endeavored to obscure the dawn of a bright day with the dark clouds of superstition hostile to knowledge.”
The last point is particularly important to keep in mind, for in those years of the early 16th century, “a new day of enlightened tolerance was about to dawn,” and Pfefferkorn’s Jewish contemporaries were quick to take advantage of it in their organized attacks upon him. The Hermetic texts, lost to Western culture during the Middle Ages, had been re-discovered, translated, and published—significant events, for with their appeals to alchemy and magic, the impact this corpus of writings had upon Renaissance thought and culture was considerable. Europe was about to veer in a new direction and the Church was considered an obstacle.
In part two of his Juden veindt, Pfefferkorn included a section entitled “How the Jews Ruin Land and People,” in which he described the process of usury—how it works and how it is used to impoverish the poor. “Thus the poor Christian, when he has nothing further to pawn, must run away and live out his life in poverty, which happens often and many times.” From there Pfefferkorn went on, in part three, to talk about Jews using their wealth to bribe officials as well as to “cause Christians to commit great sins”—sins in the course of which many Christians, both learned and unlearned, are “led astray” and come “to doubt their faith, as I have shown in other books of mine.”
All of this finally won the ear of the Emperor Maxmillian I, who in 1509 authorized this “anti-Semitic” troublemaker (as Pfefferkorn would no doubt be referred today) to travel throughout “the German empire” for purpose of examining Jewish writings and to “destroy all whose contents were hostile to the Bible and the Christian faith.” Subsequently, however, the emperor, bowing to Jewish pressure and bribery, reversed himself, and instead of having the books destroyed, appointed a commission to study them. Pfefferkorn won a seat on the commission, but luckily for the Jews, the panel was to also to hear testimony from Johannes Reuchlin, a man who, though ironically a Gentile, was to become their valiant ally and Pfefferkorn’s chief detractor.
Though Reuchlin is described by Jones as a “Judaizer,” he also was a highly educated man who had written a number of books, and like many of his time he was quite enamored of magic. Esteemed as a one of the great intellects of Europe, Reuchlin was a particularly avid proponent of the Jewish Caballah, and in 1506 he published De Rudiments Hebraicis, the first Hebrew grammar ever written by a non-Jew. Little wonder, then, the Jews celebrated his involvement with the commission.
Reuchlin claimed the Caballah demonstrated the validity of the Christian faith and also corresponded to the esoteric wisdom of Orpheus, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster. By locating the magical power of his system in the Hebrew language, Reuchlin hoped to evade the dichotomy the Church, following the classical tradition, had established. According to that dichotomy, a man either asked for power over nature, in which case his action was known as prayer and dependent on the permissive will of the deity; or he forced the issue by invoking evil spirits. Caballah seemed to indicate another possibility. The possibility of a middle ground between science and prayer based on the magical effects of angelic names in Hebrew seemed theologically unlikely, but that is the course Reuchlin pursued, hoping to evade the censure of those who claimed he was involved in black magic.
After skimming through the Jewish books that had been seized (it appears he never actually read all of them), Reuchlin recommended only two for destruction—Nizzachon and Toledoth Jeschu—meaning he did not find the Talmud objectionable. Pronouncing the latter “a work which is difficult to understand,” he acknowledged there were many strange ideas found therein, but held that this did not justify suppressing it. “If the Talmud were deserving of such condemnation, our ancestors of many hundred years ago, whose zeal for Christianity was much greater than ours, would have burnt it,” he assured. As for the two works which did merit extirpation in his view, Reuchlin insisted they had no standing in the Jewish community and that “even the Jews themselves regard them as apocryphal.”
But what of Jewish attitudes toward non-Jews? Reuchlin expressed the view that “whether they are inimically disposed toward us in their hearts, only God can say.” As gracious and cordial as that sounded, for the Caballah, of course, Reuchlin had nothing but highest praise, calling it “the most secret speech and words of God,” and asserting that “Jewish commentaries should not and cannot be abandoned by the Christian church, for they keep the special characteristics of the Hebrew language before our eyes.” Furthermore, he asserted that “the Bible cannot be interpreted without them.”
Thus having given the Jews a substantially clean bill of health, Reuchlin then turned his attention on their chief nemesis, insisting that Pfefferkorn’s attacks upon the Talmud were most likely motivated “for private reasons.”
In his report, Reuchlin denounced Pfefferkorn’s writings as the work of an ignorant hatemonger, thus establishing the debate’s parameters: the refined man of letters vs. the ignorant “tauf jud,” a racist slur picked up by Reuchlin’s supporters, including Erasmus of Rotterdam. Pfefferkorn called Reuchlin a Judaizer, a term then in the process of losing its opprobrium among educated humanists.
Says Jones, the debate in fact came down to a “Humanist vs. Scholastic mode,” with Pfefferkorn being staunchly defended by the Dominicans and the theology faculties at the Universities of Cologne and Louvain. In fact, every scholar appointed to the Commission, with the exception of Reuchlin himself, supported Pfefferkorn. But it was all to no avail. In the end, the Emperor decided matters in favor of the Jews.
As a result of Reuchlin’s recommendation, the emperor did not renew the mandate to confiscate the Jewish books. Reuchlin had killed the project, and Pfefferkorn was furious. Pfefferkorn correctly claimed “the Jews bribed Christians in high places…and they filled the ears of the good Emperor with false advice, so that His imperial Majesty gave orders to restore the books to the Jews”…
Having one of the most distinguished Christian scholars in Europe defend the Talmud left Jews rubbing their eyes in amazement. The Jews rushed out to buy Reuchlin’s book, and using their commercial connections, made it an instant bestseller, perhaps the first in history.
The incident paved the way for further changes in Europe, some of them huge, for as Jones notes, Reuchlin had gathered support from “virtually the entire Humanist community”—a group that included Martin Luther and Ulrich von Hutten.
The loser, of course, was the authority of the Catholic Church.
The Second Vatican Council
In June of 1960, a French Jew by the name of Jules Isaac journeyed to Rome where he managed to win an audience with Pope John XXIII. Isaac was an historian, had served as inspector general of France’s public schools, and had written two books on Catholic attitudes toward Jews, Jesus et Israel and Genese de l’Antisemitisme, in which he argued that 1) the Catholic Church had preached an anti-Semitism for 2000 years which, 2) found its ultimate expression in the mass murder of Jews in World War II. “Father Paul De Mann from Paris and Father Gregory Baum, a Jewish convert from Canada, spread his thesis in Catholic circles,” Jones writes. “Baum called Jesus et Israel ‘a moving account of the love which Jesus had for his people, the Jews, and of the contempt which the Christians, later, harbored for them.’”
Pope John’s predecessor, Pope Pius XII, had led the church through the war years, having been nuncio to Germany during the rise of National Socialism, elevated finally to the papacy in 1939. As Jones puts it, Pius “knew the rise of Hitler in Bavaria in 1923 was predicated on the excesses of Jewish Bolshevism there and not on readings of the sermons of St. John Chrysostom or the Gospel of St. John.” But with the death of Pius in 1958, Isaac sensed a “new spirit” blowing through the Vatican and a “window of opportunity for his ideas.” Indeed there was, and attacks upon Pius, not surprisingly, ended up becoming one of the chief strategies employed by Jews in pushing their resolution through the Council.
The story of Vatican II is a complex one, but Jones tells it skillfully and in detail. Initially, at any rate, the Council’s principle aim was not addressing the issue of anti-Semitism. Rather, the key word was aggiornamento, meaning to bring the church “up to date” in its relationship with the modern world. The preliminary documents in fact were already being drawn prior to Isaac’s audience with the pope, and for the most part their objective was not so much to “baptize the Enlightenment,” as Jones puts it, but to “make Catholics aware of a threat to faith and morals coming from the West, in particular, the United States, more particularly, Hollywood.” For some in the Church, represented particularly perhaps by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, American films were “a vehicle for American mores,” which in turn were “undermining the traditional way of life” in predominantly Catholic countries. “Modern life, without doubt, multiplies invitations to evil by such distractions as beauty contests, spectacles, billboards, songs, illustrated magazines, beaches, places of vacation, promiscuity, and certain forms of sport,” one of the early documents asserted. Condemning “the cult of movie stars, naturalism, the so-called sexual education, pansexualism, and certain injurious aspects of psychoanalysis,” the document warned that if the Church lost its hold on sexual morals, it would lose control of “the ordinary way of sanctification for the majority of the human race.” Jones comments:
It didn’t take a genius to know who in America was prominent in supporting “the cult of movie stars, pansexualism and psychoanalysis.” It was the Jews.
Yet at the same time, Isaac found himself amiably received by Pope John. Their meeting took place June 13, 1960, with the pope taking the initiative by “discoursing on his devotion to the Old Testament,” and Isaac responding that such sentiments “kindled great hopes in the people of the Old Testament.” Isaac further told the pope the time had come to fulfill these hopes and expectations, a fulfillment that could only be met with the Church issuing a strong condemnation of anti-Semitism. John had been “thinking along those lines,” and the pope referred the matter to a German Jesuit by the name of Augustin Bea, who had been made a cardinal the previous year. The idea was that Bea would draft a text about Jewish-Christian relations that the Council would consider for adoption. However, as Jones relates:
The pope’s desire soon was transformed into something radically different when it made contact with the realities of 20th century Jewish interest groups and publicity organs. Before long “the people of the Old Testament” were represented by international Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Rather than formulating the Catholic position on the Jews in light of Catholic tradition, Cardinal Bea became a go-between between the Jewish organizations and the Council Fathers, who initially were also under the impression they were dealing with the “people of the Old Testament.” Because the Council Fathers were favorably impressed by Jules Isaac’s petition (as opposed to his books, which they had not read), Isaac was allowed to determine the terms of the debate, becoming the principle theorist for the Vatican’s statement on the Jews.
Though Isaac seems to have made a favorable impression overall with Church authorities, he did have his critics. Viscount Leon de Poncins was a journalist and Catholic essay writer who rose to the occasion by mounting a vigorous campaign against the resolution. Also, perhaps by virtue of being a fellow Frenchman, he seems to have had Isaac pegged to a tee. Poncins called Isaac the main promoter of a “campaign being waged against the traditional teachings of the Church,” and predicted (accurately as it turned out) that Nostra Aetate would become “a weapon designed to overthrow traditional Catholicism, which they consider the chief enemy.” Certainly his words, even then, must have had a ring of truth, but unfortunately not all heeded them. The Second Vatican Council “became a battleground over whose interpretation of the Jews was going to be normative,” as Jones puts it, or, in other words, competing visions over what actually the Jews were and are—“people of the Old Testament,” as Isaac portrayed them, or “the avant-garde of modernity and the promoters of sexual deviance as a covert form of control, as Ottaviani implicitly portrayed them”? Of course, for a good many in the Church, the “goal of condemning anti-Semitism seemed noble enough,” and regrettably “the spirit of the times precluded close theological examination of the terms of the discussion.”
The Second Vatican Council convened in October of 1962, and it came to be seen as a contest between Church liberals and conservatives, or at least that’s how it was portrayed in the media, particularly by Time Magazine and one of its reporters, Robert Blair Kaiser, whose reporting seems to have been anything but objective. The Church was out of sync with the modern world in its attitude toward the Jews, and in an effort to remedy that, the pope had “asked Cardinal Bea to prepare a schema for the Council that would revise the old Catholic story about the Jews killing Christ, and thus bringing eternal damnation on them and their children too,” Kaiser reported at one point, asserting that the New Testament’s crucifixion narrative was “a myth that had nurtured anti-Semitism for centuries.” In general, the portrayal of the Council in the media was as a struggle between “the forces of darkness and reaction”—as symbolized by Ottaviani—and “the forces of light and progress.” Among the “forces of light” were those apparently willing to throw out fundamental aspects of Church doctrine and Catholic teaching in an effort to appease the Jews—and ironically, the more they tried to appease, the more outrageous Jewish demands seem to have become.
B’nai B’rith wanted the Church to delete any language it deemed anti-Semitic from the Catholic liturgy. This was a tall order because the liturgy was based on Scripture that was, if not anti-Semitic, then certainly anti-Jewish. Virtually the entire Gospel of St. John and the Acts of the Apostles revolved around the conflict between the Jews who accepted Christ as their savior and the Jews who rejected him. Since those texts were central to any Catholic liturgy and full of invidious comparisons between the New Israel, the Catholic Church, and the Old, repudiated by Christ for its blindness and obstinacy, it was hard to see how dialogue could succeed. Unless, of course, the purpose of dialogue was something other than what it claimed to be.
Opponents of the declaration “claimed that ulterior motives had been driving the discussion from the beginning”—one ulterior motive, of course, being to deal the Catholic Church a crippling blow, a church which at the time, as Jones notes, enjoyed almost “universal esteem.” But as in previous eras of history, the Jews had no trouble finding Christians willing to join their cause. As the discussions progressed, Bea seemed to gravitate increasingly into the Jewish camp, being picked up by limousine at one point for a meeting with Jews at the Park Plaza Hotel in New York, while meanwhile in Rome, Time’s reporter, Kaiser, turned his spacious apartment into “a gathering place for conciliar progressives…those who were pushing hardest for updating everything and doing so with high hilarity.” A series of “soirees” were held in Rome, with Hollywood director Otto Preminger in attendance at one, but as Jones notes:
By this point the Jewish lobbying was beginning to cause a reaction. Pamphlets on the Jews began to appear at the Council. The Jews and the Council in the Light of Holy Scripture by Bernardus offered the most rational presentation from the official Church standpoint. Its message: Scripture states clearly that the Jews were voluntary deicides; the Fathers of the Church supported this doctrine. St. Thomas of Aquinas wrote that the attitude of the Roman Pontiffs can only be interpreted as an affirmation that the Jews partake of a world-wide plot to destroy the Church. Hence, all should be wary of the Jew and not destroy a foundational dogma of the Church.
The Council’s third session began in the fall of 1964, resulting, by November, in passage of “a document on the Jews so heavily influenced by Jewish lobbying that many thought it repudiated traditional Catholic teaching.” As Jones notes, “the Jews rejoiced, but their rejoicing was short-lived” when the schema was rejected by Pope Paul VI. The latter had become pope upon the death of John the previous year, and now he found himself faced with the “unenviable prospect” of having to mediate between warring factions within the Church. And at this point it was the conservatives, that is to say those opposing the declaration, who were gaining the upper hand. In October of 1965, Poncins showed up at the Council carrying thousands of copies of a pamphlet he had written entitled Le Problème Juif face au Concile, or “The Jewish Problem vis-à-vis the Council,” in which he committed the unpardonable, “anti-Semitic” sin of quoting directly from Jewish texts. Among those quoted were Isaac himself, who had previously attacked the Church in writing, calling its teachings:
a tradition which, moreover, is infinitely noxious and murderous, and which, as I have said and shall repeat, leads to Auschwitz—Auschwitz and other places. Some six million Jews were liquidated solely because they were Jews and thus brought shame not only upon the German people but upon the whole of Christianity, because without centuries of Christian teaching, preaching and vituperation, Hitler’s teaching, propaganda and vituperation would have been impossible.
Isaac had also labeled the Gospel of Matthew “obviously tendentious,” and accused the Church fathers of being “persecutors filled with anti-Jewish hatred.” Comments Jones:
Poncins maintained in his tract that the Schema of November of 1964 passed because the bishops were ignorant of Isaac’s true feelings toward Christianity, but, more broadly, they were ignorant of the difference between the Torah and the Talmud. The former is the Word of God; the latter is its antithesis. The Talmud, Poncins pointed out, was a post-Christian confection designed to keep Jews from converting to Christianity. After the destruction of the Temple, “The Talmud replaced the Torah as the foundation of all wisdom and the guide in every detail of daily life.” The point of the Talmud was “to consummate the definite break from triumphant Christianity.” So “The imposition of the ideals of the Talmud on the new branch of Judaism has been the calamity of the Jewish people even to this day.”…
The schema was dangerous because “it put the Church in the position of the accused, guilty of the permanent, unjustifiable and unatonable crime of anti-Semitism for two thousand years.” Beyond that, it questioned “the good faith and truthfulness of the Evangelists, of St. John and St. Matthew in particular, it discredited the teaching of the Fathers of the Church and of the great doctrinarians of the papacy by depicting them in distasteful colors; in short, it threatened to demolish the very bastions of Catholic doctrine.”
Poncins also argued against viewing modern-day Jews as “the people of the Old Testament,” demonstrating that their desire was not a Messiah, but “a terrestrial reign in which they will control the social, economic and political life of the nations…Judaism seeks to impose itself as the sole standard and to reduce the world to Jewish values.” Keep in mind, this was written in 1965. Clearly a man in many respects ahead of his time, Poncins concluded that the Jewish schema was an attack on the Church “under the banner of ecumenism,” and that in allowing Jews unprecedented access in the formulation of the document, the Church had provided them with a means of carrying a “war…into the very interior of the Church itself.”
As may be expected, given Pope Paul’s “unenviable prospects” in trying to negotiate an end to the strife, what ended up passing was a document that seemingly offered concessions to both sides.
The schema on the Jews was incorporated into a “Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions,” known as Nostra Aetate, promulgated by the Council on October 28, 1965…On the whole, the conservatives were jubilant, and the Jews were disappointed, but the results in light of the actual document were mixed. Jews were disappointed that the charge of deicide was not rebuked. But conservatives were disappointed the text did not implicate all the Jews in deicide. In one of the cleverest lines in the document, the Council Fathers wrote, “Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (cf. John 19:6), neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his passion.” According to the principles of logic, that statement could be taken to assert that some Jews were responsible for Christ’s death. If we exclude from that group the Blessed Mother, the Beloved Disciple, and all of the other Jews who accepted Christ as the Messiah, we come up with a statement that is largely faithful to the gospels texts.
But it didn’t end there. The Church was left divided, while “an indignant press campaign” ensued, provoking even more controversy, and Jones believes that in essence both sides ended up losing. Those who supported the document were accused of having sold out to international Jewry, while opponents were held practically “co-responsible” for the rise of Hitler. Furthermore, the disjunction between the Jews of Christ’s time, and those of today, raised a double standard on the issue of “collective responsibility”:
Jews could hold the German people accountable for Hitler’s crimes, forcing generations of German taxpayers to pay billions in reparations to Jewish organizations and the state of Israel. But Jews vehemently denied collective responsibility for the death of Christ. The Council’s schema tried to have it both ways, repudiating the claim the Romans alone were responsible for Christ’s death, but limiting Jewish guilt to Jewish leaders and their followers. As Poncins points out, in the case of Germany in the 20th century, “The whole people is considered responsible and subsequently punished for faults officials committed by its leaders, even when [those faults] are unknown to a great part of the people.” On the other hand, the Gospel accounts make clear that many Jewish people in Jerusalem were aware of what their leaders were doing and supported them in their efforts.
In addition to the above, one other factor figured prominently—most likely unanticipated saving perhaps by Poncins and a few others—namely the power of the Jewish media, for the Church ultimately lost control over the document’s interpretation. While Nostra Aetate had its share of “clever” lines, there were also passages that aided the “hijacking” of the resolution’s meaning, with Jones pointing to the following as one of the most glaring examples: “The Church…deplores all hatreds, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism leveled at any time or from any source against the Jews.” Thus the document condemns anti-Semitism, but, and this became the crucial point, without defining the meaning of the term. It was “an omission of truly catastrophic proportions,” says Jones, and here we might again consider the words of Poncins:
In Jewish eyes, every measure of defense and protection against the penetration of Jewish ideas and conceptions, against anti-Christian Jewish heresies, against Jewish control of the national economy, and in general every measure of defense of national Christian traditions is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, many Jews consider that the very fact of the recognition of the existence of a Jewish question constitutes a declaration of anti-Semitism…
Jules Isaac accuses all the Fathers of the Church of anti-Semitism…He accuses them of having unleashed the savagery of the beast and of being the real people responsible for German anti-Semitism and the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He finds them even worse that Hitler and Streicher and others for their system resulted in the Jews being tortured slowly and being left to live and suffer interminably…Does the Church admit Jules Isaac’s thesis and plead guilty?
For the next four-plus decades, Nostra Aetate would be used exactly as Poncins had predicted, i.e. as “a weapon designed to overthrow traditional Catholicism,” or as another writer described it, it was “the cornerstone of the abusive relationship that has hamstrung the Catholics.” By way of example, we might point to the passion play performed at the Bavarian village of Oberammergau. The play is a huge production and has a long tradition dating back to the year 1634, but one year after the passage of Nostra Aetate, the American Jewish Congress demanded that directors of the play make changes in the script or face a boycott. In support of its efforts, the AJC marched out a bevy of celebrities including Arthur Miller, Lionel Trilling, Stanley Kunitz, Leonard Bernstein, Leslie Fiedler, Theodore Bikel, Irving Howe, and Alfred Kazin, and even several German writers, including George Steiner, Guenter Grass (yes, that Guenter Grass), Heinrich Boell, and Paul Celan. Also in support of the effort was Elie Wiesel, whose account of his Auschwitz experience in recent years has been highly challenged, but in November of 1966, Wiesel, surrounded by the other celebrities, held a news conference in New York where he asserted:
The artist cannot be silent when the arts are used to exalt hatred. If the people of Oberammergau feel that they cannot faithfully represent their vision except through an explicitly anti-Semitic text, then others have no choice but to denounce that vision and urge that all who share our view join with us in condemning the performance.
Jews even enlisted Catholic theologians in their efforts, but the greatest weapon in their arsenal was Nostra Aetate, or as one Jewish writer put it, “Oberammergau was caught between the anvil of Vatical II and the hammering criticism of Jewish groups.” Caught not so much because of what the document said, but, as Jones argues, “because the Church could never make its interpretation of its own document prevail over the interpretation which the Jews wanted to impose on it.” Not surprisingly, the Bavarians made concessions. But of course, the more ground they gave, the more the Jews demanded of them. Changes to the play were adopted in 1970, in 1980, and again in 1984. The lesson to be drawn is that “interfaith dialogue” is always a one-way street—with Jews making demands, and Christians giving in. So it has been in the past, and so it remains to this day.
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The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit is a remarkable look back at the past, but it is even more than that. By understanding history, we understand the world we live in today, and Jones provides an invaluable service in helping us to understand the “revolutionary spirit” of Jewish power—how it operates, how it evolved, and how it maintains itself. Besides the three chapters I have covered here, you’ll find others, focusing on various periods of history, particularly of the last 500 years, offering insights into what at times seems like a living, breathing animus…as well as the volatile reactions that sometimes occur when that animus (the “revolutionary spirit,” as it were) comes into contact with unsuspecting Gentiles. I’m talking about events such as England’s consolidation as a Protestant, and philosemitic, power under the reigns of Cromwell and Queen Elizabeth I; the rise of Freemasonry; and the Russian revolution—all events in which, as most of us are well aware, key roles were played by Jews.
But other historical offshoots—episodes lesser-known, perhaps, but in which Jews nonetheless played equally significant roles behind the scenes—are also covered here. Jones includes a chapter on the Jewish criminal Leo Frank, who in 1913 murdered a 14-year-old girl employed as a child laborer in his factory in Atlanta. We also get the American Civil War, the civil rights movement, as well historical portraits of figures like Frederick Douglas, Marcus Garvey, and Lorraine Hansberry—with the book culminating finally in chapters on the Jewish takeover of American culture and the rise of the neoconservatives. Jones packs it with information every step of the way, and basically what he gives us is “the other side of the story,” the parts of history that somehow got left out of school textbooks (textbooks which, if we looked closely enough, we’d probably find were published by Jewish-owned publishing houses). No doubt, were it to become a bestseller, such a book would pose a public relations nightmare to Jews.
This is not to say I don’t have some criticisms. I do. Like many Christians of both the past and present, Jones takes a dim view of the ancient Gnostics, and in an early chapter of the book he discusses Irenaeus, a bishop in the early church, who in the second century condemned Gnosticism in his tract, Adversus Haereses, or “Against Heresies.” Writes Jones:
Irenaeus’ work, as its title implies, was written to combat heresy, specifically Gnosticism, but in entering that fray he had to deal with the Jews, acknowledging “from the very beginning of the Gnostic attack on Christianity,” that Gnosticism was associated with judaizing.
Far from attacking Christianity, many, if not most, Gnostics were Christians themselves. Moreover, such views would seem to overlook Gnostic groups such as the Sethians and the Marcionites, who were very much opposed to worshipping the God of the Old Testament, and who, at least in the case of the Marcionites, sought to eliminate the Old Testament entirely from the Christian canon of sacred literature. Had that happened, the course of history, needless to say, would have been quite different. The Judaizers—neither they of Pfefferkorn’s time, nor those of today—would have had a leg to stand on.
Another quibble I have with the book is the omission of a bibliography. The book is extremely well documented, with roughly 5,000 source notes, but Jones habitually refers to the numerous authors he quotes by last name only, which leaves you with the task of going back through hundreds of footnotes searching for the initial author citation and the title of the work quoted. The inclusion of a bibliography would have eliminated this problem.
All in all, however, this is an extremely important work and one that should be read any and all concerned about Jewish supremacism and the extent of Jewish power in the world today.
The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit is published by Fidelity Press, South Bend, Indiana. The book is available for order here.
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A couple of other things I’ll mention quickly before cutting to the videos. Firstly, a brief elucidation regarding a “red thread” that gets mentioned during the interview but that unfortunately is never elaborated upon—on page 19, in the book’s introduction, Jones talks about a tradition recorded in the Talmud (Rosh Hashanah 31b), of Jewish priests in the second-temple era supposedly determining how successful temple sacrifices had been—i.e. “successful” in terms of expiating the sins of the Jews—through observance of a scarlet thread. If the thread turned white, the sacrifice had been accepted by God and the sins expiated. “According to Schoeman, the Talmud itself ‘unwittingly confirms’ that the Temple sacrifices failed 40 years before the destruction of the Temple in 70 a.d. (i.e. at the time Christ died and the veil covering the Holy of Holies was rent in two) when it “recounts that from that time on…the scarlet thread never again turned white,” writes Jones.
And finally, a new interview with Jones has just been posted at The Ugly Truth. Though quite interesting, the interview deals primarily with current events in the Middle East rather than with the book, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit.
River toSeaUprooted Palestinian The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Bible, Christians, Richard Edmondson, Talmud | Comments Off on A Review of ‘The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit’ by E. Michael Jones
“The destiny of the Jewish people is to return to the land of Israel and reclaim their inheritance promised to Abraham and his descendants forever. This inheritance extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. Within their land, Jerusalem is recognised to be their exclusive, undivided and eternal capital, and therefore it cannot be shared or divided.
At the heart of Jerusalem will be the rebuilt Jewish temple, to which all the nations will come to worship God. Just prior to the return of Jesus, there will be seven years of calamities and war known as the tribulation, which will culminate in a great battle called Armageddon, during which the godless forces opposed to both God and Israel will be defeated.
Jesus will then return as the Jewish Messiah and king to reign in Jerusalem for a thousand years, and the Jewish people will enjoy a privileged status and role in the world.”
The scary US-based Unity Coalition for Israel brings together more than 200 partners claiming to represent more than 40 million Americans in the largest network of Pro-Israel groups in the world. Their Mission is “to focus the efforts of secular and religious organizations and individuals for whom the existence of the State of Israel is central and essential to the future of the free world. We educate these organizations and individuals on security issues and radical ideologies, including global Islamic terrorism… UCI reaches millions of people through more than 200 Christian & Jewish organizations, including churches, synagogues, prayer networks, think tanks and thousands of individuals.
Christians owe debt of eternal gratitude to Jews”
Pastor John Hagee is founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, which claims to be the largest pro-Israel organization in America, with over 850,000 members. It holds at least 40 pro-Israel events a month in towns and cities across this country. “We’re building support for Israel from coast to coast!” is the sort of proclamation that reveals the real agenda. What does Hagee’s CUfI believe in?
We believe in the absolute authority of the [sacred] scripture to govern the affairs of men.
We believe in the promise of Genesis 12:3 regarding the Jewish people and the nation of Israel. We believe that this is an eternal covenant between God and the seed of Abraham to which God is faithful. Genesis 12:3 “And I will bless them that bless thee and curse him that curseth thee; and in thee shall all nations of the earth be blessed.” Point: God has promised to bless the man or nation that blesses the Chosen People. History has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the nations that have blessed the Jewish people have had the blessing of God; the nations that have cursed the Jewish people have experienced the curse of God.
We support Israel because all other nations were created by an act of men, but Israel was created by an act of God! The Royal Land Grant that was given to Abraham and his seed through Isaac and Jacob with an everlasting and unconditional covenant.
St. Paul recorded in Romans 15:27 “For if the Gentiles have shared in their (the Jews) spiritual things, they are indebted to minister to them also in material things.”
Christians owe a debt of eternal gratitude to the Jewish people for their contributions that gave birth to the Christian faith… the Jewish people have given to Christianity:
a) The Sacred Scripture b) The Prophets c) The Patriarchs d) Mary, Joseph, and Jesus Christ of Nazareth e) The Twelve Disciples f) The Apostles It is not possible to say, “I am a Christian” and not love the Jewish people.
Hagee pretends the relationship between Christians and Jews in biblical times still applies today. He uses ‘mushroom management’ methods – keep ‘em in the dark and keep shoveling horse manure at ‘em. If his Cornerstone church followers bothered to take an independent trip to the West Bank and Gaza – and I do mean independent, not an Israeli bus tour with guides trained by the Tel Aviv propaganda department (or by Hagee) – they’d quickly discover the unpalatable truth. The glitzy Hagee empire, and others like it, would then crumble.
An effective riposte to the biblical distortions used to support Israel’s lust for supremacy is The Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism, a statement by the Latin Patriarch and Local Heads of Churches in Jerusalem issued in 2006 http://imeu.net/news/article003122.shtml. They are on the ground, in the front line, in the Holy Land. They know the score. They put the genuine Christian case. And it is summed up in the first sentence:
“We categorically reject Christian Zionist doctrines as a false teaching that corrupts the biblical message of love, justice and reconciliation. We further reject the contemporary alliance of Christian Zionist leaders and organizations with elements in the governments of Israel and the United States that are presently imposing their unilateral pre-emptive borders and domination over Palestine. This inevitably leads to unending cycles of violence that undermine the security of all peoples of the Middle East and the rest of world. We reject the teachings of Christian Zionism that facilitate and support these policies as they advance racial exclusivity and perpetual war rather than the gospel of universal love, redemption and reconciliation taught by Jesus Christ. Rather than condemn the world to the doom of Armageddon we call upon everyone to liberate themselves from ideologies of militarism and occupation. Instead, let them pursue the healing of the nations!”
The Declaration, explains Sadaka, asserts that “Christian Zionists have aggressively imposed an aberrant expression of the Christian faith and an erroneous interpretation of the Bible, which is subservient to the political agenda of the modern State of Israel… Christian Zionism thrives on a literal and futurist hermeneutic in which Old Testament promises made to the ancient Jewish people are transferred to the contemporary State of Israel in anticipation of a final future fulfillment.” For the posh churchy word ‘hermeneutic’, read ‘interpreting the Scriptures’.
Corrupting the Biblical Message
Not only does Zionism cloak itself in the Jewish faith, it hides its ugly face behind Christianity’s skirts. And, believe it or not, there is even a movement calling itself the World Muslim Zionist Organization. In Christianity’s case the rot set in way back in1909 when the Scofield study bible was published and became the standard religious text in the United States.
It’s a propaganda classic. And the indoctrination has lasted 100 years.
Cyrus Scofield, a convicted criminal and described by one American newspaper as “a shyster”, was commissioned to re-write the King James bible by inserting Zionist-friendly notes. The idea was to change the Christian view of Zionism by creating and promoting a pro-Zionist sub-culture within Christianity. The Oxford University Press appointed Scofield as editor, and the Scofield Reference Bible was born
It introduced a new worship icon, the modern State of Israel, which did not exist until 1948 but was already being ‘prepped’ on the drawing board of the World Zionist movement.
American journalist Grace Halsell explained the re-hashed Biblical message: “Simply stated it is this: Every act taken by Israel is orchestrated by God, and should be condoned, supported, and even praised by the rest of us. Never mind what Israel does, say the Christian Zionists. God wants this to happen…
Scofield said that Christ cannot return to earth until certain events occur: The Jews must return to Palestine, gain control of Jerusalem and rebuild a temple, and then we all must engage in the final, great battle called Armageddon. Estimates vary, but most students of Armageddon theology agree that as a result of these relatively recent interpretations of Biblical scripture, 10 to 40 million Americans believe Palestine is God’s chosen land for the Jews.”
This belief that Old Testament promises made to the ancient Jewish tribes are transferable to the largely unrelated people that make up the modern state of Israel is what underpins their hope for the final battle they call Armageddon, in which Israel’s enemies (and God’s, of course) will be defeated. After that Jesus will return as the Jewish Messiah and King to reign in Jerusalem for a thousand years, and the Jewish people will enjoy privileged status in the world.
That is the Zionist dream of world domination in a nutshell. What’s in it for non-Jews? Blessed if I know. Yet armies of non-Jewish politicians have become eager stooges. My reading of history is that the Jews were expelled from Palestine by the Roman occupation in 70AD, when the second temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. They were expelled again in 135AD. Nowadays return is regarded as an inalienable right. But it must be exercised as soon as the reason for expulsion (e.g. foreign occupation) ceases. In the Jews’ case an opportunity would have occurred in the 4th century AD as the Roman Empire collapsed. But they didn’t take it. They can hardly expect to change their mind 16 centuries later. Their right expired a very long time ago.
By comparison the Palestinians’ right of return after being ethnically cleansed in 1948 (and ever since) is valid because the enemy occupation has not yet ended and the UN has endorsed their right. Nevertheless Zionists claim Jerusalem is theirs by heavenly decree. But this holiest of cities was already 2000 years old when King David captured it.
Historians say that Jerusalem, in its ‘City of David’ form, lasted only 73 years. In 928BC the kingdom divided into Israel and Judah, and in 597BC the Babylonians conquered the city and destroyed Solomon’s temple. The Jews recaptured it in 164BC but finally lost it to the Roman Empire in 63BC. Before the present-day illegal occupation the Jews controlled Jerusalem for some 500 years, whereas it was subsequently ruled by Muslims for 1,277 years. Before the Jews it belonged to the Canaanites. And for nearly 90 years it was also a Christian kingdom. A lot of competing claims, then, which is probably why the UN declared in 1947 that it should be independently administered as an international city.
In 1187 Saladin restored Jerusalem to Islam while allowing Jews and Christians to remain. Today Jewish religious groups want control of the city for their spiritual centre and for a third temple to be built in accordance with ancient prophecies. The plan to make the Israeli occupation permanent threatens not only the Muslim but also the Christian holy places. Political and religious tensions are thus kept at boiling point. It is no wonder that the Iranian president quoted the late Ayatollah Khomeini as saying the unfriendly regime occupying Jerusalem “must vanish from the page of time”. It is no surprise either that he was immediately misquoted by Zionist propagandists as wanting to wipe Israel off the map.
The question is, are we seriously to believe that an all-powerful Supernatural Being has chosen and elevated one group of humans to a position of supremacy above all others, and has approved the use of any mean, including murder, brutal eviction and even war, to achieve their selfish goal, and now mobilizes millions of lesser mortals from around the globe, like those who regard themselves as upstanding Christians, to serve as tools and sing the praises of this ‘Grand Design’?
I’m with the Churches of Jerusalem on this. It’s a gross corruption of the biblical message.
River toSeaUprooted Palestinian The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
Yesterday at AIPAC annual conference, the American president had to go out of his way to appease his Jewish crowd. He used every trick in the book, he even peppered his talk with some Yiddish sporadic words and he did it all just to justify his decision not to launch a World War as yet.
One should ask, how come a lobby of a small state that practices the most appalling racist expansionist politics and practices has managed to gain so much political power in the USA.
As it happens, more and more academics and political commentators indeed ask themselves the exact question – they wonder what is it in American culture and political system that allowed it to happen? I am also interested in a very similar quest. I actually try to identify the different elements within Jewish culture and identity politics that have led to the rise of AIAPC into the dominant force within American politics and foreign policy.
In my latest book, The Wandering Who, a book that both Zionist and Jewish Anti Zionist Zionists (JAZZ) are desperate to stop, I explore those themes. I for instance, elaborate on the significant role of the ‘Book of Esther’, in shaping Jewish Lobbing in the West and beyond. The Book of Ester is an Old Testament text that preaches lobby culture and tribal infiltration into foreign administrations.
I also explore the Exilic nature of Judaism. I maintain that Judaism, as we know it, was founded in Babylon in conditions that, from Jewish perspectives, were very similar to 19th century Europe and the birth moment of Zionism. In both cases it was the fear of assimilation that led towards the invention of an isolationist and separatist cult.
Seemingly the exilic nature of Judaism transcended itself into Jewish secular and nationalist politics- rather than being concerned with the ‘here and now’, the Diaspora Zionist Jew explores his or her aspiration towards a different place and different time i.e. Zion. Unlike other migrant lobbies in the West that are engaged in issues to do with the interests of their respective migrant communities (in terms of social rights, religious freedom, education and so on), the Jewish Lobby is actually solely concerned with the interest of a remote state and a remote community. This fact alone, explains the uniqueness of AIPAC. It also means that it is unlikely that any other political lobby would ever compete successfully with AIPAC except another Jewish Lobby.
Yet one may wonder whether AIPAC’s hegemony over American foreign policy is ‘good for the Jews’. In fact, more than a few commentators including myself are convinced that that it is actually a total disaster. It doesn’t take a genius to notice that the domination of Jewish elite in the USA is similar to the condition of German Jewish elite in late 1920’s Weimar Republic. In fact Jewish history is saturated with similar occurrences in which Jewish elite’s overwhelming influence led to the birth of rapid growing of anti – Jewish sentiment.
Israeli historian Shlomo Sand points out that in between the 1st and early 19th century Jews didn’t engage in writing history. Not a single Jewish historical text saw daylight in that period. According to Sand, the Rabbinical Jew didn’t need history text. The Bible provided a sufficient explanation. The meaning of it is clear, there is an element of Jewish cultural denial to historical thinking. Such an interpretation may help us to grasp the surprising fact that Jewish communities in the West are not at all alarmed by the growing influence of the Jewish lobbies in West and AIPAC or CFI in particular. In fact, the complete opposite is correct. Jewish communities are often in the press boasting of their Lobbying victories. Jewish communities also invest a lot of energy silencing any attempt to point at the growing danger entangled with the emergence of Jewish power. This is far from being new. Jewish history is saturated with attempts to shoot the messengers and whistle blowers: Jesus found himself nailed to the wood, Spinoza was excommunicated, Bernard Lazare was largely ignored, Otto Weininger was dismissed, Mordechai Vanunu is locked behind bars again and as my followers know, I am also chased by the like of Alan Dershowitz, and the Jewish Anti Zionist Zionists (JAZZ).
Like many other commentators on Middle East current affairs, I also don’t have any doubt that we are facing a volatile situation. Considering its influence and its open advocacy to attack on Iran, AIPAC is a grave threat to world peace. In the open it pushes for another war that can easily escalate into a nuclear global conflict. AIPAC clearly endangers American interests and American people but it is also very dangerous for Jewish communities all over the world.
If America loves itself and cares for its future, it must immediately find within itself the means to dismantle the power of this lobby. America owes it to its people, to world peace but also to its Jews who largely have nothing to do with this appalling warmongering genocidal campaign.
Gilad Atzmon’s New Book: The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
River toSeaUprooted Palestinian The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
Sheffield PSC last night hosted a talk by Professor Keith Whitelam, author of The Invention of Ancient Israel, the Silencing of Palestinian History and Palestine, the Bible and the Imperial Imagination. Keith Whitelam’s book has caused some controversy in academic circles, as explained by Simon Targett
Like other sceptics, Whitelam, a soft-spoken Quaker with a Lincolnshire lilt, contends that ancient Israel is an invention of modern scholarship. He believes that the picture of a thriving Iron Age Jewish kingdom headed by David and Solomon is “a fiction”. Unlike other sceptics, he goes one key step further, contending that the scholarly debate has been driven by a dominant “biblical discourse” fuelled by a tankful of “unspoken and unacknowledged” assumptions. The main effect, he says, has been “the silencing of Palestinian history”. According to Whitelam, the history of Palestine has been distorted by the deference shown to the Hebrew Bible. All the great biblical scholars – from the earliest explorers like Edward Robinson through mid-century biblical specialists like the German Albrecht Alt and the American William Albright, to modern scholars like Israel Finkelstein – have been diverted by the search for ancient Israel, and particularly the Davidic empire. This search, he maintains, has sometimes been underpinned by more controversial political assumptions, which have a bearing on the fraught contemporary politics of the Near East.
The audio provides an interesting introductions to the ideas that Professor Whitelam explores in his book, along with some up to date commentary.
In case you missed it: Jerusalem does not belong to Jewish-Israelis: “The Bible Came From Arabia”, River toSeaUprooted Palestinian The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
Posted on February 9, 2012 by Nahida Exiled Palestinian
Says Rabbi Dr. Jacob Immanuel Schochet
As I surfed the net, I came across several items, from different sources, the pieces appear unrelated, but with a tiny scratch to the surface, some disturbing image begins to emerge:
The first item is a letter by Rabbi Dr. Jacob Immanuel Schochet addressed to his congregation, in which he expresses his “authoritative view” [sic] and joins the global ban on this book written by a fellow Rabbi.
He declares the book to be “heretical” and confirms “It Is Forbidden for Anyone to Buy or Read this book”. The book is called “Kosher Jesus“, yet Rabbi Schochet could not bring himself to even pronounce the name “Jesus” or print it in his letter, he uses instead the letter”J“!
He elucidates:
“Regarding the recent controversy surrounding a book released by Shmuley Boteach entitled ‘Kosher J’ I am writing this letter to express my authoritative view in response to those who have sought my opinion on this matter.
While it is not normally my style to write letters of condemnation, having read the book, I feel it poses a tremendous risk to the Jewish community and therefore imperative to state my halachic (Jewish legal) opinion that it is forbidden for anyone to buy or read this book, or give its author a platform in any way shape or form to discuss this topic.”
In this second item however, we read an article by a young man complaining about his experience in a Yeshiva school, he talks about what he calls exposure to non-Jewish sources of information. The young man starts his article with this comment: “When I was in Yeshiva, my friend was “busted” reading a non-Jewish novel. Guess what was his excuse and what the Director did to him“ Coming from a student, I expected a critical article from a rebellious young person, against that kind of restriction and practice. To my shock and dismay, the young man instead was criticising parentswho allow their children to be “exposed” to “schmutz” (filth/ dirt) of non-Jewish sources of information! Worse, in his piece he argues that EXPOSURE to non-Jewish sources is actually a form of abuse !! he goes on further advising parents to be a “living example of what a Chossid is. Even if it is fake“.
His message to Jewish parents was clear:
“Please do your children a favor and bring them up in a warm Yiddishe Shtub (home) that is illuminated by the light of Chassidus (many hear this under the Chuppa and forget that one fast …) and keep the schmutz out“
In the third item, we are confronted with an even more bizarre situation where reading becomes a crime punishable by law: 7 years in prison for reading the Torah !
Then we end up face to face with the absurd; where contradictory laws are fabricated and enforced to permanently oppress and shackle the mind; where even involuntary thoughts that creeps into the mind which does not conform to an imposed narrative, and where modest aspirations of basic human rights would throw the “culprit-thinker” behind bars:
One begins to wonder if the time has come to start watching out our dreams, were last night dreams “permissible” or not? and if not what sort of dreams is “allowed”? and failing to dream the right dream what sort of punishment should one expect? and how best to conceal “forbidden” dreams before ending up in prison?
But the mind is such a naughty thing, curious as it is, it keeps nagging; where does this attitude towards knowledge and the concept of “forbidden knowledge” come from? Why is that in this day and age, some still believe that it is their business and divine right to act as Thought Police; to block the flow of information and to classify knowledge as permissible or forbidden? Why is it that some suffer with such uncontainable ego, that they think they are somehow intellectually, morally or spiritually more able/entitled to decide what is good for people and what is not?
“While Jews are commanded to learn the entire Torah, Hasidic Gentiles are obligated only in those parts that pertain to the Noahide Laws and related concepts…… A gentile receives great reward for studying relevant parts of Torah, but faces death from Heaven for delving deeply into forbidden parts” source
“Idolaters — those who follow false gods and false religions, such as Buddhism or Christianity — are forbidden to learn any part of Torah at all, except those specific teachings that will bring them to repent and become Hasidic Gentiles. We are therefore forbidden to teach idolaters any parts of Torah they are not allowed to learn” source
“Gentiles who are oseik in Torah related to the Noahide Laws achieve the holy status of the cohen gadol; gentiles who are oseik in other parts of Torah are liable to death penalty“. Talmud Bavli, Avodah Zarah 3a source
“Hasidic Gentiles have a portion in Olam HaBa; Christians and Muslims do not, because they are kofrim baTorah”. Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Teshuvah 9:2 source
“Idolaters have no business studying any portion of Torah.” “Torah study is forbidden to idolaters.” “Indeed, if an idolaterwere to studyTorah, especially Kabbalah, they would place anirrevocable curse upon their souls.” source
“Idolaters will never be able to understand Torah and/or Kabbalah properly all the while that they cling to unclean beliefs and practices. Therefore, suchNon-Jewish individuals have no place in Torah study and are thus not welcome here in KosherTorah.com.” source
“A Gentile who engaged in Torah is punishable by death. He should not engage in anything other than their seven commandments alone.”source
“A Gentile who studies Torah is punishable by death, as it is said: ‘Moses commanded us the Torah as an inheritance,’ for us it is an inheritance, and not for them”. source
“A person unfamiliar with the extensive rabbinical literature devoted to this topic may perceive a certain tension, and perhaps even contradiction, between a recognized need to disseminate religious truths and an almost xenophobic reluctance to share the greatest repository of such truth—the Torah. Yet even a cursory examination of the relevant sources dispels the notion that while the community of Israel jealously guards its spiritual wealth, it refuses to share these riches with others. On the contrary, it is unique among Western religions in its willingness to share its teachings without seeking to impose its observations. This necessarily involves a vocation of teaching despite the stricture against teaching Torah to non-Jews. The latter, while based on substantive philosophical considerations and of definite halachic import, admits of sufficiently broad exclusionsto assure that Israel remains true to its role as a lamp unto the nations. p192″ source
“The Gemora in Sanhedrin (59a) states explicitly that a non-Jew who studies Torah is liable for death.” source
“The prohibition against teaching an idolater Torah is only applicable to the six hundred and eleven mitzvos that Moshe taught us. The other two, I am Hashem your God and the Unity of God; one would be permitted to teach to them.” source
The above would’ve been somehow less disturbing if such exaggerated sense of worth and entitlement, such grandiose image of self, and such delusion of entitlement to censor and withhold knowledge were only confined to ultra Orthodox fanatical groups, or if it were only restricted to the inner circles of the artificial Zionist entity, however, this is proven not to be the case.
This obsession with the entitlement to “educate”, to filter the flow of information and to select intellectual diet for others, this pushy strive for dominance, to be in control of people’s minds, this bizarre trend “we know best” is not limited to some weird rabbinical rulings of some ultra Orthodox Talmudists, Nay, it permeates deep into the secular sphere, even outside the Zionist entity.
One is entitled to ask then, since when using one’s own brain and acquiring knowledge needed “permission”?
How can one be expected to exercise his/her freedom of thought, freedom of expression, or any freedom in general when books and sources of knowledge become forbidden fruits?
How can humanity hope to progress or arrive to any understanding of the other, if communication processes are jeopardized and access to information are blocked?
How can some self-appointed Thought-Police and Political-Commissars feel entitled to ban books or forbid others from reading or communicating with each other?
Those who appoint themselves gatekeepers at gates of knowledge, minders of minds of others, or guardians to grounds of wisdom are no less than Intellectual Supremacists.
In other words, those who consider knowledge as a threat are themselves THE THREAT. period
“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings“ — Heinrich Heine
Youlus claimed to have found a Torah at Bergen Belsen Occasionally we lean about Rabbi fraudsters being charged of some serious unlawful activities. Two years ago we read about ‘Organ trafficking Rabbis’ being arrested in New Jersey.
Seemingly, the rabbinical price tag extends far beyond kidneys and organ trafficking.
The BBC reported today that a self-described “Jewish Indiana Jones” who claimed to have travelled the world to rescue holy Torah scrolls has pleaded guilty to fraud.
Rabbi Meacham Youlus, 50, admitted he had simply made up claims that he personally found and restored Torah scrolls in Europe and Israel.
Prosecutors also said he defrauded the charity he founded and its donors of $862,000 (£545,000).
According to a criminal complaint, Youlus claimed to have scoured Europe in search of lost or endangered Torah scrolls – the holy Jewish text containing the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament. He distributed the Torahs among American synagogues and communities, sometimes at inflated rates, and put almost one-third of the $1.2m proceeds into his personal accounts.
At a 2004 Torah dedication, Youlus wrote: “I guess you could call me the Jewish Indiana Jones,” the prosecutors alleged.
Rabbi Youlus, who owns a Jewish bookstore in Wheaton, Maryland, told one prospective buyer that he had personally retrieved parts of a scroll from a metal box at Auschwitz. Seemingly Rabbi Youlus fully internalised Abba Eban’s old insight-‘there is no business like Shoa business.’
Gilad Atzmon’s New Book: The Wandering Who? A Study Of Zionification of the West Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk.
River toSeaUprooted Palestinian The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
Dr. Ashraf looks so excited with Prof. Israel Finkelstein & Neil Silberman, asserting that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never existed,
“Dozens of digs in Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon have changed experts’ understanding of ancient Israel and its neighbours- as well as their vision of the Bible’s greatest tales” In other words instead of digging somewhere else, the A masterful archaeological and biblical investigation, lead atheist the digs as a real evidence that “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never existed, that David and Solomon were not great kings but obscure chieftains and that the Exodus never happened” wrote Heather Campbell
“I think the genius and power lie with the scientists and scholars who have painstakingly put together what really happened, based on real evidence, even though it goes against what they have been told is holy and authoritative. This book is a testament to what the human mind can discover when it does not delude itself.”
“Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary, the Israelites did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon, nor of the source of belief in the God of Israel. These facts have been known for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and nobody wants to hear about it.”
As a born-Muslim, who embraced Islam in his late fourties after extensive reading, and realized the very thin line seperating Islam (Quran) and the relative human understaing and the history of Islam (muslims), I accept archaeological facts, but at the same time I reject using it as an ideoligical tool to “Assert”:
That “Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never existed”,Kaaba, in Mecca is the evidence that Irahim and Ismael existed.
that “David and Solomon were not great kings but obscure chieftains”. This conclusion is political designed to justfy, the Israeli failure to find a single archaeological evidence to support Jewish claims in Palestine, So David and Solomon were not great kings, they were Tribe cheifs living in TENT, and therefore, the conquest of Palestine is judstified.
That the men wrote the Bible, (Consequently Quran was written by Mohamad PUH).
We Muslims believe that the Bible is the world of God, Quran tells us that it was rewitten by men.
“2.79 . Therefore woe be unto those who write the Scripture with their hands anthem say , “This is from Allah , ” that they may purchase a small gain therewith . Woe unto them for that their hands have written , and woe unto them for that they earn thereby .”
Moreover, the prominent Israeli archeologist Israel Finkelstein and the American historian Neil Asher Silberman, should have heard about the Lebanon’s historian Kamal Salibi and his book “The Bible Came From Arabia” In his book Kamal Salibisolved the problem of the “Two of archaeology’s leading scholars Prof. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman,” and the conflict within the the Bible as a religious and historical work. Salibi claimed that Asir near Yemen was the original Israel and the original Judah. And the Jordan was not a river, but the escarpment between the highlands of Asir and the coastal plain below.
Research and analysis of the Old Testament place names, corroborated by contemporary Pharaonic and Mesopotamian sources, Kamal Salibi locates the ancient land of Israel, not in Palestine, but in the Najran province of what is now Saudi Arabia. According to Salibi, The Promised Land was Asir
“Prof. Israel Finkelstein & Neil Silberman, Two of archaeology’s leading scholars shed new light on how the Bible came into existence. They assert, for example, that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never existed, that David and Solomon were not great kings but obscure chieftains and that the Exodus never happened.”
For the first time, the true history of ancient Israel as revealed through recent archaeological discoveries-and a controversial new take on when, why and how the Bible was written. In the past three decades, archaeologists have made great strides in recovering the lost world of the Old Testament. Dozens of digs in Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon have changed experts’ understanding of ancient Israel and its neighbours- as well as their vision of the Bible’s greatest tales.
Yet until now, the public has remained almost entirely unaware of these discoveries which help separate legend from historical truth. Here, at last, two of archaeology’s leading scholars shed new light on how the Bible came into existence. They assert, for example, that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never existed, that David and Solomon were not great kings but obscure chieftains and that the Exodus never happened.
They offer instead a new historical truth: the Bible was created by the people of the small, southern nation of Judah in a heroic last-ditch attempt to keep their faith alive after the demise of the larger, wealthier nation of Israel to the north. It is in this truth, not in the myths of the past, that the real value of the Bible is evident.
The Bible is both a religious and historical work, but how much is myth and how much is history? When and why was the Old Testament written, and by whom? What do contemporary archaeologists know about the Patriarchs? The Exodus? The Conquest of Canaan? Kings David and Solomon? Where do the people of Israel originally come from? Why were the historical accounts of the Bible written down?
A masterful archaeological and biblical investigation, The Bible Unearthed visits digs in Egypt, Jordan and Israel – including Megiddo, the cradle of biblical archeology, where 7,000 years of history have been excavated.
This far-ranging exploration of biblical history also makes use of archival footage of previous archaeological excavations, maps, biblical illustrations and computer animation, revealing ancient architecture, cuneiform tablets and other rare artifacts.
Based on the best-selling book (The Bible Unearthed) by prominent Israeli archeologist Israel Finkelstein & coauthored by American historian Neil Asher Silberman, this enthralling documentary features interviews with archaeological specialists and biblical scholars from all over the world, including experts from the Louvre, the Museum of Cairo, the Museum of Jerusalem, and the British Museum.
The Bible Unearthed does something which has never been done before: it reveals a still-unraveling revolution of what we know of the society, the history, and the men who wrote the Bible.
The Wall Street Journal Reported today (March 2011): “Oil futures settled at their highest level in 2 1/2 years Wednesday as air strikes continued against Libya and the U.S. reported a sharp drop in gasoline inventories.” On New York commodities markets, ‘Light Sweet Crude’ settled at $105.75 a barrel, the highest we’ve seen since September 2008.
The US and Allied forces air strikes on Col. Moammar Gadhafi’s military infrastructure and Western sanctions have stopped the 1.3 million barrel per day of Libyan output and have caused commodity futures traders to speculate that oil supply will get worse before it gets better. Kyle Cooper, managing partner at IAF Energy Advisors in Houston stated in the WSJ article, ”If this spreads into Saudi Arabia, $120 a barrel is going to look cheap. People are scared to death to be short.”
In Bible prophecy, Libya is included in the Russian-Iranian alliance against Israel in “the last days.” Ezekiel 38-39, tells us that ‘Put’ is one of the nations that joins the ‘Gog/Magog’ alliance against the nation of Israel. Ancient historian Flavius Josephus records that ‘Put’ or ‘Phut’ is ‘Libyos.’ Ancient Libyos included the territory of modern Libya. Regardless of the outcome of the current military and political struggle in Gadhafi’s Libya, Bible prophecy tells us that one day, Libya will be a part of the alliance with an ‘evil thought’ in its head, to invade the land of Israel to take a ‘spoil’ – maybe oil? Bible prophecy seems to be coming into fullness on almost a daily basis in Israel. Is the current Libyan war a precursor to the fulfillment Ezekiel 38-39? We’ll keep watching.
River toSeaUprooted Palestinian
The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this Blog!
“Even With archeology aside and relying only on your sane mind you would still reach the same conclusion; the exodus never happened”
Dr. Ashraf Ezzat
History is passed over at the Jewish Passover
What is Passover?
Passover, or Pesach in Hebrew, is an eight-day spring holiday that celebrates the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.
What is the Exodus?
It is the story of the departure of the Israelites from ancient Egypt described in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is the pride and joy of every Jew. It is the book of Yahweh, their chosen God, as they are his chosen people.
In Judaism, all the tales of kings and prophets, of conquests and defeats, of captivity and Diaspora and of a united kingdom and some holy temple, it all depended on this ancient story of enslavement and suffering of the ancient Israelites in Egypt under an allegedly ruthless and heathen Egyptian king, or what the Hebrew Bible mistakenly called Pharaoh.
But strange enough, and according to historians of the ancient Near East, Egypt was no land of the heathens, On the contrary, it was exactly in Egypt where the human conscience dawned on earth. The ancient Egyptian civilization which sprouted along the banks of the river Nile, had been mostly of religious and ethical legacy that heavily influenced the way religion had evolved on earth.
This story of exodus is the corner stone of the Israelites’ narrative throughout history; it is their favorite ancient melodrama upon which they claimed divine rights to the land of ancient Canaan.
They simply stripped the fertile portion of the land from its indigenous Canaanites and proclaimed it theirs by Yahweh’s decree. This has gloomy echoes of the present day story of the land grip and the ethnic cleansing of the descendants of Canaanites, the Palestinians, by the modern Jews, the Israelis.
Following the WWII, the modern Jews used, or rather exploited, the story of the calamity of the mass killing and the concentration camps as a non- negotiable pretext to displace the Palestinians and take their land to be their new Zionist state declared by a biased UN decree.
Likewise, the ancient Israelites embarked on their imaginary narrative of an ancient kingdom after they had successfully fled out of the horrors and years of alleged torture and persecution in ancient Egypt.
Two million Israelites exited Egypt without leaving any archeological trace
Ancient holocaust
In a way, the Exodus after years of unbearable suffering and humiliation on the hands of the Egyptian empire seemed as if it was the Holocaust of the ancient Israelites but with sparing the ovens’ part.
But while we have historical evidence of the holocaust, which the Zionist media managed to augment dramatically, the suffering of the Israelites in ancient Egypt and the exodus stand refuted and totally unsubstantiated as far as history is concerned.
A century of research by renowned archaeologists and Egyptologists has found no evidence, what so ever, which can be directly related to the Exodus narrative of an Egyptian captivity and the escape and travels, for 40 years, through the wilderness of Sinai.
Even more, throughout the entire and long span of the ancient Egyptian kingdom (3100-332 BC) there had been absolutely no mention or any evidence of Egyptians mistreating or isolating foreigners in certain ghettoes. On the contrary Egypt was the world trade center of the ancient times with its markets and trade routes replete with foreigners from the Far East, the Mediterranean coast and the African horn in the south. According to Exodus 12:37-38, the Israelites numbered “about six hundred thousand men on foot, besides women and children,” plus many non-Israelites and livestock. Numbers 1:46 gives a more precise total of 603,550. The 600,000, plus wives, children, the elderly, and the “mixed multitude” of non-Israelites would have numbered some 2 million people.
A crowd of that multitude couldn’t have passed through the peninsula of Sinai at the eastern Egyptian borders uncommented upon or without leaving an archeological trace. But that what we have on hand, as modern archeologists- including Israelis– have declared after failing to find any shred of historical evidence of the exodus or the encampment for 40 years in Sinai. They found not a piece of broken pottery or a small bone or even a left behind vessel, absolutely nothing.
And while history is unable to recall any memories of the Exodus and archeology refutes it ever happened in the first place, the Hebrew Bible laden with historical anachronisms remains the only source of information behind this imaginary mega-event.
Even With archeology aside and relying only on your sane mind you would still reach the same conclusion; the exodus never happened.
Zombie revenge
Playing back the catastrophic scenes of the unbelievable ten plagues that hit Egypt by the avenging god of the israelites, you would wonder how such a horrendous scale of devastation could have taken place without being mentioned in the scrolls of ancient Egypt, which apart from all ancient world civilizations, is recognized for its meticulous documentation of its history and state affairs.
Egyptian scribes with their inscriptions on the temples and papyri kept a fairly accurate record of the chronicles of ancient Egypt. But never a reference to such alleged Exodus had been mentioned in the Egyptian records.
Not even once, the Exodus or the ancient Israelites were mentioned in the Egyptian documents while the Exodus is referred to around 150 times in the Bible with pharaoh mentioned alone around 20 times. What does that tell us?
May be the Israelites were so insignificant and unessential the Egyptians never noticed their existence or bothered to. As a matter of fact, and according to modern archeology, the Israelites were a bunch of herders at the eastern borders of the kingdom with the Egyptians referring to them as the filthy and impure Asians for they were known for their unhygienic outlook and practices and by their notorious reputation as plunderers. According to the zombie revenge type of Yahweh, the river Nile turned into blood, the land of Egypt had been menacingly fraught with the perils of flocks of frogs, lice, flies, locusts and wild animals and under the abrupt and total shutdown of daylight the first-born of all humans and animals were mercilessly killed by the passing over angel of death.
And amidst that horror and disaster the Israelites were busy looting Egyptian treasures while their god was joyfully watching. They had to leave Egypt in a hurry before the pharaoh and his army could catch them and impede their majestic exit.
Egyptian empire at the time of the Exodus.
The exodus from and into Egypt
And now to the funny part of this exodus story.
Due to the Hebrew scribes’ lack of geographical knowledge concerning the borders of the Egyptian empire and its sovereignty at the time, and lacking any GPS satellite technology, it somehow slipped their attention that going out of Sinai and entering Canaan did not necessarily mean exiting Egypt, as Canaan was just another Egyptian territory with fortified Egyptian garrisons and check points everywhere.
Reviewing that horror stories of the Passover you can’t help but to wonder how ancient Egypt – in the absence of anything like the UN relief efforts in our modern times- ever managed to escape total annihilation and collapse. If those natural disasters ever stroke the land of the Nile simultaneously and in that extreme manner that had been depicted in the Hebrew bible, ancient Egypt would have been wiped off the map permanently or at least collapsed as an economical, military and political power.
Historians are inclined to place the exodus at the middle 15 century BC, but curiously enough, Egypt at that time- the new kingdom time- was at its pinnacle of strength and prosperity. During that period of time, ancient Egypt with great kings like Thutmose III, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun reigned over an empire reaching eastward to the borders of Iran and Syria and southward to the sources of the Blue Nile in Sudan.
Simply, Egypt was the super power of the ancient world at that time and for centuries to follow.
To cut a long story short, and according to archeologists and geologists; the Passover environmental disasters along with the presence of those hundreds of thousands afflicted Israelites is nothing but a myth that runs counter to the archeological truth, environmental geology facts and chronicles of ancient Egypt. And if history stands skeptical about this tale of the Exodus from ancient Egypt, what does that say about the rest of the ancient Israelites’ narrative that happened to depend primarily on this story and regard it as self-evident and totally axiomatic.
After thousands of years, the exodus memory had transformed, for modern Jews, into matzah snacks and gathering around the Seder meal while telling the story of the exodus to the children so that it would grow up with them to be retold again to their children.
And this is how historical authority is being systematically undermined every passing year at the Passover. And this is why the Jews are absolutely the best storytellers ever.
For more articles by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat visit his website
Pastor Terry Jones (left) and his son Luke walk into the
Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla.
“Muslims dare not put the Bible on some despicable trial; this is beyond any Muslim’s wierdest imagination”
Dr. Ashraf Ezzat / Veterans Today
“We’re not big debaters. We’re not very well-educated; we’re just simple people trying to do the right thing.” Said Luke Jones, the son of the Florida pastor who finally carried out his most ignorant plan and burned a copy of the holy scripture of Muslims (Qur’an)
Adding to what Luke had said, I tend to believe that he and his father, Pastor Terry Jones, along with the 30-person Christian congregation at Dove World Outreach Center are amongst the most clueless and deluded people on earth.
According to this Jones and on March 20th – or what he designated as “International judge the Qur’an day”– he burned a copy of the Qur’an after he had thoroughly judged the book which he found dangerously guilty.
….!!
What a joke,
What a silly joke.
If we were told that every day there were some persons who thought of or actually contrived to kill their stepfathers, whom they had suspected of being accomplices to the murder of their deceased fathers, would that incriminate Shakespeare and his masterpiece play “Hamlet”?
Could we by any chance or logic for that matter, judge the book of Shakespeare and find it guilty of inciting violence and the killing of one’s next of kin.
Does that make any logic?
To develop a better Understanding of any Literature or Holy Scripture you should rely on your heart not your mind.
Logic and religion are irreconcilable.
Did you know that the Bible contained more violence and fairy tales than all Harry Potter’s parts put together? But is that enough reason for Muslims to ridicule or demonize the Bible or put it on trial for that matter.
Every time I read Hamlet, I can’t help myself sympathizing with the deeply tormented and mourning prince who cherished so dearly the memory of his late father he was sincerely willing to give up his own life to see his lord’s betrayal avenged.
Foolishness breeds more foolishness…
And extremism will definitely breed more extremism.
Qur’an is the most sacred book on planet earth for Muslims; for the sake of its reverence they are willing to give their lives just as little and dispensable Hamlet thought of his life when the memory of his king had been desecrated.
You don’t disgrace other people’s most dignified text and expect them to react in a dignified way. Hamlet himself couldn’t do it, he couldn’t restrain himself. Once he knew of the disgrace and the calamities that befell his Lord he went insane. That’s how Shakespeare went about it and I believe no one could have managed better.
The world doesn’t need more madness right now.
We have got all the madness we need for the moment.
Muslims will dare not burn the Bible back in return. But they’d rather die than witness the sanctity of their Qur’an violated.
Muslims dare not judge the Bible for it is equally sacred to them as the Qur’an is.
Jesus and mother Mary are equally revered as prophet Mohamed by all Muslims. Muslims dare not put the Bible on some despicable trial; this is beyond any Muslim’s weirdest imagination.
William Shakespeare
To be or not to be ..
This is how we should be judging ourselves?
To be tolerant,
To be civilized,
To be caring for others,… or not to be.
…..
That is the question.
For more articles by Dr. Ashraf Ezzat visit his website. Related Articles:
Israel’s Chief Rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar have called the Israeli Jews to fight the abortion epidemic, which is delaying the arrival of the ‘Promised Jewish Messiah’.
Interestingly, in 1974, Zionist Jews like Henry Kissinger and Z. Brzezinski have lead this epidemic among the non-western countries via food, abortion and other means of birth control. These measures are killing an average of one million female children in India (popl. 1.1 billion). In United States (popl. 300 million), over 1.2 million abortions were officially reported in 2005.
The two Zionist Rabbis have sent a letter to all the Rabbis in the Zionist entity to fight this epidemic, based on the teachings of the Jewish Bible (Torah). They have decided to form a committee to fight the 50,000 Jews who practice abortion each year in Israel (highest rate in the world based on country’s Jewish population of 5 million only).
In 2009 – Metzger and Amar had claimed that “abortion kills thousands of Israeli babies a year and delays the coming of the Messiah”.
They Jewish leaders also said abortions “delay the redemption” by postponing the coming of the Messiah and they based the teaching on the Babylonian Talmud in Tractate Niddah which says each baby that is born brings the Jewish people closer to redemption.
With the exception of a few dozen members of the ‘House of Israel’ – the rest had rejected Jesus as the ‘Promised Jewish Messiah (pronounced Moshiach in Hebrew)’ because he failed to bring them into power as the Jewish Messaih was expected to. The present-day, Khazarian and African Berber Jews also believe that Jesus was an “imposter” and not the promised Jewish Messiah.
The Tanakh gives several specifications as to who the messiah will be. He will be a descendent of King David (2 Samuel 7:12-13; Jeremiah 23:5), observant of Moses’ law (Isaiah 11:2-5), a righteous judge (Jeremiah 33:15), and a great military leader. Jesus fulfilled all except being a military leader.
Jerry Rabow in his book ’50 Jewish Messiahs’ (published in 2002) has documented the stories of 50 Jewish religious leaders who claimed to be the “Promised Jewish Messiah” since the crufication of Jesus of Nazreth. Most prominents among them was the 17th century Jewish Messiah, Shabbatai Tzvi, whose followers, the ‘Crypto-Jews’ are still found among Turkish secular elites and in the West, faking as ‘Christians’.
Muslims believes Jesus to be a Messiah for the House of Israel – but not divine as the Christians believe him to be. Furthermore, earlier Church Fathers have written that there will be a time in the future in which the Jews will mistake the Antichrist (Dajjal) for the Messiah.
It is interesting to see another attack on ‘Christian values’ in the name of the ‘freedom of press’. The Federally-funded Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery is currently showing an exhibition that features images of an ant-covered Jesus, male genitalia, naked brothers kissing, men in chains, and lesbian Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts.
Personally, making fun of Christian values doesn’t amuses me but the bigotary of those Christians who were critical of building a Muslim Cordoba Center near the ‘Ground Zero’ – are voicing their objection to ‘freedom of press’ for the exhibition of a video about ant-covered Jesus on Cross (which I have read, has been removed now).
Film of the crucifix with ants crawling on Jesus is from “A Fire in My Belly,” a video by David Wojnarowicz (a Dhimmi and not a Muslim, thanks G-d), who died of AIDS in 1992, that expressed his rage and anguish at the death of a lover who also died of AIDS.
In February 2010 – the ‘Israel-Firster’ homosexual British singer Sir Elton John called Jesus “a super intelligent gay man”, Guardian, February 19, 2010. Elton John married Canadian David James Furnish, a gay film and TV producer in 2005.
The New York Times’ in its November 5, 2010 review of the Hide/Seek, glorified Jonathan Katz and David Ward for “mounting one of the best thematic exhibitions in years”.
The fact is Jesus is portrayed totally differently in the Bible, Jewish Talmud and Holy Qur’an. In the Bible Jesus is depicted as a racist who insists that his message is only for the the House of Israel (not the present-day Jews); a rude person who insults his own mother and an angry man who curses the Rabbis and their followers.
In Jewish Talmud is portrayed as an illegitimate child, a fraud and his mother Mary being a harlot. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 106) gloats about the death of Jesus at young age: “Hast thou heard how old Balaam (Jesus) was? He replied: “It’s not actually stated but since it’s written, Bloody and deceitful men shall not live out half their days it follows that he was thirty-three or thirty-four years old”.
Holy Qur’an claims that Jesus was a prophet like Moses, David, Solomon, Aron and John the Baptist – and was born to virgin Saint Mary. Holy Qur’an also declares that whosoever (Yahud and Nasara) that Jesus died on Cross – is a liar. According to Holy Qur’an, Jesus was raised to Heaven alive by the Mercy of Allah and that he would return to complete his life journey on Earth before the Doomsday.
Dr. Anwar Ul Haque explains the Islamic narrative of prophet Isa (Jesus) in an article, titled Jesus in Islam. Also watch a video below.
The Invention of the Jewish People is a book written by Shlomo Sand, an Israeli professor of history at the University of Tel Aviv.
Uprooted Palestinian 
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Friday, February 3, 2012 at 12:21PM
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 