The “Israeli” government is moving forward with plans to undermine the judiciary and place it under its control.
The Knesset passed the first reading of one of several planned bills that Benjamin Netanyahu’s opponents describe as legislation seeking to destroy the democratic system, deepen the social rift, and push “Israel” towards the brink of civil war.
And while this narrative may contain exaggerations, it is all part of political push and pull. It is also worth noting that the leader of the Likud (Netanyahu) may be intending to conduct a loud maneuver with the aim of dragging his opponents into the negotiation box, and then entering into a settlement with them that will protect him from going on trial. At the same time, the hand of the fascists is slipping through.
One thing is for certain: “Israel’s” years-long divisions have peaked and it is no longer possible to weld or bridge the gap that has been created.
At a time when the internal crisis is escalating, the occupying entity is awaiting a seemingly inevitable response to the Nablus massacre. The massacre reveals the “gelatinous” nature of the understandings concluded between Ramallah and Tel Aviv under the auspices of Washington, and the former’s inability to leave behind its illusions, despite hinting that it plans to cancel a security summit scheduled in Aqaba with the United States, “Israel”, Egypt and Jordan.
On the domestic front, the camp of “Israeli” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completed its first legislative step on the road to changing the nature of power in “Israel”, deepening the rift with his opponents and complicating the internal crisis. All of these pave the way for scenarios that the occupying entity may not be able to overcome.
This step has provoked Netanyahu’s opponents. They consider it a “coup” aimed at making the judicial system a mere “rubber stamp”. They also warn about “Israel” being transformed into a “totalitarian state” and being ruled by parties and figures according to their own agendas, which include, among other things, the imposition of special ways of living on others – be it Jewish or not.
The Supreme Court prevented these impositions when it came to the Jews, as these were seen as incompatible with “justice, logic, equality, and human rights.” Of course, it was a completely different approach when it came to the Arabs.
Today, warnings are multiplying about the potential consequences of the Netanyahu government’s actions, whether in terms of deepening social divisions, the exit of capital and investments, the possible prosecution of army personnel before international courts, the decline of “Israel’s” standing and the disruption of its alliances, the urging of a counter-immigration that empties the occupying entity from its settlers, or even the start of a “civil war” that is constantly mentioned by a large number of officials, experts, and the media.
In view of the aforementioned, the following conclusion can be drawn:
First: Criticism of the “judicial reform” plan is clearly politicized. But this plan would inevitably harm the unwritten collective contract that enabled the various Israeli “tribes” to coexist and preserved the internal stability of the entity despite its many seeds of fragmentation.
The “Supreme Court” has been, for decades, and according to established customs, examining every petition that comes to it regarding decisions or laws issued by the government, its ministers, the Knesset and its committees, or state and private institutions, with expanded and unrestricted authority unparalleled in the world.
Based on this authority, the court played the role of a “guard” that prevents any “tribe” from changing the “rules of engagement” with other “tribes” or jumping over its own fence to pounce on “others” and harm them. This applies, for example, to its ban on secularists from imposing their will on religious people, and vice versa.
Today, however, if the ruling coalition is able to remove the authority of the “Supreme” to consider the laws of the “Knesset”, then the fascists and the religious factions will be able to work on issuing “Talmudic” laws, which the secular factions and even the traditionalists among ordinary “Israelis” cannot coexist with.
Some of these new laws may include electricity cuts and transportation disruptions on Saturdays, limiting the equality granted to women on multiple personal and public levels, limiting the type of food, clothing, and places that can be used by both genders, etc.
In other words, Talmudic laws will take precedence over any military order issued by an officer or a non-commissioned officer, and the rabbi will become the chief of staff instead of the organizational chief of staff. Meanwhile, the situation is no different in the occupied territories, where there is an agenda that conflicts with the interests of “Israel”.
Second: The secularists see all this as a threat to their way of life, their aspirations, and their collective and private stability. This explains their repeated escalations against the government.
However, these escalations go hand-in-hand with exaggerations, manifested, for example, by bringing back everything that is “bad” at any level to the “judicial reform” plan or exaggerating the potential consequences of the plan on the future of the entity.
Third: There are other aspects of the repercussions that are being discussed that should be paid attention to; the new laws imply a threat to democracy but will not lead to its downfall.
Likewise, many aspects of the economic dilemma appear to be related to the distress being experienced by many sectors around the world. This extends to the technology sector in “Israel”.
It is true that there is a crisis in the high-tech sector, and that money is leaving “Israel” faster than ever. Unemployment is on the rise and there is a decline in foreign investments, while strong economic institutions reduce their presence in the entity. However, this is a global phenomenon that transcends countries and continents.
Fourth: What has happened so far is a vote on the first reading out of three readings that are binding for the bills to enter into force, bearing in mind that experiences tell us that many projects did not reach the last two stages.
For the time being, it is not possible to predict the fate of the “judicial reform” plan. However, it is worth noting that Netanyahu, who remains the real engine behind this legislation, can stop driving it forward if he reaches some sort of a settlement with others from within his secular “tribe” that will protect him from standing trial over corruption and bribery charges
It appears the Prime Minister wanted to pass the first reading to improve his negotiating position and increase pressure on the opposition with the aim of forcing it to lower the ceiling of its demands and enter into a kind of barter with him.
However, if Netanyahu does not find a willing listener among his opponents and concludes that the consequences of proceeding with the “coup” against the judiciary are bearable and can be overcome, then he will continue down this path. Such a move is likely to lead to dangerous repercussions and could push “Israel” into chaos or internal strife. This will force him to step back and search for settlements again.
The last scenario is a possible disruption of the march of “change” led by the fascist allies of the Likud leader, which will stir up his government and possibly lead to its downfall. This again opens him up to extortion from his allies.
Fifth: While it is important not to fall for the exaggerations, some data cannot be overlooked. The most important is the following:
– “Israel” is plagued by years-long divisions, which have become increasingly entrenched with the passage of time. It is no longer possible to weld or bridge the gap that has been created.
– The division between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardic still exists, as recent protests have revealed, after many thought that it was about to disappear.
– What is happening now against the backdrop of the “judicial revolution” is a result of the internal division, not a cause for it, even if the former led to the nourishment and development of the latter.
Studies of Orthodox Judaic believers (followers of the post-Second Temple Judaism faithful to the Mishnah, Gemara and derivative sacred texts representative of the theology of the ancient Pharisees), have almost always been marked by two extremes: giddy approbation, or its antipode, atavistic contempt. Both views are predicated on fallacious judgments. In the former case, credulous acceptance of pious sloganeering and lachrymose self-righteousness, and in the other, a callous dismissal of the humanity of those who are captives to Talmudism, along with a failure to discern in our own behavior and beliefs those sins for which we censure the rabbis.
Nothing in this study is to be construed as giving aid and comfort to Jew-haters, anti-Semites or pseudo-Christians who direct detestation toward or advocate the oppression of Judaic persons. Our work entails the analysis of iniquitous ideas and texts; not people. Like the goyim (gentiles), Judaic persons are fully human beings deserving of dignity, respect, compassionate understanding and love, having been made in the image and likeness of God. Christians are enjoined by our Savior to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44). These are among the most profound, counter-intuitive words of wisdom ever spoken, exemplifying the crux of the theology of the believers who make up the true Klal Yisroel (people of Biblical Israel).
There are some worldly ones who, upon discovering the extent to which they or others may have been cursed, hated or spitefully used by certain adherents of Orthodox Judaism, proceed to disobey or at the least, derogate the command of Jesus in Matthew 5:44. By this act of disobedience they are engaging in the mockery of becoming what they oppose: a Talmudist in spirit and a Christian in name only.
Historically, the counterfeit of Christ’s ecclesia has sometimes been termed “Churchianity,” and it was this impostor institution bearing the name of Christ that mirrored the revenge and contempt which it denounced as the apex of evil when practiced by rabbis. This bipolar approach to Judaism severely undercut Christendom’s evangelical mission, and served demonic spirits in so doing. Jesus defined our love for Him very sharply and clearly. If we love Him, then we will keep His commandments. Matthew 5:44 is one of Our Savior’s commands which we must place uppermost in our minds as we proceed to explore the theology of the Talmud.
Furthermore, believers in rabbinic Judaism are urgently in need of our concern and missionary effort. In addition to the obvious reason that they have refused a saving faith in their Messiah Jesus, the negative consequences of institutionalizing that rejection are enormous: oppression by Talmudic and cognate theological dictates, including the suffocating, tyrannical micro-management of their lives. The misnamed “Laws of Family Purity” (Halakhos of Niddah) for instance, are among the most reprehensible forms of oppression of women ever devised (cf. this writer’s Judaism Discovered, pp. 729-747).
Another illustration is the requirement that Jewish women remove from their homes every speck of chametz —leavened grain of any type (wheat, oats etc.). This dictate is a source of neurosis and misery. Not even a crumb may be present in her home during the eight days of Pesach (Passover). Her “failure” to totally eradicate every particle is believed to invite a curse on the family due to the “negligence” of the wife. In the Kabbalistic texts, chametz represents a Jew’s individuality, something which, the Orthodox rabbis assert, “must be eliminated at all costs.”
Another wretched factor is Talmudism’s incitement to unethical conduct. Among the dense thicket of heinous halakhic injunctions, is the command for Jewish males to become completely drunk on alcohol every year on the holy day of Purim (BT Megillah 7b). Then there is the admonition to Jews in BT Moed Katan 17a, to perpetrate evil in secret:
“If one sees his yetzer hara (evil inclination) gaining sway over him, let him go where he is not known, put on sordid clothes and do the evil that his heart desires.”
The lives of their own unborn babies are also forfeit in Orthodox Judaism. It was the ruling of the famed rabbinic law-giver “Rashi” (Shlomo Yitzchaki), that a Jewish baby, before being born, is not a human being with a soul (nefesh).
According to rabbinic law, it is permitted to kill the dehumanized child with abortion in situations where the unborn infant is considered a “pursuer” (rodef) who represents a danger to the mother (cf. BT Sanhedrin 72b, and Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Sefer Nezikim, Rotzeach u’Shmirat Nefesh 1:9).
The exposition in this study of radical truths concerning the theology and praxis of Orthodox Judaism is imperative for the advancement of both the Gospel and human reason, as well as for the protection of innocent human beings, particularly in Palestine and Lebanon. It is intended equally for the enlightenment and liberation of Jews and non-Jews, and it is toward those ends and in that spirit alone, that we have undertaken this work.
Under Threat of Death
It is worth noting that on the authority of the law of the rabbis in the Babylonian Talmud, in Berakhot 58a, the publication of this study renders its author a rodef (רודף, homicidal “pursuer”). According to the law of din rodef, a person designated a rodef is liable to be killed on sight.
In BT Berakhot 58a, an interlocutor is asking a rabbi residing in Persia about the racist denigration of non-Jews. The religious authority being questioned, Rabbi Sheila, responds to the questioner by stating that gentiles are beasts of burden (“donkeys”). Rabbi Sheila then deduces that the man who is the questioner is going to report this denigration of non-Jews to the rulers of Persia. At that point the Talmud states, “This man has the legal status of a rodef.” This section of Berakhot 58a concludes with the rabbi righteously killing the would-be reporter.
The Talmudic permission for the murder of reporters and scholars who testify to the factual content of rabbinic law has never been rescinded.
The rodef is also found among those who seek to return land stolen from the Palestinians. As recently as November 4, 1995 a dramatic murder of an individual classified as a rodef took place in Tel Aviv, when no less an eminent personage than the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who sought a land-for-peace treaty with the Palestinians, was gunned down by Yigal Amir, a zealous Israeli Talmud student. An alumnus of Bar Ilan University, Mr. Amir specifically cited the Talmud as his justification for murdering the Israeli Prime Minister.
In endeavoring to answer the question:
“What Does Rabbinic Judaism Say About What Makes Jews and Gentiles Different?”
Our Response is Rooted in Halakha (Rabbinic law)
The founding legal texts of rabbinic Judaism are the Mishnah and the Gemara. They are collectively termed the “Torah she-be’al peh” (תורה שבעל פה), i.e. the oral law committed to writing as the Talmud Bavli (i.e. Babylonian Talmud, abbreviated as “BT”).
According to the Babylonian Talmud, God himself is subservient to the rabbis: “Since God already gave the Torah to the Jewish people on Mt. Sinai we no longer pay attention to heavenly voices. God must submit to the decisions of a majority vote of the rabbis.” (BT Bava Metzia 59b).
Consequently, the Word of God (Scripture) is subordinate to the traditions of the rabbis. These traditions were previously oral. They were committed to writing, first as the Mishnah, in the early centuries (Tannaitic era), after the crucifixion of Israel’s Messiah. The subsequent portion of the Talmudic canon (the Gemara) produced mainly during the Amoraim era (circa 300-450 A.D.) was written in the Aramaic language.
The Babylonian Talmud (as distinct from the Jerusalem Talmud which is not authoritative), is the holiest text of the religion of Judaism. The revered Pharisaic “sages of blessed memory” decree this themselves in the Talmud. In BT Shabbat 15c and Baba Metzia 33A, we see the Three Declarations of the much-honored, goyim-despising Rabbi Shimon ben Yohai, one of the most adored of all the “sages.” Yohai wrote: A. “He who occupies himself with Scripture gains merit that is no merit. B. “He who occupies himself with Mishnah gains merit for which people receive a reward. C. “He who occupies himself with Talmud — there is no source of merit greater than this.”
What part of the preceding unimpeachable statement from the supreme sacred book of Orthodox Judaism do gentiles and Christians not understand? Old Testament law is a distant second in Orthodox Judaism. It is studied, misapplied and nullified by being read through the distorting prism of the Talmud.
The non-Biblical basis of Orthodox Judaism is acknowledged in the Mishnah: “The laws concerning the Sabbath, Festal-offerings and acts of trespass are as mountains hanging by a hair, for they have scant Scriptural basis but many laws” (Mishnah Hagiga i, 8).
“Torah-True” Jews?
“Torah” is Orthodox Judaism’s spurious badge of authority. The rabbis proclaim that they have the Torah, have mastered the Torah, base their laws on the Torah and that they are “Torah-true.” Yet these rabbinic claims are a deceptive play on words, for the “Torah” upon which they base their laws is not the Old Testament, but the counterfeit Torah SheBeal Peh. Hence, when the rabbis are acclaiming their relationship with the “Torah,” Christians are deceived into imagining that the rabbis are harkening to their allegiance to the Old Testament (Torah SheBichtav), when Orthodox Judaism’s laws emanate from the man-made Talmud Bavli, which is the “Torah” they regard as supreme.
In 2010 something of a confession concerning this fact came to the fore in the Judaic media. In an article at Ynetnews.com of Feb. 10, 2010 titled, “Time to Face Haredi Secret,” Efrat Shapira-Rosenberg reported a remarkable admission about the ultra-Orthodox “Haredi” (Hasidic) Judaics:
“Not too long ago I happened to speak with a young man who studies at one of the ‘flagships’ of the Haredi yeshiva (Talmudic academy) world; a yeshiva which is no doubt among the most important and elitist ones. We spoke about various issues, and at one point I referred to a certain Biblical character I’m especially fond of. This figure was not one of the Bible’s leading actors like Abraham or Moses, but it was not a particularly marginal character either, but rather, an interesting and significant one in my view; one that conveys an important message to biblical scholars.
“So why am I telling you all this? Because the guy had no idea what I was talking about. He never heard about this figure, he was unfamiliar with it, and he was certainly unfamiliar with the important messages it teaches us.
“…the time has come to shatter the myth and explicitly address the most open secret which we all have known for a while now – Haredi education in its various yeshivas only focuses on one thing, while creating ignorant students on every other front. An important clarification: I am not referring, like secular critics, to the Haredi disregard for subjects such as math, science, English literature, etc…This is a different problem.
“The issue I have is with the fact that the vast majority of yeshivas only teach Talmud and related questions and answers. That’s it.
“What about the Bible? I am not disparaging, Heaven forbid, the importance of the Talmud. Yet for once let’s talk about the religious people who strictly adhere to the mitzvahs (blessed deeds), yet are unfamiliar with the Bible…And this is not an anomaly – this is the norm. The only Biblical verses familiar to yeshiva students are those quoted by Talmud sages, and that’s that. The Bible is seen as a sort of inferior genre that is appropriate for young children (or for women)…” (End quote)
Jews who reject the Talmudic traditions of men and regard as supreme law only the Old Testament Word of God, are known as “Karaites” (“Scripturalists”). Karaism arose in reaction to the growing influence of the Talmud emanating from the Babylonian Talmudic academies in Pumbedita and Sura (in present day Iraq), among Jews of the late 7th and early 8th centuries. The Jewish patriarch of Karaism was an 8th century rabbinic convert from Talmudism, Anan ben David. His book of precepts, Sefer ha-Mizvot, undercut the authority of the Mishnah and Gemara. He famously stated, “Search diligently in the Scriptures and do not rely on my opinion.”
Due to their Bible-only devotion, throughout their history Karaite Jews have been persecuted and even killed by Talmudic zealots. The existence of the Karaites is largely unknown to the Vatican II Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants who imagine that Talmudic rabbis are faithful Scripturalists.
The Talmud of Babylon and its successor texts:
Authoritative Halakha or mere Commentary and Debates?
In order to answer the question about what makes Jews different, it is necessary that we refute a familiar defense against charges that the Babylonian Talmud is the basis of the laws of Orthodox Judaism. Apologists assert that the more blatantly horrible passages in the Babylonian Talmud do not constitute the law of Judaism (halakha), but only commentary and debate. The truth is very different, however. Halakha is comprised of the traditions found in the non-Biblical, sacred rabbinic texts. Those texts as a whole comprise the Oral Law, what Josephus termed, paradôsis (“tradition”).
The oral traditions of the Pharisees is the foundation of the Talmud, as Jesus declared (cf. Mark 7; Matthew 15). Those traditions consist of extra-Biblical superstitions and occultism, self-worship, racist hatred for non-Jews and sheer nonsense. BT Ketubot 60b-61a: “If a woman copulates in a grain mill she will have epileptic children. One who copulates on the ground will have children with long necks.” BT Berakoth 55a: “A certain matron said to Rabbi Judah b. Ila’i: ‘Your face is [red] like that that of pig-breeders and goyim!’ The rabbi replied, ‘On my faith both are forbidden me, but there are 24 toilets between my house and the Beth Midrash (house of study), and when I go there I test myself in all of them.”
Apologists assert that the Talmud is only a record of debates (mahloket) between tanna’im and amora’im (the authors of the Talmud Bavli known collectively as Chazal who lived in the early centuries A.D.), and that by focusing on one portion of the controversy and upholding that passage as authoritative, the critic errs, for no legal sanction is given to either side of the “debates in the Talmud.” This is demonstrably false. The Mishnah and subsequent rabbinic amplifications of it comprise the halakha, by which every believing Orthodox Judaic person is bound, down to the most minute and intimate particulars of his or her daily life.
How Talmudic law is deduced and adjudicated is often an enigma to outsiders, but that it constitutes halakha is certain. The key point is that the appearance of Talmudic indeterminacy does not preclude law-making by majority rabbinic consensus — which is the process by which Talmudic halakha is determined in a given time and particular situation, both in terms of a decision on what constitutes the oral law of the elders as presented in the Mishnah (halakha lemosheh misinai), as well as the subsequent Mitzvot derabanan (rabbinical commandments) found in the Gemara, arising from the deductive process known as Middot shehatorah nidreshet bahen.
As a public relations ploy, many rabbis and Zionist leaders pretend otherwise, revealing the low opinion they have of the public, who they believe will swallow the line about the Talmud being a mere book of discourses and disputes, where no definitive teaching or authoritative law-making emerges. The intent behind the deliberate sowing of this deception rests in the stratagem that by promoting the idea that the Talmud is a collection of debates and commentary without force of law, no indictment of it is possible, since another text can always be cited to contradict the offending one. However, the investigator who examines the historic discipline and practice of Orthodox Judaism can ascertain that a body of law codified in the Babylonian Talmud exerts the most profound command over individual Judaics and governs their conduct.
What is disputed in the Talmud is often the Yud Gimmel Midot, not the Halakha l’Moshe M’Sinai. In presenting the Talmud to the public this distinction is often not made. There are thousands of discourses in authoritative rabbinic texts about minutiae, such as which dishes can be washed on Shabbos (the Sabbath), and how they may be washed. Disagreements along those lines are not disagreements concerning the non-negotiable, core Talmudic dogma that forms the halakha itself.
Let’s look at a dispute involving situation ethics: the ban on a Jewish man shaving his beard, the hair-splitting dimensions of which would try the patience of most sane people. Rabbi Maimonides (also referred to as the “Rambam”), asserted that the rationale behind the ban was the fact that the goyim, as personified by the chukos ho’akum (customs) of Catholic priests, were clean-shaven. To distinguish goyim from Jews therefore, Maimonides decreed that beards on Jewish males were obligatory. A point in this dissertation on this particular situation ethic was raised centuries later by the learned posek (determiner of halakha), Rabbi Yosef Babad, in his Minchas Chinuch, a 19th century disquisition on the 13th century Sefer ha-Chinuch, itself a treatise on the halakha codified by Maimonides in the 12th century. Rabbi Babad in his ruling followed the clarification proffered by a 17th century halakhist, Rabbi ha-Levi Segal (“the Taz”), stating that there were extenuating circumstances and dispensations in connection with shaving, in that when it becomes the general practice of Catholic priests to grow beards, Jews would no longer be obliged not to shave.
To say that there are tens of thousands of other cases like the preceding would be a low estimate. Gedolim,poskim and the other prodigiously erudite legal authorities of Orthodox Judaism, clarify, modify, squabble and split hairs over puerile trivia, such as whether a Jew may go to sleep while wearing shoes. (No, because it is “a taste of death,” according to BT Yoma 78b. However, if the shoes are to be worn during a brief nap, it could be allowed, as specified in Lekutei Maharich Tefillas Rav NB’H p. 107; Pe’as Sadecha 37, and Shemiras Haguf V’hanefesh [115, footnote 2]). What happens if during his supposedly short nap the Jewish person oversleeps? The response to that requisite question is found in another dozen rabbinic sources.
Then there are the pages of responsum concerning the permissibility of using colored toilet deodorizer on Shabbos (Sabbath): “Some poskim say it is considered dyeing (coloring) on Shabbos,” which is forbidden (cf. Minchas Shlomo, 2:14 and Rav Y.A. Silber: Oz Nidberu 13:14). “Harav Yisrael Belsky maintains that if the deodorizer hangs from the rim of the toilet then one may use it on Shabbos, while if it is in the toilet itself then it is considered coloring on Shabbos,” and is not allowed (cf. Moishe Dovid Lebovitz [2010], p. 89). Orthodox Judaism consists of a universe of lawyers who bear the name rabbi. It is the domain of a theocratic bureaucracy so overgrown with laws, regulations, stipulations and minutiae — as well as innumerable derivatives thereof — that it makes Charles Dickens’ Circumlocution Office look like a libertarian utopia by comparison.
Rules of derivation and procedure (Yud Gimmel Midot) cannot compare with the oral law, which rabbinic dogma fantasizes that Yahweh gave to Moses. To the am ha’aretz (ignorant bumpkins) it is insinuated that the Talmud is a debating society where everything is on the table. This insinuation reveals contempt for the person, whether Judaic or non-Judaic, who dares to check into the matter. Using the record of Talmudic disputes on issues pertaining to situation ethics to maintain that in the Talmud the dogmas of rabbinic Judaism are merely batted back and forth in debates which do not have a significant function in forming halakha, is almost too asinine to merit comment. Nonetheless, numerous persons troubled by candid documentation of the uncensored contents of the Talmud, when given a line of malarkey about it being a series of legally non-authoritative debates, too often swallow it — accepting the legend that rabbinic Judaism is the religion of the Old Testament prophets from which was born western civilization’s concepts of free will, freedom of conscience and reasoning for one’s self.
In truth, the creed founded upon the Talmud is wholly alien in relation to that noble western ethic. The Agudath Israel Orthodox rabbinic organization publishes Hamodia newspaper, in which we find the following representative statement in the 19 Adar 5763 (Feb. 21, 2003) issue, p. 14: “From time immemorial, every G-d-fearing Jew subjected his personal and communal affairs to the guidance of his Rav (rabbi), understanding the folly of following the dictates of his own heart or mind.”
The laws of the Mishnah and Gemara as decided by the consensus of Chazal through their supposed supernatural power of siyata dishmaya, as stated in authoritative law codes derived from the Talmud Bavli, such as the Mishneh Torah, Shulchan Aruch,Mishnah Berurah etc., are binding legal precedents. Opinions inconsistent with the Talmudic canon are void.
Because the principle of situation ethics is central to Orthodox Judaism, halakha is applied and enforced according to stringencies and leniencies geared to a particular period of time. These distinctions date to the “zuggot pairs” of the Tannaitic era.
“Show no Mercy to a non-Jew”
In the Middle Ages (the Rishonim era), Moses Maimonides devoted twelve years to extracting every decision and law from the Talmud of Babylon, and arranging them into fourteen systematic volumes. The work was completed in 1180 as the Mishneh Torah.
In the Mishneh Torah, Moses Maimonides taught in “Avodat Kochavim” chapter 10, “Show no mercy to a non-Jew.”
He gave the following example: “If we see a non-Jew being swept away or drowning in the river, we should not help him. If we see that his life is in danger, we should not save him.”
Situation Ethics in the Killing of Christians
Maimonides also taught that Christians should, under the proper circumstances, be killed. The “proper circumstances” are predicated on Rabbi Maimonides’ situation ethics: when Talmudists are powerfully dominant over goyim then worshippers of Jesus can be executed.
This is the foundation of Rabbi Maimonides’ ruling on when Jewish doctors may refuse to treat non-Jewish patients: when Jews are sufficiently supreme in a nation that the refusal to treat will not result in repercussions and reprisals from goyim, who would be too cowed to retaliate in a nation where Jewish supremacy was nearly total. It is instructive to observe that Maimonides in Mishneh Torah, Sefer Ha-Mada, Aodah Zara 10:1-2, ruled that goyim not currently at war with Israel should neither be actively killed, nor saved from death: “It is prohibited both to save them from dying and to kill them.”
This is not a simple open-and-closed finding. Many more rabbinic texts have been generated, setting out the situation ethics entailed by this injunction. Cf. for example Rabbi Nahmanides, Hidushei HaRambam, Makot 9a. The key law giver Rabbi Joseph Karo, compiler of the highly credited legal volumes of the Shulchan Aruch, looks upon Maimonides’ ruling not as a ban on the killing of goyim, but a means for temporarily dispensing a Jew from the obligation to kill them, while doing nothing to save them from death.
With this in mind, we observe how halakha is applied and enforced subject to contingencies such as the ones that Maimonides stipulated: the legal, political and social position of Jews in the nation in which they reside, and the goyim with whom they are dealing.
So for example, in contemporary occupied Palestine (“Israel”) most Christians, Muslims and Arabs in general may be killed with relative impunity, as the situation demands. There may be a temporary uproar in the western world in protest, but historically these protests have subsided, with no lasting detrimental effect on the Israeli state. In times past however, in nations where Christian or Muslim governments were vigilant concerning crimes against non-Jewish persons, the field of action against Christians and Muslims as promulgated by law-giver Rabbi Moses Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah, was restricted by the circumstances. Maimonides himself served for a time as the personal physician to the family of the sultan of Egypt, ostensibly dispensing with the Talmudic dictum of showing no mercy to goyim. The situation demanded however, that the Talmudic ethic be suspended for the time being for a more paramount objective — to allow Maimonides to gain influence with the nation-state’s ruling family.
During the administration of President Barack Obama, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israeli physicians and hospitals were giving medical treatment to the Nusra Front’s injured al Qaeda fighters, so as to hasten their return to the Syrian battlefield, where they were waging war against the government of Bashar al-Assad (cf. “Al Qaeda a Lesser Evil?” Wall Street Journal online, March 12, 2015; and Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2015, p. A6). This is another instance of how rabbinic injunctions can be temporarily suspended under certain circumstances, in line with Orthodox Judaism’s situation ethics.
Hence, there is certainly debate within the rabbinate over how, when and to what degree to apply the Talmudically-derived halakha.
To extrapolate from the situation wherein questions of timing and tactical application arise within the rabbinate, to a nullification of the existence and compelling force of law which the Talmudic Mishnah and Gemara exert, is without foundation.
For example, there is no authentic debate about gentiles having lesser souls (or in the case of Chabad-Lubavitch theology, no souls whatsoever).
That goyim are nefesh-deficient is the fixed sacred law of Orthodox Judaism. How the law that goyim are less than fully human is applied is indeed subject to discussion and contestation in the Mishneh Torah, Kesef Mishneh and hundreds of cognate legal texts derived from the Talmud. But the halakha comprising the Talmud of Babylon itself is incontestable. When putative defenders of the Talmud engage in absurdity and point to debates about how Talmudic halakha is to be interpreted, as evidence that the source of the Torah she-be’al peh—the Talmudic texts themselves—comprise only an admired collection of debates and discussions, they are playing a prank on their goyische dupes.
In addition to the Mishnah and Gemara of the Talmud Bavli, the laws of rabbinic Judaism are also derived from successor legal texts emanating from the Talmud. These include, but are not limited to, the Mishneh Torah, the Shulchan Aruch, the Mishnah Berurah, the Shulchan Aruch Harav, the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, the Igros Moshe, and many dozens of additional post-Talmudic sacred volumes having the force of law in Ashkenazic Orthodox Judaism.
Where is the Word of God, you ask, amid the miasma of anthropocentric laws which constitute these rabbinic traditions? It’s a good question and one that sola Scriptura Protestants—who excoriate Catholicism over its belief in a Bible-plus-Tradition theology—have generally either conspicuously ignored, or unconscionably neglected.
The Inherent Moral Turpitude of the Goyim
We intended to demonstrate that rabbinic law imputes an inherent moral turpitude to non-Jews and classes them as innately malevolent.
The goyim are grouped together with categories of criminals and transgressors who cannot act as a witness in a Beis din (rabbinic court; cf. Shulchan Arukh: Hoshen Mishpat 34).
Goyim are detested and feared in part because it is taught that they are congenitally predisposed to commit murder:
“A Jew should not be alone with a goy, because the goy is suspect to commit homicide.” (Kitzur Shulchan Aruch 168:17).
In the laws governing kashrut (kosher food and drink) victuals may not be consumed by a Jew if their preparation was entirely by a goy. A goy handling Jewish food must be supervised by a frum (Talmud-observant) Jew, because a goy cannot be trusted not to render the food or drink impure, or poisonous. Even this supervised food preparation may not be permissible in situations where a stringency, known as the rabbinic prohibition of bishul akum is enforced. (Cf. Pischei Teshuvah Y.D. 113:1, Aruch ha-Shulchan 113:50; Y.D. 113:16; Chochmas Adam 66:11). Under certain circumstances wine that has even been touched by a non-Jew “has been defiled and is unfit for use by Jews” (BT Avodah Zarah 72b).
When the opportunity to save a Judaic human life (pikuah nefesh) conflicts with the observance of the Sabbath, saving the Judaic life takes precedence. Rabbinic legal authorities also distinguish between the obligation to save a Judaic life on the Sabbath and the life of a goy.
Israel Meir Kagan (1838–1933), the halachic authority known as the Chofetz Chaim (a.k.a. the Hafetz Hayyim), condemned the behavior of any Judaic physician who did not discriminate between Jews and non-Jews. Concerning Judaic physicians, Rabbi Kagan wrote in Mishnah Berurah: O.H. 330, “…to treat a non-Jew…there is no authority for them to do so.” (The halakhic status of Rabbi Kagan’s Mishnah Berurah, was assessed by Simcha Fishbane in The Encyclopedia of Judaism, as follows, “His greatest work, which remains the strongest influence on Orthodox practice today and whose authority is considered final, is Mishnah Berurah [1884-1907], in six volumes”).
It is a minhag (a custom without the force of law) to refer to goyim using racial slurs. Non-Jewish men are termed a “male abomination” (shegetz; plural: shkotzim). With regard to non-Jewish women the racist term of derision is shiksa, denoting a female abomination.
“Only Jews are Human”
The Babylonian Talmud states, “Only Jews are human. Non-Jews are not human.” (Bava Metzia 114b. Also: BT Kerithoth 6b and 58a).
One of the earliest laws distinguishing between Jews and goyim is found in the Babylonian Talmud, in Sanhedrin 57a:
“Regarding bloodshed, the following distinction applies, if a non-Jew killed another non-Jew, or a non-Jew killed a Jew, the killer is liable for execution; if a Jew killed a non-Jew, he is exempt from punishment.”
“Regarding a Jew stealing from a non-Jew, the act is permitted.” (BT Sanhedrin 57a).
It is commanded in the Talmud’s Kiddushin 66c: “The best of the gentiles: kill him; the best of snakes: smash its skull; the best of women: is filled with witchcraft.” (The uncensored version of this text appears in Tractate Soferim [New York, M. Higer, 1937], 15:7, p. 282).
The Talmud decrees in Sanhedrin 81b-82a: “All gentile women without exception are: ‘Niddah, Shifchah, Goyyah and Zonah’ (menstrual filth, slaves, heathens and prostitutes).
The Talmud rules that black people are cursed: “The sages taught: Three violated that directive and engaged in intercourse while in the ark, and all of them punished for doing so. They are: the dog and the raven, and Ham, son of Noah. The dog was punished in that it is bound; the raven was punished in that it spits, and Ham was afflicted in that his skin turned black.” (BT Sanhedrin 108b).
The preceding Talmudic legal text has directly contributed to the suffering and misery of black Africans enslaved on the basis that they were accursed descendants of Ham and their enslavement was foreordained by God. Nowhere is this bigoted lie found in the Bible. It is entirely the invention of the Talmudic and Midrashic theology of men.
Moreover, a declaration by the supreme arbiter of rabbinic law in the Ashkenazic world, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, created a justification for white slave-holders and slave-traders (both Judaic and Christian) to enslave black people for life and treat them as chattel (animals). Maimonides performed this service for the slave trade in his seminal text, The Guide of the Perplexed, which is celebrated throughout the western world (his image hangs in a place of honor in the halls of Congress and numerous buildings in the United States are named for him). In The Guide of the Perplexed, this “illustrious” rabbi taught that black people are “irrational animals” who are situated midway between the ape and the human (cf. University of Chicago Press, Shlomo Pines translation, vol. II, [1963], p. 618).
The leading disciple of Maimonides in American 20th century politics and statecraft was Leo Strauss, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. The Neoconservative (“Neocon”) intellectuals he influenced were a significant force in George W. Bush’s decision to needlessly invade and make war upon the nation of Iraq. President Bush filled many key command and advisory positions with Neocons, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Douglas Feith, John Bolton and Ari Fleischer.
The founding sacred book of the theologically influential and, in the United States, politically powerful, Orthodox Chabad-Lubavitch Judaism, is the Tanya, which was written by Chabad’s founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Lyady. This foundational Chabad volume decrees that:
“Gentile souls are of a completely different and inferior order. They are totally evil, with no redeeming qualifies whatsoever. Their material abundance derives from supernal refuse. Indeed, they themselves derive from refuse, which is why they are more numerous than the Jews.”
(Cf. Habad: The Hasidism of Shneur Zalman of Lyady [Jacob Aronson, 1993], pp. 108-109). Apparently Rabbi Zalman never read or credited Genesis 22:17 in which God informs Abraham that his descendants will be “more numerous than the stars in the sky.”
Shneur Zalman: “The souls of the goyim emanate from the unclean kelipot (husks) which contain no good whatsoever.” (Cf. Opening the Tanya, p. 43).
The Kabbalah in the volume “Book of Splendor” (Zohar), defines kelipot as “husks of evil…waste matter…bad blood…dross…dregs…the root of evil” (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, pp. 125, 139, 156-157).
Israeli “settler” rabbis such as the late Moshe Levenger and Meir Kahane took Rabbi Zalman’s dogma to heart and encouraged terrorism against Palestinian civilians. Levenger shot to death an unarmed Palestinian store keeper and served less than a year in an Israeli jail for the murder. Today, tens of thousands of rabbis from Brooklyn to Moscow and Jerusalem, preach and teach the soul-searing dehumanization of goyim promulgated by the revered founder of Chabad-Lubavitch Judaism. Palestinians are oppressed, robbed, beaten and killed based upon the theological determination that they, like goyim in general, are not human; indeed, garbage (“supernal refuse”).
In Orthodox Judaism goyim are not to be trusted: “…a gentile’s word is totally discounted regarding ritual prohibitions…In a situation where a gentile’s word is not relied upon, his conversion to Judaism will not influence our acceptance of his testimony.” —Rabbi Ezra Basri, Chief Justice, District Court, Jerusalem, “The Testimony of a Gentile Regarding Ritual Matters,” in Ethics of Business Finance & Charity, vol. 2, chapter 13.
In Orthodox Judaism there is no obligation to be fair to goyim:“The laws (of fairness) mentioned above only apply between two Jewish neighbors. Gentiles do not necessarily respect these principles and, hence, there is no obligation to show them such consideration in return.” —Rabbi Ezra Basri, Chief Justice, vol. 4, chapter 2.
Raping Goyim
In 2014 Dr. Mordechai Kedar, a professor at the elite Israeli Bar-Ilan University stated that the only action that can successfully deter armed resistance by Arabs, is to rape their sisters or their mothers. Prof. Kedar’s words were not an aberration or a misinterpretation. They were consistent with rabbinic law.
Though it will be claimed by the usual public relations hacks that the Bar Illan University professor’s monstrous rape-deterrent observation is “condemned by the Jewish tradition” (citing, for example, BT Kiddushin 22), there are rabbinic escape clauses which justify rape. First, the rape target must be classified as a zonah (prostitute) or a nokri (hostile alien). The supreme Ashkenazic halachic authority, Rabbi Moses Maimonides, rules that a Judaic soldier may rape this type of female “Yefas To’ar” (prisoner of war), when he is not actively fighting a battle (Hilchos Melachim 8:3).
A text in the Meorot theology journal of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinic School, gives permission to Judaic soldiers to rape a female goy battle captive one time:
“It is the consensus of many halachic decisors (judges of rabbinic law) that the yefat to’ar (female goy battle captive) can be subject to involuntary intercourse, though only once, after which she must undergo a specific regimen described in the Torah (Torah sheBeal peh i.e. the Mishnah and Gemara), conversion and marriage, before her captor is permitted further sexual relations with her…”
Source: Dov. S. Zakheim, Meorot vol. 6: no. 1 (2006), p. 5. (Mr. Zakheim was Under Secretary of Defense in the administration of George W. Bush, 2001-2004).
Advocates of raping non-Jews can be found at the highest levels of the Israel ruling class. Here is the permission to commit rape given by Eyal Karim, the Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Army:
“The wars of Israel […] are mitzvah (divinely blessed) wars, in which they differ from the rest of the wars the nations (goyim) wage among themselves. Since, essentially, a war is not an individual matter, but rather nations wage war as a whole, there are cases in which the personality of the individual is ‘erased’ for the benefit of the whole. And vice versa: sometimes you risk a large unit for the saving of an individual, when it is essential for purposes of morale. One of the important and critical values during war is maintaining the army’s fighting ability […]
“As in war the prohibition against risking your life is broken for the benefit of others, so are the prohibitions against immorality and of kashrut (kosher). Wine touched by gentiles, consumption of which is prohibited in peacetime, is allowed at war, to maintain the good spirit of the warriors. Consumption of prohibited foods is permitted at war (and some say, even when kosher food is available), to maintain the fitness of the warriors, even though they are prohibited during peacetime.
“Just so, war removes some of the prohibitions on sexual relations (gilui arayot), and even though fraternizing with a gentile woman is a very serious matter, it was permitted during wartime (under the specific terms) out of understanding for the hardship endured by the warriors. And since the success of the whole at war is our goal, the Torah permitted the individual to satisfy the evil urge (yetzer ha’ra), under the conditions mentioned, for the purpose of the success of the whole.” (End quote).
Rabbi Karim’s words would be despicable even if he were not the chief spiritual teacher and counselor of the Israeli army which holds in its iron fist the nearly helpless captive population of Palestine.
Weaponizing the Babylonian Talmud’s Racism and Bigotry Toward Non-Jews
Racist and hateful Talmudic doctrine about non-Jews has been weaponized by the halakhic injunctions of rabbis in “Israel” and the United States, and the expulsion, subjugation and mass murder of Palestinians and the Israeli slaughter of Arabs in Lebanon, can only be fully comprehended within the context of the anti-gentile halakha derived from the Talmud, which was formerly concealed, obscured and denied, and which is increasingly being published in the Hebrew language press, and in the case of the Steinsaltz Talmud, in English.
“Jewish Superiority and the Question of Exile”
Rabbi Saadya Grama is one of the intellectual stars of the Beth Medrash Govoha, otherwise known as the “Lakewood yeshiva,” an internationally renowned center for Talmud study located in New Jersey. In 2003 Grama published the book, Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut (“Jewish Superiority and the Question of Exile”). In it he declaimed:
“The Jew by his source and in his essence is entirely good. The gentile, by his source and in his very essence, is completely evil. This is not simply a matter of religious distinction, but rather of two different species…
“Jewish success in the world is completely contingent upon the failure of other peoples. Jews experience good fortune only when gentiles experience catastrophe…The difference between Jews and gentiles is not historical or cultural, but rather genetic and unalterable.”
Rabbi Grama further stated that the “Torah” mandates that Jews, while in exile, should employ such means as “…deception, duplicity and bribery in their dealing with gentiles.”
Romemut Yisrael Ufarashat Hagalut was endorsed by eminent rabbinic authorities, including the distinguished Rabbi Aryeh Malkiel Kotler, the Rosh yeshiva (Dean of the seminary) at Lakewood. He lauded Grama for his teaching on: “…the subjects of Exile, the Election of Israel, and her exaltation above and superiority to all other nations, all in accordance with the viewpoint of the Torah, based on the solid instruction he has received from his teachers.” (A year after the publication of Grama’s supremacist volume was published, Congress awarded the Lakewood yeshiva a federal grant of $500,000).
Murder Manuals: Baruch Hagever and Torat Hamelech
“Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life”
Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh (born in 1944 in St. Louis, Missouri), is considered one of Chabad-Lubavitch’s leading experts on the Kabbalah. He is a celebrated educator and influencer in the USA and the Israeli state. Like Rabbi Grama, Ginsburgh also teaches the dogma that Jews possess a genetically-based superiority over non-Jews.
“If you have two people drowning, a Jew and a non-Jew, the Torah says you save the Jewish life first,” Rabbi Ginsburgh asserts.
He teaches: “If every single cell in a Jewish body entails divinity, is a part of God, then every strand of DNA is a part of God. Therefore, something is special about Jewish DNA.”
Rabbi Ginsburgh stated further, “If a Jew needs a liver, can you take the liver of an innocent non-Jew passing by to save him? The Torah would probably permit that. Jewish life has infinite value. There is something infinitely more holy and unique about Jewish life than non-Jewish life.”
Rabbi Ginsburgh is the author of Baruch Hagever, a book praising the example of mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 40 Palestinians as they prayed in a mosque in Hebron on Purim, February 1994. In Baruch Hagever the rabbi termed the slaughter, “…an act of bravery whose source was divine grace.”
Baruch Hagever is a summary provided by one of Ginsburgh’s students, of a class Rabbi Ginsburgh taught in 1994 during which he identified positive aspects of Baruch Goldstein’s massacre of Muslim worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs as:
“The sanctification of the name of God…The life of Israel is worth more than the life of the goy and even if the goy does not intend to hurt Israel, it is permissible to hurt him in order to save Israel.”
“Legally,” Ginsburg asserts, “if a Jew kills a non-Jew, he’s not called a murderer. He didn’t transgress the Sixth Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not murder.’ This applies only to Jews killing Jews.” (This is a nearly verbatim reference to BT Sanhedrin 57a).
Ginsburgh’s teachings have incited a new generation of Israeli murderers who rely upon his Talmudic theology to justify the killing of goyim.
This homicidal rabbinic theology is imparted in a book co-authored in 2009 by the Rosh yeshiva (Dean) of Ginsburgh’s seminary, Od Yosef Chai in the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar. It is titled Torat Ha-Melekh: Berure Halakha Be’-inyene Malkhut U-Milhamot (“The King’s Torah: Halakhic Clarifications Regarding Matters of Kingdom and Wars”). The title has been abbreviated as Torat Hamelech. It was written by the Rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, in collaboration with Rabbi Yosef Elitzur. It explicitly claims that the life of a Jew is worth more than the life of a non-Jew, and permits the killing of innocent non-Jews, including children.
One section of the volume teaches that it is permitted to kill non-Jewish infants on the enemy side during warfare “if there is a good chance they will grow up to be like their evil parents.”
Other reasons the rabbis furnish for the permission to kill non-Jewish children include if they “block the rescue of Jews…Little children are often situated in this way…it is permitted to kill them because their very presence facilitates the killing (of Jews)…(p. 215).
“It is also permitted to kill the children of the leader (of the enemy) in order to put pressure on him…” (p. 215).
In another instance, Rabbis Shapira and Elitzur write, “Every citizen of our kingdom who opposes us and who encourages [our enemies’] fighters, or expresses satisfaction with their deeds, is considered an assailant and may be killed….”
On p. 185 the rabbinic authors state that whoever uses freedom of speech to weaken the Jews is considered to be a rodef and can be killed. They base this on the ruling by the Maharal of Prague, Rabbi Judah Loew, who determined that whoever causes Jews to be reluctant to kill (“faint-hearted while at war”) deserves death (cf. Gur Aryeh on Parashat Mattot).
In chapter four of Torat Hamelech, Rabbis Shapira and Elitzur state that because the life of the Jew is superior to that of the non-Jew, “…there is a consensus among the halakhic sources that it is permitted to kill non-Jews to save the lives of Jews…It is permitted as well in cases in which we exploit the presence of innocent young children (and harm them) in order to harm their parents” (p. 199).
The rabbis further state, “There is a svara (a compelling reason founded on intuition) for hurting young, non-Jewish children if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us, and in such cases, we should aim our destruction specifically towards them. Young children will benefit from this killing since they would have grown up in an unrepaired way (be-tzurah lo metukenet), that would require their killing anyway. Therefore, it would be better to kill them now” (pp. 205-207).
The final chapter of this rabbinic law book urges the employment of merciless vengeance against the goyim (pp. 217-224). Torat Hamelech concludes with an indirect call for vigilante killings of Palestinians, many of which have occurred since the volume appeared, to little publicity in the West, such as the burning to death in 2015 of a Palestinian baby, Ali Dawabsheh, and his mother and father, by a youthful Talmudist, Amiram Ben Uliel.
Two dozen Orthodox rabbis have signed an open letter calling on the government to free Amiram Ben Uliel. The adult son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Yair Netanyahu, has raised money for the child-killer’s legal costs.
Rabbi Shapira and Rabbi Elitzur declare that individual Jews can make the decision to kill goyim extra-judicially: “One does not need a decision by the nation to permit the spilling of blood…sometimes one must commit ruthless acts that are designed to create the correct element of fear.” (End quote from Torat Hamelech).
In addition to Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, prominent rabbis Dov Lior and Ya’acov Yosef gave Torat Hamelech their blessing. This book has been circulated among Israeli military and police forces.
Rabbi Ishay Berg also wrote in approval of Rabbis Shapira and Elitzur’s teaching: “The Jewish soul is, in fact, the thrusting of the world into the absolute, into an entity with a validity of existence which cannot be compared with the fragile reality which we see before our eyes. This perception lies behind the ruling that the life of a Jew and the fulfillment of the commandments are superior to the life of a non-Jew in any situation” (M’aneh Le-Derekh Ha-Melekh).
In 1989 a mob of Zionists led by Rabbi Ginsburgh rampaged through a village in the West Bank region of Palestine, engaging in arson and murdering a 13-year-old Palestinian girl. A Talmud (“yeshiva”) student was arrested and put on trial in an Israeli court. Ginsburgh spoke for the defense, pointing out the lower value of the life of the Palestinian child: “The people of Israel must rise and declare in public that a Jew and goy are not, God forbid, the same. Any trial that assumes that Jews and goyim are equal is a travesty of justice.”
In March, 1996 Rabbi Ginsburgh delivered a Purim lecture claiming to quote Chabad-Lubavitch Grand Rabbi Schneerson on the subject of “the mitzvahs of war for the sake of revenge and war for the sake of conquering the Land of Israel.” According to Rabbi Ginsburgh, Grand Rabbi Schneerson taught “that war for the sake of revenge was a much higher mitzvah” (blessed act). Ginsburg asserts that criticism of him is equivalent to criticism of “the Lubavitcher rebbe” (Schneerson) and of the תורה שבעל פה — the Torah sheBeal peh itself. (Cf. Lawrence Cohler, “Hero or Racist? Are Jewish lives really more valuable than non-Jewish ones?” The Jewish Week, April 26, 1996, pp. 12 and 31).
Yitzchak Ginsburg was a 2019 recipient of an award from the Israeli Ministry of Education honoring him for his “Torah wisdom.”
According to Judaic scholars Norton Mezvinsky and Israel Shahak in their book, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Kabbalah is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Kabalah the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”
The largest funeral for any Israeli dignitary in the history of the Israeli state was conducted in honor of the memory and teachings of an advocate of the genocide of Palestinians, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, in Jerusalem in October, 2013. His funeral was attended by an estimated 700,000 to 800,000 Israeli mourners. The New York Times described Rabbi Yosef as “the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party…”
The Associated Press reported, “Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the religious scholar and spiritual leader of Israel’s Sephardic Jews who transformed his downtrodden community of immigrants from North Africa and Arab nations and their descendants into a powerful force in Israeli politics, died on Monday…Yosef was often called the outstanding Sephardic rabbinical authority of the century.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu declared that Rabbi Yosef was “one of the great halachic authorities of our generation. Rav Ovadia was a giant in Torah and halakha…He worked hard to glorify the heritage of Israel.”
These are the teachings of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the object of media and Israeli veneration:
Arab people should be exterminated: “May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them. It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.” (2001 Passover sermon. Cf. Haaretz [Israeli newspaper], April 12, 2001).
Gentiles likened to donkeys who exist only to serve the Jews: “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel…With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant… That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew. Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why gentiles were created.” Jerusalem Post, October 18, 2010. (Concerning this identification of goyim with donkeys, Yosef was repeating the teaching of the Talmud in the aforementioned BT Berakhot 58a, as well as BT Kiddushin 68b).
The Talmudic theology that produced Ovadia Yosef, also produced the prominent Israeli Rabbi Bentzi Gopstein, who advocates the burning of Christian churches on Israeli territory (cf. The Telelgraph [UK] Aug. 6, 2015). He has declared that Christian “Missionary work must not be given a foothold… Let’s throw the vampires out of our land before they drink our blood again.” (Forward, [New York Judaic newspaper], Dec. 24, 2015).
Gopstein is a leader in Lehava (ץ הקודש LiMniat Hitbolelut B’eretz HaKodesh: “The Prevention of Assimilation in the Holy Land,” which attacks Palestinians who date or marry Judaic women. In 2010, “Multiple rebbetzins, (wives of rabbis), acting on behalf of Lehava, issued an open letter urging Israeli women not to associate with ‘non-Jews.” It advised, “Don’t date non-Jews, don’t work at places that non-Jews frequent, and don’t do national service with non-Jews.” The letter implied that if the women did so, they would be cut off from their ‘holy race.” (Cf. “Rabbis’ Wives Urge Israeli Women: Stay Away from Arab men” Haaretz December 28, 2010; also: Jerusalem Post, December 28, 2010).
The leading Israeli settler-Rabbi Shlomo Aviner declared that the devastating fire at Notre Dame cathedral in April, 2019 was God’s curse—divine retribution for medieval Catholics putting the Babylonian Talmud on trial: “Aviner said it was a result of the Paris trial, ‘In which Jewish sages in France of that generation were forced into confrontation with the Christian sages. The result was the burning of the Talmud. The Talmud books were brought to the Notre Dame square in 20 wagons…and were burned there, meaning, 1,200 Talmud books… Aviner, now the rabbi of the West Bank settlement Beit El, said it is a mitzvah — a deed done from religious duty — to set fire to churches in Israel…” (Cf. Yotam Berger, Haaretz, April 17, 2019).
“The great Christian Church in Paris is on fire. Should we feel sorry for that, or should we rejoice, as it [the cathedral] is idolatry, which it is a mitzvah to burn?…Several immensely important rabbinic rulers, most prominent among them Maimonides, ruled that churches are places of idolatry and ought to be destroyed. The rulings are very clear.”—Rabbi Shlomo Aviner.
Hasbara (Israeli propaganda) is so intense and widely repeated in the western media that it has managed to convince the non-Talmudic world that these Orthodox rabbis and their declarations are “an exception, a marginal extremist phenomenon condemned by the mainstream.” It is true that sophisticated public relations experts can be depended upon to parade a long line of Orthodox rabbis who will offer lip service-denunciation of the openly hateful Talmudists. But these protests are mainly for public consumption, targeted at naive gentiles. The racism and bigotry toward Palestinians, Christians and goyim in general is a direct transmission from the Babylonian Talmud and the later rabbinic legal texts that are the heirs of its didactic hermeneutic.
The Talmudic dictum to show no mercy to a non-Jew is taught at yeshivas in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, where settler institutes of higher education in places such as Petach Tikvah turn out recruits for service in “elite combat units” of the Israeli army and air force. Regiments and squadrons composed of these Talmudic-Zionist troops are among the most brutal in the Israeli military.
Objection: Problematic Talmud Citations are taken “Out of Context”
Context is everything for the defenders of the Talmudic rabbinic theology. Fair enough. But by “context” they do not mean taking into account the surrounding text, but rather submitting to Judaism’s own narrative about itself, which includes how it chooses to present the malevolent contents of the Talmud to non-Judaic audiences. In their eyes, “misuse” of knowledge of rabbinic texts is defined as employing those texts for “polemical” purposes. In their view, no polemic contra Talmudic Judaism is permissible, however authentically contextual it may be.
In considering the low value which the Talmudic religious system places on nefesh-deficient (lesser-souled) non-Jews, we can find no substantial body of exculpatory halakhic texts that radically contradict this racist-supremacist (and potentially homicidal) theology. The quotations we have furnished above are grounded in rabbinic law. This is a tragedy of course, but the facts speak for themselves and no amount of pressure or intimidation alters this truth or causes us to withdraw that which advances human knowledge and serves to prevent racism, hatred and violence.
We are aware that Jew-haters throughout history have attempted to exploit the lamentable facts about the rabbinic tradition as a means of engaging in the reverse of what the Talmudic rabbis do to goyim: oppress and subjugate them. The perverse irony of Jew-hatred rests in the fact that it is often a mirror image of goyim-hatred.
There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus Christ and His apostles which directs or condones hatred of Jews. Jesus taught, “Salvation is of the Jews.” He first came “only unto “he lost sheep of the House of Israel,” and all of his initial followers, as well as His Blessed Mother, were Jews. When so-called “Christians” crusade to oppress or violently suppress Jews they are doing so without a Biblical foundation; contrary to the teachings of the Moshiach (Messiah) of Israel.
Whereas hatred, violence and bigotry are in accord with the holiest texts of Judaism: the Mishnah, Gemara, Mishneh Torah, Shulchan Aruch, Mishanh Berurah, to which the Old Testament is subordinated.
Until the founding of the Israeli state, violence toward goyim was less widespread and the idea of building a Judaic military force or to propose a mission of conquest or capture of land designated as “Israel,” was abhorrent to Orthodox Judaism and opposed to Talmudic theology. It is important to note that theologically-motivated murderers have risen commensurate with the ascendance of the Zionist ideology.
The Satmar Grand Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum has written Maamar Shalosh Shevuos, a treatise on the history and theology of pre-Zionist Orthodox Judaism, extending back centuries. During that time he demonstrates that the Talmudic theology taught that “Jews” were forbidden to found a nation-state of any kind until the Messiah appears, and forbidden to engage in military warfare against the goyim. Prior to the introduction of the heresy of Zionism in the 19th century, and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s theology in the 20th, the religion predicated on the Talmud strictly proscribed founding any so-called “state of Israel” on any land anywhere on earth, and least of all in the God-forsaken sandbox misnamed the “Holy Land.” The dogma was and remains that only Moshiach could found Israel on earth and no one else was allowed to do so, not even the provocateur whose alias was Ben-Gurion, and his clique of atheists, socialists and Stalinists.
(The principal anti-Zionist texts of Hasidic Judaism are I. Domb’s classic, The Transformation, and Yaakov Shapiro’s massive, The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft).
Among the minority of non-Zionist Talmudic Judaics (they are a substantial minority in Hasidic ranks), who have adhered to this doctrine that no Jewish state may be founded prior to the coming of Moshiach, they typically bear no blood guilt for the countless murders of the Arabs of Lebanon and Palestine, which the Zionists have falsely perpetrated in the name of the “Jewish people.” Occupied Palestine is a counterfeit Israel and Zionists do not represent or speak for all Judaic persons.
This is not to say that Talmudism, in its original form prior to the late 19th century and the rise of Zionism, was benevolently disposed toward goyim. Far from it. Israeli scholar Rami Rosen’s study, “History of a Denial,” which appeared in the Israeli magazine Haaretz in 1996, wrote, “A check of main facts of the (rabbinic) historiography of the last 1500 years shows that the picture is different from the one previously shown to us. It includes massacres of Christians; mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus that usually took place on Purim; cruel murders within the family; liquidation of informers, often done for religious reasons by secret rabbinical courts, which issued a sentence of rodef (‘pursuer’), and appointed secret executioners; assassinations of adulterous women in synagogues and/or the cutting of their noses by command of the rabbis.”
Plausible Denial and Institutionalized Deception
Secrecy concerning what Judaism actually teaches and represents is not as necessary in these days of rabbinic supremacy as it once was, for the reason expressed in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?” (Act 5:1)
Nonetheless, the propaganda continues and on the Internet there are Zionist rabbinic statements decrying the “commentary” and “interpretations” which Rabbi Ginsburgh and his like-minded fellow haters, such as Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, Rabbi Dov Lior, Bentzi Gopstein, Michael Ben-Ari, Rabbi Saadya Grama, Rabbi Meir Kahane, Rabbis Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, and others have supposedly falsely “imposed” on a blamelessly benign Talmud and ancillary halakhic texts.
These condemnations are not worth the paper they were written on. They are often put forth in the form of the standard disinformation which only am ha’aretz would believe, to wit, that the Mishnah and Gemara do not constitute rabbinic law, being merely various back-and-forth debates. As we have shown, this claim is retailed without stating that the zuggot pairs in Talmudic hermeneutics, such as the School of Shammai and the School of Hillel, each have the force of law at different times under given circumstances, due to the fact that a primary rabbinic exegetical principle is situation ethics.
Moreover, and this point is key, a principled Judaic protest contra racist rabbis, in order to have a reforming impact on Orthodox Judaism itself, would have to entail a repudiation of the iniquitous sacred texts upon which the bigotry and incitement to violence are predicated. Yet, there is no such repudiation in any of the signed declarations by supposed “enlightened” Orthodox rabbis allegedly attempting to distance their theology from that of a Meir Kahane or a Yitzchak Ginsburgh. Hence, it is not difficult to determine that the quintessence of the iniquitous Talmudic theology is upheld by these alleged rabbinic opponents of violence-prone, hate-spewing rabbis. What the supposed dissenters are doing is giving a deceitful public relations spin to Zionist-Talmudic theology, in the expectation that this will suffice to disarm critics and quiet any indignation or alarm that manifests among the public at large in the face of the awful truth about the Babylonian Talmud and its adherents.
The famed Rabbi Yosef Hayim of Baghdad, in Torah Lishmah, section 364, put forth the grounds for deception: “Behold, I set for you a table full of many aspects of permissibility in the matter of lying and deceit which are mentioned in the words of the Sages. Carefully examine each case and extract conclusions from each of them.”
In response to this study, Talmudists may attempt to deny everything, based on the invocation of their considerable clout and prestige: “The author is lying about Judaism because we say he is lying about Judaism.” That’s one simple tactic that has succeeded in terminating further investigation.
The recently deceased Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, translator of the Talmud Bavli, was an illustrious pillar of Chabad-Lubavitch Zionist Hasidism. So elevated was his position in Orthodox Judaism that in Tiberias he was named the Nasi (leader) of the reconstituted Sanhedrin. Rabbi Steinsaltz wrote:
“Rabbis are liable to alter their words, and the accuracy of their statements is not to be relied upon.” (The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, Vol. II, pp. 48-49 [Random House]).
In attempting to explain Talmudism’s penchant for lying, Judaic scholar Ari Zivotofsky states that truthfulness is not an absolute imperative in Orthodox Judaism, and that while the “value of truth permeates the fabric of Judaism…there are other ethical imperatives which are, in fact, often side by side with truth…The problems arise when two or more of these principles come into conflict…As is often the case with a legal/ philosophical issue, the black and white answer is not to be found…” According to Zivotofsky, “avoiding great embarrassment or financial loss at the hands of the unscrupulous may be legitimate motives for lying. The Talmudic sages were serious about lying in order to recover (or keep) property from illegitimate hands.” (BT Yoma 83b).
We note with considerable dismay the dissimulation employed to assert (as Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List does) that, “The Talmud teaches that to save one life is to save the entire world.”
This preposterous humanitarian gloss applied to the rabidly ethnocentric Talmud, was given credibility, both as dialogue in Spielberg’s movie and as the film’s motto, reproduced on countless posters that probably adorn school rooms to this day. The motto, dramatized in the film, is a purported to be a quote from BT Sanhedrin 37a, but the Talmud contains no such humanistic, universalist statement.
The uncensored Babylonian Talmud in Sanhedrin 37a is concerned only with the welfare of fully human beings, i.e. those described in its text as “Jews.” The actual Talmud tractate reads: “Whoever saves a single life in Israel, Scripture regards him as if he had saved the entire world” (emphasis supplied).
This reflects the ruling of Maimonides in his Mishneh Torah, Sefer Nezikin, Rotzeach u’Shmirat Nefesh, 1:1: “Whenever a person kills the soul of another person from Israel, he transgresses a negative commandment, as it says, “thou shalt not murder.” With his narrow definition of who should not be killed, Maimonides nullified the Word of God in Genesis 9:6, Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17.
Mr. Spielberg’s fraud was peddled throughout American culture and educational institutions. What is instructive about this faking is the extent to which the corporate media have been sublimely complicit in circulating it, while their “fact-checking” departments failed to detect the cheat, if indeed they bothered to undertake the obligation to do so.
Righteous “Noahide” Goyim?
Another gateway to making nice about the non-Jews is the much publicized “Noahide” (also spelled “Noachide”) status that it is said goyim can obtain to become “righteous.” However, one would do well to read the “fine print” of the misnamed Noahide laws (they have nothing to do with the Biblical Noah). Under these rabbinic laws, “idol worshippers” are liable to the death penalty. (BT Sanhedrin 57a). This should not be a source of anxiety, correct? After all, true Christians don’t worship idols.
Again, consult the fine print: the rabbinic legal authorities of Orthodox Judaism decree that the worship of Jesus Christ is “avodah zarah” (idol worship; cf. Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Avodat Kochavim 9:4; Teshuvos Pri ha-Sadeh 2:4. Also Igros Moshe, Y.D. 3:129-6).
Any non-Jew classed as a “Noahide” and who worships Jesus Christ as the Son of God is in for a lethal surprise: he or she is liable for the death penalty.
Moreover, Maimonides ruled that acceptance of Noahide status on the part of the goyim is not a choice, it is an obligation: “All of the inhabitants of the world are compelled to accept the Noahide laws. If any non-Jew does not accept these laws he should be killed.” —Maimonides, Mishneh Torah: Hilchot Melachim U’Milchamoteihem (“Laws of Kings and Wars”), Section 8, Halakha 10.
This passage from Hilchot Melachim deals with battle captives, but in the course of elucidating those laws pertaining to captives, Maimonides is drawing on the larger corpus of laws having to do with non-Jews; i.e. the Seven Laws of the Noahide. (Maimonides is specifically cited in this regard in Tosefot Yom Tov, Avot 3:14). The call to execute all those “among the nations” (goyim) who do not accept the Noahide laws (not just those who are prisoners of war), is indubitably present in Hilchot Melachim 8:10.
In the twenty-first century that killing can occur in Palestine, where the Israelis are supreme. In Europe and America Judaic executions of those who worship Jesus Christ as God, or refuse to submit to the Noahide laws, cannot as of this writing, take place overtly. This is due to Judaism’s previously noted situation ethics. Maimonides decreed that killings of obstreperous non-Jews can only occur overtly in those places and situations where “the hand of Israel is powerful over them.” In other words, where Judaic supremacy is complete, or nearly so. (Hilchot Melachim 8:9).
For Christians, the belief that adhering to Noahide laws renders them “righteous gentiles” in the eyes of the Orthodox rabbis, is a perilous fiction.
Conclusion
It has been our regrettable duty in these pages to bear witness to the appalling truth that Orthodox rabbinic Judaism constitutes a virulent and brutally racist dehumanization and detestation of gentiles, and a concomitant idolization of persons who are Jewish; this being the predominant difference between the two.
The denial of the full humanity of non-Jewish persons is the axis upon which the theology of Talmudism is founded and sustained.
Jesus Christ took a different path. It was He who declared of the Roman soldier, “Greater faith than this I have not seen in all Israel” (Matthew 8:5-10).
Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press, the author of nine books of history and literature and the editor of the periodical, Revisionist History®.
Basri, Ezra, Ethics of Business Finance & Charity, six volumes, (Jerusalem: Haktav Press, 1987-1993)
Biale, David, et al., Hasidism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2018)
Domb, I. (Rabbi Yerachmiel), The Transformation: The Case of the Neturei Karta (1958)
Clifton, Tony, and Leroy, Catherine, God Cried (Quartet Books, 1983). The only comprehensive book in English documenting the Israeli air force terror bombing of the city of Beirut, Lebanon during the summer of 1982.
Eaford, Witness of War Crimes in Lebanon: Testimony Given to the Nordic Commission, Oslo, October 1982 (Ithaca Press, 1983)
Eisenmenger, Johann Andreas, Entdecktes Judenthum, two volumes (1700). Unsurpassed inaugural scientific study of the Babylonian Talmud and related rabbinic texts by the Heidelberg University Professor of Hebrew and Aramaic. In German in the old 17th century typeface. Digitally reprinted in 2007 by Independent History and Research. Over 2,000 pages scanned in a pdf. text file; a facsimile of the rare first edition, which was almost entirely destroyed by the Holy Roman Emperor at the request of his financiers.
Finkelstein, Norman G., Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History (University of California, 2006)
Finkelstein, Norman G., This Time We Went Too Far (OR Press, 2011). One of the most important of all chronicles of the Israeli massacres of Arab civilians.
Foxbrunner, Roman A., Habad: The Hasidism of Shneur Zalman of Lyady (Jacob Aronson, 1993)
Friedman, Robert I., The False Prophet Rabbi Meir Kahane: From FBI Informant To Knesset Member. (Lawrence Hill & Co., 1990)
Friedman, Robert I., Zealots for Zion: Inside Israel’s West Bank Settlement Movement. (Random House, New York, 1992)
Ganzfried, Shlomo, Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, two volumes, trans. by Avrohom Davis (1996)
Maciejko, Pawel, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)
Martin, Tony, The Jewish Onslaught: Despatches from the Wellesley Battlefront (1993)
Matt, Daniel, The Zohar, nine volumes (Stanford University Press, 2003-2016). This is the uncensored English translation of one of the principal texts of the Kabbalistic canon.
McCaul, Alexander, The Talmud Tested: A Comparison of the Religion of Judaism with the Religion of Moses (Independent History and Research, 2006). McCaul was Professor of Hebrew at King’s College, London. He converted thousands of Judaics to Christ, including rabbis. This is a reprint of his classic work, first published in 1837, with an introduction by Hoffman.
Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, three volumes (1991, 2010 and 2016). An indispensable revisionist history of black enslavement in America and its aftermath.
Neusner, Jacob, The Mishnah: A New Translation (Yale University Press, 1988)
Pappe, Ilan, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2007)
Sand, Shlomo, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009)
Shahak, Israel, and Mezvinsky, Norton, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (Pluto Press, 2004)
Shapira, Yitzhak, and Elitzur, Yosef, Torat Ha-Melekh: Berure Halakha Be’-inyene Malkhut U-Milhamot (Yeshivat Od Yosef Chai, 2009)
Shapiro, Marc B., Changing the Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (Littman, 2015)
Shapiro, Yaakov, The Empty Wagon: Zionism’s Journey from Identity Crisis to Identity Theft (Bais Medrash Society, 2018)
Sprinzak, Ehud, Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination (1999).
Steinsaltz, Adin, Opening the Tanya (2003)
Steinsaltz, Adin, The Koren Talmud Bavli, 42 volumes (Koren Publishing Jerusalem, 2012-2019). A mostly uncensored English-language Babylonian Talmud. Various “explanatory” margin notes have been added seemingly to lessen the shock of the reader’s encounter with the corpus of the Judaism’s holiest books, such as Sanhedrin 54b (cf. vol. 30, p. 41), where the reader confronts one of the most startling expositions extant of Talmudic permission for criminal conduct.
Steinsaltz, Adin, The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition, 22 volumes (1989). A little more than one-half of Rabbi Steinsaltz’s uncensored Talmud of Babylon in English, the printing of which was abruptly halted by Random House midway through publication. The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition is particularly valuable for the inclusion of Steinsaltz’s candid בָּרַיְיתָא (baraitot).
Wolf, Arnold Jacob, “Habad’s Dead Messiah,” in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Life and Thought (Winter, 2002), pp. 109-115.
Yarden, Ophir, “Recent Halakhic Discourse in Israel Encouraging Racism and Violence,” in Svartvik J., and Wirén J. (eds.) Religious Stereotyping and Interreligious Relations (2013), pp. 221-231.
A viral video showing an Israeli family mocking impoverished Palestinian children and a controversial New York Times editorial by famed Zionist commentator Peter Beinart have exposed the racist underpinning of the so-called Jewish state.
Two seemingly unrelated items hit social media recently and both received a lot of attention. The first was an article by Peter Beinart that was published in the New York Times where Beinart claims he no longer believes in a Jewish State and calls for a binational state with equal rights in Palestine. The other, a video clip showing an Israeli family riding in a car when two children approach them. The car window opens and we hear the father ask the children in Hebrew, “Who wants to feed a Bedouin?” While these two seem unrelated, there is something equally disturbing about both of them.
A Jewish home in Palestine
One might think that the epiphany experienced by yet another liberal Zionist, and one that has access to the mainstream media, should be celebrated. After all, another well known Jewish American has reached the conclusion that Palestinians deserve equal rights in their own country. However, as we read this article there are several disturbing elements that dampen the excitement.
Beinart shares with the readers, “I knew that Israel was a source of comfort and pride to millions of other Jews.” He explains that this is why he believed in the Jewish state. One could argue that slavery was a source of comfort and pride for millions of white Americans, yet to support slavery is still abhorrent.
He goes on to describe a sentiment that one hears from many liberal Zionists. “One day in early adulthood, I walked through Jerusalem, reading street names that catalog Jewish history, and felt that comfort and pride myself.” Jerusalem was an Arab city for over a thousand years. In 1948, Palestinians in Jerusalem were subjected to a total and complete ethnic cleansing, and not a single Palestinian was allowed to remain in the city. Jerusalem then became the capital city of the state of Israel and the street names, which used to catalog the long and magnificent Arab history of the city, were changed.
“I knew Israel was wrong to deny Palestinians in the West Bank citizenship, due process, free movement and the right to vote in the country in which they lived.” What about the rights of millions of Palestinians languishing in refugee camps? This country that gave him, and Jews like him, such pride is denying millions of Palestinians their right to return to the lands and homes from which they were expelled.
“But the dream of a two-state solution that would give Palestinians a country of their own let me hope that I could remain a liberal and a supporter of Jewish statehood at the same time.” That was precisely what the scam of the Two State Solution was set to do. To allow liberal Zionists to support the crimes of Zionism and the creation of a racist state in Palestine while still feeling good about themselves.
The idea that the Two State Solution would give Palestinians “a country of their own,” is puzzling. Palestinians have a country of their own, it is Palestine. According to historian Nur Masalha, it has been Palestine for thousands of years before the establishment of the Zionist state on May 15, 1948.
The epiphany experienced by liberal Zionists who suddenly realize they can’t have it both ways is really not an epiphany at all. It is a compromise that allows them to continue to justify their patronizing attitude towards Palestinians. Beinart is not unlike another liberal Zionist, Avram Burg. Burg, a staunch Zionist who served as speaker of the Knesset and chairman of the Jewish Agency, and in between, profited greatly from peddling Israeli weapons. He is a Zionist through and through, and yet, he too claims it is time for a single state. In a piece he authored in 2018, he writes, “Since 1967 Israel had occupied Palestinian territory.” Not unlike Beinart, he sees only the West Bank as Palestinian territory.
To feed a Bedouin
A disturbing video clip was recently shared on TikTok by Roy Oz, also known as Roy Boy, an Israeli entertainer who hosts various programs for children. In the clip, an Israeli family is driving comfortably in what appears to be an SUV, with young children in the backseat and the parents in front. The father, Roy Oz, is driving. As they drive, two young children approach the car. The children in the car are white, the children outside are brown. The landscape is barren, like a desert, and we can safely assume it is the Naqab region in southern Palestine.
The father opens the window and hands a cookie to the children outside and says to his children in Hebrew, “Who wants to feed a Bedouin?” He speaks to the children outside in Arabic and then turns to his children again, asking in Hebrew, “You don’t want to feed a Bedouin, Ariel?” One of the two children outside is older than the other and hands the cookie to the younger child. Then, the father turns the camera, showing his children’s faces and asks again, “Do you want to feed a Bedouin? You don’t?” We hear him also saying to himself, “they are so cute,” referring to the children outside.
The father then turns to the children outside and asks in Arabic how much money they want. “One thousand shekel?” He asks. “No, just ten” one of the children answers. “Only ten?” The father asks at which point the mother reaches out of the car and hands one of the children a coin.
Expressions of Shock
Expressions of shock came fast from Palestinian communities, who demanded an apology and an explanation. Some even said this was the worst expression of racism they had ever seen. But there is nothing shocking about this clip because this was a normal Israeli middle-class family expressing what countless Israelis express all the time. The appalling racism and patronizing colonial attitude toward Palestinian Bedouin children, as we see in the video, is the foundation upon which the state of Israel was established and exists throughout Israeli society.
Without structural, systemic, deeply ingrained racism, Israel would not exist. Furthermore, without this white supremacist attitude, no Israeli pilot would be able to push the button that releases the bombs which then burn and rip Palestinian children in Gaza to shreds. No sniper would be able to pull the trigger and kill and maim Palestinians. It is an essential part of Zionist education.
Many Israelis had expressed their displeasure at this expression of racism. However, their displeasure aside, this is nothing new or abnormal. It is not unlike the incident where an Israeli army medic, who is charged with saving people’s lives and had taken an oath to do so, executed a wounded Palestinian laying on the ground. The incident was caught on video and went viral, resulting in the medic being court-martialed and receiving a slap on the wrist. This medic also acted as he was trained, as he was taught, that a Palestinian life does not matter.
Recognizing that Palestinians have rights within a Zionist construct is a symptom of Zionist racist supremacy. This racism is what allows a family to drive by Palestinian children and treat them like animals in a safari. It is how the state of Israel is able to continue the Naqba, the systemic, catastrophic destruction of Palestine and its people for close to one hundred years.
Feature photo | Beinart speaks at a 2012 event in Atlanta after being banned from a Jewish book festival over his criticism of Israel. David Goldman | AP
Once every day, a Labour official offers a grovelling apology to the Jewish community, but for some peculiar reason its leaders seem unforgiving. They don’t take Corbyn‘s expressions of remorse seriously. Today’s attempt to appease his party’s detractors was made by Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell on Andrew Marr’s show, it was: “we’ve done everything, I think, we can possibly do. We’ve apologised to the Jewish community.”
BBC Politics
✔@BBCPolitics
“We’ve done everything, I think, we can possibly do. We’ve apologised to the Jewish community”#Marr asks Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell about anti-Semitism in the Labour Partyhttp://bbc.in/2RxpsQ2
So far, nothing seems to have worked. If the Labour party is to be forgiven by the ‘Jewish community,’ it must perform an authentic act of total humiliation and the sooner it occurs, the better, as electionday is just a few days away.
Therefore, I suggest that Corbyn, his shadow chancellor and any other person who contemplates becoming involved in British politics learn some basic Jewish history and in particular. the horrendous and tragic story of Jewish philosopher Uriel Da Costa .
Uriel Da Costa, (born in 1585-1590), was a Jewish rationalist who became a symbol among Jews and others of one martyred by the intolerance of rabbinical zeal.
Da Costa was the scion of an aristocratic family of Marranos (Spanish and Portuguese Jews forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism). Initially, he studied canon law and became the treasurer of a collegiate church. Da Costa questioned the salvation depicted by the Roman Catholic church. In his search for authentic meaning and spirit, he turned to the Old Testament. He then converted to Judaism and convinced his close family to adopt his new/old religion. At the age of 22, Da Costa fled with his family from Porto, Portugal to Amsterdam.
Da Costa soon found that the form of Judaism that prevailed in Amsterdam had little to do with the Bible or with rational or analytical thinking and had much to do with an elaborate structure based on rabbinic legislation (Talmud). Being philosophically inclined, he formulated 11 theses (1616) attacking Rabbinic Judaism as non-biblical, for which he was excommunicated by the Rabbinical institutions.
Uriel Da Costa
Da Costa next composed a larger work condemning rabbinic Judaism and denying the immortality of the soul (1623–24). In a path that may remind some of life in contemporary Orwellian Britain, the Amsterdam magistracy arrested Da Costa, fined him and deprived him of his books.
In 1640, after years of ostracism which he could hardly bear, Da Costa made a public recantation. In response, the community’s leaders choreographed an exceptionally cruel and humiliating rite. As described by the Israeli Museum of the Jewish People:
“In a ceremony in the Great Synagogue of Amsterdam, da Costa was first forced to confess his sins, then endure 39 lashes, and finally to lie on the (synagogue) threshold and let the entire crowd step over his body.”
Da Costa never recovered from the barbarian ritual. A few months later he shot himself in the head in the middle of the street.
If Corbyn, his shadow cabinet or anyone else within the Labour party is interested in forgiveness, the road is open for them to undergo Urial Da Costa’s experience.
However, some major categorical differences between Da Costa and Labour politicians must be examined before such a development matures into a televised spectacle. While Da Costa was an exquisite free thinker who served as an inspiration to the great Baruch Spinoza (who was subjected to similar Rabbinical malevolence just a few years later), Labour’s leadership isn’t exactly an intellectual collective. Their contribution to authentic thinking and freedom of thought is currently in the red. Unlike the sensitive Da Costa who couldn’t bear the humiliation and ended his life under tragic circumstances, Corbyn and the Labour elite are more than likely to survive such a humiliating scenario, they may even enjoy it. Like most British politicians, they long ago lost contact with the concepts of dignity and pride.
In the instance, the goods are those boycotted by the BDS measure (Boycott-Divest-Sanctions), proposed in the American Congress .
The bad are the US congressmen and politicians who sold their soul to the Jews for thirty pieces of silver, and rejected even the symbolic and extremely platonic ‘non-binding’ initiative of boycotting goods tainted by crime, theft, barbarities of all sorts, and by the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
Actually, there is a better word for ‘soul’ as in ‘politicians who sold their soul’, but I will forbear to mention it out of my inviolable respect for the ladies. Even Tulsie Gabbard, who has made a name for herself as an enemy of the status-quo, chose to oppose the measure, demonstrating the type of caution that cowards borrow from fear and attribute to policy.
Finally, the ugly are the criminals who killed and stole – and continue to kill, maim, imprison, humiliate and steal from the dispossessed Palestinians and rightful owners of Palestine.
If we were not living in a world upside down, the considerations that follow would be unnecessary.
The term ‘Jews’ excludes those (few or many, it is difficult to say), who reject the ‘chosen people’ philosophy of their sect – a philosophy known to many, but not many enough – for its meaning, history and implications.
For the voice of their dissenters is irrelevant, considering that the Jews, as a political-social entity, are a monolith, practicing a cultural-political hegemony that only blindness can deny. Hence, to edulcorate the truth by a quasi-synonym (Zionists) will not, in my view, do justice to the real dissenters.
In fact, many suspect, with cause, that some fake ‘dissenters’ are planted in the right places to ‘cover all bases’ – the metaphor of ‘gate-keepers’ being most appropriate. For hegemony to appear not overly conspicuous it must simulate some kind of antithesis or opposition. Why? So that hegemony may seem a choice and not an imposition.
Quoting from a Jewish writer about Jews in the Middle Ages.
“Without in any way minimizing the force of these factors (earlierreferred to by the author as “a sense of frustration and exasperation aroused by Jews at large”), we believe nevertheless that they do not tell the whole story or even the essential part of the story. The most vivid impression to be gained from a reading of medieval allusions to the Jew is of hatred so vast and abysmal, so intense, that it leaves one gasping for comprehension. The unending piling up of violent epithets and accusations and curses, the consistent representation of the Jew as the epitome of everything evil and abominable, for whom in particular the unbounded scorn and contumely of the Christian world are reserved, must convince the most casual student that we are dealing here with a fanaticism altogether subjective and irrational.” (Joshua Trachtenberg, “The Devil and the Jews”)
Yes, it is irrational, but the position regarding the issue was clearly first stated by Pope Callistus II in 1120 AD, with his Bull “Sicut Judaeis Non.” And I quote from the Encyclopedia Judaica,
“It was a general Bull of Protection for the Jews, who had suffered at the hands of participants in the First Crusade (1095–96) and were being maltreated by their Christian neighbors. It forbade killing them, using force to convert them, and otherwise molesting them, their synagogues and cemeteries.”
And it is a position – we may all agree – that all rational people continue to maintain 900 years later. But it was expected from the Jews, at the time and in return, that they would not corrupt the Christian world.
The idea of corruption arose clearly when Nicholas Donin, a Jewish convert to Christianity, translated the Talmud into Latin in the twelfth century. Here I quote from Wikipedia,
“Donin translated statements by Talmudic sages and pressed various charges against the Talmud by quoting a series of ‘allegedly blasphemous’ passages about Christianity. He also selected what he claimed were injunctions of Talmudic sages permitting Jews to kill non-Jews, to deceive Christians, and to break promises made to them without scruples.”
Note the inverted commas I added around ‘allegedly blasphemous,’ in view of what comes next.
The Catholic Church had shown little interest in the Talmud until Donin presented his translation. The Pope (now Gregory II) was surprised that the Jews relied on texts other than the Torah; texts that contained alleged blasphemies against Christianity. Equally surprised, we may add, are or would be many Americans today.
This lack of interest also affected, until then, the French monarchy that profited by the Jews’ money-making skills.
Given the astonishment generated by the translated Talmud, a debate was organized in Paris – it began on June 12, 1240. Donin represented the Christians. Four distinguished Rabbis represented the Jews, namely Yechiel of Paris, Moses of Coucy, Judah of Melun, and Samuel ben Solomon of Château-Thierry.
The four rabbis’ objective was to defend the Talmud against Donin’s accusations that it contained obscenities and blasphemies against the Christian religion and God. In one Talmudic passage, for example, reference is made to someone named Jesus, dispatched to hell to be boiled in excrement for eternity. The Rabbis denied that this is the Jesus of the New Testament, stating as a kind of proof that “not every Louis born in France is king.”
Interesting argument, contradicted by another contemporary Jewish scholar– more on this later.
Among the obscene folklore, there is a story that Adam copulated with each of the animals before finding Eve. And Noah, according to the Talmudic script, was castrated by his son Ham. Furthermore, by now and thanks to the diffusion of knowledge via the web, most readers are aware of what the Talmud considers ‘acceptable’ sex, for example, lowering the age of consent to a 3-year old girl.
I don’t know why, but the recent resurrection of the already well-known criminal porno-ring of underage girls in Epstein’s ‘Lolita Island’, comes to mind.
Until the debate of 1240, Christians associated the Jewish religion with the Mosaic faith of the Old Testament. Hence the Church, suddenly and officially, realized that the Talmud was the Jews’ equivalent of the New Testament.
It is usually believed that the crucifixion of Christ is the historical trigger of the inherent conflict between Jews and everyone else. Some prominent Catholic thinkers have advanced the thesis that by rejecting Christ, the Jews have rejected Reason, (also referred to as Logos), as the underlying principle on which Greek-inspired Western civilization was built. Lack of Reason leads to continual upheaval, as in Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.”
Maybe, but the issue precedes the birth of Christ. For example, in 59 BC Lelius, a Pompey’s lieutenant, brought a suit against Flacco, a pro-consul in Asia Minor. The suit had to do with the transport (or lack thereof) of Jewish gold to Jerusalem. Flacco chose Cicero as his defender.
Here are Cicero’s words in his related writing, “Pro Flacco.”
“Now as to the accusation regarding the Jewish gold – which is why this trial is held not very far from the Aurelian square (the Jewish quarter). Yes, for this accusation you (Lelius), have chosen this place and this assembly of people, because you know how great is their number, how great their unanimity of purpose and how much is their power in the assemblies. I will speak softly so as to be heard only by the judges. For individuals are not wanting, ready to incite these people (the Jews) against me and against any other respectable citizen. I don’t want to give them reason to facilitate their attacks.”
Advance the clock by 2060 years, and Cicero’s words could be applied almost verbatim to the US Congress, to the neo-cons, and to the objectively unbelievable proposition that any criticism of Jews amounts to ‘hate-crime,’ as does any reference to their history, or confutation of their documentably fantastic inventions of inexistent or unproven facts.
History is silent as to which seed was sowed, and to where, how, why and what created certain destructive characteristics of Jewish ideology. For all seed-sowings a mysterious thing, whether the seeds fall into the earth or into souls.
Maybe it was a little thing. For what we call little things are merely the causes of great things; they are the beginning, they are the embryos. It is the point of departure that may decide the whole future of an existence of a race or ethnic group. One single black speck may be the beginning of a decomposition, of a storm, of a revolution. From one insignificant misunderstanding hatred and separation may finally issue. An enormous avalanche begins by the displacement of one snow-crystal, and the conflagration of a town by the fall of a match. Almost everything comes from almost nothing. For accident plays a vast part in human affairs. Calculation has its uses but chance mocks it, and the result of a planned calculation is in no wise proportional to its merit.
It is a mystery. For it is in the origin of things that the great secret of destiny lies hidden, although the breathless sequence of after-events has often many surprises for us all. So that at first sight history seems to us accident and confusion; looked at for the second time, it seems to us logical and necessary; looked at for the third time, it appears to us a mixture of necessity and liberty; on the fourth examination we scarcely know what to think of it. For if force is the source of right, and chance the origin of the force, we come back to the first explanation, only with a heavier heart than when we began.
And equally, with a heavy heart, we observe that any effort at understanding the inner mechanisms of time and mind, whereby the US has become the secular arm of Israel, taints the researchers with anti-Semitism.
If the patient reader who read so far will catch his breath, I will now introduce Ms. Patrizia Cecconi, an Italian writer, a botanist and a strenuous defender of the cause of Gaza’s citizens and of Palestine at large.
In what amounts to a guerrilla of tactics, Patrizia has managed so far to reach Gaza and provide what help and support her organization makes possible. Among other things, she has published a very interesting and very well-written book titled “Vagando di erba in erba” (Roaming from herb to herb). In which Patrizia details an extended visit to the West Bank, using as a conductive theme, the description of Palestine’s natural flora, and the characteristic and beneficial uses of various wild plants. While, simultaneously, telling the reader of the life of the Palestinians she met, spoke with or was the guest of. I hope that the book may be available in English in the near future.
I will now translate the text of one of her recent articles published in Italy. The reported event – the destruction of Palestinian houses and apartment buildings in East Jerusalem, accompanied by the laughter of Israeli troops – almost coincided in time with the rejection by the US Congress of the BDS non-binding proposal.
The witness-reported Israeli laughter is not the first example of the lawless confidence of successful robbers. Some readers may remember the picnic tables and picnic chairs positioned above the wall dividing Gaza from the rest of Palestine. From where Israeli onlookers and tourists could watch Israeli soldiers gun down unarmed Palestinians, including women and children, as if they were pins in a bowling alley at a recreation center.
A Specter roams around… but it is not Communism
A specter roams around the Middle East, and from there, crossing seas and mountains, reaches everywhere, demonstrating the absolute inanity of the Universal Humanitarian Law and nullifying every rule of international legality, starting from the Geneva Conventions.
A specter that, with actual incontrovertible facts under our eyes, shows the useless foolishness of the United Nations Organization itself – reduced to be but a glass-palace shown to visiting school-children. Explaining to them how the dream of a “magnificent and progressive future” envisaged in those proud halls, was broken after three short years, thanks to self-declared birth of the Israeli State. A structure that, since its foundation, would ignore, dismiss, discard, disregard and trample-on all the United Nations’ principles and resolutions.
It would be reductive and factious to classify this statement as anti–Semitic. While not realizing, instead, the weight and danger – for the world at large – of Zionism’s long tentacles, obliterating universal humanitarian principles and every rule of international law. Any honest thinker, even minimally aware of reality, cannot but bitterly agree on the consequences of continuing to shelter Israel from the legal sanctions deserved by its criminal actions. Sanctions equally necessary to make that entity comply with the accepted standards of humanity, and to limit the horrendous damage, human and political it has produced for over a century.
For about 80 years, what occurred and occurs in 2000-year old Palestine, is an unrestrained use of power, applied in the name of Zionism. An ideology developed at the end of the 19th century by Austrian-born Theodor Herzl and later implemented in the establishment of the Israeli state, not respecting the UN Resolution 181, but through self-proclamation by Ben Gurion. This occurred shortly before the expiration of the British mandate, therefore outside the terms of the UN Resolution. Showing and declaring to the world that Israel stands above and beyond any human law, international or super-national. And making the only basis for the state’s existence a biblical tale that would entail or allow a “return to the Promised Land.”
What said above is not intended as a historical summary, but the not-to-be-forgotten basis for understanding Israel’s latest violation of international law and of the rights of the Palestinian people. Namely the recent demolition of large apartment blocks in Jerusalem, as part of the continuous, illegal and brutal confiscations of Palestinian property.
The Jewish state is carrying out the project of the “greater Israel,” envisaged prior to the establishment of the state and consisting in the step-by-step annexation of all historic Palestine from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, on the ground that God had decreed and promised to Jewish men and women the right to occupy this land. [My note, as clearly stated in the 1982 Odet-Yinon Plan, Israel is supposed to extend from the Nile to the Euphrates. When, thanks to the efforts of President Jimmy Carter, Israel had to give up the illegally occupied Sinai, a day of mourning was declared in Israel. Israeli president Rabin paid with his life for that ‘mistake.’]
In Israel, religion and politics blend as required, ever since 1897, when Theodor Herzl, though an atheist, found the biblical narrative useful for the establishment of a racist state, so that the religious aura would become the trump card, having the force of all founding myths.
Of course, without the interest of the then great powers of having a ‘Western reference point’ at the gates of the Middle East, no Sykes-Picot agreement (1916), nor the Balfour declaration (1917) would have been possible. And without the Shoa of WW2 perhaps we would not witness the Shoa of the Palestinians.
We use the term shoah, meaning a “devastating storm,” leading to the elimination of a population. With Nazism, the population was defined by race and was identified with its religion. The intention was to physically remove every individual associated with the race. In Israel and with the ongoing massacres of Palestinians the intent is not based on race or religion, but rather on the goal of driving them out, and to fully occupy the ground on which they have lived for centuries, even before the emergence of Islam.
Some call it the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” tracing it back to the Nakba, the catastrophe of 1948. Others call it the ‘shoa,’ a Hebrew term, to make better understand the similarity between the Nazi-led and the Israeli-led ‘shoas’.
Yet all this does not disturb states that do business with Israel, even though they call themselves democratic, nor international and supranational organizations, even though their institutional representatives replenish their speeches with concepts such as ‘human rights,’ ‘justice’ and ‘peace.’
Israel benefits from a halo of false legality that, along with the tragedy of the (1972-born) Holocaust narrative, protects it as an unassailable armor. This is the will of the Israeli government, well supported by almost the entire population of approximately 9 million inhabitants. With the exception of twenty or so young activists plus a few journalists such as Gideon Levy or Amira Hass, who denounced the Israeli decision to destroy a dozen Palestinians apartment buildings, thus proceeding further on the path of destruction that has already affected tens of thousands of Palestinian buildings and homes.
It was an escalation beyond any possible justification, for the demolition affected even apartment buildings located in zone A – an area that, even according the Oslo agreements of 1993 (actually a trap to advance Jewish interests), should be under total Palestinian jurisdiction.
By so doing Israel, through Netanyahu, delivered a further kick to the law and to the already frayed Palestinian National Authority. Demonstrating once more, in the style of the “Iron Chancellor”, that agreements are but pieces of paper.
Israeli bulldozers and some 700 star-of-David-attired soldiers were ready to carry out the crime immediately after the Israeli Supreme Court, in total mockery of international legality, issued the predicted sentence of demolition. For in an act of foolish confidence the Palestinians had appealed to the (mock) Supreme Court.
In sum, like the Italian Jews, expelled from schools and jobs after November 1938, the Palestinians – in a tragic mockery that amuses the Israelis and is justified by sundry lackeys – saw their homes ‘legally’ demolished. This heinous abuse is repeated and recurrent. Between 1967 and 1973 Israel destroyed 9,000 homes, leaving thousands of Palestinian homeless, as documented by Jewish writer Felicia Langer in her book, “With My Eyes.” Then she left Israel because her action rarely had an effect on the rigged Israeli courts, though she unwillingly helped, by her legal attempts, to give a coat of legality to plain illegality, as the most recent case shows, with the Supreme Court deciding that it was legal to destroy the homes in East Jerusalem.
Did the (Italian) mass media adequately cover this umpteenth violation practiced on the Palestinians? – Did it note that by ridiculing international institutions, Israel removes from all citizens of the world the right to be protected by a Universal Law made mockery of? No the mass media was silent but for one ‘niche’ newspaper, “Il Manifesto,” that dedicated its first page to the event.
Therefore ‘mass-opinion,’ driven by the usual suspects concludes that the Palestinians built illegally, and that Israel, through its Supreme Court, has righted an illegality. We may wonder as to how many (Italians) may have thought that if we had an (Italian) Netaniahu there would not be so many building abuses (a plague in Italy).
While Israel will continue to do business with Italy and with other democratic Countries, the UN will issue a lamentation – it has already done so – and the European Union will issue their concern. In the end, the Palestinians will grow more desperate and understandably hateful of an entity that, for more than 70 years, humiliates them, stops them, injures them, kills them, expels them, and is even called democratic.
We saw the soldiers of the occupying army taking selfies and videos as they blew up the buildings, laughing and complimenting themselves. The Palestinians saw them too and we can imagine their feelings.
No one calls those soldiers terrorists, but according to Israel, terrorist is he who will rebel, perhaps with a stone or a kitchen knife, to this destruction of lives and rights.
Felicia Langer, the Israeli lawyer who left Israel shortly before she died, wrote, “The day will come when Israel will be forced to change its policy.” Perhaps it was an affirmation of faith, perhaps the desire to see justice triumph. But what we can see is only the multiplication of Israeli power and the contamination – as if it were a bacterium without an antibody– of every aspect of cultural, scientific, agricultural and industrial life everywhere in the world. With all this creating a kind of awe and discomfort that muzzles and prevents criticism. The fear refers to the anathema that condemns to isolation, anti-Semitism!
I wrote this before. Only independent newspapers can run the risk of an anathema without renouncing their function of making the truth known.
Here the truth is clear. Israel knows only abuse, and out of systematic abuse, only two results are possible, either resignation and flight, or resistance by all possible means, however right or wrong they may appear to our eyes as Western observers.
Meanwhile, while we write, the ten-story buildings with apartments adorned with velvet cushions, with curtains often bought in installments, with the tea glasses, the small cups for the ever-hot coffee, the dishes for the maqluba and the mussaqan, the rooms for the children , their games, their books, their clothes… all is now a pile of rubble. This is what the chosen people’s government wanted … except for twenty generous but impotent dissenters.
As for the rabbis of 13th century Paris, according to whom the Talmudic Jesus boiling in eternity in excrement is not the Christian Jesus, here are the thoughts of a Jewish scholar, Israel Shahak, a survivor of a WW2 concentration camp, who settled in Israel after WW2.
“Judaism is imbued with a very deep hatred towards Christianity, combined with ignorance about it. This attitude was clearly related to the Christian persecution of Jews, but is largely independent of them.
The deeply negative attitude is based on two main elements. First, on hatred and malicious slanders against Jesus. … The notion of collective and inherited guilt is both wicked and absurd. However, what is at issue here is not the actual fact about the Jesus, but the inaccurate and even slanderous reports in the Talmud and post Talmudic literature – which is what Jews believed until the 19th century and many, especially in Israel, still believe.
According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt for rabbinical authority. All classical Jewish sources that mention his execution are quite happy to take responsibility for it; in the Talmudic account the Romans are not even mentioned.
… In addition to the above crimes they accuse him of witchcraft. The very name ‘Jesus’ was for Jews a symbol of all that is abominable, and this popular tradition still persists. The Gospels are equally detested, and they are not allowed to be quoted (let alone taught) even in modern Israeli Jewish schools.”
But even before Christ – we may add – some historians interpret the celebration of Hanukah, for example, as a reminder of the rejection by the Jews of any Greek influence (and therefore Greek thought and values) into their midst – that is the rejection of Reason. It is the same Greek influence that, along with Christianity, molded Western thought and civilization at large – now under attack.
Israel Shahak titled his book, “Jewish History, Jewish Religion – The Weight of Three Thousand Years.” I doubt whether any of the US politicians who voted down the non-binding BDS proposal knows that the book exists.
Though even if they did, gold trumps justice, especially among the rich. For many, a Congressional seat, with all its emoluments, benefits, guaranteed luxurious life and dream-like pension, is well worth the sale of their soul. As Romeo said to the struggling pharmacist who sold him the poison Romeo wanted,
“There is thy gold, worse poison to men’s souls,
Doing more murders in this loathsome world,
Than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.”
Not knowing who-is-who in the Russian government, only recently I learned of Alexander Patrushev. He is reputed as “one of Putin’s closest and most trusted advisers,” who “has been the nerve center of most of Putin’s special operations,” and “was one of 24 Russians close to Putin subjected to sanctions by the United States.”
But all the world well knows of Russia’s support and heavy sacrifice made to defend Syria from the ISIS-Saudi-Israeli concocted Caliphate-Jihadi operation. A venture – the Caliphate – reminding of 9/11 in scope and objectives, but conducted on a different soil, with different victims and different patsies.
And all the world knows well that Israel continues to bomb and kill in Syria, without apparent fear of retaliation, the very country for whose defense many Russian soldiers gave their life.
Therefore, I could hardly believe the image of Patrushev in Israel, joining hands, in a masonic-looking triple-clutch, with the diabolical Bolton and with the devil himself in the middle.
I thought it was a false creation, proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain – yet an image that should terrify Syrians, Palestinians, Arabs, Iranians and all ethnic Europeans concerned with the survival of Western, Christian-based Civilization.
The Saker and other knowledgeable sources have documented that Israel’s expectation of concessions by Russia were fruitless. And it could well be that Putin’s political vigor is balanced by consummate prudence and careful weighing of consequences.
Still, seeing a high-ranking Russian official shaking the devils’ hands, polluted with the blood of thousands of Palestinians and millions of Arabs, is and should be a depressing sight.
For, irrespective of how many layers of diplomacy, or dissimulation, disguise reality behind appearances, a picture is still worth a thousand words. And though the practice among politicians may be universal, the act of dissimulation is still a breach of faith.
Recently demonstrating the idea was an angry Trump, charging with the grace of an albino hippopotamus against the British ambassador, guilty of giving his British masters his candid Trump’s evaluation.
On the other hand, the almost-unanimous British Government’s defense of the ambassador tells more about the tone of current British politics, (and by inference about the tone of the nation), than a ponderous treatise on international relations.
For, in the end, the invisible hand of Fate turned the British Ambassador into an unwilling buffoon. And yet, in the current climate of Western politics, buffoons are a godsend. For they don’t understand what they are doing, believe everything which is in the domain of personal interest, know how to lie because their whole life is a dissimulation, and create enough confusion to disorient people and prevent the birth of a coordinated and effective alternative to the thought-unique. Where ‘thought-unique’ concisely describes a long-term plan to eliminate independent thought by inventing fake oppositions, fake contradistinctions and fake news. Plus, of course, enacting censorship and criminalizing speech.
In fact, when it appears inevitable that the plan or part of it may be uncovered, the buffoon even becomes necessary. For his meandering creates confusion and makes it difficult to understand what is going on, though he dutifully follows the recipe his masters imposed on him, and that he takes on faith.
An emblematic example of programmed confusion are the American presidential elections, which offer the voters a choice between two elephants. One of them is actually an ass, but that is irrelevant poetic license, inserted into a rigidly enforced ceremonial and substance-less selection. With scores of buffoons upon the stage, uttering words full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
And where voters are persuaded not by the golden spell of eloquence, but by the candidate’s dubious quality of simply existing – a being declared electoral and electable by shadowy characters, the product of palpably dirty money and impalpable dirty tricks. For what money is not dirty that was paid – as in the last presidential elections – to endorse the rape of Syria’s Golan Heights and to anoint the theft of Jerusalem, for the benefit of we know who?
But I digress.
Intrigued by Patrushev’s appearance in friendly assembly with two wretched individuals who embody the core of evil, I wondered if there is more behind the image. To this end, I located a document suggesting evidence, not apparent, based on what we know, but puzzling, based on what we saw. And possibly suggesting that, besides Patrushev, there may be more than one Putin involved.
All of the above and below assumes that what we see is what IS, rather than a shadow’s shadow, while reality remains hidden behind the tinted glasses of semblance. Obvious caveat, but it makes me feel better to say it.
Anyway, I located a thesis prepared at the University of Pennsylvania, and titled “Putin’s Chosen People: Theories of Russian Jewish Policy, 2000-2017.”
The university authorities have declared it an ‘honor’ thesis. Which, as I have learned, is defined as a “a comprehensive 6-credit research effort of original scholarship. … It offers students an opportunity to work closely with faculty members on advanced research topics or creative endeavors.
I have no doubt that, when a laureate, this student will find a lucrative position in academia or in government, riding the tide of pomp that beats upon the high shores of the world.
We learn from the thesis’ abstract that
“Despite support from and for right-wing elements and a deep-seeded national history of anti-Semitism, the policies of the Russian government under Vladimir Putin have been markedly devoid of anti-Semitism.” And though “foreign policy concerns fail to explain these policies adequately,… the personalized influence of the president on Jewish policy suggests a personalized, hyper-centralized regime generally.”
Expectations were for Putin to be anti-Semitic. For
“… The major regimes that preceded it, the Soviet Union and the Romanov dynasty, were officially anti-Semitic and actively persecuted Jews inside their territory, often singling them out above other minorities for special mistreatment.
The Russian population is also widely considered anti-Semitic, thanks in part to the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and libels sometimes peddled by the Russian Orthodox Church… In reality… the unofficial anti-Semitism of some of its officials appears to be limited, and strictly personal, as opposed to part of government policy.
He states that
“it would not be surprising or unusual if Putin supported anti-Semitic ideas...because his pre-Soviet predecessors, the Romanoff tsars, embraced stridently anti-Semitic policies, including the Pale of Settlement, state sanctioned or state enabled pogroms, and exclusion of Jews from many kinds of business and government.”
As an aside, readers may be aware that most recently Israel asked 300 million $ from the Polish government, in compensation for the anti-Jewish rebellion and mini-war that occurred in Poland, in 1946, well one year after the collapse of Nazism. A circumstance that should prompt some meditation on the enforced narrative about the whole business.
“…. even if the Russian revolution could only temporarily suppress the expression of anti-Semitism. … the behavior hostile towards Jews… was replaced by Marxist attitudes opposed to religion. Many secular Jews had great prominence in Lenin’s party, including Lev Kamenev, Grigori Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky.”
In fact…
“Stalin promulgated much harsher policies toward other ethnic and religious minorities than towards the Jews.And… despite the creation of a Jewish autonomous Oblast on the Mongolian border, Jews were never forcibly deported there.”
“By the middle of Stalin’s reign, however, official anti-Semitism began to creep back into the Soviet government. The open propaganda against Jews jarred with Lenin’s heritage and internationalism. For this reason the Soviet authorities replaced the term Jews with Zionists. Since Zionism was a legitimate enemy of socialism, it became possible to carry out an anti-Semitic campaign under the guise of the fight against it. The hatred of Jews was so high that the Soviet propaganda tended to describe Zionism as a greater evil than the United States, suggesting that American imperialism was merely a tool used by the Jews to conquer the world.
The last days of the Stalin era also saw the Doctors Plot…. The plot was symptomatic of Stalin’s fears that Jews where a potential fifth column within the Soviet Union, a variation of the ancient “dual loyalty” libel used against Jews as far back as the Roman Empire.
“Libel ?” – we may ask. Here is a verbatim transcription of a very recent statement by the current Leader of the American Congress at an AIPAC meeting,
“Schumer comes from the Hebrew word “schowmer”, which means guardian, watchman. My ancestors were guardian of the ghetto-ward of “Jordcoast” in Galicia, and when they came to Ellis Island, they said their name in Yiddish, “Schoimer” and it got written down as “Schumer”
To you I say this. That name was given to me for a reason. For as long as I live, for as long as I have the privilege of serving in the senate from New York , I will unflinchingly, unstintingly, and with all of my strength be “shoumer Israel, a guardian of Israel. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am your “throwel kai (yiddish)” in Israel and America. The Jewish nation lives, now and forever.”
Skipping the rest of our scholar’s rendition of Russian history we find next,
“Putin’s relations towards both individual Jews and the Jewish people in Russia have been remarkably warm. Individuals of Jewish background have been among Putin’s closest advisers and allies during his years in power, including Roman Abramovich (chairman of the Federation of the Jewish communities of Russia and one of the most visible oligarchs.) ... In fact, state anti-Semitism (as opposed to popular anti-Semitism) has almost completely disappeared from the Russian political scene. Jews or so-called half-Jews hold a large number of high positions in the state apparatus, including the government and leading state corporations.”
In contrast with the Soviet Union,
“… The Russian government under Putin has maintained remarkably close and cooperative relations with Israel…. Putin has done more than any other Russian leader to improve economic and strategic ties with Israel…. The policies and the true intentions of the Putin regime and their close cooperation with Israel suggest a sincere respect and affinity that, while not unlimited, would be scandalous for any previous Russian ruler. In short, for centuries of Russian history, through different political regimes and social conditions, the standing decision has been that the Jews are to blame for Russia’s problems, and this presumption has resulted in countless incidents of discrimination, victimization and violence. Putin’s cooperation with Israel suggests that (that) decision has been nullified.
This is reflected in his domestic affairs as well.
*… He promised to donate one month’s salary for the construction of a Jewish Museum of tolerance.
*… He meets regularly with representatives from Russian Jewish communities and various Western Jewish organizations.
*… He met with a representative of the European Jewish Congress, attended many Jewish religious celebrations and regularly sends congratulations to the Russian Jews in connection with their holidays.
It appears that Putin’s friendliness towards Jews is either being encouraged among government officials or is voluntarily imitated by them, suggesting a more permanent and official status of pro-Semitic attitudes within the government.
Putin has praised the role of Jews in Russia’s history and contemporary life…. It is no longer uncommon to see a mayor or governor visit a synagogue or congratulate the (Jewish) community on a holiday. … Already Yeltsin… involved many Jews in his government and administration.
Referring to Lev Gumilev, a Soviet ethnologist and historian who – according to our scholar – had an effect on Putin’s not-negative evaluation of the Soviet Union… “There is no evidence that Putin subscribes to his (Gumilev’s) classification of Jews as a parasitic people.”
In attempting an explanation for the change in the Russian political wind, the scholar quotes Yevgenia Markovna Albats. She is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host. Who, as of 2011, works as a chief editor of The New Times magazine and is quoted as saying,
“Russia pretty much lost its relationship with Arab countries after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the same time Israel came on the map, actually because there is a huge Russian-speaking population in Israel, partially because there are a lot of Jews – powerful Jews – in Russia who have some aspirations for Israel, partially because Israel is a developed nation. It is a great startup nation and it was pragmatically better for Russia to do business with Israel relevant to its ends. So definitely it was connected to its foreign-policy.”
The scholar then refers to what he defines as the ‘Biographical Hypothesis.’
“Putin’s remarkable pro-Semitic policies may be inspired by his own biography, which includes benevolent intervention by many Jews. One example is the Jewish family that shared Putin’s communal apartment in St. Petersburg… An early religious experience of Putin’s may also have impressed on him that the Jews are not a threat to orthodoxy or Russian culture as he may perceive other religions to be…. Another figure who appears to have had a great impact on Putin’s life was his first judo coach. He talked about his Jewish wrestling coach Anatolii Rakhlin as a person who “probably played the crucial role in my life.”
Putin’s early study of German was encouraged and mentored by Mrs. Yuditskaya Berliner. Berliner is Jewish, and now lives in Tel Aviv in an apartment Putin bought for her as a demonstration of his appreciation for her teaching many years before. Putin bought the apartment for her while on a state visit in 2005 although it was not disclosed for some years.
Many of those (Jews) personally close and important to Putin are rewarded with expensive gifts, sometimes including multibillion dollar businesses, as in the case of Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, who jointly control the SGM group and have over 1 billion in assets each, thanks to the friendship with Putin, stemming from their shared dojo in St. Petersburg. The Rotenbergs are also of Jewish ancestry.
The most convincing existing evidence suggests that the Jewish policies of Putin’s government are primarily motivated by his personal attitudes towards Jews, based on biography which includes similar notably influential and positive Jewish friends, mentors, and role models.”
In conclusion, as just about all scholars conclude in these cases,
“… no single hypothesis presented completely explains the Putin regime’s (friendly) Jewish policies… and further research is imperative.”
Nor, I may add, any of the above hypotheses can explain Putin’s chief-advisor’s conspicuous hand-shake with the dreadful agents of Zion, a gesture of equally dreadful symbolism. For Patrushev is not Putin. It is possible or likely that, in Patrushev’s mind, the necessity or convenience of diplomacy overbalanced the inconvenience of appearing ostentatiously friendly with two criminals – or recognized as criminals by millions. It would be interesting to know how readers would hypothetically handle a similar situation.
In any event, whether anyone can explain Putin’s friendly Jewish policies is uncertain. But we still should be fairly safe in assuming that, unlike Trump’s daughter, Putin’s conversion to Judaism is not imminent.
As for the diligent scholar who wrote the thesis, he just confirmed that cultivated leisure is the aim of man.
More worrying, however, are the curious, and frankly sinister noises coming from the world of official and traditional religion. And I am not referring to the fundamentalists, also called dispensationalists, or neo conservatives or, more diabolically, neocons. I am referring to Catholicism and to a creeping ideology, inside the Vatican, which has some perplexing association or similarities with fundamentalism.
Before any of my twenty-five readers says, “impossible!” I must summarize the key notions of fundamentalism and how they connect to the Catholic developments I referred to.
The millions who listen in enchantment to the words of sundry Southern fundamentalist preachers are but cannon fodder in the holocaust of brains. For the absolute madness of fundamentalism cannot be explained without considering the times of its birth and the fertile ground of that era, so suitable for sowing the seeds of lunacy.
As readers well know, the Protestant Reformation spawned the birth and growth of an almost innumerable number of sects and ‘churches’, each interpreting the Scriptures differently, and each claiming to have the correct interpretation.
The period 1820-1850, in America, was as ripe for a ‘church-bubble’ as the late 1990s were ripe for the ‘dot-com-bubble.’ One of the most notable, or rather notorious products of that period was the Mormon Church, founded by a shyster-in-chief called Joseph Smith.
His biographies differ only on details. One I read years ago said that on a hill, somewhere in New York State, an angel gave him two silver plates containing the ‘true’ history of Christianity. Smith was directed to establish a religion inspired by the saintly principles of the early Christian church. Hence his followers were ‘saints of a later day’ or “Latter Day Saints.” Much of Smith’s religion drew from the Old Testament, including polygamy. Unfortunately the silver plates were never found, because during a particularly violent thunderstorm a lightning melted and vaporized them.
As Joseph Smith’s flock grew in members, they were repeatedly expelled from various places where they established their residence. Eventually they arrived at Carthage, Illinois. Rumors have it that Smith proved a bit too friendly with some wives of the yet-unconverted locals. Their enraged husbands and an anti-polygamy mob broke into the jail where Smith had been confined and killed him. Once more the flock left and eventually found a place without locals in Utah.
The same ‘church-bubble’ produced another notable character, namely the founder of the Fundamentalist Church. He was the Anglo-Irish John Darby, born in 1800, initially a member of the Church of the Plymouth Brethren, then founder of the Church of the Exclusive Brethren and later of Fundamentalism, Dispensationalism, Futurism, the Rupture-Theology, the Pre-Tribulation Theory and more. All his theories and theologies are as sibylline as they are absurd and, in the end, actually amusing, were they not taken seriously by so many.
The core of the ‘Exclusive Brethren’ theology is based on a serious application of an unserious paradox. Which goes as follows: The Apostles were twelve – these pears are twelve – therefore the Apostles were pears.
John Darby’s theology closely parallels the queer and paradoxical principle of deduction. “The Apostles were Jews – Christ was a Jew – therefore Jews are Christians.” The incredulous reader may verify the vibrant presence of a very active Fundamentalist/Dispensationalist sub-group called ‘Jews-for-Jesus’.
This is/was amusing music to the ears of authentic Jews, who are laughing their heads off, and even more musical to the ears of rabid Zionists, who never could have expected such immense help from men who, in their Talmud, are described as donkeys, and from women who, in their same sacred text, are described as prostitutes.
Darby’s ‘church’ may have met the end of all flesh, were it not for a follower called Cyrus Scofield, born in 1843 and who was, at first, an ‘alien soldier’ in the Confederate Army. After leaving the Army he moved to St. Louis Missouri, where he married into a wealthy French family and later had some scrapes with the law because of fraud. He then divorced his wife and moved to Texas, where he remarried and founded a branch of the ‘dispensationalist’ Church, according to which ‘Jews are Christians’.
In Texas he began to comment, or rather, annotate the Bible. There are actually not that many comments, but the most critical for all that happened afterwards, refers to Genesis 12:3 (the words in italics are Scofield’s comments).
‘I will bless them that bless thee.’ In fulfillment closely related to the next clause, ‘And curse him that curseth thee.’ Wonderfully fulfilled in the history of the dispersion. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew—well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.”
Again, Scofield’s annotated Bible would probably have been forgotten, but the wheels of fortune caused Scofield to meet with money, in the shape of Wall Street Zionist lawyer Samuel Untermeyer. According to Zionism, the Supreme Realtor in the Sky had assigned to the Chosen People the real estate where their ancestors lived 2000 years before.
Impressed by Scofield’s annotations, Untermeyer introduced him to his wealthy and influential Zionist circle in New York. He then sent him on a lavish tour of Europe and was instrumental in prompting the prestigious Oxford University Press to publish Scofield’s annotated Bible. The rest you know.
Now to the new Vatican ‘fundamentalism.’ In June 2019 the magazine “Civiltà Cattolica”, the New York Times of the Vatican, published an article titled, “Jews and Judaism in Catholic Teaching. A Revolution in Interpretation” – written by the Jesuit Correspondent in Israel Fr. David Neuhaus.
The writer says that the changes incorporated into the Encyclical “Nostra Aetate” (Our New Age) on the relationship between Christianity and Judaism is “one of the great Revolutions of the XX century.” Through the centuries often Christians were taught to connect Jews and Judaism with sin, rebellion, obscurity and evil through a wrong interpretation of biblical texts.”
It was the work of French Jewish historian Marx Jules Isaac…(a member of the Jewish-Masonic Association called Bnai Brit), who documented the teaching of contempt (for Jews) by Christians. Thanks to him the teaching of contempt has been transformed into the teaching of respect.”
No problem so far, but for the ‘teaching of contempt’, for it’s actually the other way around. Readers should familiarize themselves to how the goym are described in the Talmud and in Maimonides’ supplementary text. It’s not even contempt for the Christians, it’s sheer and profound hatred.
But for Fr. Neuhaus it is the ‘Patristic’ (read Catholic) tradition that, erroneously, paints negatively the Judaic incredulity (of Christ). Until “the glorious modernist Revolution of Vatican II (Council), following on the steps of the Bolshevik Revolution, has changed course and has remodeled the contempt connected with the Deicide and with the (Jewish) incredulity in the divinity of Christ…”
The revised prayer “Pro Judaeis” (for the Jews) not only has erased the idea of lack-of-faith by the Jews, but actually says,
“Let us pray for the Jews. May the Lord our God, who chose them first among all men to receive his word, help them to always progress in the love of his name and in fidelity to his covenant. […]. Lord grant that the firstborn people of your covenant may come to the fullness of redemption. By Christ Our Lord.” In short, there is a new theology and liturgy that takes the place of the old.
Fr. Neuhaus then refers to a speech by Pope John Paul II in Mainz, where he said that “The old alliance (between Christian and Jews) has never been revoked.”
And a prayer attributed to Pope John XXIII, and quoted by Fr. Neuhaus says,
“We are aware today that over many centuries our eyes were so blind that we were no longer able to see the beauty of your chosen people, nor to recognize in your Face (Christ’s) the traits of our privileged brethren. We understand that Cain’s sign is written on our forehead. [!]. Forgive us for the curse we unfairly attributed to their names as Jews. Forgive us for having a second time crucified you in them in their flesh, because we did not know what we were doing.”
In other words, it is the Christians who are blind, because they did not see the beauty of Judaism. Christianity marked itself with by the sign of Cain who killed his brother Abel. In other words, the deicide people are the Christians, who have crucified Christ a second time, when they taught that Talmudic Judaism is disapproved by God.
I leave it to the reader to decide how closely these tenets approach those held by the plump, prospering and prosperous preachers of Fundamentalism.
Nevertheless, the Zionist movement (in America and elsewhere), is at the forefront of the promotion of open borders (except for Israel), of miscegenation (except for Jews) and of the vilification of Ethnic Europeans as evil (as hinted in the article of Father Neuhaus).
In fact, Yale University, in 1918, started a course titled “The Problem With Whiteness,” and the Zionist Harvard Professor Ignatiev – though denying as false his purported statement that the “white race must die”, – nevertheless admits that his journal “Race Traitor” intends to “keep bashing the dead white males (along with live ones and white women), until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed.”
To conclude, perhaps before the extinction of ethnic Western Europeans, (as per the hope of Ignatiev and the plan of Coudenhove-Kalergy,) Putin will allow to some survivors an Oblast near Mongolia, as his ancestors allowed the Jews, but that the Jews refused. Where the remaining Europeans may establish a new kingdom, a church of refuge, a republic of souls. And where – far beyond the region of sordid utility and sheltered from hatred – beauty, devotion, honor, enthusiasm, the extraordinary, and even the infinite will have a place of worship and an abiding city.
Debris inside the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on April 16, 2019, a day after a fire that devastated the iconic building. (Christophe Petit Tesson/Pool/AFP)
A prominent Israeli rabbi suggests that the Notre Dame Cathedral fire may have been divine retribution, indicates that the burning of churches in Israel may be problematic only in that they may be rebuilt.
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, the rabbi of the illegal Beit El settlement, instructs Jews that they need not feel saddened by the fire that devastated the 12th century cathedral, priceless artifacts, and works of art.
[Christianity] is our number one enemy throughout history. [They] tried to convert us by arguments and by force, carried out an inquisition against us, burned the Talmud, expulsions, pogroms. Western anti-Semitism draws from Christianity’s hatred of the ‘murderers of God.’ It also had a role in the Holocaust.
The first great Talmud burning happened in Paris, right there at the Notre Dame Cathedral square. It was the result of the Paris trial in which Jewish sages were forced to debate Christian sages, and the result was the burning of the Talmud. Volumes of Talmud were brought in 20 carts and burned there, 1,200 Talmud volumes. So [the fire demonstrates] ‘there is justice and there is a Judge.
The 1240 Disputation of Paris, in which rabbis were forced to defend accusations that the Talmud was anti-Christian, was remembered by medieval Jews as a traumatic event. The public “trial” culminated in the burning of some 1,200 volumes of Talmud and other Jewish holy texts in Paris in 1242.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports that the burning of Talmuds had been triggered by a Jewish man named Nicholas Donin who had converted to Christianity. Donin traveled to Rome and presented the pope with a list of complaints about the Talmud. Among them the fact that a number of its passages “blasphemed Jesus and Mary, and attacked non-Jews.” During the French disputation about the Talmud, it was Donin who argued against it,* ultimately resulting in the pope’s decree that the books be “burned at the stake.”
Modern directive
In an online discussion as the Notre Dame Cathedral burned, Avner was unwilling to take a definite stand on the “divine retribution” theory. He conceded that “we do not know the secrets of God”; yet he dismissed the possibility that several recent fires in Israel could be punishment.
Aviner does not encourage the burning of churches in general – “for the time being.” However, he hesitated to condemn the practice inside Israel, stating that the “issue is more complicated” in the Jewish State. When a church is destroyed, it will likely be rebuilt, and building a church in Israel “is a greater transgression than leaving one intact.”
Mondoweiss reports that, far from being a fringe figure, Aviner is “considered to be one most important rabbis of the religious nationalist sector. He is a prolific writer, having published more than 200 books.”
It points out that Aviner does not merely state his own opinion about church-burning, but quotes two sources (Rabbi Menachem Mendel Kasher and the Satmar Rabbi), a fact which “says volumes about the discourse among his followers and students.”
Mondoweiss notes: “Several churches have been burnt in Israel in the last few years, and the police have been spectacularly useless in capturing the arsonists. In several cases, the arson was accompanied by slogans familiar from ‘price tag’ attacks in the West Bank (mostly along the lines of Jewish vengeance).”
The targeting of homes, vehicles, and Palestinian individuals have also been a daily occurrence.
*Editor’s note:
A number of authors have discussed anti-Christian passages in the Talmud. Peter Schäfer’s book Jesus in the Talmud, published by Princeton University Press, notes that the Talmud referred to Jesus as a bastard and his mother Mary as an adulteress; he is depicted as “sitting forever in boiling excrement.”
According to the Talmud, Jesus was executed by a proper rabbinical court for idolatry, inciting other Jews to idolatry, and contempt of rabbinical authority. All classical Jewish sources which mention his execution are quite happy to take responsibility for it; in the talmudic account the Romans are not even mentioned.
Shahak reports in another book on the subject that a 1996 Ha’aretz article stated the following (bracketed phrases inserted by Shahak]:
A check of main facts of the [Jewish] historiography of the last 1500 years shows that the picture is different from the one previously shown to us. It includes massacres of Christians [by Jews]; mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus that usually took place on Purim; cruel murders within the family; liquidation of informers, often done for religious reasons by secret rabbinical courts, which issued a sentence of “pursuer” and appointed secret executioners; assassinations of adulterous women in synagogues and/or the cutting of their [the women’s] noses by command of the rabbis. Rosen included in his long article many well-documented cases of massacres of Christians and mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus on Purim, most of which occurred either in the late ancient period or in the Middle Ages. (Some isolated cases occurred in sixteenth-century Poland.)
Shahak added: “Rosen included in his long article many well-documented cases of massacres of Christians and mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus on Purim, most of which occurred either in the late ancient period or in the Middle Ages.”
Kathryn Shihadah is staff writer for If Americans Knew. She blogs at Palestine Home.
We learned last Wednesday that Shlomo Aviner, a prominent Zionist rabbi and Yeshiva leader, suggested the fire that gutted Notre-Dame may have been divine retribution for the burning of Jewish manuscripts in 1242.
In the eyes of His followers, the Jewish almighty is an elastic substance. He morphs occasionally to fit with the needs of His favourite sons and daughters. Early Zionists, for instance, demoted God into an ‘estate agent’ as they reduced the Torah into a ‘title deed’. The early Zionists were secular Jews, they didn’t believe in God but were happy to expel the indigenous Palestinians in ‘His name’ and on ‘His behalf.’ But Rabbi Aviner takes us one step further. He made the Jewish God into a lazy but revengeful arsonist. The rabbi practically makes the Jewish God into a church burner who takes eight centuries to ‘hit back.’
Shlomo Aviner is the rabbi of the Beit El settlement and head of the Ateret Yerushalayim yeshiva. He provides the ‘rational’ behind the divine retribution. “Christianity,” he says, “is our number one enemy throughout history. [They] tried to convert us by arguments and by force, carried out an inquisition against us, burned the Talmud, expulsions, pogroms. Western anti-Semitism draws from Christianity’s hatred of the ‘murderers of God.’ It also had a role in the Holocaust.”
It is needless to mention that many Israelis and Jews were appalled by Rabbi Aviner’s statement. Some Israeli politicians condemned the Rabbi and yet his blatant hatred towards Christianity is unfortunately engraved in both Jewish and Judaic thought.
Back in 2009, the Jerusalem Post reported on the growing tendency of Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem to spit on their Christian neighbours. Father Samuel Aghoyan, a senior Armenian Orthodox cleric in Jerusalem’s Old City, told the JPost “that he’s been spat at by young Haredi and Orthodox Jews ‘about 15 to 20 times’ in the past decade”. Similarly, Father Athanasius, a Texas-born Franciscan monk who heads the Christian Information Centre in Jerusalem’s Old City, said he’s been spat at by Orthodox Jews “about 15 times in the last six months”.
The Israeli professor Israel Shahak commented on Jewish hatred towards Christianity and its symbolism, suggesting that “dishonouring Christian religious symbols is an old religious duty in Judaism.” According to Shahak, “spitting on the cross, and especially on the Crucifix, and spitting when a Jew passes a church, have been obligatory from around AD 200 for pious Jews.”
As I am currently in Prague, I am obliged to add that church spitting has had an impact on the landscape of the city. The following can be read in a ‘Travel Guide for Jewish Europe’:
“In Prague’s Charles Bridge, the visitor will observe a great crucifix surrounded by huge gilded Hebrew letters that spell the traditional Hebrew sanctification Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh Adonai Tzvaot, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts.” According to various commentators, this piece, degrading to Jews, came about because in 1609 a Jew was accused of desecrating the crucifix. The Jewish community was forced to pay for putting up the Hebrew words in gold letters…” (To read more: Travel Guide for Jewish Europe, pg 497)
Charles Bridge, Prague
Shahak maintains that “in the past, when the danger of anti-Semitic hostility was a real one, the pious Jews were commanded by their rabbis either to spit so that the reason for doing so would be unknown, or to spit onto their chests, not actually on a cross or openly before a church.”
But the anger towards the church extends well beyond the rabbinical realm. Some traces of it can be found in most secularised Jewish so-called ‘progressive’ circles. In a letter to his mother dated November 25 1937, Chaim Katz, a combatant within the Yiddish speaking Spanish International Brigade, writes “I took up arms against the persecutors of my people–the Jews–and my class–the Oppressed. I am fighting against those who establish an inquisition like that of their ideological ancestors several centuries ago, in Spain.” As we can see, Katz defines himself in the letter “as a Jew and a progressive” and sees the deadly civil war in Spain as a possible platform for Jewish retribution against the Catholic Church. It is hardly a secret that the battle in Spain escalated quickly into an orgy of burning churches.*
A week ago, we learned that the Jewish world was outraged by pro Israel Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s suggestion that the crimes of the Holocaust can be forgiven, though not forgotten. While Bolsonaro expressed the most basic Christian belief, both Yad Vashem and the Israeli president were quick to clarify that Jewish forgiveness is not an option. President Rivlin announced that “no one will enjoin the forgiveness of the Jewish people, and no interest will buy it.” Yad Vashem spokeswoman Dana Weiler-Polak said nobody can decide “if it is possible to forgive the crimes of the Holocaust.”
If Christianity is all about forgiveness, Jewishness can be seen as an accumulative project of ‘Amalek’ characters. If Christianity is all about compassion, the ability to defy gravity by means of harmony and reconciliation, Judaism and Jewishness can be described metaphorically as gravitational forces. They are there to unite the tribe around the constant fear of an emerging enemy. I guess that those who insist on pushing the phantasmic notion of ‘Judeo-Christian values’ should bear in mind the clear ideological, spiritual, metaphysical contrast between the two distinct religious precepts that in fact have very little in common.
*Rather than taking Franco’s side I am dealing here with Jewish means of identifications.
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The Rabbis do not regret the Paris disaster. “It’s Divine punishment for burning the Talmud,” divines a prominent Jewish divine, the Bethel Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, about the Notre Dame fire. In 1242 the French investigated the Talmud, established that the codex contains volumes of hate speech, and finally burned 1200 codices in the square of the freshly-built Notre Dame Cathedral. “The time for punishment is here,” the Rabbi intones dramatically. Not so fast, Rabbi! If we must connect these two events – the historical burning of the Talmud and the recent destruction of the church, the real point of the story is that France once had a strong, virile immune system. That medieval destruction of that evil book built up a healthy immunity to Talmudic legalisms that helped the cathedral survive wars and revolutions for the magic number of 777 years. But nothing, alas, lasts forever: the resistance of the French people has exhausted itself.
Perhaps it’s time to re-inoculate the French people against Talmudic scheming. Maybe the nasty spirit of Talmudic intolerance and Judaic supremacy should be exorcised once again from the heart of France for another 777 years. Mayhap the building of the replacement cathedral will inspire a new spirit of fidelity to Our Lady. But it’s not likely to happen. Indeed, in the present climate the French authorities are more likely to turn the burned wreckage of Notre Dame into the next Tolerance Museum.
777 years ago, a Jew who denied the Talmud, parted with Jewry, accepted Christ and entered the Church, Nicholas Danin exposed the kvetching Talmudic hate to a disputation that, shocked and bitterly offended, agreed to gather them up and burn them. In Macron’s France, Nicholas Danin would be dragged into court by LICRA (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme) and sentenced to jail, if not burned at the stake. Danin, not the Talmud, would be found guilty of hate speech if his judges had been trained, as we are, in philosemitism. Is there any reason to return the ruins of Notre Dame to the Catholic Church? Why not hand it directly over to CRIF (Conseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France).
In the same article the French-born Rabbi Shlomo Aviner reminds his followers that all Christian churches will eventually be destroyed (at least in Israel) – but the time is not ripe yet. As for the French cathedral, “we aren’t obligated to destroy it,” though “Christianity is the main enemy of the Jews.” A Jew is supposed to rejoice at the sight of a burned church and recite a special blessing of the Lord of Vengeance Who overturns the House of the Proud. Jewish power in France rises whilst the significance of the Church dwindles; the old cathedral had little chance to survive such a turn of fate. It will be rebuilt as something else: something not Catholic, something that is not a church. It will be designed to appeal to tourists; no need to consult the native Frenchmen. It is already being decided for them.
The destruction of the cathedral had been in the cards a long time. When the naked witches of Femen celebrated their black mass, abused the priests and flogged the venerable old bells in the Notre Dame towers, the French court immediately acquitted them of all charges and instead sentenced the guards who tried to stop the sacrilege. And yet even this was not enough for the enemies of the Church: for their bold blasphemy the Femen were presented with France’s 2017 International Secularism Award, their leader had a postage stamp issued in her honour and she served as the model for the French icon of Marianne. Dominique Venner, a French Catholic writer and historian, committed suicide in the cathedral in 2013 to alert his countrymen to the storm clouds threatening his beloved France, but all in vain.
In France, the relentless struggle against the church, led by the Jews and their allies, continues to bear fruit. In 2013, the government of Holland forced their citizens to accept gay marriage despite massive demos by French Catholics. The influence of LICRA in France exceeds even that of the ADL in America. Catholics like Soral and Dieudonné are now being sent to jail for offending Jewish sensitivities (and as you know, Jews can be very sensitive). They prosecute the Yellow Vests just as they persecute the Church and for the very same reason: both are made up of sturdy provincials who harken back to the days of Christian France.
The terrible blaze in Paris should be an ominous warning for the French: Reconnect with your Church! Save Her and cherish Her, for She may not always be with you. And who will save you when She has gone? The Church of France should reach out to the people by supporting the Yellow Vests against the anti-Christian government of Macron. His government did nothing to defend the Church and that fire didn’t come out of the blue. Macron is definitely guilty, if not by deed, then by criminal negligence. It’s too easy to imagine him toasting champagne at the news. We all should be wary of powerful people who are likely to rejoice at the destruction of our churches.
The previous campaigners against the church in France marshaled, as they did in the US, beneath the banner of ‘Paedophile Priests’. This clear-cut ad hominem (or should we say “canard”, or “trope”?) is aimed directly at the heart of the Church. No one says a word about the dishonesty of the jibe, they are too busy beating their breasts. Yet if you make mention of “Jewish crooks” you’ll have LICRA or its sister bodies pounding on your door. It might be that there are crooks who happen to be Jews, but that doesn’t make them ‘Jewish crooks’, they recite piously. And if you happen to say ‘Jewish crook’, you are guilty of antisemitism. But ‘Paedophile Priests’ is fine. And so the Church is forced to cleanse Herself, and the Jews are left alone, free to continue their self-destructive denouement.
Jews describe themselves as “a Nation of Priests”, the priests of the most anti-Christian faith on the planet. As the influence of the Jewish church waxes, the strength of the Christian church wanes. It is zero-sum-game.
Even those of us who aren’t interested in things spiritual can see history threatening to repeat itself. Whenever the forces of darkness prepare a new attack on mankind, they use their considerable artillery to shut down any potential resistance, and they always start by targeting their avowed enemy, the Church. This was the practice of the Third Reich as well: before starting the war, they began a timely campaign of ‘priests as sex fiends’ to bully the church into silent acquiescence. Our Fourth Reich has taken careful notes: the Church was against the war in Iraq; the Church was steadfast in her defence of Palestine; the Church is against the impending attack on Iran; the Church is implacably opposed to war with Russia. Obviously the Church must be brought to heel.
But the Church cannot be stained by the foul deeds committed Her servants. If a priest abuses a boy then the crime is his crime, not that of the Church. Likewise, if a soldier abuses a boy it is not the fault of the army, and if a politician abuses a boy the nation is not to blame. Since we now sue the Catholic Church for crimes committed by priests, shouldn’t we be able to sue her traditional competitor, the Jews, for every crime committed by a Jew? If the Church bears responsibility for “abusing priests”, maybe International Jewry should be responsible for “cheating Jews”? Or for war-mongering Jews? Or for Jews killing gentiles in Palestine?
A little bird tells me that modern Jews would never agree to accept collective responsibility. They regret their hubris when they stood before Pilate. Today’s Jews are ready to act as a collective in order to collect, but not to pay. Today’s generation of gentle church doves might learn a few pragmatic lessons from these wise old serpents on how to survive in this Jewish world.
A little advice: dismiss the alleged victims of last century’s clerical abuse. Send them home. I do not feel sorry for these late claimants. Why did they wait 20 years to complain? Children who are attacked scream and run home to parents and police. If they didn’t run and scream, it wasn’t an attack. Chalk it up to a clumsy pass by a pathetic amateur; an unpleasant, shameful experience to be sure, but one unlikely to be repeated with a firm rebuke. Blame yourself for sending mixed signals, and go on with your life. Join mankind: every one of us, even your mommy and daddy, suffered an unwanted kiss or an undesired embrace. The laws should be reasonable. Allowing 20-year old claims for unreported transgressions is not reasonable. Only an immediate accusation should be considered valid, and 24 hours is more than enough time in most cases to lodge a formal complaint.
If a crime has occurred, then of course the criminal should be punished. But let not the denouncer profit by his report of the crime. This is the necessary rule of justice. There was a time when a denouncer could claim a third of a denounced man’s property. Oftentimes we exceed even that in today’s litigious environment.
The “paedo” angle is misleading. What is “a child”? Are you revolted by Romeo and Juliet? As a good American citizen, you should be; Juliet was 14, and thus Romeo today would be tried and locked up as a “paedophile”, together with his accomplice the good Friar Laurence. Friar Laurence would surely be considered as an “abusing priest”, and a Dershowitz would collect a million ducats from the Diocese of Verona for his sin of arranging the lovers’ tryst. Edgar Allan Poe married a 14-year old, and if the present laws were in force the American poet would harken to his Raven’s “nevermore” in jail. The prophet Muhammad married nine-year-old Aisha, but Jacob, the Biblical patriarch, surpassed him and married Rachel who was only 7. In our modern world Jacob and Muhammad would be hunted down, extradited and jailed. It is possible that even better-placed Persons would not fare well when faced with today’s enlightened justice: the Mother of our Saviour was just 14 at Annunciation.
Greek tradition approves of mature women who are willing to share their expertise with growing boys. In the Greek classic book Daphnis and Chloe, an experienced and mature lady Lycaenion taught young Daphnis how to attend to his girlfriend – to their mutual satisfaction. The BBC reports of a 26-year old woman teacher who was arrested for having sex with her 15-year old pupil. Even the prosecutor admitted that it’s “every schoolboy’s fantasy to have that kind of attention from a young, attractive member of staff”, but pushed for conviction all the same. In the US, Pamela Rogers was sentenced to years of jail-time for having sex with a boy as tall as you and me; he may have been only 13 at the time, but this happens to be the exact age my great-grandfather was married. If Mrs Rogers had instead concentrated on emotionally torturing and humiliating the boy she would have certainly enjoyed a successful career in public education. Who knows, she might have become Secretary of State.
The Americans and the Brits have invented the nonsensical concept of “statutory rape”; as if a state prosecutor knows better than boys and girls what they want. The great French thinkers Sartre and Derrida, Foucault and de Beauvoir, called in 1977 for scrapping this jailbait trap, this tool of selective prosecution. Wise Spaniards established the age of consent at 13, while the even wiser Muslims place no age limit for marriage at all because they so strongly disapprove of extramarital relations. Jews were guided by the Talmud, which stipulates the permitted age of marriage for girls at ‘three years and one day’ (though the safer age of nine was preferred), and wisely forbidding sodomy.
Indeed, almost all the cases of alleged clerical abuse are homosexual; the alleged victims should perhaps sue the gay rights organizations that infested the Church instead of harassing the Church Who failed to keep them out. But Church leaders are not permitted to even contemplate such a suggestion. They can’t say “pederasty”; they must pretend this is “paedophilia”. They are forbidden to defrock a homosexual priest lest they be accused of “homophobia”.
Sexual violence towards a small boy or girl by an adult man is a repulsive and criminal act, but such accusations are extremely rare in the history of clerical abuse.
We must not remain indifferent to the travails of the Church, for only She has the potential to turn the predatory neo-Judaic state into a peace-loving Christian one. The Church affirms the primacy of spirit, and of our godlike abilities to think and to reproduce; such hopeful opinions are anathema to our Worldly Masters. On the deepest level the Church is the main adversary of evil in our world. The worldlings have formed a competing church of sorts, the church of darkness, and they will not suffer a competitor.
Dominant as they are, they are not omnipotent. There is no magic in their incantations. They have no divine powers behind them. They are impostors. They exploit the old myths of mankind, forgetting that nothing works without God. As rebels against God, they will be defeated. As charlatans they will be dismantled. Their fall is imminent. We should reject them completely, as completely as we are called to in our confession of faith.
The Catholic Church is one of the greatest champions of Palestine. They have a Palestinian Patriarch, they do their best to defend the Palestinian people. All established churches support Palestine; with the apostolic churches taking the leading role, and the Catholics often leading them all. During the 2002 Bethlehem siege by the Jews, the Catholic Church led the resistance. I know because I was resisting too. Once upon a time, the Church led the Crusade to liberate the Holy Land. With a brave and selfless spirit She could lead a Crusade of Peace and free it again.
France once reached the greatest heights of economic fairness, social sophistication and moral integrity in union with the Church. The terrible warning of the Notre Dame blaze should shock the people of France into returning to the Rock of the Church, just as it must surely make the Church wake up to the “smoke of Satan” permeating Her walls.
New York historian, journalist, and lecturer, Alfred M. Lilienthal, was the leading 20th century American Jewish spokesman against the Zionist project of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. His views gained a wide audience in the United States when his essay, “Israel’s Flag Is Not My Flag,” was published in the September 1949 Reader’s Digest. The following is an excerpt from that article, which was written in the form of a letter to his mother:
The plain fact is that we Jews are not a race and we should not let the Zionists persuade us that we are. Proof to the contrary lies in Palestine, plain for all to see. You had my letter, Mother, from my Army furlough there. I was second to none in my enthusiasm for. what my co-religionists had done for a desert brought to bloom, for clean new cities rising out of age-old sand dunes. All of these wonders had come to pass while only a few fanatics talked of statehood. One evening I went to see a performance of an opera in Jerusalem. In that theater lobby you could distinguish almost at a glance the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazic Jew from Poland, the Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jew from North Africa or Turkey, the German Jew, Jews from a score of countries all differing in dress, language, manners and mental attitudes. I had visual proof of the arguments of anthropologists. who laugh at the notion of a distinct Jewish race.
Anyone who tells me those foreign Jews are exclusively my people that I should be closer to them than to Bob McCormick, the kid on the block with whom I used to play ball: or to Nick Galbraith, who roomed next to me at Cornell; or Dave Du Vivier with whom I studied in law school that man is talking dangerous nonsense. I have also learned, Mother, that when something. goes wrong in my relations with non-Jews. I avoid the habit of thinking that it happened just because I am a Jew. Such self-pity is comforting, but it is usually wrong and therefore dangerous.
It is dangerous, indeed, because it is precisely the sort of paranoia and us-against-the-world mentality upon which the very dangerous little state of Israel is founded. Take it from Lilienthal, as bad ideas go, this Israel foolishness has to be just about the worst.
The sentiments that Lilienthal expressed in that article, I dare say, were also the sentiments of a very large proportion of American Jews at the time. It is certainly the sort of sensible approach to the Israel issue that I encountered among the first group of Jews that I rubbed shoulders with in graduate school at the University of North Carolina, 1968-1972. In my first year I shared an apartment with two of them and my office mate was also Jewish for most of the time I was there. Several other of my student colleagues in the economics department were also Jewish, as were a few of my professors. Almost all of them were sort of standard left-liberal in their politics and as a consequence their sentiments probably leaned naturally toward the plight of the native Palestinians. The one exception was a professor for whom I was a teaching assistant for one semester, and I was amazed by his extreme Zionist, Israel-first attitude. It was really a brand-new experience for me, and I frankly found it shocking. My thought at the time—which I dared not express to him—was that he was really living in the wrong country. In fact, his son, he told me, was planning to emigrate to Israel. From my admittedly very small sample, I got the impression that his views were that of a quite small minority of American Jews.
Perhaps Lilienthal’s best known book is the brief little 1969 volume, What Price Israel? The reviewing customer, Herbert Fleschner, of Washington, DC, sums it up very well:
This highly intelligent, well-educated man was Jewish. He was strictly against the creation of the State of Israel and said that it would spawn great problems in the Middle East. So it has. The Zionist creators of the State of Israel operated by lies, deception, trickery, subterfuge, and even harassed their own Jewish people in order to force them to immigrate to Palestine. They even had the power to manipulate the delegates of the United Nations who made recommendations for this situation at that time. Enter King David Hotel Bombing into your search engine, and you will discover Menachem Begin, former Prime Minister of Israel, was a Zionist terrorist, who masterminded this bombing, resulting in the death of a great number of people, including the British High Command whose job it was to keep law and order under the British Mandate. An excellent read for those of you who are not afraid to discover the truth. Remember, Lilienthal was Jewish.
He might also have suggested a search of “Menachem Begin Deir Yassin Massacre” to get a bit more of the flavor of the terrorist role that Begin played in the creation of the state of Israel. One of the better articles one comes up with is “Deir Yassin: The Massacre that Sparked the Nakba” by Britt Wilkins on Counterpunch.
The Zionist Connection II
One can also learn quite a bit about Deir Yassin and its foundational importance to Israel in Chapter Five, entitled “What Palestinians?”, of Lilienthal’s 1978, 904-page magnum opus, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace? The flavor of that book is well-captured by the opening of his 24th and penultimate chapter, which is headed by a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”
In a controversial 1970 Commentary article, Robert Alter raised a most basic question:
Does a Jewish state belong in an area where, even as late as 1947, the majority of the population was Arab? How can Israel be imagined, even in the most diffuse sense, as a continuation of the moral heritage of Judaism if its existence depends upon a manifest historical injustice? (link added)
That Judaic heritage is clear and unmistakable and has been unwavering. Where Zionism is particularist and segregationalist, Judaism has been universalist and integrationalist. Judaism, like its offspring monotheistic faiths, Christianity and Islam, has always represented a moral choice, a spiritual link between man and his Creator in whose ethos there is little room for narrow chauvinism. Whereas Zionism staked its claim to a land that had not belonged to Jews for 2,000 years, Judaism’s power to survive has always depended on its being unrelated to any particular geographic tract. The Jews were chosen by the Lord neither to possess a specific piece of land nor to be favored over others of his children. They were selected for the task of spreading the message that there is one and only one God.
In exchanging their birthright for the “mess” of statehood, and staking the future of American Judaism on the roulette of power politics, Jewish leaders surrendered to the noxious dualism of religion and nationalism.
Fifty years ago, these same Jews had vigorously opposed being classified with Italian, Germans, Czechs, French, etc. on an ethnic basis rather than with Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Muslims, etc., as a religious community. But with the triumph of the Zionist revival in Palestine, the ethnicity of the Jew elsewhere shifted; and without protest the subtle transmutation from Jewish Americans, a religious grouping, into American Jews, an ethnic-national entity, was accomplished. (link added)
To conceal the dual national attachment, the link with Israel was passed off as a religious tie, the worship of Israelism increasingly supplanting Judaism. It was much simpler to write a check to the UJA, and pleasanter than to attend synagogue services. The new idolatry had no time for immutable principles and universal values. Jews accepted situations they otherwise would have rejected, but now welcomed in the name of Israel. (link added)
Opposed to violence and war, Jews accepted Israel’s acts of military might and aggression. Opposed to union of church and state, they accepted such a unity wherever Israel was involved. Long dedicated to integration into the body politic, they moved toward separateness and segregation. Judaistic tradition had placed its followers alongside those who struggled against the limitation of human and civil rights. In the name of Israelism, they sanctioned the suppression of Palestinian Arab civil and human rights within Israel proper and in the occupied territories. Expressed another way, Jews have come to lose their own traditional universal, human ethos through their identification with Israelism. Intellectual and staunch defenders of Israel Arthur Waskow noted pertinently, “and it’s not just politics the Jewish institutions want to avoid; it’s God, too. Try talking of God to a rabbi!—he’s too busy trying to raise money for Israel or the synagogue mortgage.”
Many people might be surprised to learn that today there are still quite a few people who call themselves Jews who think like Lilienthal did. They, like he, would agree that modern-day Israel exemplifies the sort of behavior that the prophets of the Old Testament deplored among the descendants of Abraham. The largest organized group of such people call themselves Neturei Karta. The following is from the “About Us” section of their web site:
The true Jews are against dispossessing the Arabs of their land and homes. According to the Torah, the land should be returned to them.
Neturei Karta deplore the systematic uprooting of ancient Jewish communities by the Zionists, the shedding of Jewish and non-Jewish blood for the sake of Zionist sovereignty and the Neturei Karta favor a peaceful transition from the present Zionist rule to a non-Zionist entity.
According to Judaic Law the Torah has the last word. There is no such thing as a majority of Jews who happen to be Jewish by birth who can alter Torah Law in any way. In fact even the greatest rabbi or as Maimonides writes, “even the greatest prophet” [referring actually to an authentic prophet], has no right to distort or amend even one letter of the Torah.
Rabbi Blau stated shortly before his death that the acceptance by the United Nations of the Zionist state as a member state constituted a grave injustice to the Jewish people. Neturei Karta hope that this great error will be corrected at the earliest opportunity. The Neturei Karta regret that the Zionist state has usurped the holy name of Israel and that the Zionists so often pretend to speak in the name of the Jewish people and assume the right to act on our behalf. Only those rabbis who have not been affected or influenced by the poison of Zionism, can be considered the spiritual leaders of today’s Jewry.
The world must know that the Zionists have illegitimately seized the name Israel and have no right to speak in the name of the Jewish people!
The United States really ought to be just about the last place where the Zionist ideology should resonate. The foundational premise for the creation of the state of Israel in the heart of the Arab world is that Jews are discriminated against in countries where they are minorities and in danger of even worse things happening to them, and therefore they must have a state of their own. Nowhere is this premise more absurd than in the United States, which has especially been a land of opportunity for Jews. The statement submitted to the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of World War I by a group of prominent U.S. Jews was, as a consequence, quite representative of Jewish sentiment in the country at the time:
As a future form of government for Palestine will undoubtedly be considered by the approaching Peace Conference, we, the undersigned citizens of the United States, unite in this statement, setting forth our objections to the organization of a Jewish State in Palestine as proposed by the Zionist Societies in this country and Europe and to the segregation of the Jews as a nationalistic unit in any country.
We feel that in so doing we are voicing the opinion of the majority of American Jews born in this country and of those foreign born who have lived here long enough to thoroughly assimilate American political and social conditions. The American Zionists represent, according to the most recent statistics available, only a small proportion of the Jews living in this country, about 150,000 out of 3,500,000. (American Jewish Year Book, 1918, Philadelphia).
At the outset we wish to indicate our entire sympathy with the efforts of Zionists which aim to secure for Jews at present living in lands of oppression a refuge in Palestine or elsewhere, where they may freely develop their capabilities and carry on their activities as free citizens.
But we raise our voices in warning and protest against the demand of the Zionists for the reorganisation of the Jews as a national unit, to whom, now or in the future, territorial sovereignty in Palestine shall be committed. This demand not only misrepresents the trend of the history of the Jews, who ceased to be a nation 2000 years ago, but involves the limitation and possible annulment of the larger claims of Jews for full citizenship and human rights in all lands in which those rights are not yet secure. For the very reason that the new era upon which the world is entering aims to establish government everywhere on principles of true democracy, we reject the Zionistic project of a “national home for the Jewish people in Palestine”.
Zionism arose as a result of the intolerable conditions under which Jews have been forced to live in Russia and Roumania. But it is evident that for the Jewish population of these countries, variously estimated at from six to ten millions, Palestine can become no homeland. Even with the improvement of the neglected condition of this country, its limited area can offer no solution. The Jewish question in Russia and Roumania can be settled only within those countries by the grant of full rights of citizenship to Jews.
We are all the more opposed to the Zionists, because they, themselves, distinctly repudiate the solely ameliorative program. They demand and hail with delight the “Balfour Declaration” to establish “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine”, i.e., a home not merely for Jews living in countries in which they are oppressed, but for Jews universally. No Jew, wherever he may live, can consider himself free from the implications of such a grant.
Leading British and French Anti-Zionists
That very cynical war measure known as the Balfour Declaration, designed to enlist world Jewry on its side by promising other people’s land to the Jews, hardly had the overwhelming support of British Jews, either. The one Jewish member of the British cabinet at the time, Edwin Montagu, was, in fact, about as anti-Zionist as Lilienthal, as we see from his observations here:
Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. If a Jewish Englishman sets his eyes on the Mount of Olives and longs for the day when he will shake British soil from his shoes and go back to agricultural pursuits in Palestine, he has always seemed to me to have acknowledged aims inconsistent with British citizenship and to have admitted that he is unfit for a share in public life in Great Britain, or to be treated as an Englishman. I have always understood that those who indulged in this creed were largely animated by the restrictions upon and refusal of liberty to Jews in Russia. But at the very time when these Jews have been acknowledged as Jewish Russians and given all liberties, it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the “national home of the Jewish people”. I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews and that the Jews should be put in all positions of preference and should be peculiarly associated with Palestine in the same way that England is with the English or France with the French, that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine. Perhaps also citizenship must be granted only as a result of a religious test.
Montagu’s prediction was absolutely accurate with respect to what Zionism has meant for the Muslim and Christian residents of Palestine. The consequent rise of ill will toward Jews in other countries that he foresaw, however, has been forestalled by something that he could hardly have envisioned, that is the creation of the “Holocaustianity” religion, which we shall discuss later, and by the sheer power of money to control public opinion.
Perhaps the most prominent Jewish political figure in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair around the end of the 19th century was Chamber of Deputies member, Joseph Reinach. His crystal ball at that time with respect to the prospects for Zionism might have been a bit faulty, but he took a similar view to Montagu’s in an article in the newspaper, Le Figaro:
The sole result of this campaign, which in any case is destined for a pitiful failure, would be to give the impression…that those Frenchmen who belong to the Jewish faith are subordinating the idea of the fatherland to I cannot imagine what sort of solidarity which existed in a vague way during barbarous times, which was prevalent no doubt at the origin of civilized societies, but which in modern societies is an anachronism.
Unfortunately, that vicious anachronism is ruling the roost these days. Lilienthal attributes its pivotal rise in the dominant world power coming out of World War II, the United States, to the wave of Jewish immigrants in the early part of the 20th century from Eastern Europe, where they were accustomed to living in a separate “state within a state.” They brought with them, in a word, the ghetto mentality. They might have been virtually all descendants of Khazarian converts to Judaism and not blood heirs to ancient Israel, but they bought heavily into the tribal “chosen people” idea. Arch-Zionist Alan Dershowitz unintentionally revealed the controlling mentality on Fox News in an interview. My grandmother, born in Poland, always wanted to know, he said, “Is it good for the Jews?”
It is not said, but what is implied, is that nobody else and nothing else counts for anything. That is the precise opposite of the universalist sentiment that Lilienthal extols in the Judaism that he embraces, but, unfortunately, it tends to represent the Judaism of the shtetl that so many 20th century immigrants brought with them to the United States.
The Zionist success in the U.S. has also been made possible by the strategic use of money. A case in point, as we learn from Lilienthal, is the transformation of the Jewish-owned New York Times from anti-Zionist to pro-Zionist. They were among the last holdouts in the early 1940’s until succumbing to a massive boycott from their major advertisers, without whose support they would have gone out of business. From that time on they have been little more than propagandists for Israel, just like all the other heavily Jewish-controlled major news organs.
Most recently, the newly elected Muslim Congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, in observing the power of Jewish money in influencing lawmakers, has illustrated the power of money in controlling the news media. They all ganged up on her, calling her anti-Semitic for noting what everyone knows is true. What is illustrated here is that she just didn’t go nearly far enough when she just blamed Jewish money for its power over Republicans. They wield the same power over American politicians of all political stripes and over the news media as well, across the political spectrum.
Why are the Democrats so Russophobic these days other than the fact that Russia is thwarting Israeli ambitions in Syria and in the Middle East generally? The card that the Zionists are predictably playing against her is what Lilienthal calls “anti-anti-Semitism.” They use it like a gun, and, says Lilienthal, “Who is strong enough to remove the gun ever-pointed at the White House by the combined hands of supine politicians, the controlled media and the Zionist lobby?” (p. 808, The Zionist Connection II) The only shortcoming in his observation is that it’s not just the White House at which it is aimed, and he implies that it is only a figurative gun.
Lilienthal also says that it is “Israelism” that has replaced Judaism as the religion of many Jewish Americans. One might say that it is just a subcategory or a supporting tenet of Israelism, but the actual faux religion that has replaced Judaism and they would have it replace Christianity and other religions as well, is what Jérôme Bourbon, the editor of the Paris weekly, Rivarol, calls “Holocaustianity”:
Not only did Professor [Robert] Faurisson by his research and famous phrase of 60 words threaten the ideological foundations of the world order issuing from World War II, but he also called in question the religion, or counter-religion, of “Holocaustianity.” It is a veritable religion, demanding respect and submission. Its false god requires a homage of adoration, a constant burning of incense before it, a flame to be lit like at Yad Vashem, flowers to be offered, and wailing to go up to Heaven, like at the pilgrimages and processions to Auschwitz and elsewhere, while people must beat their breast, crying out “Never again.”
“Holocaustianity,” taught from primary school to the end of one’s days, by television, cinema and every form of entertainment, does in fact ape all features of the Catholic religion. It has its martyrs (the Six Million), its Saints (Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank), its miracles (“Holocaust” survivors), its stigmatists (tattooed camp-inmates), its pilgrimages (to Auschwitz, etc.), its temples and cathedrals (“Holocaust” museums and memorials), its alms-giving to obtain pardon (never-ending reparation payments to Israel and to “Holocaust” survivors), its relics (camp inmates’ teeth, hair, shoes, etc.), its lives of the Saints (books by Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, etc.), its torture chambers (gas-chambers), its Gospel (the verdict of the post-war Nuremberg military tribunal), its High Priests and Pontiffs (Simon Wiesenthal), its Inquisition (anti-Revisionist civil law-courts), its laws against blasphemy (strictly forbidding any questioning of the “Holocaust”), its Holy City (modern Jerusalem), its preachers and guardians (all instructors and associations in politics, the media, religion, trade unions, sports and economics), its religious Congregations (World Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, AIPAC, etc., etc.), its Hell (for all nationalists – except Israelis! –, all revisionists, all believers in the deicide and in the New Testament replacing the Old, etc.), and its faithful (almost all of mankind).
However, not only does “Holocaustianity” ape Christianity, it also turns it inside out: instead of love, hate; instead of truth, lies; instead of forgiveness, Talmudic vengeance; instead of respect for elders, the hunting down of aged camp-guards; instead of the spirit of poverty, the pursuit of reparation payments; instead of humility, the drive to dominate; instead of sharing, the pursuit of personal gain, instead of charity, blackmail: instead of respect for others, lynching: instead of quiet and discretion, publicity and noisy accusations in the media; instead of the boundless justice of God, the brazen injustice of conquerors setting themselves up as judges of the conquered, and so on and so on. (links added)
“Indeed, my God does nothing Without having revealed His purpose To His servants the Neviim.” Amos 3:7 (The Israel Bible™)
Featured image (Credit: Breaking Israel News)
Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, one of the most prominent rabbis of this generation, made a shocking statement, claiming that the Messiah will precede the upcoming Israeli elections. Several rabbis noted that the writing is on the wall and the signs that the process leading up to the Messiah has already begun…for those who have the eyes to see it.
Rabbi Yekutiel Fish, an expert in Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) gave a lesson this week in which he discussed how the Messiah was imminent. Rabbi Fish cited Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, one of the most prominent Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbis of this generation, who began foretelling the arrival of the Messiah just a few years ago.
“It is written that in the days leading up to the Messiah, tzaddikim (righteous men) will begin to announce his arrival but some people, those who have not prepared for His arrival, will laugh at the righteous and the learned,” Rabbi Fish said, warning that it is forbidden to mock the righteous.
Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leading authority in Haredi Jewish society, (Credit: Yaakov Naumi/Flash90)
Fish emphasized that Kanievsky was especially suited for presaging the arrival of the Messiah. Not only is Rabbi Kanievsky one of the most learned and righteous Jews alive today, there is another indication of his connection to the Moshiach (Messiah). Rabbi Kanievsky’s full given-name is Shmaryahu Yosef Chaim ben (the son of) Miriam. Rabbi Fish noted that first letters of each of Rabbi Kanievsky’s Hebrew names can be rearranged to spell “Moshiach.”
Rabbi Fish related a story that is just now being told within Haredi circles in Israel. A young Torah scholar from outside of Israel was hosted for the Sabbath a few weeks ago at the house of a follower of Rabbi Kanievsky. The young man visited Kanievsky during the Sabbath. He asked the rabbi if he should apply for Israeli citizenship in order to vote for the Haredi party in the Israeli elections being held on April 9.
“There is no need,” Rabbi Kanievsky answered. “The Messiah will already be here before the elections.”
The young man was unsure that he had heard the rabbi correctly so after he departed from the house, he asked Kanievsky’s grandson, a venerated rabbi in his own right, to confirm the answer. The grandson entered the rabbi’s chamber and asked again: ‘Should the young man apply for citizenship before the elections?’
Rabbi Kanievsky responded, “I already told him that there is no need. The Messiah will be here before the elections.”
Rabbi Fish emphasized the need for Rabbi Kanievsky to make such statements.
“People need to act in practical manners to prepare for the Messiah, not just speak about it,” Rabbi Fish told Breaking Israel News. “Rabbi Kanievsky is calling for all religious Jews and all Jews in general, to come together, to show unity, not just for the Israeli elections or national interests. Our ultimate goal as a nation is to bring the Messiah and we need to be united, to actually love one another to do this.”
Rabbi Pinchas Winston, an expert on Jewish sources concerning the Messiah, normally eschews predictions of the Messiah’s arrival based on a precise date but notes that such a statement made by a scholar and righteous Jew of Rabbi Kanievsky’s stature needed to be related to in a different manner.
“You should know that Jews who live in a Messiah awareness take these predictions seriously,” Rabbi Winston told Breaking Israel News. “People who haven’t been trained properly to see this, can’t see it. They won’t see it even when it is happening in front of our eyes.”
Winston noted that the paradigm for this ability to see the Redemption was implicit in the story of the Exodus from Egypt.
“Moses was walking around for 79 years and when he revealed himself, so many people, Jews and Egyptians, were surprised.”
Winston noted that many people cannot see the beginnings of the Messiah as they are actually appearing because they have been taught that redemption has never happened.
“The modern state of Israel is the second time the Jews have come back to Israel,” Rabbi Winston noted. “There have already been two Jewish Temples in Jerusalem. People who are not educated or living in a Messiah context don’t relate to this so they can’t see it as a possibility even while it is happening.”
Rabbi Winston applied this concept to modern history.
“The Holocaust never happened until it did,” Rabbi Winston said. “So the Jews were surprised by it even though it was building up for years. Today, people learn about the Holocaust as if it could never happen again so even after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the election of openly antisemitic politicians, they insist it cannot happen again.”
“God can be speaking right at you, saying the Messiah is right in front of you, but if you refuse to hear, you won’t,” Winston explained.
Rabbi Fish agreed, emphasizing that prophetic predictions could materialize while going unnoticed. Eight days ago, Rabbi Fish predicted that the blood moon lunar eclipse that passed over the continental U.S. on Sunday would be a significant omen, even more so because it coincided with the Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat.
In fact, an unprecedented daylight airstrike by the Israeli Air Force against Iranian military targets in southern Syria on Sunday led to an intensification of the conflict. An Iranian General declared that his forces were prepared to “destroy Israel” and the Israeli Intelligence Minister referred to the situation as an “open confrontation” with Iran.
“It is true that Rabbi Kanievsky has been saying the Moshiach is imminent for a few years, but that is not really very long when we are speaking about the Messiah,” Rabbi Fish said. “And every time, Rabbi Kanievsky speaks in different terms, describing a different aspect of the process,” he added.
“The Messiah is already active in the world but not everyone is willing to see this,” Fish said. “Some people are unwilling to see this no matter what proof is presented. If the conflict with Syria develops, it will become clear that the process of the Messiah began on Tu B’Shevat.”
Rabbi Fish emphasized that the upcoming Israeli elections are the result of a political divide that may prove to be irreconcilable.
“This could be the end of the Israeli government as we know it,” Fish said. “The conflict is over the law concerning the draft. The Supreme Court gave them three months to solve this. After that, no one knows what will happen.”
“The only solution is unity,” he maintained. “Not the appearance of unity for political purposes but a sincere and deep unity of the Jewish people. The last time we stood together as a nation was in the days of the Temple. If this [political] crisis, or the military crisis, brings us together, the result could be the Messiah.”
Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson (Screenshot)
Rabbi Kanievsky’s statement was also discussed by Rabbi Matityahu Glazerson, an expert in Torah codes, in a recent video. Using a Torah program that searches for equidistant letter sequences in the Bible, Rabbi Glazerson did a search for relevant expressions concerning Kanievsky’s announcement. He noted that the term “יבוא משיח” (the Messiah will come) appears once in Leviticus 23 adjacent to the letters “תשעט” signifying the current Hebrew year, 5779.
The rabbi also noted that included in the table was the word “מפורים” (from Purim). The holiday of Purim will fall on March 21 this year, three and a half weeks before the Israeli elections.
Also included in the table is the word “תשובה” (repentance) and אמונה (belief).
“Tshuva and belief are what bring the Messiah,” Rabbi Glazerson said. “Even in the times that are suited for the Messiah to come, without tshuva, there can be no Messiah. And faith is what leads to Israel being redeemed.”
Rogue regimes like Israel with their illegal stockpiles of nuclear weapons present the real danger to global peace, according to independent political analyst and writer,Adam Garrie.
A senior Russian official has cautioned the United States against a plan to withdraw from a landmark Cold War-era nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, saying such a move would have grave consequence for the world.
US President Donald Trump announced last month that Washington would withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which was signed toward the end of the Cold War in 1987 by then-President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
The treaty — seen as a milestone in ending the Cold War arms race between the two superpowers — banned ground-launch nuclear missiles with ranges from 500 kilometers to 5,500 kilometers and led to the elimination of nearly 2,700 short- and medium-range missiles.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told a news briefing on Monday that leaving the treaty would provoke “a new round of arms races.”
In an interview with Press TV on Tuesday, Garrie said, “Intermediate range nuclear weapons and tactical nuclear weapons are going to be the things in the 21st century.”
“Many may not want to hear that and many may not have anticipated that in the late 1980s when the denuclearization among the superpowers was something of a rule rather than the exception. Today, the world is going towards the opposition direction as the technology to deploy small nuclear weapons or smaller becomes ever more sophisticated,” he added.
“So does the proliferation of any weapon make the world more dangerous? Generally yes depending on whose they are in. But I think this whole tit-for-tat business with the US and Russia is really more of a side show especially when what we’ve got the rogue states like the Zionist regime which illegally has nuclear weapons and no one is saying a thing about it. Koreans are deescalating their nuclear program and cooperating with South Korea, US, Russia, China and with others. That’s really a positive development. While on the other end of this spectrum is Israel,” he stated.
“And then of course you have nuclear weapons in south Asia, where the next war between India and Pakistan could turn into a nuclear war a lot more easily than people think,” he added.
“I think those are the real issues to consider in respect of the problems of nuclear proliferation. I am not particularly worried about the US and Russia dropping nukes on each other. It did not happen in the last century and I don’t think it is going to happen in this one,” the analyst concluded.
Western thinking and intellectual endeavor is very much epitomized by formality, rationality and clear boundaries or limits. These qualities no doubt derive from the Aristotelian philosophical and analytical basis of Western Christendom, in which the Excluded Middle of Aristotelian logic reigns supreme when it comes to the formulation of a thesis or argument. Aristotelian logic posits an absolute binary division between opposites. Its basic formula is an either/or contrast. Truth and falsehood are opposites: there is no half-truth or half-falsehood. This binary division permeates all other fields of quantifiable intellectual endeavor and finds expression in such opposites as good/evil, right/wrong, friend/enemy, legal/illegal, etc. There are obvious benefits to such clarity of thought, and no doubt it is this methodology which has contributed to the scientific achievements of the West. While such sharp divisions cannot always be imposed upon contingent reality because it is situational and circumstantial, rather than absolute, when this principle is violated in the law, the outcome is not only, or merely egregious, it defies ordinary human understanding and contributes to an inaccurate, if not corrupt, view of reality.
The Jewish oxymoron as an instrument of overcoming the limits set by Aristotelian logic
One of the binary opposites of Aristotelian classification in modern times is the democracy/dictatorship opposition. Democracy is recognized and understood to be of whole cloth, such that there is no such animal as a “somewhat” democratic state, or a “nearly” democratic state. A political system is not democratic if all the citizens of the country cannot participate on an equal basis. Either a political system is, or is not, democratic. Jewish genius however, has overcome this opposition with a number of oxymoronic legal definitions. The Jewish state of Israel characterizes itself as a “Jewish and democratic” state, although the latest law of the Knesset wishes to raise “Jewishness” above “democracy”. However, it must be blindingly obvious to anyone not in thrall to the ruling narratives, that when a minority of a population is regarded as hostile, is unwelcome and therefore is never part of a governing coalition, democracy must be a casualty, especially when that minority has been singled out for discriminatory and dispossessory treatment, despite the legal somersaulting of the greatest of Jewish legal minds.
The designation of Israel as an apartheid state characterized by apartheid- style laws has been accepted by leading jurists and many international organizations. As a former South African I not only know the meaning of the term in its original language of Afrikaans– separateness- but saw its effects upon the non-White population. In political practice, separate means unequal. It was only many years after my coming to Israel on aliya as a young Jewish woman and subsequent to obtaining a law degree from the Hebrew University and engaging in legal work for Palestinians, that the resemblance of Israeli legal system to South African apartheid really struck me. In fact I was quoted on the front page of the Ha’aretz intellectual daily newspaper as making this comparison. The first person to invoke the comparison was Dr. Uri Davis, an Israeli sociologist, who wrote a book called Israel: An Apartheid State.
I would like to elaborate on those elements which contribute to making Israel not only an apartheid State, apartheidbeing confined to the law, but rather the wider sociological cultural phenomena of discrimination in which the legal system is placed. The matrix of the society is based on force, violence, and inhumanity which derive from “values” of the Jewish religion.
The basic values of the Jewish religion as the basis of Israeli culture and politics
It can be stated without any fear of contradiction, that the Jewish state of Israel is built upon the principle of separation, which is why the apartheid comparison holds. But it must be understood how and why this is the case as well as the limits of the comparison. It is not an accident, nor a choice based merely upon economic, political or cultural considerations. Rather the principle of separation is at the heart of the Jewish religion itself and Zionism is the political expression of the Jewish religion. Normative Judaism in Israel is Rabbinical Judaism or Talmudic Judaism, which, historically, has been normative for nearly two thousand years. This is the Judaism developed by the Rabbis following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, or who were then known as the Pharisees. This Judaism is not a biblical religion: rather it is a religion based upon the interpretation of the Torah – the relevant parts of the first five books of the Bible from Genesis to Deuteronomy – by a succession of Torah interpreters known as rabbis. I would like to stress that the bible is not normative In Judaism, that is, it is not binding nor is it obligatory for Jews: only the Talmudic rulings are binding. It is for this reason that the politically-concocted “Judeo-Christian” heritage does not hold. Christianity sees the Bible, both Old and New Testaments its standard-setting texts. Not so for Judaism. Judaism and Christianity do not share a parent/child relationship nor an older sibling/younger sibling relationship, as per the politically correct Roman Catholic Church.
The first codification of these interpretations was made in 200 CE and consisted of the six-part Mishnah. To this was subsequently added further interpretations; the Gomorrah and later, the Responsa literature – all products of Jewish community-acknowledged rabbinical experts of the law. This Judaism held a monopoly which began to be challenged only in the mid-nineteenth century in Germany as a result of the influence of what is called the Enlightenment, the source of the secularism of the West and the secularism of a majority of Western Jews, most of whom, nonetheless, have not broken with Judaism’s basic rituals of circumcision, the bar-mitzvah, Jewish divorce and burial.
The late Professor of Biblical studies at the Hebrew University, Shemaryahu Talmon, explained in a lecture to Catholic Christian Zionists, that the basic value of Judaism is the principle of separation. He illustrated his point with the binary opposites of sacred and profane, holy and unholy, Shabbat and non-Shabbat or weekdays, and, of course, kashrut, the laws governing pure and impure food and clothing. All of these pairs are exemplars of the underlying opposition of purity and impurity with purity being the ideal state.
At that meeting He did not however explicate in detail the source and full effects no doubt in deference to his audience. He left out the most significant binary opposition of Rabbinical Judaism: the Jew/Gentile or Jewish/goy opposition, the consequences of which have always been, and remain, central to Jewish life. Talmon did not explain that the principle of separation derives from kadosh – which is translated as holy, but its literal meaning is “set aside” or “separate from”. The separation that both exists and is demanded for Jews is the separation from the “impure”. God is kadosh and His people must be kadosh too. This is the significance of “chosenness” – chosen by God to have the existential quality of purity. The Jew is pure because he possesses a soul – – nefesh in Hebrew. The purpose of all Jewish ritual is to sustain the state of purity of the Jew. Jews are commanded to do all in their power to avoid being contaminated by what is considered impure. In contrast to Jews, goys or goyim, the latter having the same dictionary meaning as gentium, people, fall into the category of the impure because they are not born with souls and are therefore, existentially separated from God without any possibility of “closing the gap”. Hence in the Jewish lexicon the term goy has a pejorative meaning while gentium does not. This is the fundamental reason that the Jew is not required to the treat the goy as an equal because, according to Judaism, he is not equal. In fact, the goy is considered as chattel because chattel do not have souls. The goy is therefore not fully human. In this essay I shall only use the term goy for this reason.
This existential distinction between the Jew and the goy is reflected in the absence of a Jewish universal moral code, an absence which is not found within either Christianity or Islam. Judaism’s moral code is characterized by its particularity: it only binds Jews vis-à-vis Jews, not Jews vis-à-vis goys. The most outstanding exemplar of this system is that a Jew is not bound to save the life of a goy if saving the life requires the use of electricity or travelling in a motor vehicle, such as an ambulance, because such activities are forbidden on the Sabbath as they are considered forms or work, and a Jew may not work on the Sabbath. a Jew may do so for another Jew according to the law known as pikuah nefesh which translates as saving a soul. A Jew not only may break the Sabbath to save a Jewish soul, he is obligated to do so. Pikuah may be translated as to take care of and to oversee, and nefesh means soul: because goys do not have souls, pikuah nefesh cannot be applied. In addition, another exceptional phenomena of the Jewish moral code is that it does also not make truth binding upon the Jew with respect to the goy. There are only two instances where it is recommended that a Jew ought to tell the truth to a goy: when there is a danger to his life, or if it is in the interests of the Jew or the Jewish community.
The question may now be asked as to why this information has been placed as a prolegomena to a description and analysis of the laws and practices of the Jewish state. The reason is quite straightforward: everything that I have described does not fall within the written laws passed by the legislative body of Israel, the Knesset, but serves, rather, as the matrix in which the laws are embedded and out of which the laws spring.
The Israeli legal system
It is this background that serves to explain why Aristotelian logic does not have an exclusive hold on the Israeli legal system and why a formal legal analysis cannot, by definition, grasp the entire experiential reality of the separateness/apartheid of the Jewish state. Once the lives of goys have no more value than chattel, the Jewish Israeli legal system cannot provide value to that which has no value to Jews. The minute a Jewish/goy conflict is encountered, that which is regarded as universal morality does not apply. A personal experience of this nature found expression during a hearing on a petition I submitted to the Supreme Court sitting as the High Court of Justice (Court of Equity concerning Administrative law and practice) requesting the voiding of a sale of Palestinian land by the majority of its owners (the land was not parcellated and therefore owned jointly by all the owners). A Justice in the hearing asked me what was wrong with an affidavit containing a blatant lie concerning the “sale” of Palestinian land to a Jew in militarily occupied territory, which is forbidden in international law. My response was that the perjury occurred to make the sale “kosher” at least in Jewish eyes. So the Justice asked what would happen if we just removed the affidavit to which I answered that the “sale” could not go through. The “sale” was not voided by the Court.
The State of Israel does not recognize the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of Civilians and hors de combat as legally binding upon it, although it is recognized as conventional international law, and not just treaty law, and hence binding upon all states. It is not that the Jewish state denies its conventional status but rather because the preamble refers to “High Contracting Parties” and the Palestinians are not, or at least were not, a High Contracting Party. This is a perfect instance of Talmudic logic – catch on to an irrelevant point and avoid the substance and rationale of the Convention. Therefore the Jewish state denies Palestinians, who are both civilians and hors de combat legal protection whilst living under a brutal military occupation whilst the Jewish appellation of the nature of the military occupation is “a benign military occupation” – one of the many oxymorons of Jewish thinking. Therefore the High Court cannot evoke this Fourth Geneva Convention to protect Palestinians in the militarily occupied territories from the Israeli army and refers instead to “humanitarian” considerations with respect to Palestinians, but never ever spells them out. But how could “humanitarian” considerations apply to Palestinians? After all they are goys, and goys have no souls and are therefore like chattel. They don’t deserve humanitarian considerations. This term therefore, in this context, is no more than flatus vocis – empty air, having no corresponding reality.
It is more than interesting to note, in contrast, that while South African apartheid was motivated by cultural concerns, not to say economic and political ones, it was not based upon an understanding that blacks and whites constitute different species of mankind. In fact, the South African government had to legislate criminal laws to prevent “miscegenation” i.e. the marriage or sexual relationships between people of different races, yet despite the attempts at prohibition, the fact is that as a result of “miscegenation”, a whole new category of “race” or “color” grew up in South Africa numbering in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. The children of such unions were called “Coloreds”.
In contrast to that situation, the marriage ratio of Jew and Arab in Israel is infinitesimal and there are no laws against it. Instead, Israel has preserved the millet system from the Ottomans, millet meaning religious community, according to which people can only marry legally within their own religious group. Naturally this was not considered discriminatory at the time, because secularism had not yet set in. “Mixed marriages” involving Israeli Jews and goyshave to take place abroad or abroad by proxy. But any Jewish woman wanting to divorce a non-Jewish man and remarry a Jew, has to have a Jewish divorce. There are special types of divorces for these cases, when they are applicable. Otherwise if she remarries a Jew without obtaining a Jewish divorce, called a get, her children and their descendents will be Jewish bastards and forbidden to marry within the normal Jewish community for ten generations! The Rabbinate keeps a list of the names of bastards.
Amongst the most egregious discriminatory laws are those legislated soon after the establishment of the Jewish state in Palestine. There is a full list of them with comments compiled on the Israeli Arab legal site Adalah and may be accessed by anyone interested. I shall not deal with all of them naturally, but will touch on the most outstanding of them. www.adalah.org/en/law/index?page=4
One of the first and most crucial of such laws for the Jewish state is the Law of Return 1950. This is another oxymoronic manifestation of Jewish genius. This law says that Jews, who were not born in the Jewish state, may return to it because it is their “land of birth”. The term in Hebrew is moledet the root of which means “to be born”. What the law does is ignore the fact of birth outside of Israel of a Jew, that is, the de facto status of a foreign-born Jew, while assigning to him a de iure legal right of birth in the Jewish state. The legal right overcomes the fact. This translates into a situation that a Jew not born in the Jewish state may return to his land of birth of Israel where he was not born.
An Arab Palestinian refugee, born in Palestine has no right of return to the country of his birth according to the Citizenship Law. One of the mechanisms for the application of this law is the ius sanguinis – the law of blood. That is to say, that if you are born to a Jew you have acquired birthrights in Palestine whether you were born there or not. This is what accounts for the free entrance of Diaspora Jews into Israel.
The Arabs acquire citizenship in Israel according to the ius soli, that is to say, because they were born in this territory – on the soil, so to speak. But these are not inheritable rights. In other words, if a Palestinian Israeli family with Israeli citizenship moves abroad for a few years, any child born abroad has no automatic right of return to Israel, particularly as an adult. This is the law that forbids the return of the 1948 refugees and their descendants. But it must be understood that this law is crucial in order to have a Jewish state in Palestine. You have to keep out Palestinians to keep Israel Jewish.
A second crucial law, also from 1950 is the Absentees Property Law concerned the dispossession of Arab private property within the Jewish State. The state invented a new category of persons, who, despite enjoying de iure property rights prior to the creation of the Jewish state, suddenly found themselves deprived of property rights, a status unheard of elsewhere in the world, seeing as the central significance of the scope of property rights is erga omnes – rights against anyone encroaching on these property rights. Jewish genius not only managed to by-pass this exclusionary factor but transformed the de iure right into a de facto issue with the wave of a pen contingent upon a factual situation. What the Jewish law created was a new status of a “present absentee” for the Arab property owner another somersault defying Aristotle’s Excluded Middle without any difficulty whatsoever. What is a “present absentee”? Well, first of all only an Arab can be an “absentee”, an Arab born in Palestine or in the Ottoman Empire before Palestine was extruded from Greater Syria. It never applies to a Jew born in Palestine nor to Jewish immigrant to Palestine nor to Jews who live abroad but who own property in Israel. The “absentee” of the law, through its labyrinthine twists refers to Arabs who own property in Palestine/Israel but who were absent from their homes, even if for only one day during a period beginning on the 29th November 1947 – even before the Jewish state existed. It refers to those people who fled from the war, who were in “enemy territory” in Palestine and those who were expelled from Palestine itself or were ordered to leave their homes by the Jewish forces. That is to say, even someone who was “absent” from his home since that date, continuing through the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel, but who managed to remain in the Jewish State of Israel, lost his property rights. The villages in Northern Galilee of Ikrit and Bir’in are examples of their populations being expelled by the Jewish forces and who were prevented from returning when the war was over. For the purposes of all other laws in Israel, a Palestinian Arab is “present” in the Jewish state. I estimate that Palestinians have lost more than 90 % of their privately owned land. Since then, the Town Planning Law has been eating away at the rest.
The latest laws which have caused stirs abroad concern the downgrading of the Arabic language from being an official language – in law – but never in practice. And the other law, the National Law posits that the Jewish state of Israel is the homeland of the Jewish nation leaving out all reference to the Palestinian Arab population but I am not sure how it is going to be applicable, particularly as there are other discriminatory pracises to do its business.
The Discriminatory administration of non-discriminatory Laws
What I would like to bring to the reader’s attention here is where the repugnant discrimination, humiliation and deprivation are felt on a daily basis. It must be understood that the outcomes of administrative decisions are deliberate and the destruction they wreak is foreseeable. Administrative law, that is to say, those norms governing the actual administration or laws, is based on equity. Included in equity is treating equals equally, justice, fairness, honesty, and using the law for the said purposes of the law itself. These values are included in what is called “discretionary power”. Discretion is one of the difficult or “hard” issues in laws because it is a power, yet a power which is exercised contingent upon circumstances and the judgment of the person or persons wielding that power. The greatest danger with discretionary power is that it may veer towards its opposite very quickly which is arbitrary power. It is at this juncture of the law and equity that one finds the intrusion of those norms characteristic of Judaism. Compared to the total number of laws on Israel’s law books, the actual number of discriminatory laws, or sections of laws, is not very large, although key with respect to certain subjects, such as land use, ownership, disposition and rights to family. Where the real, hard, anti-Arab forces kick in is in the discretionary or arbitrary application of laws which in themselves make no reference at all to either Jew or Arab.
The budget of the government is unashamedly discriminatory and funds are not distributed proportionately amongst Jews and Arabs. Naturally there has been an unbroken verbal against this situation, but the Arabs have no power at all to change anything. It is important to take cognizance of the fact that no Jewish government has ever gone into coalition with an Arab party in order to form a majority government. This is, or would be, considered treason, to put it mildly. Therefore they have no way of influencing governmental decisions. Although the Arabs constitute approximately one-fifth i.e. 20.9% of the population, their fraction of the national cake, so to speak, is nowhere near proportional to their numbers. See reliable figures from those compiled by the Adva non-profit organization and http://adva.org/en/ and http://din-online.info/pdf/ms2.pdf from the Mossawa non-profit organization – both of them highly reliable sources. An internet search for budgetary discrimination against Arabs in Israel will yield a rich treasure.
With the discrimination in the budget as the starting point, and keeping it in mind, I would like to concentrate on other areas where this administrative apartheid is not only apparent, but which has had, and continues to have, disastrous effects upon the Arab population in Israel, not to speak of the Occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Arab Land Use
Arab land ownership has been exponentially diminished in the Jewish State. The following is an excellent article on how this was achieved but it is not my intention to further explicate this subject. https://mondoweiss.net/2013/03/historical-israeli-planning/
What I shall only deal with the actual use of Arab-owned land because this remains the chief instrument of deprivation financially and socially as well as actual emotional suffering affecting a person’s well-being, under Israel’s apartheid. The prime weapon in this on-going war against Arab Israeli citizens is the Building and Planning Law of 1965. That it is old-fashioned and dates from the time of the British mandate in its approach, utterly undemocratic, top heavy with apparatchiks, has not prevented its usefulness to the Jewish population. Israel has set up new towns all over Israel proper as well as in the Occupied territories with modern, admirable infrastructure and public spaces. I believe that within the Jewish community women and Jewish institutions may have an input. The importance of this law lies in the fact that it is used as the main administrative tool of control over the Arab population. Town Planning is the central and main tool used for urbanization and therefore modernization, industrialization, socialization and economic development. It developed as a result of the industrial revolution, mass production and urbanization of the peasants and it plays a critical role in a country’s development. Israel has settled most nearly all of its Jewish population – most of which is of course an immigrant population in cities, towns and what are called development towns crucially located within the country according to perceived needs of Jewish society.
In contrast the Arab community has had no town planning in the modern meaning of the word and neither do Arabs have any planning rights. They are also not consulted as to the needs of the communities. The town planners are 90% Jewish with an occasional Arab brought in for appearances sake and their “planning” is devoted to the inhibition of growth Arab “towns” or overgrown villages. The Arab “towns” are actually “townships” equivalent to the South African black townships. I remember Alexandra township just north of Johannesburg way back when. A “township” lacks modern planning for modern facilities and modern land disposition: there is no proper infrastructure of any kind: sewage, drainage, electricity, road design, transportation facilities, and no proper land parcellation and zoning! Modern cadastral zoning takes into account current ownership and possibilities of parcellation, allocation of uses of land and can increase building space. As a striking example, on land taken from Arab owners in the Galilee to build a Jewish settlement as part of the “judaization of the Galilee” building rights on Jewish parcels can range well above 100% as a result of permission to build upwards, while on Arab land in the identical vicinity it was 20%. This is repeated in the entire country. Modern land use builds to height and creates separate private properties within single buildings called condominiums. In Hebrew it is called cooperative housing. Arab land has not been zoned to permit this multiplication of space within the “town” or village limits. In the township in which I live, the population of which is approximately 30,000, there are not more than five buildings taller than three storeys! No public housing has been erected in any of them, no public facilities have been developed and there are no parks, no proper sidewalks nor parking arrangements. It is all higgledy-piggledy. And this is not because the Arabs do not know how to plan or how to build. In contrast to the South African townships where the housing is often leanto’s, Arab private housing is built up to the most modern standards and can be exceptionally elaborate with attention to aesthetic details. But the building is at strangulation levels. The main intended effect of the lack of planning is that it is almost impossible to get a building license. So the vast majority of all homes are built without licenses: according to the law they can be destroyed by administrative decision. And many are. Many organizations have spoken up against house demolition but they have not questioned the basic cause of such demolitions. Jewish town planning is based on the principle, according to them, of “natural increase”. This principle is totally absent from the town planning for Arabs and one could say that its opposite governs town planning considerations: rather than expansion the aim is restriction and constriction.
Another outcome of this approach is that there is no distinction between industrial zones and city and residential uses of land. What this means, is that the infrastructure required for certain industries, such as the food canning industry, is absent where an Arab has managed to set up a factory. The lack of sewage facilities leads to land pollution with the intendant fines imposed by the government for “breaking the laws”.
The municipal courts are packed full of Arab “scoff law” cases about homes built without building permits. The list of cases in the Jerusalem municipal court hardly mentions Jews and when it does, it is for building a verandah without a license or something similarly negligible.
On the other hand, new Jewish towns and settlements have been planned and built on Arab land such as to not only dispossess Arab owners, but to literally trespass into actual housing. The land allocated to a Jewish settlement includes huge “border” land swathes of hundreds of meters which are not necessarily needed or used for building, but the purpose of which is to prevent Arab building. A visit to the town of Sakhnin illustrates this perfectly. The Jewish settlement is built at the top of the hill whilst its border went through the Arab home’s living room in which I sat at the bottom of the hill.
In another Arab “town plan” a line was drawn through a plot dividing it with no rhyme or reason. It imposed an almost unbearable burden on the owners of the land, because they could not use the land properly. After eight years there were murmurings of it having been a mistake, just like that, but no change was made to the plan.
In a word, every single decision concerning Arab town planning is based on an attempt to make life as difficult and as uncomfortable as possible for Arabs. It also completely arbitrary and therefore there are no logical or coherent arguments that one can use which are persuasive within the system. Outside the system their rationale is obvious, but not within it and there are no officials to whom they may turn for salvation. And this rationale cannot be used in the courts.
Another result is that there is no building inspectorate because if there is no town plan permitting building, why do you need inspectors? However a vacuum has not been left: in place of an inspectorate used to enhance living, there is a policing of illegal buildings – not for the purposes of safety, efficiency of use, functionality or aesthetics, but rather for the purpose of imposing fines to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per building. The state sues the person who built illegally, and as a consequence, after a show trial, the owner finds himself having to pay a fine which is about ten or twenty times the size of his monthly earnings. Naturally this is deliberate. Not only shall an Arab man not have his castle, but he shall not have the means to even live comfortably, if not at all lavishly. After one has been present in many of these hearings, they are so transparently evil that it becomes unbearable.
I would like to interject my own personal experience in the municipal court of Jerusalem, in my attempt to prevent the demolition of a home built without a license. The judge was an American Jew who had come on aliya to Israel so he and I shared at least the same language barriers, if not the same language. In defense of my client I quoted a South African court decision, S v. Govender, 1982 of the Transvaal Supreme Court, reported as 1986 (3) SA 969 (T)concerning the Urban Areas Act, which determined which areas or towns or neighborhoods were reserved for which racial groups. Govender, an Indian, had moved into a White area in Johannesburg and the State wished to expel him from that area. Justice Goldstone argued that seeing that housing was a basic need of a human being, and that there was no housing available for Govender, it would be unjust to expel him from the only housing he could find. This case marked the beginning of the collapse of the Urban Areas Act. I used this case, mutatis mutandis, in favor of my client, arguing that there was no housing available for him and that as he owned the land upon which he had built, but which had been zoned as “open landscape area” – a designation absent in all Jewish town plans – he built his house under duress, which is a mitigating circumstance of the Israeli criminal code, in order to protect his family. If the state wanted to destroy this house, it would have to provide alternative dwelling for my client.
Nobody had ever argued this before, and I understand that this was taken up to the Supreme Court behind the scenes, where my argument being dismissed on the grounds that “it was not from Israel’s legal system”. Naturally the moral and existential values included in it played no rôle in the court’s decision rejecting my argument. But there was a quite unexpected outcome to this case. I was called into the Justice’s chambers a short while thereafter and he told me he was leaving the municipal court and going to the family court. When I asked him the reason for this move he looked at me and said “How long can a man sign demolition orders for family homes?”
I wanted to cry and still do, even while writing this. Why? I believe that this Jewish principle of separation, this principle that determines that Jews are not the same species as goys, enforces a psychopathy on its adherents. The justice could not bear what he was doing, so he just ran away. He did not stop and stand up and ask what the hell was going on? What the hell was a state destroying the housing of human beings? Yet he knew that it was wrong. He knew that it was evil.
It is for this reason that I believe that Zionism has wrought is the destruction of the Jewish heart. After all, what is touched when we see the suffering of others? Our hearts. And I discovered that this heartlessness was not confined to Arabs. In a labor case, I represented a man of about 63 who was the head of a government hospital kitchen accused of stealing food. The “food” stolen was the leftovers of chicken soup the bones of which had been through three preparations, together with leftover vegetables on his and others’ plates. He took this “food” home for the thirteen cats which his mentally ill wife looked after in her madness. He was a religious Jew and would not consider putting her in a mental home. The reason for the accusation was that someone wanted his job. After I clarified the nature of the food and provided his history, his having been through four camps during the war, and his wife having lived underground in hiding for a couple of years, I burst out into tears, pointing out how grotesque the entire process was in all its aspects. The prosecutor replied by telling me “not to be so emotional” and my reply to her was that as soon as I no longer felt emotional about human suffering, I would give up the profession of law. I did win the case however, and the judge in the trial always spoke to me fondly when we met in other venues.
This hardness of heart finds expression with respect to the marriage of Arabs – both Christian and Moslem. There is no overall protection of non-Jewish marriage either in the Jewish state or in the militarily occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza. Israel controls all ports and points of entry and exist into the Palestinian territory east of the River Jordan. The Jewish State treats some non-Jewish marriages as neither sacred nor as the basic building block of society. On the contrary. For twelve years now, marriage between Arabs with Israeli citizenship who live in Israel proper with spouses from either the militarily occupied West Bank and Gaza or even from abroad receive no conjugal rights in the Jewish State of Israel. Therefore an Israeli Arab has no rights to create a family in Israel if his spouse is from Palestinian territories or from abroad. West Bank Arabs are not allowed to bring in spouses from Jordan or elsewhere. In other words, Israel does its best to limit demographic growth of Arabs under its control. The hardships are unbearable in most cases: some couples have to split up, others lose their homes and/or their livelihood, are split off from families etc. etc. The barrier wall built on Palestinian land to protect Israel has split towns, village, families and homes to an egregious extent. It can take up to one or two hours for people to make a one-way trip to the other side of the wall.
It is clear therefore that there is a profound cruelty and inhumanity at the basis of the Israeli system and as the one example I gave demonstrated, it is not always confined to Arabs, except in 99% of the cases.
What can be observed from this overview of interlocking fields of endeavor, is that the Jewish regime in Palestine has done and continues to deprive Palestinians of many of their rights in law as well as their rights as human beings. Is it unreasonable to suspect that the Jewish regime has not let up in its efforts to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its non-Jewish residents, following the huge success of the Naqba or Catastrophe, as the Arabs call it, in 1948 when 90% of the Arab Palestinian population was expelled from Jewish-controlled Palestine?
I have been asked as to what I consider to be the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There will never be a freely-agreed upon political solution unless the Jews admit to their theft and destruction of Palestine which nobody can see happening. But I do see Israel “bleeding” its Ashkenazi or “white” population leaving behind a far weaker country with no proper ruling elite. In this case, I do not see how a Jewish State will survive, despite its being a creation of the international banking cartel.
The author is an Israeli lawyer who has represented Palestinians in the Israeli courts. She has lived in Israel/Palestine for over fifty years and considers herself political dissident and lives in an Arab township. She writes out of her own experiences.
The title of Ronen Bergman’s book, ‘Rise and Kill First,’ comes from the Babylonian Talmud: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.”
In his recent appearance on Democracy Now, Bergman repeated this phrase, arguing that the Talmudic verse defines the lethal vindictive practice that Israel has used for three generations. Yet, for one reason or another, Amy Goodman and Juan González, Democracy Now’s leading hosts, failed to do their jobs. They didn’t question or challenge Bergman’s observation regarding the Talmudic origin of Israel’s vengeful impetus.
Being a well meaning character I decided to remind González and Goodman what journalism is all about.
JTA – Several tombstones and crucibles were vandalized at a Christian cemetery and monetary near Beth Shemesh, west of Jerusalem.
Monks on Sunday discovered the vandalism, including the toppling of tombstones and smashing of tombs, Antonio Scudo, an Italian monk from the Bait Jimal Salesian monastery, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. Some 30 graves were vandalized in total.
A police forensic team is investigating the desecration of the cemetery. Police do not have suspects in custody.
A popular pilgrimage and tourism site, Bait Jimal has been vandalized several times.
Vandals desecrated the cemetery in 1981 and 2015. In 2013, a firebomb was thrown at the church causing minor damage, and the words “price tag” were spray painted on a wall. In 2017, vandals shattered stained-glass windows, destroyed a statue of the Virgin Mary, and damaged furniture, the Post reported.
Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid opposition party, condemned the attack on church property. “Harm done to cemeteries is a despicable act, and must not pass without widespread condemnation when it is carried out in Israel.”
Archaeologists identify Bait Jimal as the village of Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, a leading rabbinical authority in the Sanhedrin in the early 1st century and the grandson of the Mishnaic sage Hillel, the Post noted.
St. Stephen, a disciple of Jesus, is believed to be buried in a cave at the monastery.
It is calculated that in addition to the secret arsenal of up to 400 nuclear warheads, according to American Scientists, the Israeli state also reportedly possesses chemical and/or biological WMD, making it a dangerous nuclear hegemon that poses a potential threat not only to the Middle East but also to Europe. Neither France nor Britain nor Germany can equal Israeli state nuclear weaponisation on both land and sea.
This calculation is based on the fact that the state of Israel is the only WMD state to refuse to be a party to either the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) or the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) which are international arms control treaties that outlaw the production, stockpiling, and use or transfer of chemical or biological weapons and their precursors.
These conventions are administered by the OPCW international, intergovernmental Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons based in The Hague, Netherlands to which virtually every U.N. member state is a party, with the exception of Israel.
Furthermore, the state of Israel is the only nuclear weapons state in the world that is undeclared and which is also outside of the inspection of the U.N. and the authority of the Security Council.
It is armed and funded by the joint efforts of the Christian and Jewish Zionist Lobby of the US Congress together with the Trump White House but Israel also receives military equipment and assistance from the UK and some other European states such as Germany.
Chancellor Angela Merkel has unilaterally altered the balance of power in the region by supplying Netanyahu with a fleet of German-built and subsidised, state-of-the-art submarines reported to have been retro-fitted with cruise-missile nuclear weapons. These undersea war vessels of the Israeli navy are uninspected by the UN or the IAEA and are now assumed to be covertly patrolling the Mediterranean Sea and the Iranian Gulf with their dangerous armaments.
We now have the ludicrous position whereby heavily nuclear-armed Israel is accusing non-nuclear Iran of being armed and dangerous in a transparent effort to destroy the Iranian economy. The U.N. Security Council needs to take urgent action before we are all in danger from a nuclear war provoked by Netanyahu with co-operation from the dysfunctional Trump White House.
At this time of writing, Iran is in full compliance with the JCPOA provisions of the EU/UNSC Iran deal and the reason why Netanyahu is peddling such fabricated nonsense before the U.N. is because he sees the opportunity to persuade a gullible incumbent of the White House to submit to Zionist pressure to bankrupt the Iranian oil industry so that Israel can achieve its dangerous objective of becoming the hegemon of the Middle East.
*
Hans Stehling (pen name) is a political analyst from the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
2,175 Palestinian children and 134 Israeli children have been killed since September 29, 2000.
“The majority of these [Palestinian] children were killed and injured while going about normal daily activities, such as going to school, playing, shopping, or simply being in their homes. Sixty-four percent of children killed during the first six months of 2003 died as a result of Israeli air and ground attacks, or from indiscriminate fire from Israeli soldiers.”
Source: Remember These Children, a coalition of groups calling for an end to the killing of children and a fair resolution of the conflict.
We refer to B’Tselem (last updated January 31, 2018) and IMEMC as our current sources for children’s deaths since Remember These Children has not been updated since July 21, 2014.
To see names, photos and more information for the Israeli and Palestinian children who have been killed, please visit our new website Israel–Palestine Timeline.
Remember These Children’s list of victims does not yet mention all of the 527 children killed by Israel in during its 2014 assault on Gaza in the summer.)
It also appears that the site has not documented a number of the Palestinian children killed during Israel‘s Dec 27, 2008 – Jan 18, 2009 assault on Gaza. They report only 269 of the Palestinian children killed during that time (and an additional 9 who later died from wounds inflicted during that time period). B’Tselem has documented that Israel killed 318 Palestinian children in Gaza during this time. We do not doubt the validity of this higher number as they are extremely careful in their documentation.
‘When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, he will give you a land filled with large, flourishing cities that you did not build, houses filled with wealth you did not earn, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant…
…And when the LORD your God brings you into the land you are to possess and casts out the many peoples living there…
You shall then slaughter them all and utterly destroy them…
… You shall save nothing alive that breathes…
…You shall make no agreements with them…
…nor show them any mercy…
…You shall destroy their altars…
…Break down their images…
…Cut down their groves…
…And burn their graven images with fire…
And therefore their goods shall become your plunder…
…While their houses become a desolation…
…They shall build houses, but not inhabit them…
…And they shall plant vineyards, but not drink the
wine thereof…
…Foreigners will build your walls…
…And their kings will serve you…
…The gates of your cities will always remain open, day and night, so that the Gentiles may bring you the wealth of their nations…
…And their kings led in triumphal procession before you…
…For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly destroyed…
…For you are a holy people unto the LORD thy God…
…And He has chosen you to be a special people above all others upon the face of the earth…”
Ed note–these are just a small sampling of the various verses found in the Old Testament, called by the Jews the Torah. They are not the words of Netanyahu, Herzl, Ariel Sharon or any of the modern founders of the Jewish state.
Rather, they are the words of the Old Testament ‘prophets’ such as Moses, Zephaniah, Isaiah and others who preached the supremacist, violent basis of Jewish behavior that is on clear display right now before the world.
These verses, and the many more just like them, are the basic building blocks of both Judaism and Zionism and are the religious justification used by the Jews and their supporters worldwide for the types of human sacrifice we are seeing take place in killing fields such as Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc.
Despite the noise deliberately created by those out to confuse Gentiles concerning the violent, psycopathic nature of Torah Judaism and who claim that this ‘Holy’ religion is distinct and different from Zionism, nothing could be further from the truth, and until the world begins to deal with this spiritual sickness in a rational, moral way, the holocaust of the Gentile world will continue.
This article follows and concludes a series of four articles I wrote recently for the Saker blog. In the first one, “How Biblical is Zionism?” (reproduced under a different title on Russia Insider), I wrote: “When Israeli leaders claim that their vision of the global future is based on the (Hebrew) Bible, we should take them seriously and study the (Hebrew) Bible.” In the second one, “How Zionist is the New Word Order?”
I explained that Zionism was never a nationalist movement like others; insofar as it is rooted in the biblical narrative, it contained from the outset a plan for world domination. In the third article, “Who the Hell is the Prince of this World?” I contended that the core characteristic of the biblical ideology—and the best-kept secret of Judaism—is its materialistic anthropology, best summarized by American rabbi Harry Waton: “the only immortality there is for the Jew is the immortality in the Jewish people.” In the fourth article, “Is Israel a Psychopath?”
I argued that “Israel is the psychopath among nations, and that means a tremendous capacity to manipulate, intimidate, corrupt morally, and get what they want.” In this fifth and final part, I wish to address once again the issue of the biblical root of Jewishness, by arguing that the psychopathic behavior of Israel—understood both as a national state and as an international organized community—is the end result of the psychopathic “personality” of the Jewish God portrayed in the Bible.
Let me first state that I take no pleasure in offending anybody’s religious faith. Some Christians tell me that I do not read the Old Testament correctly, through New Testament glasses. My answer is: read it as you like, and convert the Jews to your reading if you can.
My purpose is to explain how the Jews, by whom and for whom it was written, have been reading it for more than a hundred generations, and how it has shaped their worldview, and continues to shape the worldview of many elite Jews. I understand and even empathize with Christians’ difficulty to engage in this effort, but I believe there will be no lasting cure from the corrupting influence of international Jewry without unprejudiced etiological inquiry.
To assess correctly the underlying ideology of the Hebrew Tanakh and its influence on those who hold it as their “roman national”, requires that we put aside the notion that it was inspired by “God” in any way, for this notion induces a cognitive dissonance which impairs our rational and moral judgment.
In fact, we should perhaps renounce looking at the Hebrew Bible as a religious book, because the category of “religion” fails to account for its strong influence on non-religious Jews. As I have shown in “How Biblical is Zionism?” most Israeli leaders, from Ben-Gurion to Netanyahu, are non-religious, but their worldview is profoundly biblical nonetheless.
The biblical outlook is the essence of Jewishness, of which Nahum Goldman said that it is impossible to decide if it “consists first of belonging to a people or practicing a religion, or the two together.”i This ambivalence is strategic: it is used by organized Jewry to ward off criticism by qualifying it either as anti-Semitic or as an assault on religious freedom, depending on the circumstance.
We should not fall into this trap. What I am dealing here is biblical ideology. Whether this ideology should be categorized as religious is irrelevant. Any idea, any ideology may be criticized, no matter how sacred or ancient it is held to be. And since the first victims of a toxic idea are the men and women who believe it, they are the first who need to be enlightened on its toxicity.
The most appropriate category to understand both the Torah and Jewishness is not “religion” but “covenant” (berit in Hebrew, meaning also treaty or oath of allegiance). The foundation of Jewishness is the Mosaic Covenant. While religious Jews consider it a covenant of Jews with God, non-religious elite Jews such as members of the B’nai B’rith (“Children of the Covenant”) or the Alliance Israélite Universelle, regard it as simply a covenant between the Jews themselves. That is why Jewishness could so easily shift from being defined as an oath of allegiance to Yahweh, to being today indistinguishable from an oath of allegiance to Israel.
The Jealous One
Ancient Egyptians believed that “the gods are social beings, living and acting in ‘constellations,’” wrote German Egyptologist Jan Assmann.iiYahweh, on the other hand, is “the Jealous One” (Exodus 34:14). He is a solitary god who manifests toward all other gods an implacable intolerance that characterizes him as a sociopath among his peers. Egyptians tried to explain this aggressive exclusiveness of Jewish religion by identifying the Jewish god with Seth, the evil god of the desert, famine, disorder and war, who had been banished by the council of the gods after having murdered his elder brother Osiris out of jealousy.iii
From the third millennium BCE onward, nations founded their diplomacy and foreign trade on their capacity to match their gods, thus acknowledging that they were living not only on the same earth but under the same heavens. “Contracts with other states,” explains Jan Assmann, “had to be sealed by oath, and the gods to whom this oath was sworn had to be compatible.
Tables of divine equivalences were thus drawn up that eventually correlated up to six different pantheons.” But Yahweh could not be matched up with any other god; his priests forbade doing so. “Whereas polytheism, or rather ‘cosmotheism,’ rendered different cultures mutually transparent and compatible, the new counter-religion [Yahwism] blocked intercultural translatability.”ivAnd when Yahweh directed his people, “You will make no pact with them or with their gods” (Exodus 23:32), or “Do not utter the names of their gods, do not swear by them, do not serve them and do not bow down to them” (Joshua 23:7), he was in effect preventing any relationship of trust and fairness with the neighboring peoples.
Yahweh taught the Hebrews contempt for the deities of their neighbors, making them, in the eyes of these neighbors, a “race hated by the gods” (Tacitus), and therefore a threat to the cosmic and social order. For, wrote Tacitus (and that was long before the Talmud), the Jews show a “stubborn loyalty and ready benevolence towards brother Jews. But the rest of the world they confront with the hatred reserved for enemies” (Histories V.3–5).
No other nation, in fact, treated its enemies as are said to have done the Hebrews in biblical times. The war code of Deuteronomy 20, which commands to exterminate “any living thing” in nearby conquered cities, and which was applied to the people of Jericho (Joshua 6:21) and to the Amalekites (1Samuel 15:3)—whereas among the Midianites were spared, as booty, the “young girls who have never slept with a man” (Numbers 31:18)—is unheard of in other nations’ archives.
The Assyrians, whose god Assur was no angel, did not slaughter the Israelites, but deported and resettled them, and the Babylonians did the same to the Judeans, who were even allowed to keep their tradition and their cohesion, and to prosper on the riverbanks of the Euphrates.
Yahweh is the most cruel of all national and military gods, even by the standards of biblical time. But Yahweh would have us believe that all other gods, not him, are abominations that need to be eradicated from the face of the earth. It all started with Assur. Yahweh’s jealousy really became pathological after the destruction of Israel by Assyria. In the oldest strata of the book of Isaiah, composed around that time, we hear Yahweh unable to cope with the frustration and humiliation, and consumed with the lust of vengeance:
“Yahweh Sabaoth has sworn it, ‘Yes, what I have planned will take place, what I have decided will be so: I shall break Assyria [Assur] in my country, I shall trample on him on my mountains. Then his yoke will slip off them, his burden will slip from their shoulders. This is the decision taken in defiance of the whole world; this, the hand outstretched in defiance of all nations. Once Yahweh Sabaoth has decided, who will stop him? Once he stretches out his hand, who can withdraw it?’” (14:24–27).
Listen to Yahweh raging after his defeat, and you hear a narcissistic megalomaniac:
“By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is saving justice, it is an irrevocable word: All shall bend the knee to me, by me every tongue shall swear.” (Isaiah 45:23)
Children of the sociopathic god
In the Bible, the fate of the Jewish people is linked exclusively to the criterion of their obedience to Yahweh’s covenant, which includes prohibition of any alliance with the people inhabiting the promised land, and the destruction of their sanctuaries (Exodus 34:12-13). Every reversal of fortune is explained by a breach of contract on the part of the people and serves to strengthen the submission of the people. When a hostile people attacks the Hebrews, it is never because of what the Hebrews did to them, but because of the Hebrews’ infidelity to Yahweh. In Kevin MacDonald’s words:
“The idea that Jewish suffering results from Jews straying from their own law occurs almost like a constant drumbeat throughout the Tanakh—a constant reminder that the persecution of Jews is not the result of their own behavior vis-à-vis Gentiles but rather the result of their behavior vis-à-vis God.”v
It is important to recognize that, in the Bible, the first victims of Yahweh’s violence are the Jews themselves. Deuteronomy orders the stoning of any parent, son, brother, or wife who “tries secretly to seduce you, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ […] since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God.” Worse still, Yahweh orders the complete slaughter and burning of any town where such “scoundrels from your own stock […] have led their fellow-citizens astray, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods.’” For that is “what is right in the eyes of Yahweh your God” (Deuteronomy 13:7–19).
When some Israelites married Moabite women, who “invited them to the sacrifices of their gods,” “Yahweh said to Moses, ‘Take all the leaders of the people. Impale them facing the sun, for Yahweh’” (Numbers 25:1-4).
Those Jews who socialized with their neighbors rather than slaughtering them, who ate with them, who intermarried with them, and who, while doing all this, showed respect to their gods, are the dregs of the Jewish people, according to the Bible. This is how Jews have been taught to see things for a hundred generations (and Christians too, for that matter).
The biblical message is, in essence: “Do not socialize with idolaters (non-Jews), despise their traditions, and—if possible—exploit them, enslave them, and exterminate them. If, after that, they violate you, it is your fault: you have not obeyed scrupulously enough.” Such is the insane cognitive logic, internalized over 25 centuries, that encloses the Jews in the infernal dilemma of election and persecution.
This mode of thinking is based on the denial of the other’s humanity, which is indeed the essence of psychopathy. It does not occur to the psychopath to question the feelings of the other in order to try to understand his anger, because the other is fundamentally an object and not a person: his motivations are irrelevant. Never does the Jewish community take into account the grievances of its persecutors. Its elites forbid it.
To his chosen people, the biblical Yahweh is behaving as a psychopath preventing his only son from building nurturing bonds with others, in order to keep total control over him and make him an extension of himself. If such a psychopath father succeeds, his son will find no comfort, no substitute parent figure, and therefore no level of resilience.
He will be trained to perceive all generous attention as a threat, any gesture of sympathy as an aggression. All around him he will learn to see only potential enemies. Yahweh convinces the Jews that all non-Jews who wish to be their friends are in fact their worst enemies; that any confidence in Gentiles leads only to disaster. The cultic and food prohibitions are there to prevent any socialization outside the tribe. “I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine” (Leviticus 20:26).
Strict endogamy is the central command, and it is directly linked to Yahweh’s demand for exclusive worship. After the conquest of Canaan, it was forbidden to marry one’s children to the natives, “for your son would be seduced from following me into serving other gods; the wrath of Yahweh would blaze out against you and he would instantly destroy you” (Deuteronomy 7:3-4).
In the ancient world, marriage required the mutual adoption of each other’s gods, or at least their cohabitation in the same household. This does not pose a problem to the extent that the gods are social beings who accept each other. But the god of the Hebrews is a jealous god, who tolerates no other. Although most Zionists pretend to be atheists, the fundamental rule has not changed, because it is the essence of Jewishness. To intermarry is, according to Benzion Netanyahu, father of the Israeli prime minister, equivalent to “an act of suicide.” vi What better proof do we need that the Israeli elite think biblically?
We need a revisionist approach to biblical history. It portrays all other nations than Israel as repulsive idolaters. But they were not. The abominable Egyptians had built the first great civilization; they had introduced wheat growing to the world. They were a peaceful and highly spiritual people. So were the Canaanites. Whenever the biblical Israelites resisted Yahweh’s antisocial order to keep separate from them, they are called “stiff-necked.”
But should we not feel sympathy for those rebellious Jews, who tried to befriend their neighbors, and assimilate into the civilizations that hosted them? What about those Jews who resist Yahweh’s orders to kill men, women and children indiscriminately? How should we judge King Saul, who was deposed for sparing one man? If we insist that Yahweh is God, how can we criticize the Jews of today for their strong communitarian loyalty? They learned it from the Bible!
Are Yahweh and Molech the same?
A quick look at Yahweh’s unauthorized biography by biblical scholars will enlighten us on his personality. Long before he claimed to be the Creator of the Universe—that is, long before Genesis was written—Yahweh was a local and tribal god attached to Mount Sinai (also called Horeb), located in Midian, north-west Arabia, according to Exodus 2 (and not in Egypt, as the Roman church would locate it in the 4th century, despite the fact that even Saint Paul knew that “Mount Sinai is in Arabia” Galatians 4:25).
This region is volcanic, with eruptions recorded up to the Middle Ages, and Mount Sinai is clearly a volcano: when Yahweh spoke to Moses on the mountain, others only perceived “peals of thunder and flashes of lightning, dense cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast. […] Mount Sinai was entirely wrapped in smoke because Yahweh had descended on it in the form of fire.
The smoke rose like smoke from a furnace and the whole mountain shook violently. Louder and louder grew the trumpeting. Moses spoke, and God answered him in the thunder” (Exodus 19:16-19).viiYahweh would never totally forget his volcanic background. He remained “a consuming fire” (Deuteronomy 4:24), especially in apocalyptic literature: in the Last Days, “glowing like a furnace,” Yahweh will “set ablaze” all evil-doers, “leaving them neither root nor branch” (Malachi 3:19).
Yahweh retained other primitive traits. He is known as the God who ordered Abraham to sacrifice his son, but then held back his hand and satisfied himself with a ram (Genesis 22). He has therefore been compared favorably with the Canaanite god Molech, to whom firstborn infants were said to be ritually sacrificed. But biblical scholars like Thomas Römer believe that Molech was in fact none other than Yahweh himself.
The name mlk, vocalized as Molech in the Masoretic text (the 9th century Tanakh which first introduced vowels into the Hebrew script), but Melech in the Greek Septuagint, is identical to the Hebrew word for “king”, applied more than fifty times to Yahweh and used to form such Hebrew names as Abimelech (“Melech is my father”) in Genesis 20:2 or Elimelech (“Melech is my god”) in Ruth 1:2.
Some psalms contain the acclamation Yahweh melech, “Yahweh is king,” still in use in Jewish religious songs. The Leviticus verses which prohibit infant sacrifice indirectly testify that they were done in Yahweh’s name and in Yahweh’s sanctuary: “You will not allow any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, thus profaning the name of your God. I am Yahweh” (18:21); “Anyone, be he Israelite or alien resident in Israel, who gives any of his children to Molech, will be put to death. […] for by giving a child of his to Molech he has defiled my sanctuary and profaned my holy name” (20:2-5). Jeremiah 7:30-31 confirms that “the people of Judah” continued “to burn their sons and daughters […] in the Temple that bears my name, to defile it.”
Although Yahweh declares it to be “a thing I never ordered, that had never entered my thoughts,” the very fact that a scribe wrote this indicates, according to Thomas Römer, that the people who sacrificed their children did claim it was required by Yahweh. It is only in the Persian era that human sacrifices became taboo, and that they were dissociated from the cult of Yahweh. viii Nevertheless, Israelites are portrayed as believing in their efficiency, for when the Moabites (Israelites’ relatives as descendants of Abraham’s nephew) were besieged by the Israelites, the king of Moab “took his eldest son who was to succeed him and offered him as a sacrifice on the city wall. Alarmed at this, the Israelites withdrew and retired to their own territory” (2 Kings 3:26-27).
Is the Mosaic Alliance satanic?
The Exodus story probably reflects a very ancient and sacred tradition regarding the origin of the Mosaic covenant. This covenant, or alliance, was sealed with a ritual sacrifice: altars were built at the foot of Mount Horeb, and oxen were killed as “communion sacrifices”. “Moses then took half the blood and put it into basins, and the other half he sprinkled on the altar.” After reading the “Book of the Covenant,” he “took the blood and sprinkled it over the people, saying, ‘This is the blood of the covenant which Yahweh has made with you, entailing all these stipulations’” (Exodus 24:4-8). As orientalist William Robertson Smith has shown, this manner of sealing in blood an alliance between tribes, or an oath of loyalty to a chief, was common in pre-Islamic Arabia.ix
The “Book of the Covenant” mentioned in Exodus refers to the complex code of laws that the Hebrews are to follow, which is detailed in the rest of the Torah (Pentateuch). Moses’s speeches in Deuteronomy give us the basic terms of the covenant. When reading it, we should keep in mind that, at this stage of the story, Yahweh is not believed to be God; he has only introduced himself to Moses as “the god of your ancestors” (Exodus 3:6).
“Today you have obtained this declaration from Yahweh: that he will be your god, but only if you follow his ways, keep his statutes, his commandments, his customs, and listen to his voice. And today Yahweh has obtained this declaration from you: that you will be his own people—as he has said—but only if you keep all his commandments; then for praise and renown and honour, he will raise you higher than every other nation he has made, and you will be a people consecrated to Yahweh, as he has promised.” (26:17-19)
“Yahweh will make you abound in possessions: in the offspring of your body, in the yield of your cattle and in the yield of your soil, in the country which he swore to your ancestors that he would give you. For you Yahweh will open his treasury of rain, the heavens, to give your country its rain at the right time, and to bless all your labours. You will make many nations your subjects, yet you will be subject to none.” (28:11-12)
What Yahweh promises is material prosperity, to the detriment of other peoples. On this point, the Tanakh is remarkably consistent: “You will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the wealth of kings” (Isaiah 60:16); “the wealth of all the surrounding nations will be heaped together: gold, silver, clothing, in vast quantity” (Zechariah 14:14). Spiritual rewards are not part of the bargain.
In fact, if we remember that Yahweh taught the Jews that they have no individual souls (read my article “Who the Hell is the Prince of this World?”), which is tantamount to claiming their souls for himself, we can say that the Mosaic covenant has the nature of a Faustian pact: Israel will obtain every worldly success in exchange for his soul: “you, out of all peoples, shall be my personal possession” (Exodus 19:5).
It is instructive to compare Yahweh’s promise to his people that they will rule over “every other nation in the world” if only they “faithfully obey the voice of Yahweh your God, by keeping and observing all his commandments” (Deuteronomy 28:1), with Satan’s bargain with Jesus in Matthew 4:8-10: “the devil showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. And he said to him, ‘I will give you all these if you fall at my feet and do me homage.’”
At the least, it is hard to see what distinguishes Yahweh from Mammon (a personification of Wealth in Matthew 6:24), when he shows himself possessed by greed for precious metals: “I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in, and I shall fill this Temple with glory, says Yahweh Sabaoth. Mine is the silver, mine the gold! Yahweh Sabaoth declares” (Haggai 2:7–8). This can be contrasted with Jesus’s admonition “store up treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20–21), which is totally foreign to Yahwism.
Yahweh against Baal
Yahweh alone is the true God, he says, whereas all other gods are demons. This is called blame shifting and is typical of psychopaths. We need to see through it and break the spell.
Let us take an unprejudiced look at Baal, Yahweh’s most formidable rival in the Bible. In the Books of Kings, Baal is presented as a foreign god imported by Jezebel, the Phoenician wife of Ahab (1Kings 16:31–32). But Baal was actually worshipped all over Syria long before Yahweh was imported from the semi-desert lands south of Judah.x Baal Shamem, the “Heavenly Lord,” was identified as the God of Heaven and his worship transcended ethnic boundaries.xi So it is ironic that Yahweh, the god of the Jews exclusively, should compete with him for the status of supreme God.
The Cycle of Elijah (from 1 Kings17 to 2 Kings 13) admits that the cult of Baal received royal support in the powerful kingdom of Israel under the Omrid dynasty (9th century BCE). The priests of Yahweh condemned Baal worship, and the biblical tale shows Elijah challenging 450 prophets of Baal to conjure lightning upon the burnt offering of a bull: “You must call on the name of your god, and I shall call on the name of Yahweh; the god who answers with fire, is God indeed.” The prophets of Baal exhaust themselves by shouting to their god, performing “their hobbling dance” and gashing themselves with swords and spears, with no result, while Yahweh sets fire to Elijah’s bull after Elijah has drenched it with twelve jars of water to spice up the challenge.
People then fall on their faces and scream “Yahweh is God!” Then they seize all the prophets of Baal, and Elijah slaughters them (1Kings 18). Thus was proven Yahweh’s superiority, in a showdown worthy of Hollywood. Elijah, however, had to flee retaliation and walked 40 days to Mount Horeb, where after a hurricane, an earthquake and a fiery eruption, he received the word of Yahweh. He was to go back to Israel and anoint the general Jehu who, after a coup against the Omrid king in 842 BCE, would first promote the cult of Yahweh in the kingdom of Israel.
Baal was for the Syrians what Osiris was for the Egyptians: both god of fertility and lord of the dead. So Baal worship was associated with the afterlife and what is presented pejoratively as necromancy.xii Such religious beliefs and practices had also strong connections with the symbol of the serpent, associated with the ambivalent nature of death. We are told that the Israelites worshipped and offered sacrifices to a bronze serpent called Nehushtan, supposedly built by Moses until the great king Hezekiah “smashed” it (2 Kings 18:4).
In Genesis, the serpent has undergone an inversion, as part of the campaign to demonize other religions: when the serpent offers to the first humans the means of “having their eyes opened and be like gods” (Genesis 3:5), it borrows the language of initiatory mysteries meant to acquire immortality; but the Yahwist scribes present him as a liar. As a result, the idea of trying to become like gods passes today as Luciferian, although the Greek fathers of the Christian Church stressed man’s potential for deification (theosis) under the logic that “God became man so that man might become a god.”xiii
The Queen of Heaven
Yahweh’s hatred for Baal is matched only by his repulsion for Asherah, the Great Goddess worshipped throughout the Mediterranean world under many names. Under the name of Ishtar, she was the “Queen of all the inhabited places, who keeps the people in order,” according to a Mesopotamian anthem.xiv Asherah and Ishtar were also identified to the Egyptian Isis, sister-spouse of Osiris, the “myrionyme” goddess (“of ten thousand names”), who calls herself the “Queen of Heaven” in Apuleius’s novel The Golden Ass, and declares: “My name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in diverse manners, in variable customs and in many names.”xv More than Baal, the Queen of Heaven (a title which would later be inherited by Christ’s mother) was a truly universal deity, with no “chosen people”, and that is perhaps the deeper reason for Yahweh’s hatred towards her.
In chapter 44 of the Book of Jeremiah, Yahweh declared to the Judeans who had fled to Egypt, that the destruction of Jerusalem was his punishment for their “wicked deeds […] committed to provoke my anger, by going and offering incense and serving other gods” (44:2-3). Yahweh, said his spokesman Jeremiah, could not bear the smell of incense offered to other gods (what he liked is the “pleasing smell” of carbonized animal offerings called holocausts, as we know from Genesis 8:21). Yahweh threatens the Judeans exiles in Egypt with complete extermination if they persist.
Unimpressed, they responded to Jeremiah: “We have no intention of listening to the word you have just spoken to us in Yahweh’s name, but intend to go on doing all we have vowed to do: offering incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations in her honour, as we used to do, we and our ancestors, our kings and our chief men, in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem: we had food in plenty then, we lived well, we suffered no disasters. But since we gave up offering incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations in her honour, we have been destitute and have perished either by sword or by famine” (44:16-18).
Why not lend a friendly ear to those Judeans’ alternative interpretation of the fall of Jerusalem: it is not because they worshipped other gods than Yahweh that their plight started, but on the contrary because, since the reform of Josiah, they gave up worshipping the Queen of Heaven. For what reason, other than ancestral habit, should we believe Jeremiah and his Deuteronomistic scribes?
In fact, we know they were wrong. Josiah’s grandfather Manasseh is loathed for having done “what is displeasing to Yahweh, copying the disgusting practices of the nations whom Yahweh had dispossessed for the Israelites. He rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had destroyed, he set up altars to Baal and made a sacred pole [an Ashera], as Ahab king of Israel had done, he worshipped the whole array of heaven and served it. […]
He built altars to the whole array of heaven in the two courts of the Temple of Yahweh” (2 Kings 21:2–5). But historians tell us today that Manasseh’s 55-year reign, when the Queen of Heaven was worshipped inside the Jerusalem temple, was a time of peace and prosperity.
It is Josiah, Manasseh’s grandson, who brought disaster to Judea, by removing from the temple “all the cult objects which had been made for Baal, Asherah and the whole array of heaven. […] He exterminated the spurious priests whom the kings of Judah had appointed and who offered sacrifice on the high places, in the towns of Judah and the neighborhood of Jerusalem; also those who offered sacrifice to Baal, to the sun, the moon, the constellations and the whole array of heaven” (2Kings 23:4–5). In Samaria, over which he regained partial control, Josiah ordered the sanctuary of Bethel destroyed, and “All the priests of the high places who were there he slaughtered on the altars, and on those altars burned human bones” (2 Kings 23:20). It was Josiah’s reign that was to provoke Babylonian anger and the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem.
The Jewish Question is the Biblical Question
According to the biblical paradigm, the Creator of the Universe became the God of Israel when he chose the Hebrews. But according to biblical scholarship, the historical process was the reverse: it is the god of Israel who became the Creator of the Universe. This process, which was only completed during the Persian period, was not so much due to a progress in metaphysical thought as to a political cunning. The book of Ezra betrays a calculated effort from the Levites to confuse, in the mind of the Persians, “the god of Israel who resides in Jerusalem” (7:12–15) with the “God of heaven” whom the Persians also called Ahura Mazda, with the aim of obtaining the support of the Persian king for their theocratic project in Palestine.
In Ezra, only the kings of Persia, in the various edicts attributed to them, recognize Yahweh as “the God of Heaven,” while in the rest of the text, Yahweh is merely “the god of Israel”. The same can be observed in the book of Daniel, when Nebuchadnezzar, impressed by the gifts of Daniel’s oracle, prostrates himself and exclaims: “Your god is indeed the God of gods, the Master of kings” (Daniel 2:47). Such passages give away, for those willing to see it, the deepest secret of Judaism, which is the key to understanding the relationship of Judaism to universalism: Yahweh is really the god of the Jews, while Gentiles are led to believe that he is the supreme and only God. “In the heart of any pious Jew, God is a Jew,” confirms Maurice Samuel in You Gentiles (1924).xvi
This secret is not a fully conscious thought for most Jews, it is more like a family secret running unconsciously through generations. Nevertheless, it is the binding force of the Jewish people, and I am reminded of Carl Jung’s remark that secrets “are of vital importance on the primitive level, for the shared secret serves as a cement binding the tribe together. Secrets on the tribal level constitute a helpful compensation for lack of cohesion in the individual personality.”xvii
As he usurped the majesty of the Heavenly Father of all mankind, Yahweh in no way lost his character as a military god bent on looting and slaughtering the enemies of his only chosen people. Against the Babylonians, his sword is expected to “devour until gorged, until drunk with their blood” (Jeremiah 46:10). Against the Edomites, “it is greasy with fat” (Isaiah 34:6).
If Yahweh had remained a tribal god from the desert, he would simply be recognized as particularly primitive and cruel, perhaps a demon escaped from hell through an Arabian volcano. But his successful claim to be honored as the true and only God is the biggest sham in human history and a civilizational disaster of incomparable magnitude.
It is ultimately responsible for the spread of atheism in the West. As long as Christians were discouraged from reading the Old Testament, they were not much disturbed by it. As soon as it became widely available, it started corroding Christianity. Philosophers like Voltaire had an easy job denigrating Christianity by quoting the Old Testament: “Never was common sense attacked with so much indecency and fury” (Sermon of the Fifty). Rather without God than with such a God, became the logical and morally decent thinking.
“The finest trick of the devil, Charles Baudelaire wrote, is to persuade you that he does not exist” (Paris Spleen). Perhaps he was mistaken. His finest trick, I believe, is to convince the world that he is God.
i Nahum Goldmann, Le Paradoxe juif. Conversations en français avec Léon Abramowicz, Stock, 1976 (archive.org), p. 9.
ii Jan Assmann, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism, University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, p. 47.
iii According to an Egyptian legend recorded by Plutarch (Isis and Osiris), Seth wandered in Palestine where he fathered two sons, Hierosolymos and Youdaios, that is, “Jerusalem” and “Judah”. Tacitus and other historians also mention rumors that the Jerusalem Temple harbored a golden donkey’s head, the donkey is the symbol of Seth.
iv Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 3.
v Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, e. 6187–89.
vi Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (1938), Balfour Books, 2012, k. 2203–7.
vii The volcanic nature of Mount Sinai and its location in Arabia were first argued by Charles Beke in Mount Sinai a Volcano (1873) and in Sinai in Arabia and of Midian (1878). It is today largely accepted by biblical scholars and has been popularized in books and films by adventurers such as Bob Cornuke and Larry Williams. Read also Howard Blum The Gold of Exodus: The Discovery of the True Mount Sinai, Simon & Schuster, 1998.
viii Thomas Römer, The Invention of God, Harvard UP, 2015. I read the original French version, L’Invention de Dieu, Seuil, 2017, pp. 181-183.
ix William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundametal Institutions, A&C Black, 3rd ed., 1927, p. 314, quoted in Thomas Römer, L’Invention de Dieu, op. cit., p. 112.
x Thomas Römer, L’invention de Dieu, op; cit., pp. 71-93.
xi Norman Habel, Yahweh Versus Baal: A Conflict of Religious Cultures, Bookman Associates, 1964, p. 41.
xii Klass Spronk, Beatific Afterlife in Ancient Israel and in the Ancient Near East, Verlag Butzon & Bercker, 1986, pp. 344–345.
xiii John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, Fordham University Press, 1974.
xiv Gérard Chaliand, Les Voix du Sacré, Robert Laffont, 1992, p. 32.
xv Françoise Dunand, Isis, mère des dieux, Actes Sud, 2008, p. 232.
xvi Maurice Samuel, You Gentiles, New York, 1924 (archive.org), pp. 74–75.
xvii Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflexions, Pantheon Books, 1963, p. 342.