BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 02:31 PM

Rabbi-Sol I believe you are a good man, obviously dedicated to your cause. It is the Christian way to look for good in others, to Love Thy Neighbour, I don't come close to doing that all the time. But I try. I bet you are the same way. I don't know the Torah as such but I am familiar with the Bible. I don't recall that philosophy being put forth in the Old Testament. But I still think you probably share it. I understand that you may not share my principles I am sorry if I spoke to harshly, I was trying to be clear. Since I cannot go back and edit, please take what I have said as poorly worded questions rather than the insults or challenges they may seem to be.

Here is a speech from a Moslem Cleric, I think it answers your question about their respect for human life. Perhaps you saw the sermon the same time that I did. Maybe at the time you cried a little like I did and thought "There is hope after all."

go to this URL

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-video-gallery.htmlstory

Scroll down to Friday September 14. and click on the link that says.

• Imam Muzammil H. Siddiqi, a Muslim Cleric, at Memorial (Real)

God Bless you Rabbi

Rob Dale

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: DougR
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 02:35 PM

Wow! Got to hand it to you Amos. You sure know how to jerk Jack and Carol C's chain.

DougR

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 02:46 PM

Hello Little Brother.

Are you the same little Brother from Talk Talk Talk. If so I hear you are fine guitar player and teacher.

I've read enough accounts to know that not all the children die becase there are terrorists hiding behind them.

Surely you are not saying that killing innocents, even in self defense, is OK?

The Old Testament says an eye for an eye. It doesn't say "and anyone who gets in the way."

The Muslims and Jews in this conflict are playing by the rame rules. Its "You kill our children and we are justified in killing yours" I don't want to go back in history to find out who did it first I don't even care. I care about what is happening now. I'm not saying that the Palestinians are right and the Israelis are wrong. I'm saying they are both wrong.

I am very much against further displacement and oppression of the Palestians. Are you? I'm against terror by suicide bomb, car bomb, mortor attact, Helicoptor F16 and Bulldozer. Are you? I do not hate Israel, but I do not love it either. I wish the government of Israel would realize that they are not the American frontier and that Sharon is NOT Daniel Boone.

I've told you how I feel, why don't you respond in kind. Maybe we can have a dialog instead of a fight. Maybe we can find some common ground.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 02:52 PM

Hi Doug.

How is married life?

What do you think about Israel?

Settlers land grabbers or "God's Will"?
Is bombing an apartment building to get one man "Justice" or "Terror"?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 03:21 PM

Traditional anti-Semitism has lately re-emerged as the kind of anti-Zionism preached by the likes of Jack the Sailor (Rob Dale) and his wife, CarolC (Carol Cunningham), focused on the Jews of Israel, the role of Israel, and the Jews in the United States who support Israel.
At the end of the 1967 war, the plucky little Jewish state was no more. In the years since, as it responded again and again to Arab attacks, sympathy for Israel eroded further still as the world's TVs broadcast images not of terrorists but of armed Israelis responding to terrorism. Only somehow the word "responding" too often got lost in the chaos. The TV pictures seemed to imply that the Israelis were guilty of a disproportionate use of force, for they were rarely accompanied by an understanding that a country with just 6 million in a sea of over 120 million Arabs could never fight a war of equal attrition.

But no matter. It is as if Jack the Sailor and CarolC somehow believe Israel must win the "moral man of the year" award in defending itself — as if responding to those who seek its destruction is morally wrong. Is there really no difference, then, between the violence of murderers who target innocents and the indispensable violence of lawful authorities? Are the arsonist and the firefighter truly moral equivalents? Is Israel's approach, which seeks to minimize civilian casualties, the same as that of the terrorists, who seek to maximize it?

Such questions are prompted by an unprecedented reversal of history: Arab terrorists, incredibly, have managed to inspire more sympathy than their victims among the Jack the Sailors and CarolCs of this world. The Jews, having experienced the genocide of Europe, today stand accused of perpetrating genocide on the hard ground of the West Bank and Gaza. The vocabulary of the accusations presents the Jews as Nazis and their Arab enemies as helpless Jews. The worst crimes of anti-Semites in the past — racist and ethnic cleansing, attempted genocide, crimes against humanity — are now increasingly ascribed to Jews and to the Jewish state. The argument has become, if you are against Nazism, you must oppose Israel. Thus has Israeli self-defense been transmogrified as aggression. As a consequence, the era of reconciliation that obtained between Israel and the world after the Holocaust is, tragically, no more. In much of the world's news media and, here at Mudcat, there is a pattern of delegitimization of Israel.

In the Muslim world, a culture of hatred of Jews permeates all forms of public communications — newspapers, videocassettes, sermons, books, the Internet, television, and radio. The intensity of the anti-Jewish invective equals or surpasses that of Nazi Germany in its heyday. The public rhetoric combines the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with cockeyed Nazi conspiracy theories that echo the famous forgery, the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," and the fanciful notion of a Jewish drive for world dominion. Throughout the Islamic world, one finds slanderous quotations about Jews as the sons of apes and donkeys. A leading Saudi newspaper has Jews using the blood of Christian and Muslim children to make their hamantascen pastry for Purim and their matzo, the unleavened bread of Passover. In this fundamentalist religious culture, America and Israel are seen as twin Satanic forces, "The Great Satan" and "The Little Satan," as Iran's religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini used to refer to them.
The linkage of the two Satans has been emphasized even more intently since the beginning of the Palestinian intifada, in September 2000, and the attacks of September 11. Remember the story of the 4,000 Jews who worked at the World Trade Center being told to not show up for work on the morning of September 11? The story was planted on the Internet by Hezbollah under the cover of a Lebanese TV station. This urban legend has now taken root among Muslims the world over, calling to mind the words of W. B. Yeats: "We had fed the heart on fantasies. The heart's grown brutal from the fare."

Islamists see the fingerprints of their enemy everywhere — the fantasy that a secret and all-powerful Zionist lobby drains the lifeblood of Arabs and Muslims and incites Washington to war against Iraq, all the while carrying out its sinister plans for global control. In Egypt, a 41-part TV series was broadcast across the Arab world during Ramadan entitled Horseman Without a Horse. The theme of the series was that the Zionists have controlled the world of politics since the dawn of history and seek to control the Middle East — a fantasy, as Prof. Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University pointed out, imported from the Germany of the 1930s.

I know it's difficult for non-Jews, unmarked by the searing memories of Jewish history, to realize the extent to which the survival of Israel remains an issue for Jews, who cannot dismiss the overheated Arab rhetoric that seeks to justify terrorism against innocent civilians by describing Israel's existence as illegitimate. That rhetoric is the product of a careful calculation by Arab political leaders who recognized the popular appeal of scapegoating Israel for their failure to provide for their own people while legitimizing their regimes.

Tragically, the growth of international hostility to Israel has found its most prominent expression in the operations of the U.N. It has, in fact, come a long way from the legitimization and legalization of the existence of Israel and the right of the Jewish people to have their own state on their own land through its 1947 resolution proposing and approving a two-state solution.

Since then, the U.N. has adopted an almost reflexively anti-Israeli stance canted to the anti-Israeli majority of its membership. The U.N. today is a regular forum for vicious anti-Israel attacks, conferring on the spurious and the hateful the false cloak of reason and legitimacy, and thus has become an organization for the conservation, not the reduction, of the Middle East conflict.
Some U.N. actions simply defy belief. At the World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, Israel — the only democracy in the Middle East committed to civil rights, the rule of law, and Arab participation in democratic government — was attacked by Arab and Third World nations and accused of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Then there is the Fourth Geneva Convention, drafted originally in response to the atrocities of the Nazi regime, to protect people like diplomats and visitors subjected to a military occupation.

In 2002, U.N. conferees met and, for the first time in the 52 years since its adoption, excoriated one country — Israel — for alleged violations. Not Cambodia and Rwanda, with their well-documented records of genocide. Not Zimbabwe, with its racist economic policies. Not the Balkan states, with their ethnic cleansing. Not even China, with its dismal record on Tibet. Only Israel was singled out. Similarly, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, chaired on occasions by such notably enlightened states as Libya, has followed this same pattern, devoting much of its time, energy, and efforts to attacking Israel. The commission went so far as to affirm, last April 15, the legitimacy of suicide bombing against Israelis, or in judgment-free U.N.-speak, "all available means, including armed struggle."

In the Arab World, and certainly by Jack the Sailor and Carol C in the Mudcat world, Zionism is portrayed not as the Jewish response to a history of anti-Semitism in a world that culminated in the Holocaust but as a hyperaggressive variant of colonialism. But since this new anti-Semitism manifests itself so clearly now as political rejection of the Jewish state, it is worth examining the historical record for a moment. Fact: The majority of Jews came to Israel in the late 19th century and early 20th century not as conquering Europeans backed by a national army and treasury but as the wretched of the earth in search of respite from ceaseless persecution. They were not wealthy; they were young, poor, and desperate. The notion that the traditional position of the Arabs in Palestine was jeopardized by Jewish settlements is belied by another fact: that when the Jews arrived, Palestine was a sparsely populated, poorly cultivated, and wildly neglected land of sandy deserts and malarial marshes. Mark Twain, in The Innocents Abroad, described it as a "desolate country whose soil is rich enough but is given over wholly to weeds — a silent, mournful expanse. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route. There was hardly a tree or a shrub anywhere. Even the olive and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country."

Even people unsympathetic to the Zionist cause believed that Jewish immigrants had improved the condition of Palestinian Arabs. Consider the words of Sharif Hussein, the guardian of the Islamic holy places in Arabia, in 1918: "One of the most amazing things until recent times was that the Palestinian used to leave his country, wandering the high seas in every direction. His native soil could not retain a hold on him, though his ancestors had lived on it for 1,000 years. At the same time, we have seen the Jews from foreign countries streaming to Palestine. . . . They knew that the country was for its original sons. The return of these exiles to their homeland will prove materially and spiritually [to be] an experimental school for their brethren." Hussein understood then, as so many refuse to see now, that the regeneration of Palestine and the growth of its population came only after the Jews returned in significant numbers. As Winston Churchill, then the British colonial secretary, pointed out: "The land was not being taken away from the Arabs. The Arabs sold land to Jews only if they chose to do so."

The hope was that the Arabs would accept Israelis as their neighbors and, finally, recognize them as such. That hope died aborning. Even war, that grim final arbiter of international relations, has made no difference. The Arabs resisted from the outset a Jewish presence in the region. They expanded their war against Israel into an attack on the very idea of Israel. Zionism, the Jewish claim to a land of their own, was declared racist because the Arabs said it deprived them of their land. They substituted the homeless Palestinian for the homeless Jew. The Arabs, having rendered the Palestinians homeless by refusing to accept partition in 1948 and having kept many of the Palestinians who fled the battle homeless in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan by refusing to resettle them in their lands, now blame this homelessness on the Jews. They have consistently charged that it was the Jews who had driven the Arabs out of Palestine. But as the eminent Arabist Bernard Lewis has written, "the great majority, like countless millions of refugees elsewhere, left their homes amid the confusion of and panic of invasion and war — one more unhappy part of the vast movement of population which occurred in the aftermath of World War II."

The foreign press, in regular contact with all sides during the conflict of 1948, wrote nothing to suggest that the flight of the Palestinians was not voluntary. Nor did Arab spokesmen, such as the Palestinian representative to the U.N., Jamal Husseini, or the secretary general of the Arab League, blame the Jews contemporaneously with the 1948 war for the flight of Arabs and Palestinians. In fact, those who fled were urged to do so by other Arabs. As then Prime Minister of Iraq Nuri Said put it, "the Arabs should conduct their wives and children to safe areas until the fighting has died down." One Arab who fled encapsulated this thinking in the Jordanian newspaper Al-Difaa: "The Arab governments told us, `Get out so that we can get in.' So we got out, but they did not get in." And a bad situation, impossibly, was allowed to get worse. Arabs and Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war were resettled in camps administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the only such agency established for any refugee group since the massive dislocations of World War II. The partition of India occurred at the same time as the conflict in Palestine, and millions of Hindus and Muslims were uprooted, but virtually nothing was done for them. Nothing was done in response to the Chinese occupation of Tibet, where a long-standing religious, social, and political culture was virtually destroyed.

Yet 56 years after they were first established, the Arab refugee camps still exist. With the exception of Jordan, the Arab governments home to these camps have refused to grant citizenship to the refugees and opposed their resettlement. In Lebanon, 400,000 stateless Palestinians are not allowed to attend public school, own property, or even improve their housing stock. Three generations later, they continue to serve as political pawns of the Arab states, still hopeful of reversing the events of 1948. "The return of the refugees," as President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt said years later, "will mean the end of Israel."

The U.N., through its administration of the camps, has made a complicated problem infinitely more so. How? U.N. officials define refugees in the Middle East to include the descendants of persons who became refugees in 1948. In other parts of the world, descendants of refugees are not defined as refugees. The result of this unique treatment has been to increase the numbers of Arab refugees from roughly 700,000 to over 4 million, by including children, grandchildren, even great-grandchildren. As a former prime minister of Syria, Khaled al Azm, wrote in his memoirs, "It is we who demanded the return of the refugees while it is we who made them leave. We brought disaster upon them. [We] exploited them in executing crimes of murder and throwing bombs. All this in the service of political purposes." And so it goes, to this very day. At the time of the founding of the State of Israel, 900,000 Jewish refugees were forced out of neighboring Arab states in a coordinated effort. These refugees were absorbed into the new Israel. Yet the world was, and still is, untroubled by the plight of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.

To single out Israel as the only state that must restore a refugee population is to hold the Jewish state to a different standard. Or, perhaps, the more accurate term is double standard. Against such a backdrop, with a history so cynically manipulated by its enemies, the distortions and outright untruths that characterize more recent relations between Israel and the Palestinians should probably come as no surprise. There are virtually countless examples from which to choose, but the "massacre" by Israeli forces at the Palestinian refugee camp of Jenin in 2002 is particularly illustrative.
A Palestinian suicide bomber, on Passover eve, killed 29 people and injured 140 in the Israeli city of Netanya. It was the sixth terrorist bombing that week. The Israelis responded by sending troops into the West Bank, including the refugee camp at Jenin, the principal home of the bomb makers. A 10-day battle ensued. The Palestinians, with support from U.N. representatives, alleged that the Israelis had massacred hundreds of innocents, carried out summary executions, refrigerated the corpses, and removed them. Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian spokesman, reiterated the claim of many hundreds killed. The media accepted his version. CarolC repeated it endlessly in her Mudcat postings. But subsequent news reports, and even Palestinian testimony and writings recently collated, established the fact that groups like Fatah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad used women and children as shields during the fighting. The reports showed, conclusively, that there was no massacre of Palestinian civilians and documented that the Israelis exercised great restraint during the battle to minimize civilian casualties while suffering an inordinately high number of their own as a result.

Distortions and untruths, unsurprisingly, characterize the Palestinians' political dealings with Israel, as well. A critical moment in the relationship was the Oslo agreement of 1993. There, the negotiating principle was land for peace. What Israel received was no peace in return for its offer of land. The most generous Israeli offer of land for peace came at Camp David three years ago. Then Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yasser Arafat 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, including the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. The Camp David offer was not only rejected by Arafat but used as a provocation to launch a campaign of violence and terrorism that continues to this day.

The notion of land for peace bears exploring. If it is taken to mean that Israel must turn over more land until peace is achieved and Arab belligerence ended, the incurious may be left with the conclusion that the lack of peace must be the result of Israel's failure to yield sufficient land. Nothing could be further from the truth. There have been thousands of terrorist attacks since the second intifada began, three years ago. The only way Israel has been able to reduce the number of suicide bombers is eliminating their sanctuary by controlling the West Bank through occupation and sealing off Gaza.
But the story is not one of occupation of the West Bank by Israel. If the term "occupation" had any relevance at all, it was when Arafat rejected Barak's proposal for a Palestinian state. The issue is Palestinian refusal to grant Israel the right to exist as a Jewish state. Israel's battle is not the battle of Jew against Muslim. It is a battle against the hatred of the Jews and their connection to the land of Israel. How else to comprehend the Palestinian rejection of Jerusalem as the sacred city of the Jews and the Western Wall as the Second Temple, except as a rejection of the Jewish presence there? "There was no temple in Jerusalem," Arafat said at Camp David. "It was only an obelisk." To question the core of the Jewish faith is hardly an indication of readiness to resolve the conflict.

Quite the contrary, the spiraling Palestinian violence evidences a single-minded determination to continue the conflict. The insight of Amos Oz, the liberal Israeli writer, is pertinent. He is haunted, he said, by the observation that before the Holocaust, European graffiti read, "Jews to Palestine," while today it has been changed, to "Jews out of Palestine." The message to Jews, Oz says, is simple: "Don't be here, and don't be there. That is, don't be."

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 03:33 PM

I am the same guest as 20 Jul 04 - 03:21 PM.

Upon reflection I have decided that Jack and Carol are not anti Semite, I am anti common sense. I also talk way, way too much. Please ignore me, especially if my antipsychotics wear off and I feel the compulsion to post again.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 03:42 PM

GUEST, 20 Jul 04 - 03:21 PM, my name is Carol Dale, not Carol Cunningham. Is there some reason why you felt the need to put my full name here in this discussion? Should I be concerned for my physical safety now? Or any other aspect of my wellbeing?

There are people who have a political agenda, like you, GUEST, who like to use the charge of anti-Semitism as a way of discrediting and shutting up anyone who dares to speak up for the human rights of the Palestinians or Muslims and/or Arabs in general. This political agenda is not one of upliftment and regard for human life. It is one of repression and of control. Not too different than the agenda the US government has promoted over the decades. And England before that, and so on.

This is what Marc H. Ellis, Professor of American and Jewish Studies, and Director of the Center for American and Jewish Studies at Baylor University has to say about tactics like yours:

On The Rabbis and the Future of Jewish Life

"It is a strange feeling to stand before a gathering of rabbis and speak of my vision for the future of the Jewish people, especially during a time when helicopter gunships are more and more defining the trajectory of Jewish life. In my youth, my own rabbis, first at an Orthodox synagogue and then within the conservative movement, did not have to warn us against such abuse of power. Like most Jews in America, using tanks and aerial bombardment to quiet resistance in villages, towns and cities was reminiscent of the horrors of World War II; the assault on a weak defenceless people gathered in ghettos and surrounded by superior power reminded Jews in America of the fate of European Jews in what later became known as the Holocaust.

I wonder now whether these rabbis would protest today what is surely the swiftest and strangest inversion of position and power in history. Certainly the rabbis I encounter at home and on the road have little if anything to say about the current situation, except to be silent, to be in unity, to strike at anyone, Jew or non-Jew, who speaks out at the abuse of Israeli power. Perhaps the rabbis with whom I studied, now long retired, escaped the moment of decision when victimisation turned to oppression and the role reversal called for resistance to our own power rather than the power of others.

I think here of Abraham Heschel and Leo Baeck, in ability well beyond my local rabbis, who, having experienced the Nazi era, were spared, at least consciously and critically, these last decades of Israel's life. What would they say about helicopter gunships? What would they say to the displacement of Palestinians that has continued long after the emergency years of the Holocaust? Would Heschel and Baeck have spoken out against the settlements that continue to expand and erode the possibility of self-determination for Palestinians, with sophisticated by-pass roads and checkpoints that isolate Jews from Palestinians, encircle and enclose Palestinian life and create what many call an apartheid reality? If they spoke out what would they say? Would they then be pursued, as many Jews are, by the local rabbis, the Jewish Federation, the Anti-Defamation League, and Hillel chapters on university campuses? Would they be called traitors, self-hating Jews, "unabashedly pro-Palestinian", and among those who "create the context for another Holocaust"?

While we do not know what Heschel and Baeck would say, or for that matter, the local rabbis of my youth, or what would be said about them if they did speak out, we do know that few Jews in public life speak out today against the injustice of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians and that those who do are maligned and pursued. Death threats against dissenting Jews abound, but they are only the most extreme of the tactics used to silence Israel's critics.

What is more commonly used are visits to employers, statements in the press and gossip with local cultural and political elites about the authenticity and character of the Jewish dissenter. Ecumenical relationships that have been built up over many years are often used to signal a dissenting Jew as a troublemaker, one to be ostracised and even demeaned by religious leaders of another faith community.

That these tactics are carried out by leaders of the Jewish community on the local level is bad enough. When aided and abetted by national Jewish leadership—and too often by Jews who are advisers to politicians and intellectuals in universities—the situation becomes more complex. How will critical thought about Judaism and Israel, indeed about the future of the Jewish people, find a home, deepen and be communicated to the next generation? If there is no place for critical Jewish thought in the synagogue, Jewish institutions or the university, how will those who seek to affiliate with other Jews hear diverse viewpoints about what it means to be Jewish after the Holocaust and after Israel?

The phrase "after the Holocaust" is well known today, used sometimes as a cliché, but in the beginning this was not true. Studying with Richard Rubenstein in the early 1970s, I read his book After Auschwitz as an incredible and difficult attempt to come to grips with the aftermath of the Holocaust. I did this as a Jew, but also as a human being confronted with the enormity of Auschwitz. Perhaps I was too young to notice the lack of other agendas in confronting Auschwitz; that came later.

It was our inability to confront the expanding state of Israel and the use of the Holocaust as a sign of our victimhood, paradoxically of our arrival as an empowered and innocent and affluent community, that trivialised the event that defines the past century. That is why we as Jews come after the Holocaust and Israel. It is not only the linear historical sequence that forces this use of after, but the use of the Holocaust as a shield against accountability for abuse of the Palestinians. We as Jews come after the Holocaust and Israel because our victimisation has become a tool of power and because our proclaimed innocence betrays a culpability that increases even today.

What are we to do with this culpability? The situation is complex and has at least two fronts for Jews who live in the West. On the one hand, Jews are a minority living in cultures still defined by Christianity or at least a Christian ethos. On the other hand, Jews are asked to support and in some cases are held responsible for Israel, a nation-state in the Middle East that Jews in the West do not control, nor, overwhelmingly, do they choose to live there.

Both of these fronts have their own complexity. Christianity and Christian culture are increasingly less hostile to Jews. The acceptance of Judaism as a religion and Jews as a people and individuals poses a different threat, the threat of assimilation. For some time the reason to be Jewish has been found outside the internal practices of Judaism and has been located instead in the memory of the Holocaust and the hope of Israel, which most Jews participate in only vicariously. Israel is more and more problematic as a supposed symbol of Jewish life and as a beacon to humanity. The opposite seems to be the case, with Israel mirroring and mimicking the nations of the world and sometimes modelling in microcosm the very problems of the nation-state system.

As Jews we are caught in this dynamic—between an accepting Christian culture and the culpability that an expansionist Israel signals—with little or no leadership to guide us. We are not oppressed and we are not innocent. Too often we use the Holocaust as a shield and are silent on the unjust policies of Israel. To speak out is to dissent on the defining issues of contemporary Jewish life without a way forward. Thus the desire to strike out against those who dissent because they point out the conundrum of contemporary Jewish life that we cannot deny and for which we have no response.

The retreat to the synagogue in the face of these unresolved issues is insufficient to resolve this dilemma. We cannot go back behind the Holocaust and Israel as if to transcend history, nor can we in the struggle for the future of Jewish life pretend that a distinctiveness lived out in the world and unique contribution to the life of the world can be offered through prayer and ritual. The recovery of Hebrew and Jewish forms of community are not enough to face the crisis of Jewish life or the world crisis.

While renewal movements that seek to infuse Judaism and Jewish life with creative adaptations to modernity and post-modernity are praiseworthy and of interest in personal and communal ways, the ancient and still-central thrust of Jewish life, the prophetic, finds no nourishment here. Without the prophetic there is no reason for Jewish life in and of itself other than a way of meaning and personal fulfilment, important to be sure, but ably covered by other religions or indeed the major religion of our time, modernity. The renewal of Judaism and Jewish life can be fascinating but only at the expense of a silence about history, especially the history we are creating, actively or passively, in Israel. And renewal in a Jewish sensibility can only be modestly different than renewal of other communities and traditions. In short, the distinctiveness of Jewish renewal is, for the most part, illusory and at the expense of the prophetic whose base is history rather than language and ritual. Thus despite its outward garb of Hebrew and kippah, renewal is in the end a form of assimilation.

When we assimilate to the state and power, whether in Israel or America, we move toward a Judaism that is passive in the face of injustice and may even argue for that injustice with the sophistication of real politik. The terrain we then enter is one familiar to Jews, though historically we have experienced this terrain as a form of oppression against us. In fact, it may be argued that Judaism, as it developed within the shadow of an empowered Constantinian Christianity, is a sustained engagement with state-orientated religiosity. That we as Jews have formed a Constantinian Judaism, where the energies of our leaders in the religious, social and political arenas are bent toward the justification of privilege and power, is ironic for a variety of reasons, not least of which is our recent survival of Constantinian Christianity in the death camps of Nazi Europe.

In Constantinian Judaism, Israel is always right, threatened, under siege by the unwashed and uncivilised Arabs who resemble, if they do not incarnate, the Nazis. United States foreign policy that supports Israel must be defended at all costs and any group or entity that criticises Israel or United States foreign policy is misguided, probably anti-Jewish and regardless needs to be confronted. The new anti-semitism is less defined by views toward Jews and Judaism as defined by acceptance or non-acceptance of Jews as citizens within the larger society than it is by those who support or criticise the state of Israel. Tied to this unequivocal support of Israel and Israeli policies is the remembrance of the Holocaust as a global obligation, and as the experience of suffering of all time. Any attempt to place the Holocaust in the broader sweep of history or even in the context of the suffering of other peoples or, and especially, as an avenue of solidarity with the Palestinian people, is an expression of anti-semitism.

Today Jewish leadership is defined by the Constantinianism of Jewish life. The rabbis are not exempt from this definition, even if they are not at the head of the structure of Jewish power. In fact, the rabbis are by definition far down the road in terms of power in this form of Jewish life. Still they are expected to carry out and defend policies and viewpoints over which they have little, if any, control. Rabbis do not control and are not even consulted about Israeli policies; in the United States, at least, they have little power in American Jewish organisations that interact with the political life of the country. Yet rabbis are the closest to synagogue-affiliated Jews and the spokespersons for the local Jewish community. Thus rabbis are expected to communicate, interpret and defend policies and statements of a Jewish world that they do not participate in, have no power within, and often, if left to their own conscience, would quarrel with or even oppose. Historically speaking, on what became the two central engines of contemporary Jewish life, Holocaust and Israel, the rabbis were hardly consulted; they were left to integrate, reform and pick up the pieces of a religious world that ultimately supercedes and diminishes rabbinic Judaism. In the end a hybrid is developed between Rabbinic Judaism and Constantinian Judaism where the rabbinic survives only to serve as the local arm of this new form of empowered Judaism. And more often than not, rabbis function as the local arm of the law of Constantinian Judaism, a new halacha that fences in authentic Judaism more narrowly than ever before in Jewish history.

This is how the rabbis are experienced by Jews of conscience who have abandoned Jewish institutions, often fleeing for a life of integrity. Instead of aiding in the formation of conscience and identity, instead of infusing the covenantal obligations of justice and reconciliation with Jewish sensibilities, language and questions, the rabbis have functioned in the main as an agent of reproach and banishment, sealing an exile from the Jewish world that is unremitting. In the main, rabbis do not interact with Jews of conscience on the personal level, at least those who cannot countenance the often twisted argumentation of an empowered Judaism, for they are gone, disappeared from Jewish life, in exile. And most of those Jews of conscience are decidedly, even militantly, nonreligious. After having barely survived the God of Constantinian Christianity, is it any wonder these Jews of conscience reject the God of Constantinian Judaism?

In the end, of course, Jews of conscience see the God of Constantinian Christianity and the God of Constantinian Judaism as the same God, and Constantinian Christianity and Constantinian Judaism as the same religion. That would make the clerics of both religions, and the leadership patterns and arguments employed by them, essentially the same as well. If the same God and religion and leadership is shared by Constantinian Christianity and Judaism, then the historical judgement on Christian and Jewish religiosity and leadership follows. For Jews of conscience, then, Christianity and Judaism, Christians and Jews, priests, ministers and rabbis, are blurring into an interchangeable force that seeks to quell the pangs of conscience and to censor the articulate prophetic speech, that is, the very heart of Jewish identity.

That is, at least, what the heart of Jewish life once was or, perhaps more accurately, what we hoped it to be. That Judaism and Jewish life have failed in the face of power and the state is hardly an exception in the history of religion. Rather it is the norm. But the patterns of Jewish life, shared with other religions but also always searching for distinctiveness in the ethical realm, make more difficult the survival of Judaism and Jewish life in this Constantinian phase. The agnosticism of Jewish life with regard to ultimate realities is rooted in the Torah and carried forth in Talmudic searching and argumentation. This has led historically to a practised religiosity, a religion of deeds and action where God is alternately affirmed or ignored, present or absent, depending on time and place.

In Rabbinic Judaism the practice of Judaism, or we might say more precisely, the practice of the covenant, occurred without power and in the face of power. This was its peculiar strength. In a time of power, in the shadow of Constantinian Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism is a shadow of itself, as are the rabbis. As a Jewish thinker who has taken Jewish history seriously, it is sad to report this fateful transposition, as it means that Jewish history as we have known and inherited it has come to an end. As an ordinary Jew who was born into the faith and has consciously embraced it, who has a Jewish home and children who are being raised as Jews, the sadness is more personal. For what future is carried by helicopter gunships? What kind of Jewish life is constructed around the displacement and humiliation of another people? If Rabbinic Judaism once bequeathed achievement, struggle, ethics and suffering as the cornerstones of Jewish life, what will Constantinian Judaism bequeath to our children?

The hope that Constantinian Judaism will pass is illusory, as is a hope for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and annexed East Jerusalem. The map of Israel, with territory that stretches from Tel Aviv to the Jordan River, and with millions of Palestinians in between, is the map of Jewish life for the foreseeable future. This is a Constantinian map that requires of Jews within Israel and beyond a loyalty to the state and power. No Jew can escape this Constantinianism completely and no Jew can dissent from this map completely and actively and be seen as authentic. At the same time, there will always be Jews who cannot accept the restraints this map places on territory, social organisation and conscience. Will there be rabbis who refuse a Contantinianism that mandates a militarised God and a theology that disguises helicopter gunships with passages from the Torah and learned Talmudic discussions?

That is why Jews of conscience have been and will continue to leave the Jewish community and why the religious consciousness of these Jews atrophies in articulation and symbol. Perhaps these Jews of conscience in exile today from Constantinian Judaism are placing above all and without specific language the two most ancient themes of Jewish life, the refusal of idolatry and the refusal of assimilation to the state and power. I ask you as rabbis, with ordination and congregations, what do you say to these exiles?

My own sense is that these exiles carry the covenant with them, and this perhaps is the last exile in Jewish history, at least as we have known and inherited it. No doubt there will be rabbis who accompany those in exile or who will arise from within the exilic community itself. But first and foremost they will be prophets, with no need of respect from the Jewish establishment or fear of congregational censure, free prophets whose witness is deep and freely given for the historical crisis that envelopes us as a people. It is this witness that will one day provide a reckoning and a possible future, however defined and with whomever pursues the struggle for community over empire.

Whether the children of these Jews of conscience will identify as Jews, whether they will gather for rituals or use language that Jews employ today is doubtful and perhaps beside the point. For the covenant, once given, can never be claimed or owned or named by any one people in perpetuity. In the final analysis, the covenant belongs to the broader arc of humanity. As Jews we have been privileged, even in our suffering, to carry this covenant with us as a people. Today it belongs somewhere else, outside our community.

This analysis may seem too pessimistic to some, but if we look at the covenant as free, given but not owned, carried but also betrayed, if we see the covenant as available and present in the most unlikely places, as it was in the beginning, then this seeming pessimism is lightened. As Jews we have failed, as others before us and as those who go after us. But we also, again with others, have periodically risen to the occasion and become witnesses to the covenant and to the world. Helicopter gunships and the nation-state that employs them, like all forms of violence and all nation-states, vitiate this witness through a Constantinianism to which all religions succumb. Did Jews think we would be different, that placing Jewish before the name of a state would thereby change its dynamics and trajectory?

We are left here, at least today, with a tradition in fragments and a leadership that is bullied by that state and in turn too often bullies those who dare to say that Jewish and state do not mix and that the covenantal affirmation that has carried Jewish life has fled its home. This tragedy prompts a reckoning that can only be approached when we acknowledge that the Judaism that we inherited and the leadership that represents that Judaism is effectively over and that the potential leaders of Jewish life are in exile. For all their limitations and flaws, one can believe that the covenant is travelling with them and the challenge of leadership in the Jewish world is to accompany this exile wherever it leads. For with the covenant there is always the opening to God, as it was in the beginning, recorded in our own sacred books. Should we be surprised that these understandings have returned and that Jews turn towards them?

In this time of helicopter gunships, when we are defined by a power that we once struggled against to survive, the time is now to announce our position. And to live it, until the end."

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST,Yes Sir, I Are A Fat Ham Ass
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 04:20 PM

CarolC and Jack the Sailor, please you take no shotspot from the zionistics who aggress on you. You are good people for justice.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Once Famous
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 04:20 PM

CarolC.

The Guest of 7/20 3:21 wins, hands down.

And Jack telling Rabbi-Sol about the Torah was worth the biggest laugh of the year.

You both are so hopeless in all of your activism new anti-semitism splendor.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Once Famous
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 04:34 PM

Fat Ham-Ass, had you figured wrong initially. sorry.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST,Corrina
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 04:44 PM

CarolC,

You say that you know oppression because you are a woman. Be very thankful that you're not living as a woman in Palestinian society.

A September 2002 poll taken by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion, found:

   * 56.9% of Palestinian Arabs "believe that a man has the right to beat up his wife if she underestimates his manhood."

   * 56.2% of Palestinian Arabs "support the physical abuse of a wife if she insults her husband in front of his friends."

   * 51.8% of Palestinian Arabs "support a man's abusing his wife physically if she does not obey him."

   * 51.7% of Palestinian Arabs "recommend beating up a wife if she does not respect her parents, sisters, and brothers-in-law."

   * 59.1% of Palestinian Arabs "believe it is the right of a man to decide for his wife whether or not to work outside the house"; 66.4% "believe it is even worse for a woman to swear, curse, or use bad words than for a man"; 73.9% believe that women should "concentrate on their becoming good wives and mothers rather than get preoccupied with their rights"; and 82.3% "believe that it is a wife's obligation to obey her husband."

   * 56.7% of Palestinian Arabs know a woman who was assaulted by her husband (up from 34.7% a year earlier).


Women Killed in PA Territory to "Protect Family Honor":

   Palestinian Arab women who are suspected of committing moral infractions are sometimes murdered by family members in order to "protect the family honor," a practice which the Palestinian Authority regime has made little effort to stop. "The sheer scale of the phenomenon, along with the weakness of the laws and the lack of a concerted effort on the part of concerned individuals and institutions to deal with the matter, all contribute to worsening the problem in a society that believes restoring honor can only be achieved by the spilling of blood," the Palestinian Arab newspaper Jerusalem Times has noted. (June 1, 2001)

   The article quoted Ayda Masoud, a researcher for the Women's Support and Rehabilitation Program, as saying: "The problem of honor killings is more serious than I had thought before working with the program. I was awestruck by the scale of the phenomenon in Palestinian society." Dr. Iyad Siraj, director of the Gaza Psychological Health Program, was quoted as saying that it is common among Palestinian Arabs to believe that "a woman is among the possessions of a man."

   Sheikh Hazem Al-Siraj of the Palestinian Alms Committee was quoted as saying that when a defendant who is accused of an "honor killing" is tried in a PA court, "leniency is exercised if witnesses confirm that the woman sinned."

PA Doesn't Enforce Laws Against Sexual Harassment of Women:

   "Sexual harassment is a common problem around the world but in [PA-controlled territory] the phenomenon is characterized by several properties that make it more serious than in other places [such as] the wide spread of the phenomenon, the lack of laws against it, and the feebleness with which laws that do exist are implemented," according to the Palestinian Arab newspaper Jerusalem Times. (August 11, 2000)

PA's Judges Look for Ways to Excuse "Honor Killings":

   "[In 'honor killings' of women], judges and police officers have been known to side with the 'wronged' man. In areas under Palestinian control, judges usually look for 'justifiable excuses,' according to Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, a criminologist at Hebrew University who participated in a UNICEF study." (Jerusalem Post, July 4, 2000)

Palestinian Arab Law is "Lenient" on "Honor Killings":

   " 'Honor killings' of women are regarded with leniency by the law in Jordan and Palestine," according to Palestinian Arab activist Daoud Kuttab. (Jerusalem Post, Dec. 16, 1999)

22% of Palestinian Arab Women Are Victims of Sexual Assault:

   A study by the Gaza Psychological Health Program in 1999 found that 22% of Palestinian Arab women "experience sexual assault." (Jerusalem Times , Oct.8, 1999)

"Palestinian Arab Society Applauds 'Honor Killings' of Women":

   Reuters reported on Nov. 10, 1997, that when a resident of PA-controlled Jericho murdered his sister for alleged sexual misconduct, "Arab society applauded his deed." A spokesman for a Gaza women's group said that 20 "honor killings" of Palestinian Arab women were reported in the West Bank and Gaza during 1997, "but the number of honor killings is much higher and they are not reported in this tribal society."

Hundreds of Palestinian Arab Women Beaten or Raped in 1997:

   In the West Bank and Gaza during the period from January through September 1997, and 47 Palestinian Arab women filed complaints of having been raped, 398 filed complaints that they were beaten by their husbands. Palestinian women's groups estimate these account for but a tiny fraction of the rapes and beatings that actually occurred.(IINS News Service, Nov. 30, 1997)

Palestinian Arab Girls Pressured to Get Married at Age 13:

   "It is now common to wed girls who are barely 13 or 14 years of age," according to a report in the Palestinian Arab newspaper Jerusalem Times (May 10, 1995). "A part of this complex problem is the practice of polygamy, which is effectively legal." A teacher in PA-controlled Beit Fajjar reported that "the girls begin getting engaged in the seventh and eighth grades," and a gynecologist in PA-controlled Bethlehem said that she sees women "from about 15 villages in the Bethlehem district, and 80% of these are married at less than 16 years of age."

Women Raped by PA Policemen in Jericho:

   An investigative report by the Israeli daily Ma'ariv (March 24, 1995) found a pattern of "random beatings, rapes, and torture" committed by PA policemen in Jericho, which had "turned the lives of the city's 12,000 residents into a living hell." The article described several brutal rapes by PA policemen, which the PA leadership refused to investigate on the grounds that in each case, "she consented."

PA Police Chief Implicated in Rape:

   In early 1995, the PA's chief of police in Gaza, Ghazi Jabali, reportedly raped a local woman. In order to preserve "family honor," the woman's family forced Jabali to marry her. In July 1995, she was found shot to death. (Al Akhbar, July 17, 1995)

Abuse of Women by the PLO Prior to the Establishment of the Palestinian Authority Regime:

"Collaborators" Were Actually Killed to "Preserve Family Honor":

   The leftwing Israeli human rights group B'Tselem reported in early 1994 that "nearly all" of the 107 Palestinian Arab women murdered by the PLO's "Fatah decency squads" during 1988-1993, supposedly because they were "collaborating" with Israel, "were in fact victims of honor killings." (Associated Press, Feb. 15, 1994)

PLO Killers Targeted Women Who Work Outside the Home:

   "During the first intifada all those elements that wanted to impose a conservative way of life on society...made women who worked outside their homes suspect of collaboration with the authorities. These relatively independent women, not subjected to constant supervision by the family men," became the targets of PLO death squads. "In 1989, sewing-shop owner Varda Safariye was murdered, and in 1991 the Fatah Hawks murdered Na'ama Jouda, who worked in a sewing shop in Deir el-Balah...

   "In 1989, six women who worked in medical institutions were murdered--five nurses and one cleaning woman in a clinic--after being accused of collaboration...many nurses decided not to risk their lives and resigned...The murder of the Abu Shawish sisters had particularly great impact. Aisha Abu Shawish was chief nurse and department head in the Nasr hospital;\four hooded men murdered her in her home with axes. Her sister Susan Abu Hussein was murdered in the hospital." (Ha'aretz, June 17, 1994)

Wife-Beating Common Among Palestinian Arabs:

   Palestinian Arab Prof. Mohammed Haj Yahya said in a lecture at Bir Zeit University, near Ramallah, in 1993 that "39% of the women in Palestinian society suffer from wife battering," but "women are afraid to complain due to social pressure. He said "attitudes in the male-dominated Arab society made wife-beating legitimate." (Al Fajr, April 8, 1993)

Women Raped to Punish Their Husbands for Working in Israel:

   During the spring of 1989, there were numerous reports in the Israeli press of Palestinian Arab women who were "gang raped by masked Arab terrorists" because their husbands "persist in taking jobs in Israel for the purpose of supporting their families. 'Offenders' are first warned, and if they persist the terrorist underground visits their wives when they are away, and amid cries of 'Allah is great' and 'Death to the Jews,' perpetrate their dastardly crime." There were also cases in which women were raped by PLO squads "after being accused of promiscuity and cooperating with the [Israeli] authorities." (Jerusalem Post, April 27, 1989; Jewish Post and Opinion, May 31, 1989)

Yes, CarolC, be very thankful that you're not living as a woman in Palestinian society.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 05:17 PM

Yes, CarolC, be very thankful that you're not living as a woman in Palestinian society.

-Corrina

I know that Carol is very thankful to be where she is.

As you saying that any of those things justify bad behavior on the part of the Israeli government? Or is it non specific demonization.

Martin Gibson,

It doesn't take much to amuse you. Most people at least have to understand what they are reading.
Rabbi-sol told me what the Torah said. I implied that the Sharon Government does not follow the principles which Rabbi-Sol described. I'm glad you spoke Martin. I don't mean this as an admonishment at all. If something is beyond your understanding please feel free to speak up. Don't be afraid to look stupid. We won't make fun of you.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 05:19 PM

Opps

As you saying that any of those things justify bad behavior on the part of the Israeli government? Or is it non specific demonization.

Should be...


Are you saying that any of those things justify bad behavior on the part of the Israeli government? Or is it non specific demonization.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Once Famous
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 05:49 PM

It's you who looks stupid Jack.

and look like the biggest of two anti-semites on this board. the other being your wife. question is, which of you two was the stupid anti-semite first and brainwashed the other. I fail to believe you both met each other, realized you had the same agenda. One of you is definately the butch. I really don't care who.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 05:51 PM

Bobert---of so many long ago posts---I agree with you about the Clinton comments and the Bush --don't do anything that Clinton would have done comment.

Guest---nice post--but why oh why does one not post one's (at least) screen name. Sounds like GUests are afraid of their identity being revealed--yet reveal others.

Carol C--of a way back post too---regarding that how can one think that the Palestinians--once they have a state--would be in any position to push Israel out. Think back to 1948---they are not alone. Let us face it---the neighborhood ain't too friendly as it is said.   Yes, it is a conundrum that can, as said, previously only be resolved by good will on all sides. That is not forthcoming---neither is the U S of much help now either.
       As to you other comment re: stopping retaliation (I paraphrase). Think about it. What if we did not respond to Pearl Harbor, what if Britain did not respond to The Blitz, and so on. It is a rhetorical query.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 05:55 PM

SOrry---hit the submit button by accident.

   My final thoughts were that business about giving the Native Americans back their land---well, they would like it back---and you Carol might have a better landlord in your "small plot"--who knows. But, as said earlier---history is ongoing so it will not happen--and hence, the Middle East is also ongoing.

    As to Israel's good will or not---I was reminded in a note that when Egypt signed the peace agreement (Sadat) and recognized the state Israel gave back the entire Sinai---AND the valuable OIL fields. So--good will--good politics and hopes for the future--dashed sadly because, as always, the Palestinians are not welcome by their own brethren.

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Rabbi-Sol
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 06:03 PM

Jack: Let me first address the issue of settlements. Before 1967, we Jews did not have access to our holy places such as the Wailing Wall, Rachel's Tomb, and the Tomb Of The Patriarchs in Hebron. I believe that the prime reason the settlements were put in, was to establish a Jewish presence so that Jews will never again be denied access to our holiest of places, and be allowed to pray there. Assuming that a Palestinian state is established in those areas, one provision that must be honored by both parties is the right of access by all religious groups (Jewish, Muslim, & Christian) to their respective holy sites. It is noteworthy that while Israel in in control of Jerusalem, the area of the Temple Mount and Dome Of The Rock are under the exclusive control of the Muslim Waqif, and Jews are not permitted to pray there. Now, as far as the Torah is concerned, it consists of all the Books in the Old Testament, PLUS the
Talmud & Mishna, which we call the Oral Law. We belive that the Oral Law as well the the Old Testament (Written Law), were both transmitted to Moses at Mt. Sinai. Although the Christians believe that the principle of "Love the neighbor as thyself" originated in the New Testament, we Jews believe that is was transmitted to Moses as part of the Oral Law. There are quotations from Rabbi Akiva and Hillel, 2 great sages of the Tanaaic era to back this up. Therefore Jack, as far as you and I are concerned it is important that we both believe in this important principle, even though we have culled it from 2 different sources. SOL ZELLER

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 06:09 PM

As to you other comment re: stopping retaliation (I paraphrase). Think about it. What if we did not respond to Pearl Harbor, what if Britain did not respond to The Blitz, and so on. It is a rhetorical query.

Bill H

If the US has responded to Pearl Harbour by bombing people who hadn't attacked them then World War II would still be going on. It would be a 65 year war. Just as Israel v Palestinians is a 56 year war. Hamas and Likud (and the "settlers") are both served by the constant escalation of the conflict. Peace will not come until the power to provoke is taken from them. On both sides.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 06:15 PM

Rabbi Sol are you saying that all the settlements are there to secure the right to pray? I heard some settlers interviewed on NPR who seemed determined to return Israel to its biblical borders. Were they atypical? Are they not supported by the Israeli govenment? I am asking sincerely I want to know your feelings on this.

Did you read the link I provided? Do you still say that the Moslem Clerics do not respect human life?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Rabbi-Sol
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 07:17 PM

Jack; What I am saying is, that was the original intent of establishing the settlements. The settlers that want to return Israel to its biblical borders are not only atypical but also very unrealistic. First of all, we are not exactly sure of what those biblical borders were. Many of the landmarks that were referred to are very vague and may not even exist today in recognizable form. One of the bounaries mentioned is the Euphrates River. I don't think that anyone in their right mind living in Israel today, expects that to happen. You must also remember that Ariel Sharon's government is a secular one and not at all religious. Some ministers such as Tommy Lapid of the Shinui party are totally anti-religious. The last thing that they are looking to support is a biblical agenda.    As far as the Muslim clerics not respecting human life, I do not go by what is said in the English language press for the benefit of Western consumption. I go not only by what is said in Arabic by those clerics in the Middle East, but by their actions which speak far louder than words. I go by what is being taught to the young children of the upcoming generation in the Midrasas of all Arab nations. SOL ZELLER

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 07:27 PM

I guess we have something else in common. When I think of chances of Peace in the Middel East I think of the actions of the Israeli government.

So what do you think the borders of Israel should be? Do you think that building "security" barrier should annex 13% of the West Bank?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:01 PM

Jack/sailor: Let me be frank. The U S responded in kind at Pearl Harbor--happily for us.   Iraq is a whole different issue and thanks to W we may well end up with your scenario. Sadly.

             On the Israel / Palestinan issue it is a different situation all together. I have no empathy for the settlers. They should go. That said, it will still not alleviate the problem. Why? I answer---History. It all comes back to all Arab nations being committed to negating the existence of Israel.   As to the Palestinians---they would end up being the Arab states version of "untouchables".   Think about it. Jordan could and should have been Palestine. What happened?   Read the history books about the artificial nation. Saudi Arabia is on record as to its feelings vis a vis Israel. Syria---what more can I say. 1948.   So---Palestinians are not the major problem in existence. They are, however, the immediate problem since they honestly think a state will help them and they will have the support of their alleged brethren.

Lord, help them for they do not see the reality.

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Rabbi-Sol
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:10 PM

Jack: It is unfair for me to be sitting here in the USA and try to dictate to people actually living in that region what their borders should be. It must be negotiated by the 2 parties themselves, sitting at a table with mutual respect and recognition for the rights of each other. Once that is achieved, there should be no need for a security barrier or fence. SOL ZELLER

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:21 PM

GUEST,Corrina. If you ask Palestinian women how they feel about the difficult situations they have to deal with in their every day lives, many of them will tell you that they would like to see many changes in the way women are treated by the men of their society. But they will also tell you that the biggest problem they face, and the one they are the most urgently in need of getting corrected is the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem.

If you really care about those women, you won't help to promote hatred towards Palestinians and Muslims, and you won't support the occupation. When people promote hatred towards a group of people, it's always the most vulnerable of the group (such as the women), who suffer the most.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:27 PM

Bill H. You are absolutly right. The question is about terrorism is what is "responding in kind". I don't think responding in kind includes attacking people who were not involved in the attack. Thank goodness the US did not respond to Tim MacVeigh by bombing Buffalo. Thank God MacVeigh was not from Canada.

It is clear that Israel's attempts at security aren't working why not give them their own state. This time stop bombing the police stations.

Rabbi-Sol a lot of people see that security fence as a land grab before those negotiations take place. And as such, are another barrier to peace, compliments of Likud. I pray that those two parties sit down soon.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:30 PM

Skirting the issue there a bit (no pun intended). The problem is larger than a "woman's issue".   But as to how they are treated in Muslim society---that is a whole other topic. Their cultural background is not that of Western civilization and much as I abhor it I surely cannot judge it. If they are frustrated (as they should be by my western and modern culture) then that is the issue---not their dealings with Israel and other such situations.   Ah---but what myster lies beneath that veil. Probably beats getting the western face-lifts all the time for vanity. A little humour always helps---don't you think---Carol?


Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:35 PM

Carol C--of a way back post too---regarding that how can one think that the Palestinians--once they have a state--would be in any position to push Israel out. Think back to 1948---they are not alone. Let us face it---the neighborhood ain't too friendly as it is said.

Back in 1948, Israel clearly had the upper hand, and the superior forces. That's why they ended up with most of the land, and most of the refugees were Palestinians. Add to that, the fact that Israel and Jordan had a secret agreement to prevent the Palestinians from getting their own state, and in which Jordan agreed to (and did) keep the fighting mostly in the areas that were given to the Palestinians in the partition plan. So even if we use 1948 as our point of comparison, Israel still holds most of the cards, and is the most unassailable. Plus, they're the only ones in the neighborhood with nuclear weapons.

As to you other comment re: stopping retaliation (I paraphrase). Think about it. What if we did not respond to Pearl Harbor, what if Britain did not respond to The Blitz, and so on. It is a rhetorical query.

Are you saying that everyone in the world, except the Palestinians has a right to defend themselves? Do you even regard Palestinians as human beings?

As to Israel's good will or not---I was reminded in a note that when Egypt signed the peace agreement (Sadat) and recognized the state Israel gave back the entire Sinai---AND the valuable OIL fields. So--good will--good politics and hopes for the future--dashed sadly because, as always, the Palestinians are not welcome by their own brethren.

So why won't they keep any of their promises to the Palestinians? Arafat signed a peace agreement and recognised the State of Israel. The only response from Israel was to build more settlements. But even more important than that, why won't they end the occupation? From the things I'm seeing people post to this thread, my guess is that nobody wants to give up their idea of "Greater Israel". So if that's the case, it really has nothing to do with "security" and everything to do with getting more land for Israel.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:42 PM

Bill H, I hardly think it's "skirting the issue". It is the issue. I've spend time reading what Palestinian women have to say on the subject. They say that if Israel would leave them alone and let them begin the process of building their country (and rebuilding their society), it would go a long way toward helping the women get the financial independence they need to begin to make societal changes. You are making broad sweeping generalizations about Muslims that do not have any basis in reality. There are Muslims who oppress women. There are also members of just about every other religion who oppress women. There are also Muslim women who are not oppressed. You're promoting bigoted stereotypes.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:49 PM

You know I am beginning, finally, to realize that you truly do not see any gray areas here---Carol C.   In fact, you truly see only the Palestinian side of the issue so that further debate is truly not worthwhile---fruitless.

Just a final thought----1948. Israel had the upper hand---your words.    Gee----all those minyons of Arab nations bent on destruction--what was it 100 to 1 or some such number (perhaps larger), asking the residents (Palestinians) for help while their brethren told them to leave because shortly they will return, and gerry built weaponry and tactics to hold of the horde---that is an upper hand?   Read history.

By the way--to anwser your query about human beings. I consider everyone who is one such---but do I applaud their tactics would be a better question.

But---as said---with you, sadly, there really is no discourse---and I will at this point avoid a bad and obscene pun. Hell---the FCC might try to invade the internet.


Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:56 PM

Just a final thought----1948. Israel had the upper hand---your words.    Gee----all those minyons of Arab nations bent on destruction--what was it 100 to 1 or some such number (perhaps larger), asking the residents (Palestinians) for help while their brethren told them to leave because shortly they will return, and gerry built weaponry and tactics to hold of the horde---that is an upper hand?   Read history.

Bill, the reason you think I have no shades of gray and that discourse with me is fruitless is because you are still clinging to your fictional historical narrative. Even the Israelis who fought in the 1948 war don't believe that nonesense about a 100 to 1 ratio in favor of the Arabs. I'll go back into some earlier threads and retrieve for you the quotes from some of the Israelis who were there.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 08:58 PM

Oh well---I guess Uris, New Reports, Film Footage and pure numbers hold no interest to you.

You seem to have the quite the archive----is this obsessive on your part? Pray tell.


Bill H

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 09:13 PM

I have no shades of gray and...discourse with me is fruitles.

There's the bottom line folks. People have been arguing with CarolC about Israeli/Palestinian issues for years. Over the course of thousands and thousands of posts, she has been remarkably consistent in toeing the Palestinian party line. There really is no point in arguing with her. As she herself has stated, she has no shades of gray and discourse with her is fruitless.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 09:22 PM

I've got plenty of numbers, Bill H.

You seem to have the quite the archive----is this obsessive on your part? Pray tell.

You'll probably never believe this, but I never really had an opinion on this subject prior to 2002, except to pretty much accept, without question, the prevailing attitudes towards Arabs and Muslims (and Palestinians) that were the norm in the areas where I lived during the period of my growing up years when such things can become inculcated. Most of my friends were Jewish, I lived in an area with a sizable Jewish population, and when there were Arabs present, such as some exchange students at my high school, I avoided them along with the rest of my friends. And I never really questioned the legitimacy of any of the stereotypes that abound in the US about Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians. If you do a search on my screen name, you'll see that I never even posted to any threads on the subject of the Middle East prior to spring of 2002. I just didn't know much of anything about it. And I shared the anger of US and Israeli Jews whenever Palestinian "terrorists" killed innocent people.

In spring of 2002, I saw things on my TV coming out of the Israeli incursion into the Occupied Territories that I couldn't believe were possible. I saw Israeli snipers shooting at unarmed old Palestinian women in the street. I saw a Palestinian man sitting in his living room with the bodies of his dead sister and brother-in-law, whose bodies had begun to subside into shapeless masses because the man couldn't leave his apartment to remove the bodies. He'd been there for two or three days with the bodies of his dead family. I would never have believed these things could possibly be committed by the government of Israel.

Then I started listening to and reading the words of the people who were trying to justify these things. They kept saying that all of the Palestinians hate all of the Jews, and that they are brought up and educated on this hate. And I started noticing that the only people I was hearing and seeing expressing hatred towards anyone else were the people who hate Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs. This didn't add up. So I started asking questions. And then I started finding answers on my own. And I found the Jewish human rights organizations. And the things I was learning from them made everything add up for the first time.

And ever since then, everything I have learned has come about because of people like you and the others on this thread and numerous other threads who ask me questions and who say things that don't add up to me. If it weren't for the other people in this forum who keep starting threads like this one and challenging me in them, I guess I wouldn't have much of an archive at all.

I'm not going to get those quotes or those numbers I mentioned tonight. I'm tired. I'll work on it tomorrow.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Rabbi-Sol
Date: 20 Jul 04 - 10:26 PM

Carol was kind enough to tell us how and why she became an advocate for the Palestinian cause. I am curious about you Jack. When and how did you be come interested in the plight of the Palestinians ? Was it before you met Carol or afterwards ? SOL ZELLER

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 12:09 AM

I'm not particularly interested in the plight of the Palestinians. I'm interested in Peace in the Holy Land. I'm interested in seeing the world move beyond the current conflict between the developed world and the developing world. I have not said I favour the Palestinians over the Israeli's and I certinly do not. But I have a certain amount of empathy and some knowledge of history. I can't help but sympathize with them just as I admire Israel's historic story of survival.

It seems you may disagree with this But I don't see any superiority of any group between Jews, Moslems or Christains I see far more differences among groups of humans than between them.

I look at the problem thinking what can we do from now on? Likud's and Hamas' actions shown that they do not want peace. I'm not so sure about Arafat. But since he is duely elected, he needs a chance to try. No bombing police stations, no occupation, no fence. If he is given a fair chance and then fails to bring peace then we have reason to ask the Palestinians to elect someone else.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Peace
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 12:15 AM

Will he get to keep the $300,000,000?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: mg
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 12:46 AM

I knew as a child there was something wrong. Not that anyone ever said anything. But something about the way the nuns told us to refer to the Holy Land as such and not call it anything else. I was born in 1948. This must have been around 1957 or 58....we just sensed something was going on that was not right. I am very offended by some things..the "making the desert"..add swampland now I guess too" Bloom...how come Jaffa oranges were so famous if the place was a desert swamp? How about the olive orchards? The dates? The sheep? It's a catastrophe built on a catasrophe. I'm an omniist..I want everyone to have what they need. I think you can't have endless expansion and totally open arms in such a small area, such a small populated area. A small, populated, hostile (now) area. I think there should have been definite borders enforced at the time, and supplemental areas on every continent to handle overflow population. I personally would have given Israel a big chunk of Germany and Austria. That would make more sense. I can not for the life of me understand the "God gave it to us" argument. I can't go back to Ireland and claim what my ancestors lost. I'm sure there is a holy book somewhere that says I can, but I can't.   No one can, unless they still have title (guess what?)

That said, I would, as I have said before, shoot a terrorist point blank. I would take serious measures, many of which are being taken. I also think that many countries, led by the U.S., no actually, led by Great Britain which sort of caused this mess, should be absolutely encouraged to take in many refugees. Palestinian and Jews from oppressed situations. Arab states should do much much more. A free Iraq should be able to absorb a number. I read somewhere..the recent USA supplement, that Iraq could feed the Middle East..does that sound right? Kuwait said so...anyway, maybe they could use a lot of farmers. I also think we need to find trades for many of the Palestinians that would benefit the world..like making eyeglasses, artificial limbs, AIDS medicines etc...they could specialize in this...

I think we need to watch how our money is spent over there, and so does the U.N.....lots of daylight might help....helping the farmers of Palestine get to their lands safely, and be guarded from the settlers is something that has to be done. Getting ambulances through checkpoints doesn't sound that hard to me. Have female guards on both sides for female patients. Strip the patients naked in a checkpoint, check for explosives, transfer to an ambulance on the other side. Add a few minutes but not the hours that are happening now. Have explosive sniffing dogs here and there and everywhere.

I am absolutely totally against the terrorism and the bombings. Don't confuse me with anyone who is for it.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 12:50 AM

Are you saying that he has three hundred million dollars? If he does he is quite a hero to stay where he is under constant threat of assassination by Israeli politicians. He must really love his people.

LOL LOL

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: freda underhill
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 07:48 AM

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Strollin' Johnny
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 08:14 AM

Mary - "I also think that many countries, ........ led by Great Britain which sort of caused this mess, should be absolutely encouraged to take in many refugees".

We already do. A very great many.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 08:22 AM

Referring to Arafat, Jack the Sailor sez: Are you saying that he has three hundred million dollars?

From that, I waould have surmised that Jack the Sailor has been hiding under his trailer and missed all the media coverage of Arafat siphoning off $300 million of Palestinian Authority funds into his personal bank accounts.

Or maybe, Jack the Sailor missed the Mudcat thread about Arafat's $300 million dollars. A thread dominated by his his wife, CarolC, and her 24 posts attacking them that would be critical of Arafat.

But, wait a minute, Jack the Sailor himself posted five times to that thread, saying: Arafat is corrupt! That was you point "Water Pricehouse" wasn't it? Now I have agreed. I am confident that everyone who has posted will agree. Arafat's corruption has never been a secret.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 08:29 AM

I'm not so sure about Arafat. But since he is duely elected, he needs a chance to try.

The Palestinian election was almost eight years ago. In a democracy, "duely elected*," means a term that expires after a time-limited term.


*I'm sure Jack the Sailor meant to say "duly elected." But I won't camm him on that because Mudcat is, as J0hn from Hull says, a music and Israel-bashing site, not a speling/spolling/spelling site.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 10:33 AM

Why do Palestinians suffer, year after year, despite the opportunity of the Oslo process, despite massive international financial aid, despite the undeniable Israeli desire for peaceful resolution? Two competing explanations are regularly put forth: blame Israel, or blame Arafat.

One view, pushed relentlessly by CarolC and jack the Sailor, holds that IDF actions in the West Bank and Gaza create a desperate culture, incapable of positive development. The other, Israeli position has long been that Yassir Arafat's corrupt regime perpetuates the suffering of his own people by continually deflecting all blame upon Israel and fomenting self-defeating Palestinian terrorism.

Though world media coverage has overwhelmingly adopted the blame-Israel approach, over the past few days the Palestinian people themselves have made it clear that Yassir Arafat's corrupt regime lies at the heart of their problems. A wave of kidnappings, the resignation of Arafat's prime minister, and street violence targeting an Arafat crony drove much of the world press (including the Arab press!) to finally point the finger at Arafat:

쳌œ Times of London: 'Arafat's policy of divide and rule has not only neutralized Palestinian rivals but stymied any political and economic progress... Mr Arafat's cynicism has now run its course, and stoked the present conflict.'

쳌œ MSNBC: 'The walls are closing in on Yassir Arafat...never before have so many disparate groups of Palestinians, including those from Arafat's own Fatah movement, formed such a united front on such a clearly definable issue 쳌\ end corruption or else.'

쳌œ Arab Times (Kuwait): 'Mr Arafat should quit his position because he is the head of a corrupt authority. There is no point for him to remain in politics... He has destroyed Palestine. He has led it to terrorism, death and a hopeless situation... All Arab leaders know this fact. It won't be possible for us to gain from the Middle East road map for peace if this man remains in power.'

쳌œ BBC quoted a Jenin Martyrs' Brigade spokesman: 'With all due respect to President Arafat, the Palestinian Authority cannot continue being monopolised by [Arafat] and his relatives...we have our own ways to show our rejection.'

쳌œ Al-Quds Al-Araby (London): 'What is happening in Gaza is a healthy phenomenon because it is a revolution against corruption and the corrupt... This is a warning not only to Mr Arafat... but to all Arab regimes which subjugate their people by turning a deaf ear to their calls for comprehensive change.'

쳌œ Pravda: Under the headline, 'Nobody trusts Arafat any more,' stated that 'Everything Yasser Arafat has been doing can be described as an illusion of reforms.'

쳌œ Daily Star (Lebanon): 'Mr Arafat increasingly lacks credibility and legitimacy... He has brought Palestine to its knees by relying on symbolism rather than bringing about results.'

쳌œ And long-time Arafat apologist, United Nations envoy Terje Roed-Larsen, finally broke rank and said that the PA has 'made no progress on its core obligation to take immediate action on the ground to end violence and combat terror, and to reform and reorganize.' UN chief Kofi Annan echoed the remarks.

But The Guardian 쳌\ McGrath of Harlow's media outlet of choice 쳌\ declared in a bold July 17 headline: 'Don't Blame Arafat'

The prominent piece, by former Guardian Mideast correspondent David Hirst, not only exonerates Arafat for the collapse of peace efforts, but goes so far as to 1) accuse Israeli intelligence figures of desiring the intifada, and 2) blaming Israel for the entire US invasion of Iraq.

Even when the Guardian gets around to addressing the anti-Arafat riots, the paper's editors can't bring themselves to call for his resignation, stating it would be 'alarming' if Arafat falls from power: 'the already grievous burden imposed on Palestinians will become intolerable if the regime falls apart... Israel must offer more incentives for moderation.'

With Palestinian rejection of Arafat's corruption and cronyism placing his regime on the apparent verge of collapse, The Guardian, like CarolC and Jack the Sailor, clings to the blame-Israel rhetoric.

If the Palestinian people are going to rise above the situation they've been in for far too long, it is vital we recognize that the sad state of the Palestinian people is due first and foremost to the tragic failure of Arafat's leadership.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 10:47 AM

One view, pushed relentlessly by CarolC and jack the Sailor, holds that IDF actions in the West Bank and Gaza create a desperate culture, incapable of positive development. The other, Israeli position has long been that Yassir Arafat's corrupt regime perpetuates the suffering of his own people by continually deflecting all blame upon Israel and fomenting self-defeating Palestinian terrorism.

Though world media coverage has overwhelmingly adopted the blame-Israel approach, over the past few days the Palestinian people themselves have made it clear that Yassir Arafat's corrupt regime lies at the heart of their problems. A wave of kidnappings, the resignation of Arafat's prime minister, and street violence targeting an Arafat crony drove much of the world press (including the Arab press!) to finally point the finger at Arafat:

Here's the flaw in your reasoning, GUEST, and it's big enough to drive an iceberg through...

When the Palestinians are showing their dissatisfaction with Arafat's regime, they commit these kinds of acts against other Palestinians within the Occupied Territories. When they are trying to effect change in the way they are treated by the government of Israel, they commit those kinds of acts against Israelis.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 01:29 PM

Are the real people done with this topic? I'm tired enough of it. How about we go on to something else?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 01:53 PM

If you, and especially your wife, goes on to something else, then the Middle East will probably disappear as a topic on Mudcat.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 07:11 PM

Is that a promise, GUEST?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 07:57 PM

Who knows if it is a promise---perhaps a hope.   Then what---you will ruminate amongst yourselves? Good idea----no disagreements by others who also hold an opinion.

Hopefully, at some point, you might visit the Metropolitan Museum or some other one---you will see all the shades there---gray being one.

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Little Brother
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 08:15 PM

Hey Jack the Sailor, sorry for the delay in getting back to you but I've been out of town the last couple of days. In answer to your question, no I'm not from the band even though I do play a little guitar. As far as a dialogue is concerned I'm afraid it will only lead to frustration on both our parts. This is a hot topic if there ever was one and we are both set in our views. We'll just have to agree to disagree.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 21 Jul 04 - 08:17 PM

Bill H, do you have any shades of gray when it comes to people promoting lies such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", or Holocaust denial? I tend to doubt it. The reason the promotion of these kinds of lies should not be tolerated is because they cause the oppression and the deaths of innocent people (mostly Jews). There should be no shade of gray about the fact that it is wrong to spread these kinds of vicious lies.

It's no different when people promote lies that cause the oppression and deaths of innocent people who are not Jewish. The historical narrative that you have been taught to you and most of the rest of us here in the US and in Israel about the history of the Middle East conflict is fiction (not unlike the American historical narrative that justifies atrocities committed against Native Americans and Blacks). It is not true. And this fiction is being used as justification for the oppression and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the killing of innocent people.

We're all human beings, Bill. None of us is any more exalted than any of the rest of us. Telling lies (bearing false witness) in order to promote an agenda that harms people is wrong, whether it is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or the lies that you have been taught about the Palestinians.