#This is what I mean when I say US political leaders see Zionism- & the Israeli state specifically- as an answer to the ‘Jewish Question’ | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

jewish-privilege · 6 years ago

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I am a lifelong Democrat. I believe the party stands for the principles that reflect Jewish values and will create a brighter future for every American, including American Jews, and for the world—from gay rights to access to health care to racial justice to women’s rights to the fight against poverty and for equal access to a prosperous future. The year I spent working to reelect Barack Obama—dedicating much of that time to outreach to Jewish communities on behalf of the president—was the best of my life. It was the most inclusive, diverse, respectful space I have ever worked, a place where my Judaism was not tolerated—it was celebrated. Together we built strong coalitions across communities and, I believe, a better America for all.

It is with this background and with these beliefs that I issue a warning to my friends and colleagues in the Democratic Party: Nothing in this life is promised.

Jewish-Americans are frightened, angry, and looking for leadership from the party to address a global crisis that hits us close to home. I know because I have been hearing from them, with increasing urgency. They fear that the climate of anti-Semitism in America right now is echoing 1930s Europe. They are remembering the warning signs that their bubbes whispered to them and renewing their passports. It may seem overwrought to you, but Egyptian Jews thought they would always be welcomed in Egypt. German Jews thought they would always be welcomed in Germany. This has been the story of Jews, for centuries and throughout the world.

They are frightened because they have heard silence from people they thought were friends, and worse from those they at least considered allies. They fear the Democrats are abandoning them. They say they plan to stop volunteering and donating, that they are afraid the Democratic Party doesn’t include them anymore, or won’t include them soon. They tell me how unthinkable this was for them even a month ago. But then they tell me the fears started before that. That they’ve faced growing anti-Semitism from various corners of the progressive movement for years, that they’re looking at what’s happening in the U.K. and thinking we are about to be kicked out of one more place in the long history of Jewish exclusion and disenfranchisement.

We need to see Democrats addressing anti-Semitism across the political spectrum, including from within the party and within the progressive movement. Because here is the truth: American Jews could stay home on election day. American Jews could decide their synagogue’s capital campaign for synagogue security needs their money instead. American Jews could decide our feet are tired of canvassing. American Jews are key to turning swing states blue. We are a reliable bloc of voters, donors and volunteers, but we are not promised to Democrats. Every vote needs to be earned. We need to see action, we need to feel respected, we want to be valued by the party we overwhelmingly support. We want your full-throated support during a frightening time.

American Jews need the Democratic Party to stand with us, and we need to stand with the Democratic Party. There is too much at stake.

...Jews have real reason for fear in America right now. We have a white nationalist movement that is growing. There is an undeniable, global rise in anti-Semitism. It is happening in France, in England, in New York City. Hate crimes are rising across the U.S., and rising against Jews at a rapid pace. Blood has already been spilled inside a synagogue.

America is experiencing political instability, and historically that bodes badly for Jews—and we must not lose sight of how we got here. We have a president who dove into the American psyche and embraced our darkest histories and worst hatred. He launched the Muslim ban. He brought extreme anti-gay policy into the mainstream with his VP. He called African countries “shitholes.” He launched campaign ads with Hillary Clinton surrounded by Jewish stars and dollar bills. He excused and endorsed violence against protesters at his rallies—even discussing the possibility of paying legal fees of those in violent confrontations. Trump’s MAGA campaign embraced hate, viscerally and loudly, and has made many historically targeted minority groups in America feel less safe. Hate crimes began to pick up during a racially charged, frightening election season and shot upwards after his election. I know you remember the crushing, paralyzing fear and shock in the days after Charlottesville.

And language has extended to other vulnerable groups, too, and those attacks reverberated back on our community with grave consequences. He created a narrative in which refugees, including children, were somehow an existential threat to America. He claimed that there were terrorists and criminals hiding within the migrant caravan – a claim that was a lie. He spoke at campaign rallies claiming that the Democratic Party was encouraging people to “break into our country.”...

Despite the fact that Trump’s claims of potential violence from refugees was a political tactic, some took it seriously—including, tragically, the shooter who took 11 lives at the Tree of Life synagogue, who believed that because of Jewish support of refugees, especially HIAS, Jews must be killed to protect Americans from the violent threat at our border. Trump created the environment which led to emboldened white supremacists, xenophobic frenzy, and eventual violence—including violence against Jews.

You would think that this sort of behavior would inspire wall-to-wall cohesion among those who oppose the president—a commitment to working together to fight his words and actions. Instead, we have seen a tragic fracturing on the left, with sharp and painful faults opening up around Jews, anti-Semitism, allyship and Israel.

I have been deeply critical of those in the progressive movement who have fallen down on anti-Semitism, but I do not believe the failures of those activist movements are analogous to the Democratic Party. One clear example is the Women’s March. After serious allegations of anti-Semitism among Women’s March leaders were reported, the DNC pulled out of partnership with them—and while some 2020 Democratic candidates participated in local iterations of the march, not a single one attended the March in Washington.

Another is the response to Ilhan Omar’s recent comments about Israel and American Jews. Within 24 hours of her first offensive remark, Omar had been formally reprimanded by Nancy Pelosi and many senior House Democrats. And after she engaged in divisive and frightening rhetoric again one week later, Democrats passed a full-throated condemnation of anti-Semitism, one that additionally reiterated their dedication to fighting against all hatred for a stronger America. That broadening reflects Jewish values of justice and inclusion, and ultimately strengthens the fight against anti-Semitism.

An additional challenge facing us is the Democratic Party’s relationship to Israel. Here’s the reality: There are forces on the left that want to create a divide between Democrats and Israel. There are people who want to see Democrats embrace BDS and anti-Zionism. This movement is small, but it has the potential to grow. Since over 92 percent of Jews consider themselves pro-Israel, this creates an obvious tension. While Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep Rashida Tlaib have been depicted as the new face of this exciting class of freshman Dems, in actuality, this freshman class is full of Israel supporters. For example, Rep. Max Rose, won a seemingly impossible race in Staten Island, a district that went for Trump by 9 points. Rep. Rose is a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and lists supporting Israel as one of his top priorities in Congress. He is deeply committed to continuing bipartisan support for Israel. Rep. Elaine Luria is another freshman in Congress after unseating incumbent Republican Scott Taylor. She is staunchly pro-Israel and has already taken a bipartisan trip to Israel. She opposes the Iran deal and BDS and supported moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Former CIA analyst Elissa Slotkin also won her race in the Michigan 8th against Mike Bishop. While serving at the Pentagon, she helped finalize the 10-year Memorandum of Understanding between the U.S. and Israel. These incredible new members of Congress, deeply supportive of Israel, all flipped their districts red to blue. That means they will face fierce 2020 elections when the GOP seeks to regain those seats. They need our support to continue to be strong Jewish pro-Israel voices in Congress. They shouldn’t be punished for others’ mistakes.

Additional pro-Israel freshman Dems include Ayanna Pressley, the first black lawmaker from Massachusetts. She is against BDS and enjoys a “warm and productive relationship” with her local Jewish community and the Boston JCRC. Mikie Sherrill, another veteran who flipped her seat, is also strongly pro-Israel and supports continued military aid for Israel. Beyond freshmen, examine Democratic Party leadership Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Hakeem Jeffries, all boasting impeccable pro-Israel records, to say nothing of Nita Lowey, chair of the powerful Appropriations Committee.

It’s also worth noting that while 92 percent of American Jews define themselves as pro-Israel, 59 percent of American Jews say they are critical of at least some Israeli policies. There should be no appetite for smears, anti-Semitic rhetoric or wholesale condemnation of Zionism, but there is plenty of room for substantive, policy focused debate.

It is true that two freshman members of Congress have chosen to engage in dishonest and ugly rhetoric about the state of Israel. I hope they take meetings with Israeli and American victims of Palestinian terror. I hope they meet with families whose kids were targeted by bomb-filled balloons in Southern Israel, and they hear what it feels like to tell your children to be afraid of balloons. I hope that they hear from Persian Jews who are messaging me telling me how angry they are to hear the country they fled compared to Israel, especially by a fellow refugee. I hope they hear from FSU Jews who are writing me telling me how dual-loyalty charges turned their family into refugees and how frightened talk of allegiances makes them. Talk to Democrats in Congress and tell them stories they have never heard and won’t ever hear without you. Tell them if they want your support, they will need to earn it.

It is true that the party has stumbled to address anti-Semitism within its caucus. It is true that we have been disappointed by many members of the Democratic Party and by their slow or inadequate response to anti-Semitism at home, around the world, and within our own movement.

But the Democratic Party is the political home of 75 percent of American Jews. I believe we can stay in our political home, where our values of justice have always lived, and create a stronger party that learns from the mistakes of the past couple of months.

And the way to do this is how Jews in America have always expressed themselves politically—by engaging those around us, especially those who claim to be our leaders. Schedule an in-district meeting. Go to a town hall. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Show up to your local Democratic Party. Call your member of Congress everyday and tell them how you feel. There are actions he or she can take right now to support our community. Tell them to pass the Anti-Semitism Envoy Act and the Domestic Terror Prevention Act—two bills that will help keep our community safer and are ADL legislative priorities. Look to your local party for action as well, especially if you live in one of the five American states with no hate-crime statutes to protect you and other communities.

We should tell them our stories. Members, especially freshmen, genuinely are moved by constituents and their stories all the time. Our stories are worth hearing. We must stand up and fight this. We must involve ourselves more and more deeply in our party—not less. We must run for delegates, vote in primaries and get involved in local party politics, and make our voices heard. Be the Democrats you wish to see in the party. The answer is not to leave—but to fight.

#carly pildis #antisemitism #long post #leftist antisemitism

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ruminativerabbi · 6 years ago

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Three Good People

Just this week, three separate emails landed in my inbox that actually made me feel encouraged and hopeful about the future. Since so much of what I’ve written about lately has been so dour and/or anxiety-provoking, I thought I’d change up the pace this week and write instead about three recent events that made me feel hopeful about the future.

First up was the speech delivered at an American Jewish Committee forum in Brussels last week by Sebastian Kurz, the chancellor of Austria (and at age thirty-three the youngest serving head of government in the world). My feelings about Austria in general are complicated, and not least of all because my initiation into the whole world of Shoah-displaced people was via my parents’ next-door neighbors who were refugees from Austria and whose stories of life in Nazi Vienna were beyond terrifying. Nor have my sentiments become less complex with the passage of time, as I continue to marvel at the Austrians’ post-war success in turning themselves from a nation of avid Nazi supporters who enthusiastically welcomed union with Germany in 1938 into, by war’s end just eight years later, a victim nation to be pitied and rebuilt. Nor was this a momentary lapse of reasonableness: the so-called “victim theory,” according to which Austria had nothing for which to apologize and no sins for which to atone became the foundational idea of post-war Austria for decades and decades, only giving way to a more nuanced understanding of Austria’s role in the war (and in the exile and extermination of its Jewish citizenry) after Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi officer, became Federal President of Austria in 1986 and forced the issue onto the public stage both in Austria and abroad.

That was then, however. And now is a whole ’nother story. I first became interested in Sebastian Kurz when I read a transcript of a speech he delivered last June in Jerusalem at a forum sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. One by one, the man addressed every skeleton in his nation’s closet, forcing both air and light into that traditionally very dark space and speaking words that would once have seemed impossible to hear from an Austrian politician.

First, he took on the myth of Austrian victimhood. “Austria used to see itself as the first victim of the Nazis,” he said plainly enough. But then he went on to make his real point. “That is certainly true for all those who fought in the resistance, whom we cannot thank enough. But the ones who gathered in large numbers in Vienna in March 1938 [i.e., when Germany incorporated Austria into the Reich] were not victims. The ones who watched and participated when their neighbors were robbed, thrown out, and murdered were not victims. And the ones who committed the terrible mass murder of Jews were not victims at all. To remember means to admit the truth. At that time, many Austrians supported a system which killed over 6 million Jews from all over Europe and beyond, among them more than 60,000 fellow Austrian Jewish citizens in Austria alone!”

I was impressed. But he went much further. He admitted that Shoah survivors were specifically not welcomed back to Austria after the war and that his nation’s lack of generosity towards people who had been publicly humiliated and robbed of their possessions was a heavy burden all Austrians must now bear. And then he went on to talk about the efforts being made to foster what he called “a culture of commemoration” in Austria’s schools and to create a Shoah memorial in Vienna. Finally, he spoke warmly about his nation’s ongoing support for Israel, announced a million-Euro gift to Yad Vashem, and concluded with these words: “Let me state very clearly: Austria supports Israel and the global fight against anti-Semitism not for political or economic reasons, but as part of our friendship, of our moral obligation, to humanity. Only if Jewish people can live without restriction in peace and security can the eternal call “never forget” truly become a “never again.”

But that was last year’s speech and now, just this last week, Chancellor Kurz was back at an AJC forum, this one in Brussels, to talk about the resurgence of European anti-Semitism. I listened carefully and I recommend that my readers all do too. (You can click here to hear the speech, which is only less than twenty minutes long. Skip forward to the eleven-minute mark in the clip, which is where Kurz begins to speak. There is no translator; Kurz speaks in excellent, clear English.) Again, he speaks openly about the grief and guilt he feels as a citizen of Austria when he contemplates his nation’s role in the Shoah. (He uses the term “Shoah” too, which also impressed me for some reason.) He resumes his theme about the importance of supporting Israel, which he references as a “stronghold of democracy, rule of law, and prosperity in the Middle East and in the whole world.” But this speech was primarily about anti-Semitism and I found his comments so important that I want to share them with you all in detail.

He declares openly that, in his opinion (as in mine), “anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are often two sides of the same coin.” The latter especially is not to be confused with being opposed to this or that Israeli policy; anti-Zionism is the global refutation of Israel’s right to exist and the Chancellor correctly understood that there can be no more precise definition of anti-Semitism than that. Particularly moving were his comments about anti-Semitism on the micro level: “No one, no matter who they are, where they are from, or what their faith is, must ever feel afraid to walk in the streets of any European country. We owe this assurance to all people in Europe and especially to the Jewish community.” Try to imagine Kurt Waldheim saying those words other than perhaps sarcastically!

I encourage you to watch the speech and to listen. There are so many horrific things in the world, so many haters, so much violence, so many reasons to feel unsafe and insecure. And then this one person appears on the stage, this very young man, who seems to see things clearly, who is in a position to make a huge difference, and who does not seem to fear speaking his mind openly and courageously. I listened to the youtube clip three times in a row and can only say that Sebastian Kurz accomplished something that I can’t recall an Israeli or American politician doing in quite some time: he made me feel fully hopeful that there are good people in the world…and that the world will be a safer and better place because such people exist in it.

And then I listened to two other speeches and was just as impressed. It was, given my generally dour mood over these last months, a remarkable experience.

First, I listened to the speech Representative Steny H. Hoyer (D-Maryland) delivered at AIPAC last Monday. He’s a good speaker, but it was the content of his remarks that I found so heartening: here was a Democrat—and not just a Democrat but the Democrat serving as House Majority Leader—who spoke passionately about his support for Israel in the way that was clearly meant to distance himself and his colleagues from the two outspoken anti-Israel Democrats in the House, Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan). When he dared any who would accuse Israel supporters of dual loyalty to include him in their charge, he sounded to me like an old-time Democrat for whom standing with Israel publicly and unambivalently would have been as natural as supporting any other one of our nation’s allies. His language was clearly aimed at those, like Omar and Tlaib, who frame their criticism of Israel using anti-Semitic tropes. He said that he and most Democrats stand “proudly and unapologetically” with Israel. He announced plans to lead a large delegation of Democrats to Israel later in the year. But most heartening of all was when he said this: “I am part of a large, bipartisan coalition in Congress supporting Israel. I tell Israel's detractors: accuse us. And millions of Americans, regardless of race or faith or partisan label, stand with Israel because they understand why our relationship with Israel is so important. Accuse us all!” He took a lot of heat for those words later on, including from some of his own colleagues, and tried to make it clear that he was speaking for Israel rather than against any specific individual. But his words were clear and heartfelt. I came away remembering that although Israel has some vocal enemies in Congress, it also has many friends…among whom Steny Hoyer certainly deserves to be numbered.

And then I listened to my third speech of the week, the one delivered at AIPAC by Joan Ryan, who just quit the Labour Party after forty years as a Labour M.P. in the British House of Commons over the issue of the anti-Semitism that has gripped the party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbin, whom she described openly as someone who “proudly declares Hamas and Hizbollah to be his friends” and who now “seeks to demonize and delegitimize Israel.” She isn’t alone, of course: nine other Labour M.P.’s have quit the party in recent weeks over the rampant anti-Semitism and virulent anti-Israelism of is leader. For her decision to join them, she has been rewarded with what she herself characterized as a “torrent of abuse” that included threats of murder and rape. And yet she has stood her ground and spoke at AIPAC with a kind of confidence born of profound conviction.

I’d like to give her the final word because I was so impressed with her remarks. “Sticking to your convictions,” she said, “isn’t always popular but it is always right.” (We all think that in theory, but which of us has paid the price Joan Ryan has for putting our money where our mouths are?) And then, after mentioning the vicious threats she has had to endure, she waved them all away graciously and bravely, noting that threats like that only strengthen her resolve to stand up for British Jews from attacks from the right and from the left, and to stand up for Israel. And she openly called on us all to “stand together—proud of each other and proud of Israel in the battles that lie ahead.”

So after so much dour news from so many different quarters and for so many months, these three speeches helped me recall that there really are decent people out there who have no trouble standing up for what they perceive to be right. That none of the people cited above is Jewish or a citizen of Israel also means a lot to me: it’s so easy to feel alone in this uncaring, dismal world that it is incredibly encouraging to recall that we aren’t alone, and that Israel also isn’t. The sonim won’t go away. But apparently neither will the good people. And where good people stand their ground and face down their foes, history has taught us again and again that they eventually prevail.

#Steny Hoyer #Joan Ryan #Sebastian Kurz

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papirouge · 3 years ago

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What’s your personal take on the conflict in Ukraine? I had a friend mention to me that she thinks despite all the aid, the purpose is to create another Zionist-Israeli/Palestine conflict. It’s profitable to have wars and it’s all about money meanwhile actual citizens are just ended up fucked with losing homes and loved ones for the name of money. Nobody wins except those who gain their profits. I believe war profiteers are damned…. I mean, look at Palestine. More bombs and strikes on Gaza, no end in sight. More funds are put into those weapons. The cycle continues. She thinks it’ll be the same in Ukraine. Idk

I briefly talked about it shortly after the war started off, but I'm team no one. I literally have no dog in this fight. Europeans are back to their roots of murdering each other for greed and power hungry leaders. Never forget that less and a century ago, Europe was in a bloody war so I'll never buy the MSM narrative of "oh we are not used to see this in Europe" dude...your own grandfather had most likely fought for WWI or WWII, get a grip : war is a cornerstone of the History of Europe. It's hilarious how hard they're trying to alienize it off their History lol

I'm just glad that African countries paid dust to Ukraine and their own now minding their business (FYI during WWII African colonies had been mobilized to help European countries sort out their stupid war, so they definitely understood the lesson of History).

I don't think the Russia vs Ukraine conflict is remotely comparable to Zionist Israel though, because the reason behind Israel policy of invasion and expansion is religion. While Russia attacking Ukraine is only motivated by political/economic reasons. Ukrainians and Russians are historically/socially (it's not rare that families/parents are spread across the borders of their 2 countries : on the other hand, Israli jews have this weird racial superiority complex over...anyone for being "God chosen people" but particularly Arabs and several Israeli political leaders called Palestinians cockroaches....or even joking about kill their were not human being; i.e Tsahal "merch" ⬇

That's also why, beside being a decent human being, as a Christian, I am fundamentally opposed to Zionism, because it is the actual antithesis of what Jesus told us about his return and how we should behave on earth : not using violence, not engaging in politics to make "God"'s way (Israelis settlers have the delusion of doing god's will by returning to the land Israel, and *still* being the god chosen people.....), WAITING FOR THE RETURN OF JESUS TO HAVE OUR KINDGOM and not trying to make it on our own. That's also why all the Christians supporting Israel have no idea of what they're doing and need to repent. Jews LOATHE Jesus and the Talmud states He's boiling into excrement....so yeah, Zionist Christians are a joke).

I totally believe all the people supporting Zionism will have the retribution they deserve though. You can't disobey commandment and support the synagogue of satan with no consequences.

I don't think Israel will stop though. When I say #freepalestine, it's a Palestine free of Zionism, but after Jesus return, who will kick the antichrist off the lead of Babylon which mos likely will sit on what we know today as Jerusalem (which, as you may know, world leaders are trying to make the capital of....Israel). Only God will stop & destroy the synagogue of satan.

#answered #free palestine

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diarrheaworldstarhiphop · 7 years ago

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Provoked by the predictable collapse of the farcical negotiations forced by Secretary of State John Kerry on the Palestinians and the Israelis, I wish to make a confession: I have no sympathy—none—for the Palestinians. Furthermore, I do not believe they deserve any.

This, of course, puts me at daggers drawn with the enlightened opinion that goes forth from the familiar triumvirate of the universities, the mainstream media and the entertainment industry. For everyone in that world is so busy weeping over the allegedly incomparable sufferings of the Palestinians that hardly a tear is left for the tribulations of other peoples. And so all-consuming is the universal rage over the supposedly monumental injustice that has been done to the Palestinians that virtually no indignation is available for any other claimant to unwarranted mistreatment.

In my unenlightened opinion, this picture of the Palestinian plight is nothing short of grotesquely disproportionate. Let me leave aside the Palestinians who live in Israel as Israeli citizens and who enjoy the same political rights as Israeli Jews (which is far more than can be said of Palestinians who live in any Arab country), and let me concentrate on those living under Israeli occupation on the West Bank.

Well, to judge by the most significant measure and applying it only to two instances of what is going on at this very moment: In Syria, untold thousands of fellow Arabs are starving, while according to the United Nations official on the scene in South Sudan, 3.7 million people, amounting to one-third of the population, are now facing imminent death by starvation.

And the Palestinians? True, when they wish to go from the West Bank into Israel proper, they are forced to stop at checkpoints and subjected to searches for suicide vests or other weapons in the terrorist arsenal. Once, when she was secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice bemoaned the great inconvenience and humiliation inflicted by such things on the poor Palestinians. Yet she had nothing to say about Palestinians dying of starvation on the West Bank, for the simple reason that there were none to be found.

Nor did anyone starve to death in Gaza when it too was under Israeli occupation. And despite propaganda to the contrary, neither is anyone facing the same fate in Gaza today because of the blockade the Israelis have set up to prevent clandestine shipments of arms intended for use against them.

Speaking of Gaza, it can serve as a case study of the extent to which the plight of the Palestinians has been self-inflicted. Thus when every last Israeli was pulled out of Gaza in 2005, some well-wishers expected that the Palestinians, now in complete control, would dedicate themselves to turning it into a free and prosperous country. Instead, they turned it into a haven for terrorism and a base for firing rockets into Israel.

Meanwhile little or nothing of the billions in aid being poured into Gaza—some of it from wealthy American Jewish donors—went to improving the living conditions of the general populace. Which did not prevent a majority of those ordinary Palestinians from supporting Hamas, under whose leadership this order of priorities was more faithfully followed than it was under Fatah, its slightly less militant rival.

As for the monumental injustice supposedly done to the Palestinians, it consists largely of losing territory in the war they themselves provoked in 1967, and the refusal of their demand that every inch of it be returned to them by the Israeli victors in that war. Such demands have always been known and universally denounced as revanchism or irredentism, most recently over the Russian seizure of Crimea. But where Israel is concerned, everything goes topsy-turvy, so that Palestinian irredentism is universally supported.

The accompanying and equally great injustice allegedly suffered by the Palestinians is that they have been denied a state of their own. But this hardly qualifies as unique, given that dozens of other ethnic groups—the Kurds being the most prominent—are in the same boat.

In any event, this "injustice" is also self-inflicted, since three times in the past 15 years the Palestinians have refused offers of a state on most of the territory taken by Israel in 1967 and with Jerusalem as its capital. They have justified these refusals by one pretext or another, but as anyone willing to look can see, what they truly want is not a state of their own living side by side with Israel but a state that replaces Israel altogether.

With this we come to the main reason I believe that the Palestinians do not deserve any sympathy, let alone the astonishing degree of it they do receive (and not least from many of my fellow Jews). It is that ever since the day of Israel's birth in 1948, they have never ceased declaring that their goal is to wipe it off the map. In all other contexts, this would be called by its rightful name of genocide and condemned by all decent people. Yet—here we go topsy-turvy again—for any and every step Israel takes to defend itself against so shamelessly evil an intent, it is the Israelis who are obsessively condemned at the U.N. and by the increasingly strident propagators of what calls itself "anti-Zionism" but is also increasingly indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Nor, alas, is it only the leaders of the Palestinians who harbor this evil intent. As revealed by poll after poll, as well as by the elections that led the way for Hamas to take power in Gaza, a decisive majority of the Palestinian people does so as well. No doubt this is the fruit of relentless indoctrination from above, but the damage has been done, and the end result is what it is.

Indeed, the best that can be said of both Palestinian leaders and led is that many of them no longer imagine—as did Gamal Abdel Nasser, the former president of Egypt—that they have the power to drive the Jews of Israel into the sea. Therefore they are now willing to give up pursuing the goal of genocide and to settle for the more modest objective of politicide—that is, to get rid of the Jewish state by transforming it, through various "peaceful" means like the "right of return," into a state with a Palestinian majority.

I for one pray that a day will come when the Palestinians finally let go of the evil intent toward Israel that keeps me from having any sympathy for them, and that they will make their own inner peace with the existence of a Jewish state in their immediate neighborhood. But until that day arrives, the "peace process" will go on being as futile as it has been so many times before and as it has just proved once again to be. Another thing that never changes: When John Kerry testified on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, it was the Israelis he blamed for this latest diplomatic fiasco.

Mr. Podhoretz was the editor of Commentary magazine from 1960 to 1995. His most recent book is "Why Are Jews Liberals?" (Doubleday, 2009).

#neoconservatism #Norman Podhoretz #israel

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schraubd · 7 years ago

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On Hating the Players While Loving the Game: The Progressive Dilemma in Israel and America

Donald Trump is effectuating a sea change in progressive Zionism.

That's not a novel hypothesis. But I mean to make the argument differently than it's usually presented.

If you asked me five, ten, fifteen years ago to associate "anger" at a country with a political orientation towards that country, I'd have said "revolutionary." If I am outright angry at a country, then I'm saying it needs to be (metaphorically, at least) burned to the ground, flipped over and radically restarted. Those who are angry at America do not also love America -- they think America is a poisoned chalice, a false promise. To be clear, I've never thought (and I don't think now) that dissent is incompatible with loving a nation. But this sort of quaking rage is a different beast -- if this is what one feels, it's because one thinks the entire endeavor is not worth saving.

And yet, right now, the attitude I feel towards America and its leaders is anger. I am angry at Donald Trump, and I'm angry at the congressional Republicans who enable him. More than that, I'm angry at the direction America has taken. Democracies are as they do, and as Richard Rorty once observed, "There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves." So, in a real sense, I'm deeply angry at America.

Many progressives share that sentiment. And some of them, certainly, channel that anger into a revolutionary critique. The election of Trump, and the careening of the Republican Party into a far-right political movement, demonstrates that America as we know it really is corrupted root-to-branch.

Yet most of us, I think, aren't going down that road (whether we should or not is a debate for another time). Our anger is not leading us to the conclusion that America cannot be saved, or that it is in its entirety a failed experiment. We continue to care about America; we continue to love America, we do not think that the current political environment -- rage-inducing as it may be -- indicates that "America" as an idea should be abandoned, tossed aside for something else.

And this, I think, is offering a new model for progressive engagement with Israel. If you asked me five, ten, fifteen years ago, "what is the political orientation towards Israel of someone who is angry at Israel," I'd have said "revolutionary." They want to destroy the Zionist state root-to-branch, and replace it with something else.

For Jews, an unbreakable syllogism created an unstable binary. The syllogism was that "If you're angry at Israel (not just "opposed to X policy", but angry) -- its practices, its leaders, its direction -- then you must want to see it destroyed." And so persons who started to feel anger were forced to choose. If they loved Israel, believed in it as a state, then they couldn't be angry towards it -- they had to sublimate and suppress those feelings, because accepting them meant (by syllogism) that they must want Israel to be destroyed. And by contrast, if that anger was irresistible, if they couldn't not be angry at this policy or that leader or those practices, then they had no choice (again, by syllogism) but to endorse the idea that Israel was a false promise, an indelible corruption, which must be torn out from the ground.

Now, to be sure, there are many people for whom anger at Israel really does come hand-in-hand with seeking its destruction. I'm not saying they don't exist, or that they represent the majority of those who have historically held attitudes like "anger" towards the Israeli state. But I don't think that connection holds syllogistically, and it is (amazingly enough) Donald Trump who has allowed me to see that.

The antipathy I hold towards Bibi Netanyahu is not different in kind to my attitude towards Donald Trump, and to be honest it's not that far off in degree either. And Netanyahu isn't even the worst actor -- proceed to the next circle out (not even to the fringes, but still people well within the Israeli political mainstream), look at your Miri Regevs and your Bezalel Smotrichs and your Naftali Bennetts and your Oren Hazans and your Ayalet Shakeds, and things get far worse. And for progressive Zionists, it is hard not to react to this with despair. I detest these people and all that they stand for, but they represent the dominant political coalition in Israel today. So if I loathe them and their policies ... where does that leave me? What's the point of caring about Israel, if this is the Israel of today?

Well, it leaves me in the same place I'm left vis-a-vis America today. The dominant political coalition in America is repulsive to me, it is horrifying, it is sickening. And yet my reaction to it has not been to throw up my hands and give up on America (nor has it been to softplay just how horrible Trump and his cohorts are). I care about America and believe in the idea of "America" -- maybe I shouldn't, but I do -- and so the implied association between anger and revolutionary rupture has not, yet at least, come to pass.

Donald Trump has illuminated the space for genuinely caring about, and investing in, a political community even as one is repelled by its leaders and its current political orientation. I live in that space every day right now, as an American. And learning how to do that is something that progressive Zionists have desperately needed, because the old binary -- abandon anger, or abandon ship -- wasn't going to work for much longer.

This is a lesson that Jews have learned at least once before. The post-Holocaust theology advocated by scholars like Yitz Greenberg and David Blumenthal have suggested that what Jews need to preserve a relationship with God is the legitimized ability to express anger towards God; in my scholarship I've extended this argument into the political context as well. It's a dangerous lesson because anger is a dangerous emotion, and because (at least in my formulation of it) this sort of anger does not imply any ethical obligation to continue to preserve the relationship going forward.

Nonetheless, one virtue of legitimizing a qualified role for anger in our political relationships is that it need not occupy the field. After the Holocaust, Jews may be angry at God -- but we are not just that. We'd be far more likely to become "just that" if our anger was delegitimized -- a sort of irrational hysteria, or proof that we are no longer Jews -- but it wasn't, and so we haven't.

Maybe I'm too sanguine. In part, this is because I dislike anger as a political emotion. I don't like myself when I'm angry; anger doesn't make me feel validated, it makes me feel sad. More to the point: I don't trust my political instincts when they're inflected by anger. I was not surprised to find that I've specifically critiqued anger as a political emotion in the context of Israel and Palestine. Yet I've also recognized that anger can have productive uses here, if it is appropriately cabined and doesn't metastasize into the dominant mode of relating to the conflict (on this more generally, see also). Because I don't like being angry, I'm less worried about the risk I'll want to stay angry for its own sake -- for me, allowing anger is a means of working through it to someplace more productive. But maybe that's not really the case, or at least not the case for everyone.

That's a nettlesome problem, and I'm not sure how to resolve it. I can't imagine a way of being a progressive Zionist that doesn't allow for one to be positively repelled by the current Israeli political climate, any more than I can imagine being a progressive American today who isn't horrified by our own nation's descent into an alt-right fever dream. Nonetheless, I do think that Trump has crystallized a mode of relating to Israel for progressive Jews that allows us to genuinely, in our bones, be upset at the direction Israel has taken -- not simply a bad headline here or there, but core features of its current politics -- without feeling the need to let go of it entirely. If I can do that for America, I can do it for Israel too.

via The Debate Link http://ift.tt/2BoMXnv

#America #Donald Trump #Israel #Jews #progressives

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antoine-roquentin · 7 years ago

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Yesterday, Haaretz columnist Rogel Alpher published a piece titled “Israeli Minister Shaked Takes After Mussolini”. In it he opined that Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was literally, not just metaphorically, a fascist. Alpher was referring to that speech where Shaked said: “Zionism should not continue, and I say here, it will not continue to bow down to the system of individual rights interpreted in a universal way.”

The minister’s announcement of a “moral and political revolution” aimed at strengthening national principles at the expense of universal individual rights was comparable to Mussolini’s “doctrine of fascism,” the columnist said. He cited Mussolini’s “revolutionary negation” of individualism and liberalism, wherein the nation “was a superior, super-personal reality … a moral law, a tradition, a mission binding together generations past, present and future, and all the individuals”(quoting from Jacob Talmon’s “The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution”).

Alpher’s column came after Gideon Levy’s column, which was also based on the speech Shaked gave, on that same critical sentence about Zionism and individual rights. But Levy actually thanked Shaked for “telling the truth” and for “speaking honestly.” And that truth was, as Levy put it: “Zionism contradicts human rights, and thus is indeed an ultranationalist, colonialist and perhaps racist movement.”

But now we need to step back a bit, and combine these two angles into a kind of intellectual 3D picture:

If Alpher is calling Shaked an actual fascist, based upon what she said, and if Levy is concluding that those words are a true and honest representation of Zionism itself, then the combined logic must be, that Zionism is itself a form of fascism.

That actually makes a lot of sense. It doesn’t have to mean Zionism is a carbon copy of Italian fascism, just like the crime of Apartheid doesn’t require identical features to Apartheid South Africa (and as I have recently opined, Zionism is Apartheid, and worse). Racist, ultra-nationalist endeavors tend to flock together in alliance, just like the Mussolini-Hitler alliance, or more recently the Netanyahu-Orban alliance (wherein Netanyahu threw Jewish philanthropist George Soros under the anti-Semitic Hungarian bus). There has of course also been the actual alliance between the Zionist Revisionists of Zeev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky and the Italian Fascists. Jabotnisky’s ideology, which informed the Jewish terrorist Irgun and Stern Gang factions in Palestine, was the informer of Menachem Begin’s Herut, which morphed into Likud.

When Jabotinsky’s fighters were training in the 1930’s, a leading Italian naval publication stated:

“In agreement of all the relevant authorities it has been confirmed that the views and the political and social inclinations of the Revisionists are known and that they are absolutely in accordance with the fascist doctrine. Therefore, as our students they will bring the Italian and fascist culture to Palestine.” (Noted in Eric Kaplan, The Jewish Radical Right: Revisionist Zionism and Its Ideological Legacy, 2005, see p. 149-171).

Alright, alright, some will say – that’s the right-wing Zionism, but what about the left wing?

Well, I believe that Ben-Gurion’s famous words from 1938, where he said that

”If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel”

are an epitome of that essentially fascist ‘revolutionary negation of individualism and liberalism, wherein the nation was a superior, super-personal reality, a moral law’. It is that will to sacrifice individuals – aye, even children – for the supposed ‘greater national good’. Note that Ben-Gurion was not speaking about soldiers fighting in a war. He was speaking about children, who weren’t even citizens of any “Jewish state” and never signed up for it. Under this all-encompassing Jewish ‘national’ notion, every Jew is considered a part. This comes full circle with Netanyahu speaking on the supposed behalf of Jews all over the world, saying to them “Israel is your home” in the wake of terror attacks on Jewish targets.

All Zionists understand this, even if it is at an instinctive level. The will to sacrifice Palestinian rights (as well as other rights) for the ‘national Jewish home’ is a core tenet of Zionism. There are no real moral qualms in Zionism about ethnic cleansing of Palestinians; any such qualms are quelled by the claim that it’s ‘complicated’. When a Zionist like the self-proclaimed ‘leftist’ Israeli historian Benny Morris finally concedes the fairness of the term ‘ethnic cleansing’, it comes with the supposedly-exonerating caveat–

“There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.”

Morris echoes Ben-Gurion’s words: “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it” (as quoted in Morris’s own book Righteous Victims). Yet Morris opines that Ben-Gurion should have gone further in his ‘transfer’: “If he was already engaged in expulsion, maybe he should have done a complete job.”

So these are the more ‘honest’ voices of Zionism. The voices that forgot to keep the mask of political correctness. They come from both right and left, but the right seems more prone to drop the mask.

Incidentally, Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair recently posted a virulently anti-Semitic meme, where George Soros is depicted as a global manipulator, controlling a reptilian, a caricature ‘Illuminati’ Jew, and a train of other figures who are supposedly the ‘food chain’ feeding off the Netanyahu family, all (except the reptilian) holding their hands in the “happy merchant” fashion. The meme, congratulated by the Nazi Daily Stormer as “awesome,” caused quite some outrage in Israel, especially in the left. But Communication Minister Ayoub Kara, who is Netanyahu’s ‘Arab puppet’, asserted that Yair Netanyahu was “just a kid playing on Facebook.“

Yair Netanyahu’s meme is an example of how Zionism brings anti-Semitism full circle (as I wrote last year). And when it does that, many distance themselves, temporarily, because it looks bad.

But what if it’s not temporary? What if Zionism is, indeed the embodiment of fascist ultra-nationalism, and is racist at its very core? This would mean that it is also, inherently, anti-Semitic, because it would turn against Jews for being Jews – if they do not toe the ultra-nationalist line. These would be “the wrong kind of Jews”, as Zionist leader (and later Israeli President) Chaim Weizmann said to Lord Balfour. The same Chaim Weizmann who met with Mussolini four times between 1923 and 1934.

Understanding that Israel is enacting Apartheid is not a very complicated conclusion nowadays. To understand that this Apartheid is part and parcel of the basic Zionist ideology informing it can be a bit harder, but it’s a logical step to make. Again, Israel does not have to copy South African Apartheid for the crime of Apartheid to be enacted, as was cogently and meticulously documented in this year’s UN commissioned report on Israeli Apartheid by professors Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley.

Likewise, Israel doesn’t have to copy Italian Fascism precisely for Zionism to be regarded as a fascist ideology. Alpher’s appraisal of Shaked’s words are actually an appraisal of Zionism, with its revolutionary, ultra-nationalist notions. And Levy says that Shaked is actually telling the truth about Zionism.

So the plot thickens, the net tightens. And for those who follow the logic of this, the question is really reduced to: Do you want to support a fascist ideology?

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rabbiandrewrosenblatt · 5 years ago

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From Debate to Dialogue

In 1992 I took Modern British Literature 3269 at Columbia University, taught by the celebrated professor, Palestinian nationalist, and author Edward Said. He used literary theory and criticism to argue that European colonialism was a system in which the indigenous people in colonized lands were portrayed in art, politics, and everyday discourse as racially inferior to the white Europeans who colonized them. A central thesis of this intellectual project was Orientalism (also the title of his book that popularized the notion) – which is the point that language has the power to normalize the racial distinctions and hierarchies that enabled European empires to colonize, oppress, and enslave the non-white inhabitants of the so-called Orient. A corollary to this was the claim that Zionism was an extension of European colonialism. He argued that the founders of the Zionist movement were white Europeans who followed the same strategy to displace Arabs that European colonizers had used to conquer and enslave non-white Indians, Asians, and Africans.

By the time I was in Prof. Said’s class, his reputation was well established. He had become an influential person in politics, advocating for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He had been an independent member of the Palestinian National Council. He had once acted on behalf of the US government to convey a peace plan to Yasir Arafat. Many of the Jewish students in my class naturally anticipated that there would be some discussion of politics. There was none.

However, according to my fellow students there was one episode of politics. It happened in a lecture that coincided with Yom Kippur, when none of the Jewish students were in attendance. The novel covered in that session was Youth by Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s work had been a central case study of Said’s doctoral thesis. Many of Conrad's works feature ships. In Youth, the ship is the Judea. However, in that particular class, Said referred to the ship as the Palestine. My classmates were confused; they would have had less context to question the nuance of this substitution than the Jewish students who observed Yom Kippur. The next class, we all anticipated further discussion about the novel, and his changing the name of the ship.

There was none.

If we apply Said’s method of critical analysis to the ‘text’ of his lecturing, then he was taking advantage of an opportunity to frame or re-frame the narrative of the defining conflict of his life – i.e., the birth of Israel at the expense of the birth of a Palestinian state. The classroom is often seen as a place where knowledge, truth, and history are defined for tomorrow’s leaders. If Said saw the birth of Israel as a racist, colonialist displacement of Arab Palestine, then re-naming Judea – the ancient designation for the Jewish state – would be a step toward reversing Orientalism.

Three weeks ago, I wrote a Friday message that commented on a podcast featuring Seth Rogen. That week’s writing got more responses than any other Friday message. Some were supportive and some critical. Last week my letter included an apology to Mr. Rogen and his family for the personal tone of my criticism of the podcast. I said the following:

In a message two weeks ago, I aggressively argued against Seth Rogen’s remarks regarding the founding of the State of Israel. The wording of the message implied a judgment of how our community and his family educated him. That was wrong, and my words should never have even suggested that. I apologize for expressing my arguments in terms that impugned the Rogen family. I, too, have to learn from my mistakes and errors

This week, I got a phone call from Mr. Rogen. I want to share what I learned from him and what I believe we agreed we learned from the reactions to the podcast.

The first and most important lesson is that we can all be guilty of oversimplifying each other’s positions or oversimplifying the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Rogen told me that he felt that his comments had been taken out of context. I had focused on a sound bite that was intended for a podcast on comedy. To clarify his position on Israel he linked me to a long-format podcast with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In this interview he said he realized, on reflection with his wife, “when having a conversation about something so sensitive...it is what we said and it is also what we did not say. When you're having even a humorous conversation about something so nuanced, leaving things out or omitting things can become just as bad as the things you do say.”

I now see that I had responded to an oversimplification at the same level, with platitudes. After speaking with Mr. Rogen and learning more about his personal values, I think that his position on Israel reflects a certain ideal, not entirely different from the philosophy of the Kibbutz movement – in which his parents met – that sought to bring a strong sense of justice and equality to the world. The humanitarian ethos of Zionism is very different from Prof. Said’s view of Zionism as an inherently racist enterprise.

From the Kibbutz movement’s perspective, the values of liberal democracy and fairness should be applied to the present situation. Israel’s treatment of Palestine and of Palestinians should reflect the humanitarian ideals that were at the core of the humanist labour movement. The argument Mr. Rogen advances sees the current policies and negotiation strategies as a betrayal of the founding principles of Israel. Many Israelis agree. I think there is much to value in such a perspective; dismissing the merits and values of such a perspective is not true to my own thinking, nor is it an effective way to get others to understand my opinion.

There is irony in the fact that this all began with a comedy podcast and a simple line about how Mr. Rogen’s Israel education was too narrow, and then was carried on by responses, including my own, that were similarly narrow. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that organized Jewish communities present a curriculum designed exclusively to build Jewish identity and love of Israel. It speaks to the nervousness of the diaspora about the disaffection and disappearance of Jews. It speaks to the reality that there are so many narrowly-defined anti-Israel counter-narratives out there – like Prof. Said’s linguistic turn on Youth – that it is only natural to advance a counter-counter-narrative. It speaks to the very real security concerns that Jews have had in Israel from 1920 to the present. However, narrowly focusing on any single factor leaves little room, if any, for a more fulsome presentation of the Palestinian condition portrayed in the media, in the arts, and in the classroom. Too often, it leaves out a balanced view of how dehumanizing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be to ordinary people on both sides – especially to Palestinians.

Mr. Rogen and I are probably more in agreement than he might think. In the weekly letter of 8 December 2017, I applied this principle [with Terry Neiman] to the Israel-Palestine situation as follows.

It is hard to imagine listening to a narrative from enemies who lie and mislabel us as an occupier, a Nazi, and a war criminal. It is hard to listen to people who cannot utter the word Israel without the modifier of Apartheid… However, in our experience, problems do not get solved without genuine appreciation of the story of the other side. Those who choose to remain callous to the opposite story in a conflict are doomed to a status quo of conflict.

Palestinians call their story the Nakba - the Catastrophe.

The Torah, at its core, values investigation that is broadly fact gathering to present the whole picture of any situation. The laws that emerge from this week’s Torah reading [Parshat Shoftim] concerning the procedures of the court reflect the need for both fact-finding and empathy. A panel of judges must include experts in the fields of practical knowledge. The law cannot exist outside of the factual knowledge of a conflict. Interestingly, the members of the court cannot be “exceedingly old.” Rashi understands this to mean that they must not be so detached from having raised their own children that they have ceased to have the patience and mercy that it takes to tolerate the indiscretions of youth.

There is a law in the Code of Torah Courts that if a court gives a unanimous verdict of guilty, then they must declare the accused exempt from punishment. One interpretation, a close reading of Maimonides in Sanhedrin 9:1, is that if everyone is of one mind to convict, then it may be that the court was biased or predisposed to find guilt and therefore was guilty of either prejudice, group-think, or both. As such, even those who are the most loyal defenders of Israel should be open to widening their lens.

I am ever mindful that my readers – many of whom I know personally – have a range of views and political leanings. My pulpit gives me the privilege to share my narrative with many, and affords me the advantage of controlling my email distribution list. In contrast to this, Edward Said had a captive, non-Jewish audience that lacked context for his interpretations, and lacked the power to challenge his academic pulpit. He was using his privilege to re-write someone else's narrative. Mr. Rogen and I, with very different audiences, share the quality of getting more diverse, unfiltered feedback than Said got in the classroom. This experience taught me that my words carried beyond my intended readership, and that those readers were sent emotionally and intellectually in a direction opposite to what I intended.

I believe that one’s ability to engage in meaningful reflections on Israel and its policy decisions and its treatment of the Palestinians suffers from being far from the realities on both sides of the conflict. We speak about Israel from the comfort and shelter of being an ocean and a continent away, and fail to appreciate what a luxury it is to opine on Israeli and Palestinian actions when we are not part of the facts on the ground.

On reflection, I see more clearly now how my conversations with political or intellectual critics and adversaries is different from my discussions with my co-author and contributing editor Terry Neiman. Over the years, Dr. Neiman and I have developed a process of dialogue. We agree, disagree, re-construct, re-approach, and incorporate each other’s perspectives. In contrast to that, the adversarial debates I have with others are more like competitive wrestling matches in which one person will be pinned or submit. To the extent that all our debates seek to open the perspectives of all, it is a good thing. To the extent that they intend to suppress voices and perspectives, it is a very bad thing.

I appreciate that Seth Rogen took the time to call me to sort this out. I don’t know if his conversations with me or with Haaretz changed his opinion or gave him opportunity to see things differently. I can say for myself it was an inspiration to read further, explore more, and to be disciplined enough not to fall further into the trap of electronically-mediated debate – the so-called echo chamber effect. The chiddush – the novel approach – here is that we stopped lobbing shots at each other in the media and started a dialogue. I look forward to less oversimplification, less winner-take-all debate, less competition for control of the narratives, and more dialogue.

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delwray-blog · 6 years ago

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THE GOAL OF ZIONISM

“Is To Destroy White Christian Civilization”

Do you really believe your Bible?

Jesus warned that the world would succumb to a one world dictator and that the entire world would follow after this Jewish “superman” leader known as the Anti-Christ. Many have asked how it is possible. How can mankind be so deceived?

Let me refer you to a document written by Lt. Col. Jack Mohr, US Army Ret. that well answers this question. It is so simple but so many Christians simply do not believe what the Scriptures teach. Do you really believe your Bible?

“Zionism, the political arm of Jewry, has openly declared their intention of destroying White Christian civilization, and to bring the world into the New World Order.”

“Give none offense, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God.” 1Cor. 10:32

A strange disagreement exists today between modern prophetic students and the people we know as Jews. The Futurist prophetic preachers of Judeo-Christian Fundamentalism affirm that the people we now know as Jews are “all of Israel”! And that they represented the twelve Israel tribes at the time Christ walked this earth, and are their descendants today, to whom, the land of Palestine was given by direct Divine mandate from Almighty God.

The Jewish leaders deny this, and have stated in the Jewish Encyclopedia that the Tribe of Judah, from which the Jewish people are supposed to have descended, is not an Israelite tribe. They claim that they are direct descendants of Judah, and Levi, with a few from the Tribe of Benjamin. The purpose of this message is to show you that Scriptural and historical facts refute both these premises. Why is this of such importance? Because Zionism, the political arm of Jewry, has openly declared their intention of destroying White Christian civilization, and bring the world into the New World Order, under the absolute control of World Jewry and Antichrist.

Their holy book, the Babylon Talmud, which their leaders say is the life blood of Jewry, puts it in perspective: "When our Messiah comes, every Jew will have 2,000 “goyim”, now-Jew slaves." (The word goyim is a Yiddish term of contempt referring to non-human animals.) The Babylonian Talmud is the single most important writings of the Jewish religion and consists on the writings of Jewish rabbis from about 500 BC when it was begun in Babylon to a thousand years later, when it was completed in the Jewish Seminary in Alexandria, Egypt. It contains the arguments and counter arguments of the Jewish rabbis from this period. In this huge writing of 63 volumes, the Jewish rabbis refute the teachings of the Mosaic Pentateuch, and much of what was written by the Israelite prophets, causing Jesus to ask them in Matthew 15:3

"Why do ye transgress the commandments of God by your traditions?" In verse eight and nine of this same chapter He said: "This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me (God), teaching for doctrines the commandments of men."

Do You Really Believe the Bible?

Most Judeo-Christians believe that the Jewish people follow the teachings of Moses, but Jesus exploded this fallacy in John 5:45-47 when He told the Jewish leaders: "Do not think that I accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye (say) trust. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?"

The purpose of this article is to determine if you really believe the Word of God, or have you become, as so many professing Christians have, a believer in the teachings of some pastor, rather than in God's Word? We will use the Bible as our Guide Book and Judge. The best illustration of this that I can think of is found in John 10:26. Ask any Judeo Christian who believes the Jews are God's Chosen people, if they love Jesus and believe His Word, and they are apt to get angry. Yet in this verse He plainly tells the Jewish leaders: "But ye (Jews) believe me not; because ye are not of my sheep!" So the evidence of God's Word proves that they will accept the teachings of a man over that of their Saviour, and that they really don't believe God's Word. Harsh but proven true! There are many other Scriptures, which testify to this truth. Matthew 23:15

In John 8:32 Jesus tells the Pharisees: "And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." The haughty Pharisees replied in verse 33 "… We be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, ye shall be free?"

Here the Jewish leaders admit to a serious situation that has caused the controversy in the Christian world. They admitted that while they were of Abraham's bloodline, they were not Israelites, for any Sunday school student knows that Israelites were in bondage in Egypt and again in Assyria. Why is it that the Bible scholars and pastors who say the Jews are all of Israel, refuse to admit that they were not even a part of it? The answer comes squarely from the mouths of those they claim are Israel: "We were never slaves to anyone!" What does this mean? If they were of the bloodline of Abraham, as they claim, and we have no reason to doubt them, they could only have been so related through Abraham's son, Esau/Edom. To see what God thought of them, read Malachi 1:2-4, where God, speaking through the prophet Malachi says of them: "I have loved you (Israel) saith the Lord. Yet ye say, wherein hast thou loved us? Was not Esau Jacob's brother? Saith the Lord: yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau, and laid his mountains and his heritage waste (desolate) ... Whereas Edom saith, we are impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places; thus saith the Lord of hosts, They shall build, but I will throw down; and they (true Israel) shall call them (the Jews), The border of wickedness, and, The people against whom the Lord hath indignation (anger) forever." Hardly the picture painted by the Zionist apologists, such as Van Impe and Robertson.

Jesus did not rebuke them when they claimed relationship with Abraham, instead in John 8:37 He tells them: "I know ye are Abraham's seed; but ye seek to kill me, because my Word hath no place in you."

Who then are these imposters? They are in part Edomites of the lineage of Esau, who God says he hated. Why? It was because Esau despised his birthright, and sold it to his brother Jacob for a mess of beans and rice. In Heb. 12:16 we read that Esau was a fornicator. (The Greek word used here is pornos, meaning: "a prostitute; to sell one’s self; a libertine; a whoremonger"). This passage says: "who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For we know how that afterwards, when he would have received the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears." It's no light thing to turn ones back on our birthright, and heritage, yet it is being done daily by millions of professing Christians in the Judeo-Christian world. Some of you who read these words will no doubt react with shock and possibly with anger. Yet the Scripture plainly tells us in Romans 9:13 - "Jacob have I loved; Esau have I hated. (God speaking)."

The entire book of Obadiah, affirms God's hatred for Esau. In Obadiah verse 10 speaking to Edom, it says: "For thy violence against thy brother Jacob shame shall cover thee, and thou shalt be cut off forever." Verse 18 "And the house of Jacob shall be a fire, and the house of Joseph a flame, and the house of Esau for stubble, and they shall kindle in them, and devour them; and there shall not be any remaining of the house of Esau; for the Lord hath spoken it."

This seems mighty plain to me. Faced with Scripture such as these, how can pastors honestly insist that the Jews are God's Chosen?

Another interesting thing about modern Jewry is that very few of them can trace their bloodline back to Abraham. They belong to those our risen Lord mentions in Revelation 2:9; 3:9, as "They who say they are Jews (Judeans), and are not; but are of the synagogue (meeting house) of Satan." Jewish authorities openly admit, that at least 90% of those who call themselves Jews, have no blood connection with Abraham, but come from a Turco- Mongolian background, with their forefathers never having set foot in Palestine. They are known as Ashkenazi Jews. Every Prime Minister of the State of Israeli has come from this heathen background. These people were adopted into Jewry in the 8th Century AD when their ruler declared them to be Jews. At this time they were known as Khazars. (For historical confirmation see Koestler's well-documented book "The Thirteenth Tribe.")

The Fundamentalists claim that when the Assyrian and Babylonian captivity of Israel, and much of Judah, took place, the Israelites from the Northern ten tribes became lost in history and have never been traced, while Judah, became the Jews of the New Testament and modern times. In this they are partially correct. The Jews who had settled in Babylon after their captivity, intermingled the Hebrew religion with the occult practices of Babylon, and a few of them returned to Palestine with a new religion know as Judaism and a Holy Book known as the Babylonian Talmud, which was not the Hebrew religion taught by Moses and the prophets, but was the traditions of the rabbis, that Jesus constantly fought against Matthew 15:9.

It is extremely important for you to know what happened to these captive Israelites, since all prophetic teachings concerning Israel hinges on this question.

If the modern Jews represent all Twelve Tribes, then there are many Bible prophecies, which are still unfulfilled. Because of this, the Futurist preachers teach that these prophesy will be fulfilled sometime in the future, during the millennial reign of Christ, for they have never been fulfilled to the present day. If on the other hand, the people we now call Jews are not the Chosen of God and all of Israel, but are the pseudo-Jews of Revelation chapter 2, then what became of the ten Northern tribes of Israel who were taken into Assyrian captivity? Are Bible prophecies being fulfilled in them now, or have they disappeared for all time as the Futurists say?

What are these prophesies and how do they affect present day world conditions? If the Jews are not all of Israel, or not Israel at all, then how did true Israel receive the Gospel of the Kingdom, as promised? Is there Scriptural evidence which shows that Israel still exists, and must be considered separate from Jewry?

The Ten Tribes of the Northern Kingdom, along with most of Judah, never returned from their captivity because when the Assyrians, carried them away foreign people from other areas replaced them. 2 Kings 17:24 tells us: "And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cu'thah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharv'im (all foreigners), and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the children of Israel: and they possessed Samaria, and dwelt in the cities thereof" They became known as Samaritans, and in Jesus' time were looked down on by the Judahites who considered them as mere animals.

The house of Judah, in the south, from which a tiny portion of today's Jews sprang, did not want the Northern Israelites in their area, since they had been quarreling and fighting with them from 975 BC until 721 BC. When one or the other could not win, they would become allies with Assyria, Babylon, or Egypt. On several occasions, they even sided with each other 2 Chronicles 18:3. I sincerely doubt this ill feeling would have been healed, without the Scriptures mentioning it, and there is no hint of reconciliation. In fact we hear the Judeans speaking to their Israelite brethren in Ezekiel 11:15 ". . . all the house of Israel wholly, are they unto whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have said, “Get you far from the Lord unto us is the land given in possession.” Do you really believe Judah would have reversed this nasty attitude towards Israel, without Scriptures mentioning it?

If the Ten Tribes had returned to Palestine, they would have broken God's Law concerning inheritance given in Numbers 36:7-9. Summed up in a few words, this said: "Every tribe shall keep to its own inheritance," and Israel had no inheritance in Judah. They had no right to settle in any lands other than those, which had been given to them by God, when the land of Canaan had been divided among the twelve tribes.

The Jewish nation began, after a relatively few Judeans returned to Palestine from Babylon about 42,360 according to Ezra 2:64, with a few more returning later in 446 BC under Nehemiah.

A close examination of the Scriptures will show that although Bible scholars often consider Benjamites as Jews, they did not live with the Jews, but lived in Galilee of the Gentile tribes.

The word Gentile in the Greek is ethnos and refers to a tribe or nation, almost always non-Jewish. Christ's disciples with the exception of the traitor Judas Iscariot came from Galilee of the Gentiles. The Apostle Paul, while a Jew by religion, until his Damascus road conversion, was a Benjamites by bloodline and not a Jew. While the Bible translators have confused this in some instances, such as Romans 3:1-2 where it says (KJV): "What advantage then hath the Jew? Or what profit is there in circumcision? Much every way: chiefly, because unto them were committed the oracles of God." Twelve hundred years before any Jews appeared on the historical scene.

In Romans 9:2-4 Paul clarifies this somewhat when he says: "That I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart. For I could wish that myself were accused from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises;" Nowhere in Scripture will you find where these were ever given to people called Jews.

He clarifies his position in Romans 11:1 "I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. For I also am an Israelite, of the seed of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin." Again in Philippians 3:5 he says: "Circumcised the eighth day of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, and Hebrew of the Hebrews: as touching the law, a Pharisee." So if anyone tells you that Apostle Paul was a Jew, here is evidence to the contrary from his own lips. When we consider the Twelve tribes of Israel, rank must be considered, since Jacob himself, in his final end time prophesies, as recorded in Genesis 48 & 49, gave them this rank. The birthright, or material blessings, was given to Joseph and his two sons Ephraim and Manasseh, who were to be the birthright tribes. The scepter or the kings were always to come from the tribe of Judah. Both Scriptures and history verifies this since the Davidic line of kings, and our Lord Himself, who is become the King of kings, came from Judah. Because the right of rulership was always to come from Judah, the genealogical tables are recorded so as to show the line of the Messiah. The line of Joseph is not shown.

Although Reuben was Jacob's oldest son and would normally have received the birthright blessing, it was withheld from him because of his sin 1 Chronicles 5:1-2, 5 and was given to Joseph and his two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, who were legally adopted by Jacob Genesis 48:16.

There was no way the ten tribes could return under the Tribe of Judah, without despising their birthright, and changing the prophetic plan as prophesied by Jacob in Genesis 49. When the division of the Kingdom took place, on the death of King Solomon, it was Ephraim who assumed leadership, when Solomon's son Rehoboam was rejected and the split between Israel and Judah took place as prophesied by Hosea, Jeremiah and other of the prophets. These prophecies were addressed to Ephraim/Israel Hosea chapter 2 & 14.

When the Judeans returned from Babylon, only the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and Levi are mentioned in Ezra 1:5. Since no other tribes are mentioned, we know they were none of them in Babylonian captivity. If the statement by the fundamentalists that the Jews are all of Israel, were true, then what became of God's promise that Israel would never cease to be a nation and would always have a king from the Davidic line, ruling over them?

In Genesis 17:7 we read: "And I (God) will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee."

The seed of Abraham were to become not only a great multitude of people, like the stars of the heavens, in number, but a great nation and a Commonwealth of Nations Genesis 12:3. The people we know as Jews have never qualified as to this great number, to being a great nation and a commonwealth of nations. So we know they are not of Israel. As close study of Scripture shows that Israel did not return from Assyrian captivity for the following reasons:

1. They could not regain the land, which had been given to their forefathers by God.

2. The inhabitants of Jerusalem had ordered the house of Israel away from God.

3. The birthright tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh could not despise their birthright by returning to Palestine under Judah.

The claim by some Bible, scholars that Israel went south from Assyria and joined Judah in Babylonian captivity is contrary to Scriptural records. Honest historians and ethnologists (the science which deals with origin, distribution, origin and distinguishing characteristics of races), know that throughout the centuries that followed, Judah, under other names such as Jute followed Israel over northern and Western Europe and the British Isles and became reunited with them. Contrary to all other migrations which went east and south, that Israel was north and west. Some believe that the Jews who returned to Palestine are of the tribe of Judah, but historical research, backed by Jewish historians themselves, shows these people to be mostly Turco-Mongolians Khazars from Eastern Europe.

The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones, in Ezekiel 37, shows the future of the reunited house of Israel:

1.) God's people will be brought back from the heathen nations.

2.) God will open the graves and cause them to come into the land of Israel. (Notice nothing is said about this being Old Palestine.) I believe it will be the new land that was promised to King David in 2 Samuel 7:10. The wording indicates it will be the future, in a place other than Palestine. I believe we are living in part of this new land now, the United States and Canada. In Ezekiel 37:14, we are told by the prophet: "And I shall put my Spirit (the Holy Spirit) in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land: (again no hint that this is Old Palestine) and then shall ye know that I the Lord have spoken and performed it."

When this happens, Israel is to be an exceeding great army and any discerning Bible scholar surely can see that the return of less than 50,000 Judeans from Babylon to Palestine, with their new religion of Judaism, cannot be part or all of true Israel. In like manner, the less than 22 million Jews who exist today cannot qualify as numbering as the sands of the sea, or the stars in the heavens.

As a nation, God divorced Israel in Hosea 1:6 - ". . . for I (God) will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away." In verse nine of the same chapter, God continues: ". . . for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God." Yet a strange thing takes place in verse ten, "Yet the number of the children of Israel (the divorced ones) shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not people (the Jews, and Judeo-Christians call us Gentiles), there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God (Christians)." Verse eleven - "Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head (Jesus Christ), and they shall come up out of the land:"

Divorced Israel was divorced for their apostasy, and cannot return until God makes this possible. Isaiah 50:1 says: "Thus saith the Lord, `Where is the bill of your mother's divorcement, whom I have put away? Or which of my creditors is it to whom I (God) have sold you? Behold, for your iniquities have ye sold yourselves, and for your transgressions is your mother put away." Then in Jeremiah 31:31-34, we read: "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel; and the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the days I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them saith the Lord: But this shall be the covenant I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." This is what we are longing and working for.

In this same passage in Hosea, the prophet refers to the fact that these people whom God has divorced, and who are said, "ye are not my people," are still referred to as the "sons of the living God." Isn't that what has happened to Israel? They are now known as Gentiles. They have lost their identity as Israel, yet God says of them: "Ye are my sons!" Only the White nations of Christendom can qualify here. The people we know as Jews have never lost their identity. They say, "We are God's Chosen!" But God says: "Only those of you who believe on my Son, Jesus, are my people, the rest of you are antichrists!" (See 1 John 4:3)

"Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is the spirit of anti-Christ, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is in the world."

There is only one way an Israelite or a heathen can become a "son of God", and that is through the new birth of John 1:12 and John 3:3. Being White or an Israelite does not qualify you as a son. This is why Jesus told Nicodemus, "Ye must be born again, from above!"

In the place where God's people would assemble in the last days, they would not be known as "God's people, called by His name", since a usurper had stolen this title. They would be known as Gentiles. Yet when they accepted Christ as their Saviour and King, they would automatically and rightfully be referred to as Christians, "sons of the living God."

Israel is destined to accept Christ, not only on a personal basis, but also as a nation, and hence the White nations are referred to as Christendom. It is interesting to note, that only the White nations of the world have openly accepted Christianity and the Christian religion. The colored have only been reached with a great deal of effort, at much expense and often danger to the messengers. Christendom has also supplied 98% of all the Christian literature published, and the same amount to missionary efforts and in times of disaster provides most of the rescue efforts. All these things and many more are fingerprints that identify us a true Israel. You will find a few of those attributes among the people known as Jews.

When Israel comes back to their new land that they will never leave, Amos 9:15, tells us - "I (God) will plant them upon the land, and they shall no more be pulled out of the land which I have given them."

Do You Really Believe?

The Jews leave Russia for Palestine, but Jewish records show that more of them leave for the Promised Land of America, and their immediate welfare benefits, than those who stay. In 1985, for instance, Jewish immigration records show that 12,000 more Jews left the mini-state in Palestine, for America than those who remained in Palestine. Those who have become immigrants to America have become the thorns in our sides, and pricks in our eyes, the prophets said would happen if we allowed them into our country. We have seen the fulfillment of the prophecy in Deuteronomy 28:43, 44, which says: "The stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low. He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail."

Any intelligent person can see how this has happened. When Jesus was on this earth, the Edomite King Herod ruled over the Jews. He was not of the Davidic line and was not an Israelite.

When Jesus first arrived on the public scene in Palestine at the age of 30, He knew that he came from the Davidic line, and that His mission was to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel. (See Matthew 10:6; 15:24)

Your Judeo-Christian pastors will no doubt tell you that these lost sheep were unsaved Jews, but this is not the case, since the English word lost, as used here, comes from the Greek word appolumi, which refers to: "Those who were sent into exile as punishment for their disobedience." This never happened to the Jews.

In John 10, Jesus discusses these lost Israelite sheep, and their need for a shepherd. He uses an example the common people understood, the shepherd and his flock. In verse four He explains how His sheep follow Him, because they know his voice and will not follow a stranger. This is characteristic of sheep.

Then turning to the Jewish leaders He clearly tells them in verse twenty-six - "But ye (Jews) believe not, because ye are not of my sheep." (Emphasis my) How could this be made any clearer before you believe?

Jesus then goes on to explain in verses twenty-seven & twenty-eight - "My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me; and I give unto them eternal life, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand." In verse twenty-nine He says: "My Father gave them, to me."

You can find no Scripture reference which tells you that the Jews were lost in the same sense as the Israelites. In no place does Jesus call the Jews, the children of God, while in at least one place, John 8:44, he said to them:

"Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." (Hardly Chosen People material is it?) In Matthew 23:15 he gives a second witness against the Jews. In case you refuse to believe the first. He accuses their religious leaders, calling them hypocrites who "go over the land and sea to make converts, only to turn them into two-fold more children of hell than themselves."

Remember, these are not my words, they come from the mouth of the man you call your Savior.

To understand this Shepherd Chapter, you will need to study Ezekiel 34. In verse six God speaking says: "My (Israel) sheep wandered through all the mountains and upon every high hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did search or seek after them."

Then in verse eleven, God says: ". . . Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out." Here again He used the example of sheep and shepherd, and promises in verse thirteen to bring them out of the lands where they have been scattered and "feed them in Israel by the rivers." (Here is another good reason I know this will not take place in old Palestine, for the only river of any size in that land is the Jordan, and this promise says rivers plural.)

In the new Israel, besides the many rivers of America, God will finally give peace, prosperity, and safety to His people. When Israel, which is God's people, that are called by His name, Christian, will finally wake up to who we are, and realize what our heritage is, then will we turn from our wicked ways, and God will hear from heaven, as He has promised and will forgive your sins, and will heal our land. This is the only Formula for Our Survival, which will work.

Over and over again in Scripture Jesus Christ referrers to Himself as the good shepherd. In John 10:11 he says: "I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." Then in the next few verses, verse twelve - "But he that is a hireling (Greek - misthotos - meaning: "a wage worker, good or bad" I'd say a false pastor), and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep, and Fleeth, and the wolf catcheth them (and devours them, for this is what a wolf does), and scattereth the sheep. Verse thirteen - The hireling fleeth, because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. Verse fourteen - I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine."

In Isaiah 51:1, 2 we are shown the value of our heritage, as the prophet admonishes us to "Hearken unto me, ye that follow righteousness, ye that seek the Lord: look unto the rock from whence ye were hewn and to the hole of the pit from whence were digged. Look unto Abraham your father and unto Sara that bare you: for I (God) called him alone and blessed him and increased him." (See also Amos 3:2 - God speaking) - "You (Israel) only have I known of all the families of the earth."

When Israel learns to obey, then the promise of Ezekiel 34:25 will come to pass - "I (God) will make with them a covenant of peace, and they dwell safely in the wilderness and in the woods." Verse twenty-seven - "And the trees of the field shall yield her fruit, and the earth shall yield her increase, an they shall be safe in their land, and shall know that I am the Lord, when I have broken the bands of their yoke, and delivered them out of the hand of those that served themselves of them (the International Jewish Bankers, who hold this Israel nation in several trillion dollars of debt, which can never be paid off and White Christian America in particular has become a slave to the Jewish slave masters. All in accordance of what God said would happen if we disobeyed Him.) Verse twenty-eight - . . . neither shall the beast of the field (Hebrew - chay - meaning: "a living creature that God created - that could walk upright like a man, talk and reason like a man, repent of evil deeds, had hands and feet and wore clothes like a man." Most certainly not an ape See Jonah 3:7-10, as an example), devour them and none shall make them afraid."

An interesting lesson can be found in a study of crime statistics. According to the FBI, Blacks who make up less than 20% of our national population committed 2/3rds of all the violent crimes. Could these be the wild beasts mentioned here and elsewhere?

Then thank God for the ultimate reward that will come when Israel turns to obedience of God, verse thirty-one - "And ye, my flock (Hebrew - t'oun - meaning: "a flock of men, used figuratively"), the flock of my pastures, are men, and I am your God, saith the Lord God."

(The word man as used here is the Hebrew word au'daum, which means: "to show blood in the face; be capable of blushing, a characteristic only of the White race.)

The Jewish rabbis in the Talmud, who insist they are God's Chosen, says this indicates that only Jews are men, and that the rest of us are goyim, a term of Yiddish contempt, meaning non-Jew animal.

Now can you understand Jesus' words, in John 10:11, when He said: "I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth His life for the sheep." And that is what He did. You will find no record anywhere, of a Jew ever doing anything like this. They are a very self-centered people, who seldom do anything nice for anyone that does not bring them adequate reward.

This is one of the major areas where they differ from Christianity.

Knowing this you can better understand Christ's words in John 10:11, where He said, "I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." Then in John 10:26, to show the difference between His Israel sheep, and the people called Jews, He told their leaders: "Ye believe me not; because ye are not of my sheep." (How much plainer could He be?)

When Zacharias held the infant Jesus in His arms in Luke 1:68, he prophesied: "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel: for He hath visited and redeemed His people ..." Verse seventy-one - "That we should be saved from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us." (Would you say that a people who state: "We will destroy your White Christian civilization are our enemies?)

Have you ever wondered why Jesus, in Matthew 10:5, told His disciples: "Go not into the way of the Gentiles (Greek - ethnos - meaning: "tribes; nations, in this case heathen), and into any city of the Samaritans (the people who replaced Israel when they went into captivity) enter ye not. But rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. "

He somewhat clarifies this in Matthew 10:23, when He tells His Israelite followers: "But when they persecute you in this city, flee not into another: for verily I say unto you, ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come." Israel was to become so large and within a hundred years of Christ's death and resurrection it had already covered northern and western Europe and the British Isles. It had become so large, that it would take until the time of Christ's return for His followers to cover it. If this verse had referred to Palestine at the time of Christ, it cities could have been covered in weeks. Here we see Jesus unfolding an age-old program for the expansion of His kingdom, and His orders still remain, "Occupy until I come!" It is a glorious program for the evangelization of the world, until He comes back in triumph to rule and reign, as King of kings, and Lord of lords. This indicates a kingdom of righteous triumph over evil, where one must go beyond the born again stage, to become, and over comer for Him. (See Revelation 3:21) Granted, this change of life must begin with being born of the Spirit, but this is just the beginning of the Christian experience, and we must not rest on our eternal security, but go on to become triumphant.

In spite of Christ's clear admonition to "go to the lost sheep of Israel, our major missionary efforts have been to the dark heathen nations of the world. These have been reached only with great effort, the expenditure of vast sums of money, and often danger to the missionary.

Talk with most any missionary who have worked with the heathens in Africa, and they will tell you about the fine Christian churches they have built, and how they have even trained native pastors in their own seminaries. Then political upheaval takes place and they are forced to leave. They come back a few years later to find their church still in operation, but with the local witch doctor as pastor. They still sing the old Gospel hymns, but their worship has become so intermixed with the occult of heathendom that it cannot be recognized as Christian. This has happened too many times to be a mere coincidence, and proves, all scientific and religious evidence to the contrary, that these heathen people do not have the spiritual capability of fully understanding the Christian Gospel, although I believe they can be saved.

This people, living without the Law, which was given only to Israel (not the Jews), are not living in sin, as are we who have the law. Paul speaks of this in Romans 2:14 - "For when the Gentiles (and here the word refers to heathen) which have not the law, do by nature the things contained the law, their having not the law unto themselves." The in Romans 7:7 he asks this question: "What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin but by the law: for I had not known lust except the law said. Thou shalt not covet." (The Greek - epithumeo - meaning: "to set your heart on; desire; long for; lust after".)

The Jewish leaders knew that Israel was divorced and had lost their identity, for when Jesus told them that they would seek Him and not be able to find Him (John 7:32-37).

Do You Really Believe?

They said among themselves: "Will he go to the dispersed (Israelites) among the Gentiles (heathen nations) and hide himself?" Later when the Pharisees and Chief Priests met to decide what to do about the problems Jesus was causing them, as He had become a thorn in their sides by His doctrine, the Chief Priests, said: "What shall we do? For this man doeth many miracles (which they could not deny). If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation." (John 11:47-53) It is obvious that Caiaphas knew that Christ's mission was to gather scattered Israel, and feared losing his position as High Priest, if this took place, verses fifty-one - fifty-three, clearly states that Caiaphas stated this, not of himself, but being the High Priest, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation. "And not for that nation only, but that He also should gather together as one the children of God (Israelites) that were scattered abroad. Then from that day forth they (the Jewish Sanhedrin) took counsel together for to put Him to death."

When Jesus used different Parables in His teachings - the Hidden treasure; the Prodigal Son; the Two Sons; the Vineyard laborers, and others, both His disciples and the Judeans who listened to Him, knew He was referring to lost Israel. As a climax to His kingdom teaching, He used the Parable of the Vineyard Laborers (Matthew 21:33-46). This was the story about the deliberate rejection and murder of the Son by the Jews.

When Jesus asked the Pharisees how the Lord should punish these wicked men, they were honest enough to reply (Matthew 21:,41) - "He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their season."

It was at this point where Jesus showed that He was the rejected stone (Matthew 21:42,43),

- "Jesus said unto them (the Pharisees), did ye never read in the Scriptures (Psalm 118:22; Isaiah 28:16), “The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes?" Then He went on in verse forty-three to tell the result of Jewish rejection of Him as Messiah: "Therefore (because of this), I say unto you, the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation (not the Church, as we have been told) bringing forth the fruits thereof " I believe that nation was the United States of America which began as a Christian nation, and was acknowledged world-wide as a Christian nation, which is now under God's disciplining hand, for leaving its first love, and supporting anti-Christ's.

The first incident of lost Israelites, seeking Jesus can be found in John 12:20-22.

The second chapter of the book of Acts, has been confusing to church folks, for they see the terms Israel and Judah applied to the same people. A little study will show you that those who were called Jews were Jews by religion (as was the Apostle Paul before his conversion), not necessarily by Israelite bloodline. They came from every known nation on earth at that time. They were not classified a Jew except by religion, and most of them were Israelites. They were classified as Parthian, Medes, Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Cappadocians, Phrygians, Pamphelians, Egyptians, Libyans, Cretans, Arabians, and Romans.

When the Apostle Peter addressed them, there was no confusion in his mind about who they were. In Acts 2:14 he calls them "Ye men of Judea (Inhabitants of Judea, not necessarily Jews by religion) that dwell in Jerusalem." He clarifies this in verse twenty-two - "Ye men of Israel, hear these words; . . ." Peter knew whereof he spoke, for he had heard from the Master's own lips how He had disenfranchised the Jewish people, who no longer could be considered as God's Chosen. Peter challenged these Israelites from all over the known world, to "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost." (Acts 2:37, 38)

This Pentecost message was to a scattered Israel, which had been elected by God for a special purpose, Peter said of them in 1 Peter 2:9, 10 - "But ye (Israel) are a chosen generation (bloodline), a royal priesthood, and holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of Him who hath called you out of darkness into His marvelous light:

Which in time past were not a people (you were divorced and known as Gentiles – Hosea 1:10, 11), but are now the people of God: which had not obtained mercy, but now have obtained mercy." The legacy of Israel! It is indeed unfortunate that most of our Bible scholars refuse to accept the plain teaching of the Word, and have confused the word Gentile to mean heathen, thus making the Israel people out to be heathens, when in most cases it comes from the Hebrew goy, in the Old Testament and the Greek ethnos, in the New. Both meaning tribes, or nations, and in a few places in the New Testament, Greeks, who were Israelites. In very few places is the word Gentile applied to heathen, but any non-Jewish person. When Jacob predicted in Genesis 48:19 - "His seed shall become a multitude of nations", the Hebrew word goy (Gentile) was used and obviously did not apply to a heathen.

The Apostle Paul said, in Romans 11:25 - "Blindness in part has happened to Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles (ethnos) be come in," he was referring to the fact that Israel would lose its identity, something which never happened to the Jewish people. Israel was to become blind and a multitude of 'nations, something else that never happened to the Jews, but has already taken place among the White nations of Christendom.

Do You Really Believe?

When the Lord sent Ananias to Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9:15, so he could be converted and receive his sight, he told him: "He (Saul) is a chosen vessel unto me to bear my name before the Gentiles (ethnos - nations), and kings and the children of Israel."

The specific wording of these verses clearly shows that it was not speaking of Jews, since they never had a king. Someone is bound to disagree with this observation and say: "How about King David? Wasn't he a Jewish King?" I challenge you to show me any Scripture, where David is referred to as a Jew. He lived and reined about 1048 BC - 1015 BC which was 300 years before anyone called Jews showed up on the historical scene in 2 Kings 16:6, about 742 BC. Yet false tradition in the church has become so strong, that David is generally considered to have been a Jewish king. It is also interesting to note that although the apostle Paul was a Benjamite, and not a Jew. Mistranslations of the Epistle of Romans call him a Jew, when he should have been referred to as a Judean. He was Jew by religion, a high-ranking Pharisee, but a Benjamite, therefore an Israelite by bloodline (see Philippians 3:5 for his own witness). We can clearly see these mistranslations by looking at Romans 3:1, 2. In the King James translation they say: "What advantage then hath the Jews? Or what profit is there to circumcision? Much every way: chiefly, because that unto them were committed the oracles of God." We know this cannot be true, since the ordinance of circumcision was given to the Hebrew Abraham, almost 1200 years before there was anyone known as Jews, and the Jewish people never received any oracle from God. The one's who received them were all Israelites. If these Epistles were written to heathen Gentiles, as most Bible scholars imply, how would they understand Paul's constant references to Sarah, Abraham, and Jacob, who were all Hebrews? The first Israelites began with Jacob, when God changed his name from Jacob to Israel.

When the Apostle Paul spoke about the "law given unto our fathers", how would heathen Gentiles understand? When he spoke about Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac and God's choice of Jacob over Esau, how would heathen Gentiles understand? It would be impossible! No my dear Christian friends, even if you are among the brainwashed ones of Judeo-Christianity, the Epistles were not for heathen ears, but for those Israelites who understood their meaning.

The very fact that the White nations of Christendom have been first in their acceptance of Christianity is an outstanding fingerprint indicating they are true Israel. Jesus said: "My sheep hear my voice and follow me," (John 10:3, 27).

Ask yourself where the Jews qualify under the promise of Isaiah 59:21? How could they when they do not believe on the Saviour?

Do You Really Believe?

Have the Jews glorified Jesus Christ, as Israel was to do? Hardly, they spit and curse when His name is mentioned. (Isaiah 41:16; Luke 1:16) Do the Jews declare Christ to be the head of Old Testament Israel? (Isaiah 43:10-12; 49:3; Acts 1:8). Not by any stretch of the most fertile imagination. Do the Jews show forth the praise of God's Son, Jesus Christ? (Isaiah 43:21). Their Talmud condemns Him and all Christians, to spend eternity in hell, buried up to their necks in boiling excrement! Have the Jews carried the Gospel of the Kingdom to the entire world? (Genesis 28:14; Isaiah 43:10; 49:6; Acts 1:8). You know the answer to this.

Are any Jews found among the great characters of faith found in the Bible in Hebrews 11? Not a one. Abel; Enoch; Noah; Abraham; Sarah; Isaac; Jacob; Joseph; Moses; Gideon; Barak; Samson; Samuel; David and more. Some like the harlot Rahab were not even Israelites, but they were commended for their faith, and not a one of them were Jews. This should tell an intelligent person something.

Are the Jews a righteous people? 1 John 2:22, 23 tell us they are anti-Christ's so they cannot qualify as Israelites on this score. How can a nation, a people, be righteous when they are against the very root of righteousness?

Are the Jews a great nation? Have they ever qualified as such? (See Genesis 35:11; 48:19). In no way have they come close to a great nation status, and only survive now because of largess and protection of the American government.

Do the Jews have a new name today? No, they still carry the same name they have had since 742 BC (See Isaiah 62:2; 65:15; Hosea 1:10; Romans 9:25, 26; 1 Peter 2:10).

No my mislead, brainwashed Judeo-Christian, Fundamentalists friends, these are only a few of the more than 200 Scriptural fingerprints, which will identify true Israel in the closing out days of this age, and the Jews do not qualify for a single one, Jack Van Impe to the contrary.

The Bible promises, Covenants, Laws, Psalms, Prophecies, Parables and history, all conclusively prove to an honest, discerning mind, that the people we know as Jews are not the Israelites of the Bible. When Jesus returns, soon I believe, as the prophetic signs point in that direction, it will be to set up His kingdom on this earth, as indicated in the Lord's prayer: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven." We will not be celebrating with Him in some heavenly party, but will be serving Him here on this renovated earth (See 2 Peter 3). He will redeem His Israel people and we shall go forward to do the work God has prepared for us to do, as we become a Blessing to all nations. That will be the day of final peace, when the "swords are beaten into plowshares, and war is not taught anymore.

Lord hasten thy return!

Are you ready for His return? Do you really believe His Word? Are you ready to show your love for Him, through your obedience? After you sought His forgiveness did you pledge yourself to Him, to serve Him as King of kings, and Lord of lords? Your Israel heritage will mean little to you, unless you are first born from above, (John 3:3). This must come first, and then must come National repentance and acceptance of Him as King. (I suggest you read and meditate on 2 Chronicles 7:14.)

Wishing you and yours His protection and blessing for the uncertain days ahead, knowing that obedience to God, must come before we can have victory!

Your brother and servant in the King's business,

Col. Jack Mohr, US Army Ret.

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bloggerblagger · 6 years ago

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86) Jeremy Corbyn would make a fine prime minister. (Irony: a type of usually humorous expression in which you say the opposite of what you intend.)

If it doesn't look like a duck - not remotely - but it quacks like a duck and it acts like a duck, is it a duck?

Let’s face it. If it didn’t come with the traditional webbed feet and beak, you’d have serious difficulty in accepting it was a duck even if laid perfect duck eggs and towed a line of pretty little ducklings along behind it. And that, I believe, is one of the principal reasons why, despite the well founded charges of anti-Semitism made against Jeremy Corbyn, and all the attention they have received, he still seems to sail serenely on.

What makes it so hard for so many to believe that Corbyn is an anti-Semite is that it seems counter-intuitive. One may think he is completely misguided but his quiet reasonableness and ‘beard and sandals’ appearance and his do-gooder earnestness and his bloody allotment always make him seem so well intentioned. How could such a man be an anti-Semite? Has he not been fighting racism and equality all his life?

Tough to see beyond that. And yet, if you were a foreign power - the Islamic Republic of Iran for instance - who thought it would be useful to get a virulent anti-Israeli and anti-Semite into office here, rather than put him in a brown shirt and jackboots, would you not produce someone just like Jezza? What better disguise would there be?

I am not actually suggesting he is an Iranian agent - although he’d been doing a damn good job if he were - but I am saying, just to thoroughly mix my animal metaphors, that it is very possible to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing if the disguise is good enough.

Labour, the party that cares, doesn’t.

As I say, that’s one of the reasons that the sainted Jezza has got clean away with such outrageous, blatantly anti-Semitic behaviour.

Oh - you don’t think it’s really been all that bad? You don’t?

That’s another reason.

And the rest of the current Labour leadership seems to agree.

I, and most other Jews too, I believe, have reached the depressing conclusion, that, frankly, they don't give a shit about anti-Semitism. (I am sure it is has not escaped Seumas Milne, Labour’s Director of Strategy, that with only 300,000 Jews in the country and, at a guess, a quarter of those children, we really don’t count electorally.)

That would certainly explain the official Labour response to any of these charges, which has been to lock His Corbyness away in a closet and to send out attack dogs like Chris Williamson MP and Owen Jones to rubbish the people speaking out, to flatly avoid answering any direct questions, and to repeat the mantra that Corbyn has always been a man of peace, and couldn't possibly be anti-Semitic.

L: Our Dear leader, man of peace. R:ChrisWilliamson MP, piece of work.

Probably futile but...

It has reached the point where one feels it almost pointless to try to explain why, amongst Jews, there is such profound distrust of Corbyn and why they simply do not accept his blandishments. But I will try one more time by dealing with the most grievous example of the profound offence he has given.

He has been caught on film saying that the Zionists in the room, despite perhaps having lived in Britain all their lives, did not understand English irony and needed a history lesson.

As he will perfectly well have known, Zionists are overwhelmingly Jews. To argue, as he has, that he didn't know they were Jews or that he was using the term in the political sense - whatever the hell that means - may be enough for Ken and Seumus but it won't wash with me or 99% of British Jews.

To say that we don’t understand something ‘English’ clearly implies that we Jews, no matter how deep are roots here, are not fully English - that we don't quite get what it is to be English. It is one of the oldest tropes about Jews and it is was unambiguous anti-Semitism.

And let’s not pretend, as Shami Chakrarbarti did the other day on Radio 4, that these remarks were taken out of context. Utter bollocks. The Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition said exactly what he was reported to have said. And he clearly meant to say it. There was nothing in the ‘context’ that made the slightest difference to the meaning. Here is the film of his entire speech. Judge for yourself.

(Click on the link below but since the sound quality is poor, click also on the subtitle symbol. That’s the litte square with ‘cc’ on it, on the bottom right.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xf1hwfo2W0

This time it’s personal

I feel I cannot adequately convey just how angry I am about this.

It wouldn’t make a jot of difference if my parents had been recent immigrants but, as it happens, I have ancestors who were in this country ten generations back.

While Jeremy’s father was not in the Army, Navy or RAF in the second world war - but doing a Pike in the Home Guard - my father (older than his) spent six years as a private in the Eighth Army in Egypt, Italy and Greece. And he felt obliged to change his name. Jerome Abraham Phillips had to become Jerome Arthur Phillips because of the fear of anti-Semitism. (Anti-Semitism in the British Army that is.)

How fucking dare Jeremy Corby accuse me - because he was, by association, accusing me - of not being fully English.

Jeremy Corbyn’s father served in Dad’s Army at the age of 24

Despite a lack of irony my father was allowed to serve in the Eighth Army.

Enter an establishment Jew

For the ex-chief rabbi, Lord Sacks to have intervened when this video came to light and charge Corbyn with being an anti-Semite was a very, very big deal. It was unprecedented. Rightly or wrongly, Sacks is the Jew most venerated by the British media and the establishment. ( As if to prove the point he is currently hosting a Radio 4 series on Morality.) Yet his words have been dismissed by the Labour leadership out of hand. The fact that he unwisely mentioned Enoch Powell in the same breath gave them an excuse to blithely shrug off the substance of his complaint.

But let's, for a moment, take Corbyn at his word, and assume he is so insensitive he didn't realise what the effect his words would have. What has his response been? To apologise? To meet with Lord Sacks? Or to make up completely unbelievable explanations and then avoid the press and cameras himself and send out his emissaries with their pugnacious, unyielding messages of denial.

What if it hadn’t been about Jews?

If he had made similar remarks about any other minority group he would have been forced to resign immediately. Imagine if he said that those who advocate the wearing of a burka might have been born in this country, but didn’t understand English irony or know English history.

Those who advocate wearing a burka may not necessarily be Muslims, but almost certainly are, in the way that Zionists are almost certainly Jews. It would certainly be something you might expect the leader of the English Defence League to say, but the leader of the Labour Party? Do you honestly think Corbyn would still be in a job if he’d said something so Islamaphobic?

But Jews don't matter to Labour. That is the message that Corbyn and his supporters have sent us.

Don’t just blame poor Jeremy

Jezza and his acolytes are not alone amongst public figures on the Left in their supposedly unwitting ant-Semitism. Steve Bell, the cartoonist in the Guardian is another culprit. In two recent cartoons he has been profoundly offensive. He has been accused of anti-Semitism before so he can’t make the excuse that he couldn’t have known the risk he was running. Here’s the first.

What can this mean but that the people caricatured are not sincere in their complaints about Labour anti-Semitism? One of those ‘sanctimonious humbugs’ (front row L) is clearly Lord Sacks and another, also in the front row, is Margaret Hodge, the MP and Jewess (to use a nice, old fashioned term) who called Corby an anti-Semite to his face.

And here’s his other recent intended witticism on the subject.

What can this mean but that these Labour grandees led by Margaret Hodge, who, since she is holding the weapon is implicitly the executioner in chief, are being wholly unreasonable in asking Corbyn to apologise and recant?

I was frankly shocked when I saw these cartoons, and probably should have complained but I didn’t. Shocked perhaps but not all that surprised. Katherine Viner, the editor, is the co-author of the 2009 play, ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’, which a writer in The Spectator called an ‘unapologetically pro-Palestinian drama’.

I wouldn’t accuse her of being anti-Semitic but neither can we expect the Guardian under her stewardship to be entirely even handed on the subject of the Israeli/Palestinian situation.

Which brings me on to the subject of anti-Zionism. And anti-Semitism. And why the two so closely intertwined as to be effectively indistinguishable.

Zionists v Anti-Zionists

To be a Zionist is to believe that Israel should be a homeland for Jews. And that is all it means. It does not mean you support the policies of Netanyahu and his government. Not the annexation of East Jerusalem. Not the building of settlements on the West Bank. Not the ridiculously provocative, recently passed, ‘nation state’ law. I, and almost all the Jews I speak to, are vehemently opposed to all of these things,

But I, like most Jews, am a Zionist. (Some, a very few, aren’t, but then again, too few to mention.)

So what is an anti-Zionist? Clearly someone who takes the opposite view; who does not believe that Israel should be a homeland for Jews. That the Israeli state should cease to exist. An anti-Zionist hopes that that one day, we would wake up and find Israel was no longer there.

In such an eventuality, if you weren’t a Jew you might be a bit concerned, even alarmed, but you’d get over it.

For me, it is a simply terrifying prospect. Quite literally, an existential threat to my own life and that of my daughter. I don’t want to rehearse all the arguments why that is the case here, because I’ve been through them all in a previous post. https://bloggerblagger.tumblr.com/post/143854734827/62-anti-zionism-anti-semitism-an-expert-explains (If you have the stamina click on the link and go back and read it.)

But the bottom line is this: anti-Zionism is plainly inimical to the interests of Jews, as hostile as crude old fashioned ‘you’re not really English’ anti-Semitism.

A history lesson for Jeremy.

There are always different versions of history.

It is said that the winners write the history and while I can’t help but admire Hamas’, Hizbollah’s and Al Fatah’s pretty successful attempts to buck the trend, I do feel the need to point out a few things in Corbyn Minor’s textbook that are factually incorrect.

1) Israel is not, as anti-Zionists insist on calling it, an ‘apartheid state’. I lived in South Africa at the height of apartheid so I have the advantage of some direct experience. The 21% of Israeli citizens - those living in Israel proper - who are Israeli Arabs or Israeli Palestinians or just plain Palestinians (however they prefer to self identify) have the full rights of citizenship. They can vote, stand for parliament (the Knesset) own property, demonstrate against the government. None of these rights were available to non-whites (as they were officially called in South Africa) under apartheid - which was the doctrine of separate development.

That is not to say that there is no racism amongst Israelis and Jews generally. Sickening bigotry can be found in every country, amongst every ethnic group. Jews have no claim to be any better. Why should they be expected to be?

Today I heard an astonishing story which both proves that there is sometimes, official racism in Israel and, simultaneously and seemingly impossibly, that there isn’t.

A friend of mine working in London, a Muslim with a family home in Nazareth, who self identifies as an Israeli Arab, travels frequently between London and Tel Aviv. Whenever he goes through Tel Aviv airport, despite having been through all the security checks that every passenger does, he is asked to do more. As soon as he hands in his passport, it flags that he is an Arab and he has to go off to have all the contents of his luggage checked piece by piece. What is that but racial profiling and what is racial profiling but racism?

But here’s the twist. In order to satisfy Israeli legal requirements that this is not racial profiling, whoever is unfortunate enough to be standing next to him in the queue is dragged off to suffer exactly the same irritating bullshit. The last time it happened it was a black hatted, ultra orthodox Hassidic Jew.

Apartheid? Not exactly.

2) Is it often said that Israel flouts UN resolutions, most notably ‘242′, passed half a century ago, which calls on Israel to withdraw behind the 1967 borders. But there’s another part to that resolution which its critics conveniently ignore. Namely, that in return, all parties should recognise the right of every country in the region - including Israel - to exist in peace and security. So far, after 50 years, only four out of twenty two Arab countries have done so.

As for the other 64 UN resolutions, do you think it is possible that at least some of them have been passed because there are 50 Muslim majority countries and most, if not all, routinely vote against Israel on any and every issue?

3) Which brings me to Gaza. We constantly hear of the Israeli blockade. But it isn’t just an Israeli blockade. It is, at the western end, also an Egyptian blockade. Have you ever heard Corbyn Minor mention that? Perhaps he was sleeping through that part of the lesson,

Gaza was territory taken in 1967 in the Six Day War by Israel and voluntarily given up to Palestinian sovereignty - as Sinai was earlier given back to Egypt - and that involved the forcible removal of thousands of Israelis who, wisely or not, had made their homes there.

Within months the people of Gaza had rewarded Israel for this act of peace by electing an Hamas government which was, and still is, sworn to the elimination of Israel. If they were to recognise Israel’s right to exist, then Netanyahu would have lost his best excuse for maintaining the blockade and not actively pursuing peace. They could shoot his fox tomorrow but they prefer to fire rockets.

It’s true that they wouldn’t get everything they want in a negotiated peace settlement but nobody ever does. It takes two to make peace on earth Jeremy, and they have to want it more than eternity in paradise.

Exactly who are the real racists here?

Then we have the charge that the very concept of Israel as a Jewish homeland is inherently racist; that it was when it was created in 1948, and that it still is.

It’s a point. As least, it is in the precisely the same way that Pakistan was always inherently racist and still is. Pakistan, created just a year earlier than Israel, came into being for the specific reason of being a nation for Muslims and is still the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

There are differences of course. In Israel all religions are free to practise exactly as they wish, people are not murdered for blasphemy, and LGBTQI (and whatever else) rights are fully respected.

it is different too from the Islamic Republic of Iran where the religious minority, the Baha’ai are not permitted to go to university and where gays are hung from cranes.

In fact, Islam is the official state religion in many countries, of which more than a few discriminate against other religions and where anything but heterosexual sex is illegal.

In Egypt a bill was recently introduced to outlaw atheism. That would put it in line with the thirteen countries where atheism is punishable by death: Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

Why is it that Corbyn and his gang are so obsessed with Israel and never seem to notice the racism of others? Isn’t the act of charging one nation with racism while ignoring all the others, racism in itself?

We, in the United Kingdom, shouldn’t feel too superior by the way. We have a state religion and all others are discriminated against. The Church of England is the Established Church and followers of any other religion, even other Christians, are proscribed by law from landing the top job in the country. No Muslim, no Jew, no Hindu, no Roman Catholic, and I believe, not even a Presbyterian can be our Head of State.

Even post apartheid South Africa is racist. It was openly discussed in the South African press that the mixed race Trevor Manuel, the much praised Minister of Finance in the noughties could never be President because he wasn’t black enough.

Trevor Manuel. Not black enough to be South African President

It would, of course, be marvellous if group identity - tribalism if you will - was outmoded and eliminated and ‘content of character’ was the only thing that mattered. But the truth is that almost every country in the world is dominated by one ethno-religious group or another. And it doesn’t seem remotely likely that any of them would tolerate the possibility of their ongoing majority being challenged.

About 5-10% of the UK’s electorate are Muslims. Can you imagine the reaction if they became 25%, never mind a majority? And would it not be the same in France, Germany, Sweden, Russia, the US and in most of the countries in the non-Muslim world.

And Jeremy, ask your Mexican wife what she thinks the reaction in Mexico would be if the hegemony of Roman Catholics was ever under threat.

Calling a Jew a Jew

No Jew would ever argue that there isn’t anti-Semitism on the political right. Or indeed anywhere in British society. There is always a low level buzz, probably not picked up by by the antennae of non-Jews, but Nazi death camps, Russian pogroms, Spanish inquisitions and yes, English expulsions (oddly enough, Corby, we really do know our history) have left Jews super attuned to anti-Semitism and it is always there in the background for us.

I will give you one simple example of endemic anti-Semitism that flies so low below most people’s radar that even Jews unwittingly accept it. It is the use of the word ‘Jew’.

How often do you hear even the most ardent supporter of Jews refer to us by the actual word? Christians can be referred to as Christians and Muslims as Muslims, Hindus as Hindus, Janes as Janes, but Jews are never called Jews. They must be referred to as ’Jewish people’. Why? To soften the effect. Because the word Jew is still, after all these years, somehow, unconsciously perhaps, regarded as pejorative.

To be a Christian is to be kind, to be generous, to be virtuous. To be a Jew is to be tight, to be clever - too clever by half - to be cunning, to be manipulative, sneaky. So even our friends and usually, even we ourselves- would rather say we are Jewish.

To call us Jews is deemed to be too strong, too brutal, too, too, too… well, Jewish.

Outing myself

Another example: whenever I meet new people who are not Jewish, I let them know almost immediately that I am, and I know that I am not alone in doing this. The purpose is to try to ensure that no careless remark - no Jewish joke about money, no casual mention of ‘front wheelers’ - is going to be made in my presence. Because I don’t want to be put in the position of either cravenly saying nothing, or calling them out and then feeling I’m responsible for the embarrassment, the awkward silence that would follow.

And yet it still happens, and shamefully, more often than not, I follow the example of another well known Jew, and turn the other cheek.

I know that these remarks are not made out of any deliberate attempt to give offence, but the moment you draw attention to someone’s otherness you take the risk that you will. So I try to draw any potential sting by identifying my otherness before you can.

Who could possibly have been the inspiration for these posters?

On Wednesday September 5th 2018 these posters were flyposted over other advertisements at several different locations across London. Less than 24 hours after the infamous meeting of the Labour Party National Executive meeting at which, late in the afternoon, it was finally agreed to adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism in full, along with the caveat that ‘it will not in any way undermine freedom of expression on Israel or the rights of the Palestinians.’ (Quite why they did this is a mystery to me as there is nothing in the IHRA definition to prevent either.)

That wasn’t enough for JC though. He wanted to include a clause that said, “it should not be considered antisemitic to describe, Israel, its policies or the circumstances around its foundation as racist because of their discriminatory impact, or to support another settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict”

This suggestion was apparently defeated, but why exactly was Corbyn pressing a case for this, when he knew that, had it been adopted, it was bound to pour a tanker of oil on the flames of the dispute between the Labour Party and the Jewish community?

Why should he want to appear the most antagonistic and unyielding member of this now very left wing, Momentum-heavy body?

How and why was the news of this leaked when all the phones were supposedly taken off all the participants on the way in?

And how was it that these posters could suddenly have appeared, pushing the very same specious bollocks that Corbyn has been trying to get adopted the evening before?

They were obviously professionally designed, printed and posted in what must have been a highly coordinated operation involving a number of people with different skill sets. And all in less than 24 hours. Really?

Here’s a conspiracy theory for you: the people who did the poster - the London Palestine Action group apparently - had advance warning of what their guru was going to say and had the posters ready to go. It was Jeremy himself or one of his acolytes who sprung the leak. And it was all part of the same orchestrated publicity campaign.

Yes, I grant you, it seems pretty fanciful. Why would the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition risk getting involved in such a crazy scheme? if it were exposed wouldn’t even he be seriously, even fatally, damaged politically?

Crazy perhaps, but I have a very nearly plausible answer: Corbyn is a lifelong idealogical purist. A ceaseless campaigner for anti-establishment causes. A zealot. A rebel to the marrow of his bones. Would he really mind if he crashed and burned and became a hero and a martyr? Wouldn’t that be more attractive to a chap like him than having to deal with the quotidian mundanity of having to read the boring contents of dispatch boxes and deal with Sir Humphrey?

Even if he didn’t have anything directly to with those posters, the timing tells you he was, at the very least, the inspiration.

And for all the reasons I have outlined here, those posters were unarguably anti-Semitic.

And Jeremy Corbyn is a duck.

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dorisphamus · 7 years ago

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Abi Wilkinson should be ashamed of her abuse of Danny Finkelstein

Danny Finkelstein – or Baron Finkelstein of Pinner to give him the title he hardly ever uses – has become the latest person to be the object of a twitter hate campaign.

He is, according to Abi Wilkinson, a Corbyn-supporting journalist, “a racist scumbag” who is “chill with ethnic cleansing.”

It may seem surprising that Finkelstein, former member of the SDP and since that party’s demise a leading voice of “moderate” Conservatism, should be so characterised, even by Wilkinson who believes that “incivility isn’t merely justifiable, but actively necessary.”

His columns in The Times are typically reflective, considered and measured. This has not prevented him sometimes receiving the most appalling online abuse, accusing him of defending paedophilia, for example, because he expressed scepticism about groundless allegations levelled at politicians.

Sometimes this abuse has been tinged with anti-semitism, as with this bit of gratuitous Jew-baiting from a paedophile-obsessed troll in Germany calling himself Dame Alun Roberts.

On other occasions the anti-semitism has been painted in primary colours. The grim reality of twitter and conspiracy websites is that racial name-calling is all too common, and not just for Jews.

Of course, just because you have yourself been the victim of racist abuse it does not mean that you can’t also dish it out. Even the fact that Finkelstein’s mother was a holocaust survivor does not mean that he could not himself be a racist scumbag, relaxed about ethnic cleansing, though it would make such a description particularly painful and therefore, if untrue, particularly nasty.

What has Finkelstein done to prompt such abuse?

Was he seen outside the Court of Appeal, joining hands with Katie Hopkins chanting “Tommy Tommy Tommy!” as the great white hope of British fascism was sprung from gaol last week?

No.

Has he been using his Times column to call for the indigenous folk of Europe to unite to drive Islam back beyond the gates of Vienna, to the Bosphorus and beyond?

No, although in recent weeks he has written paragraphs like this about about immigration and the problems of multi-ethnic societies:

“It is therefore right to argue for control and moderation in allowing the migration that creates ethnically diverse societies; essential to recognise that integration is extremely challenging and will require great political effort; vital to see that civic equality will not happen by itself and prejudice will not easily disappear, both needing to be driven by enlightened leaders.”

Control and moderation! Creating diverse societies! Trying to make prejudice disappear! Demanding political effort to achieve civic equality!

What about international affairs?

As, Finkelstein himself has written:

“The allegation of dual loyalty is one of the most common ways I encounter antisemitism, through the suggestion that my political position on an issue is the result of my “zionism”. This, alongside the posting of comments about Israel to almost anything I or other Jews write.”

So I am afraid some – including, I fear, influential members of the Party that Willkinson supports – will ask, or even assume: he is a Jew, surely he has demonstrated racist scumbaggery in his writings about Israel?

“The Palestinians must have a homeland, they have a right to a homeland, in which they can live in prosperity and peace.

As most people agree, this should be broadly consistent with the borders that existed before the 1967 war. And Israel has made the creation of such a state considerably more difficult by its disastrously wrong and ill-considered decision to allow Jewish settlements to be built outside these borders.”

It doesn’t seem entirely beyond the pale of civilised discourse.

The odd thing about the 48 hours of Finkelstein twitter-hatred is that nobody, even amongst the many who have been piling in to support Wilkinson, has been able to point to a single racist opinion, racist argument, or racist statement that he has ever made.

Her attack came shortly after Finkelstein wrote about the anti-semitism controversy that has dogged the Labour Party. He wrote almost despairingly of the anti-semitism that has been on display both in wider society and particularly inside the Labour Party.

“Complacently, I had always assumed that what happened to my parents couldn’t happen to me or my children. There were too many liberal, progressive people who wouldn’t allow it. I no longer believe this with the same confidence. …

“It’s less the antisemitism itself that has induced this fear. It is the denial of it. The reaction I expect on the left to the rise of antisemitism — concern, determination to combat it, sympathy — is not the one I’ve encountered, at least not from supporters of the leadership. Instead there is aggression, anger at the accusation, suggestions that the Jews and zionists are plotting against Jeremy Corbyn.”

It is entirely of a piece with Finkelstein’s writings over many years: a plea for tolerance and understanding and a determination to combat racism. For what it is worth, I should disclose that I have met him on one occasion, and he was as polite and civilised in person as he always is in writing.

During the height of the twitter-storm, the writer Jamie Palmer asked if anyone could provide a link to a racist article written by Danny Finkelstein. None has yet been provided.

Instead Wilkinson explained that Finkelstein was a racist scumbag not because of anything he had written or said, but because he had been on the “Board” of the Gatestone Institute, an American based think-tank which has provided a platform to some brave and respectable people – Gary Kasparov and Elie Wiesel, for example – but also to some arguing for very unpleasant anti-Islamic policies.

For some reason, probably not a good one, the Gatestone Institute’s website no longer reveals who its “Board” members are, or even if it has a Board, or, if it did have one, what it actually did. Instead it now lists a number of what it calls “distinguished senior fellows” rather as though it were an Oxbridge college. Amongst the British “distinguished” fellows are such luminaries as Raheem Kassam, the boastful and absurd former adviser to Nigel Farage, accurately described by Marina Hyde as a “nebbishy shitposter … chiefly known for trailing around after Farage in a coat … with a brown velvet collar” (who doesn’t actually seem to have written anything for the Institute), and Douglas Murray, the journalist and author, who has written copiously for it.

Kassam: “Distinguished Senior Fellow.”

Finkelstein is no longer listed, in any capacity, although in February of this year he appeared in a Gatestone sponsored conversation at the House of Lords with Khaled Abu Toameh, an Arab Israeli journalist. All this was entirely above board, with Finkelstein properly disclosing the event in the House of Lords Register of Members’ Interests, one of 15 paid speaking engagements between October 2017 and June 2018 (none of the others were for the Institute).

Gatestone is, Wilkinson says, an “Islamophobic far right institute” which advocates “deporting my husband from Europe.”

Clearly, if that were true then anyone having anything to do with the Institute would not be deserving of much sympathy. However, it isn’t true.

It is in fact very difficult to see precisely what, if anything, the Institute itself advocates, as opposed to the views of the various people to whom it gives a platform. All contributions to its website contain a footnote explaining that the views expressed “do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or of Gatestone Institute,” but as the Institute’s own views are not made known anywhere readily accessible, the views of its contributors are all we have to go on.

To be sure many, perhaps even most, of the articles on its website are broadly hostile to Islam, certainly to Islamism, and some are very unpleasant indeed. The sheer volume of material published on the “Gatestone” website makes it impossible to be sure, but I haven’t been able to find any article which advocates deporting people like Kadhim Shubber, Ms Wilkinson’s Muslim husband, who is a distinguished journalist working for the Financial Times, either from Britain or from America where he currently works.

Mr Shubber himself drew particular attention to one 2017 Gatestone contribution by Giulio Meotti, a journalist who, judging by his Wikipedia entry, seems to be some sort of Italian Johann Hari who has achieved a certain notoriety for being accused of plagiarism. Presumably he singled out the piece because it was one of the worst and it is, certainly, a stonkingly bad piece of journalism. Under the headline “Are Jihadists taking over Europe” Meotti makes the preposterous claim that “Europe could be taken over the same way Islamic State took over much of Iraq.” The article itself veers rather incoherently from justifiable concerns about Islamist terrorism, through tendentious claims about “self-segregated, multicultural enclaves in which extremist Muslims promote Islamic fundamentalism and implement Islamic law,” (I think these are the mythical no-go zones beloved of the far right), and finally into outright dishonesty with a bizarre claim that the head of the Swedish army was referring to Islam when he said “there might be a war within a few years,” when in fact he was clearly referring to a possible war with Russia. It’s writing of a very low order indeed, but it does not actually advocate deportation of Muslims. Nevertheless, I can see that anyone reading it, and stupid enough to take it seriously, might be more easily persuaded that mass deportation of Muslims was a good thing.

So what of Wilkinson’s suggestion that Finkelstein was, “at absolute best chill with calls for ethnic cleansing”?

Probably she has in mind the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who has regularly been published by Gatestone. Wilders has described Moroccan criminals as “scum,” he has said he wants to “make the Netherlands ours again,” and in a 2014 speech which led to his prosecution and partial conviction (currently subject to an appeal), he appeared to promise to try ensure that there would be “fewer Moroccans” in The Hague in the future. Whether or not he was actually advocating “ethnic cleansing” of Moroccans (his defence was that he was advocating the deportation of Moroccan dual nationals convicted of criminal offences, and the voluntary repatriation of others) Wilders promotes profoundly unpleasant prejudices.

Or perhaps she was thinking of journalist and best-selling author Douglas Murray, another “senior distinguished fellow” who writes regularly for the Institute, as well as many other publications, including the Spectator where he regularly tops the “most popular” league table published on its website. He is combative, readable, provocative and influential. He has never advocated “ethnic cleansing,” although in a speech in a 2006 speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference (nothing to do with the Gatestone Institute as far as I am aware) he demanded that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board.” He expanded on what that meant:

“All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. In the case of a further genocide such as that in the Balkans, sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis. This should also be enacted retrospectively. Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed. And of course it should go without saying that Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin.”

It was not quite advocacy of ethnic cleansing (he did not spell out whether “persuading” innocent Muslim refugees to return was to be by use of the carrot or the stick), and it wasn’t published by the Institute, but it was the promotion of an unpleasant, deliberately discriminatory set of policies, and a dog-whistle to those wishing to deport Muslims.

In fairness, although Murray did not repudiate his speech when asked to do so in 2006, or for some years afterwards, by 2011 he had asked for it to be removed from the internet (which is why it is now only available on the Wayback Machine site) and has explained why:

“I realised some years ago how poorly expressed the speech in question was, had it removed from the website and forbade further requests to publish it because it does not reflect my opinions.”

Quite what Murray now thinks is wrong about the speech, apart from it being “poorly expressed,” is still opaque, but he evidently does not believe in ethnic cleansing, and perhaps not any more in “making conditions for Muslims in Europe harder across the board.” Even so, according to former MP Paul Goodman, now editor of Conservative Home, the Conservative front bench broke off relations with Murray as a direct result of it. Whether Finkelstein, who was at one time a speech-writer for David Cameron, was involved in the issue or aware of it, I have no idea.

Wilkinson’s charge against Finkelstein is that he sat on the Board of the Institute while people like Murray were writing for it. It’s a charge that would presumably apply to anyone sitting on the “board” of The Spectator, where Murray is a regular contributor, or of the BBC which has given Murray considerable air-time over the years (although it did also broadcast a guest calling him a “hate preacher,” something for which it then apologised), or even of The Guardian, which invited Murray to take part in a panel discussion about Donald Trump, an invitation which he declined and then rather haughtily wrote about in the Spectator. Indeed, given that Wilkinson herself regularly writes for the Guardian I wonder how “chill” she is with assisting an organisation that offered Mr Murray a platform. Does that make her a racist scumbag too, if slightly less of one than Finkelstein?

It is bad enough to accuse someone of being a “racist scumbag.” It’s unpleasant, it’s aggressive and it greatly lowers the tone of political debate – how can you expect to debate with someone who describes you as such? – but it is in the end just vulgar abuse. One person’s racist scumbag, I suppose, is another’s campaigner for slightly tougher controls on immigration. “Being chill with calls for with ethnic cleansing,” is far nastier and a great deal more specific.

“Ethnic cleansing,” a phrase originating in the horror of the Yugoslav wars, means forcibly driving out, deporting or killing people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. It is a particularly objectionable insult to hurl at the son of a holocaust survivor. It should not be made unless you are very sure of your ground. It is utterly baseless to make it against Finkelstein.

I don’t want to defend the Gatestone Institute. Much of the material on its website is nonsense, and some of it nasty nonsense. Just conceivably somewhere within the archives of the Gatestone Institute there may be some explicit calls for genocide or ethnic cleansing. It would be the work of years to read the outpourings of all the “distinguished fellows” and “writers” named by the Institute, but nothing that I have seen or that she or Mr Shubber has highlighted justifies Wilkinson’s charge that it “advocates deporting my husband from Europe.”

This brings us to Finkelstein’s own position on the mysterious “Board” of the Institute. It seems to have been no more than a publicity device for the Institute. It never met and apparently had no role in the running of the organisation. As Finkelstein described it:

“They listed me on a board and I didn’t actually know at first. The board never met or was asked to meet or had any role and rather lazily, once I do (sic) know, just left it. More recently I thought, mmm, being listed on a board is rather different to making a speech or two and I don’t want to be responsible for everything they do with no actual control, so I asked to be taken off. That I’m afraid is the unheroic truth.”

He also explained that:

“I do not serve on the board and have never had any role of any kind running Gatestone or supervising it in any way. They listed me on the board, until I asked them to stop.”

He had been asked about his membership of the Board in 2015 by Nafeez Ahmed, and specifically about Murray’s “stated views on Muslims in Europe.” He replied:

“I naturally don’t (and didn’t) say that I didn’t know who it was or what it publishes or who it hosts. Of course I do. Being on the Board doesn’t mean I agree with every article or every speaker, nor does it imply that I don’t. … I find Douglas Murray stimulating an worthwhile and often right, without always agreeing.”

This has been presented by some as evidence that Finkelstein tried to conceal that he was “on the Board” of Gatestone, although clearly he did nothing of the sort. He was open about it in 2015 and he has been open about it in 2018, although – assuming his good faith which I do until the contrary is demonstrated – “being on the Board” did not mean much other than that for a year or two he allowed the Institute to use his name for publicity purposes.

Finkelstein’s politics are quite clearly not those of Murray, still less of Geert Wilders. Nobody has been able to produce a single racist word that he has written. He has described the idea that Muslims should be deported from Europe as “obnoxious and mad,” which of course it is.

In any case, he has accepted that he made a mistake and apologised. In fact he has done so more than once.

“Yes I’m sorry I was on it [the Board] and I apologise for the error. Worst of all it gives the legitimate impression I support ideas I think completely wrong and are rightly thought offensive.”

He should not have allowed himself to be named as a Board member. He should have paid more attention to the garbage the Institute was pumping out, and less to the fact that it had also provided a platform to brave and necessary voices like those of Gary Kasparov, Raif Badawi or the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

It is very sad that Ms Wilkinson does not yet seem able to accept his apology, and sadder still that she will not herself apologise for traducing a decent man. No wonder political debate these days is so poisonous.

The post Abi Wilkinson should be ashamed of her abuse of Danny Finkelstein appeared first on BarristerBlogger.

from All About Law http://barristerblogger.com/2018/08/06/abi-wilkinson-should-be-ashamed-of-her-abuse-of-danny-finkelstein/

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how2to18 · 7 years ago

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FOR THE PAST DECADE, Eli Valley has been drawing comics unlike any other. Bombastic, frenzied, and often grotesque, Valley’s work unrestrainedly critiques American and Israeli institutional Jewish leaders and narratives. From human and animal rights abuses at a kosher slaughterhouse, to endless sociological surveys lamenting the sins of secularism and intermarriage, to widespread disregard for Palestinian lives, Valley attacks the Jewish community’s ethical failures from the inside. For this he has earned the ire of prominent figures on the Jewish right and the discomfort of many others. The Forward, a left-leaning publication that printed his work for years, eventually broke with him over the severity and specificity of his satire. Valley’s work, though deadly serious, is also raucously fun, filled with everything from a zombified Theodor Herzl to a crotchety Jewish turtle accusing his Jewish owners of anti-Semitism. He draws from the rich history of diasporic Jewish comic-making — from the comics that appeared in Yiddish socialist newspapers in the early 20th century to MAD comics — but his style and wit are all his own.

Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel collects more than 60 of Valley’s comics into a beautiful volume, complete with extensive commentaries and a riveting introduction that covers Valley’s own history and the history of Jewish self-images since the birth of Zionism, to which his work responds. The book is not only a towering artistic achievement and a disturbing chronicle of American Jewry’s relationship to Israel over the last 10 years, but also a battle cry for a resurgent American Jewish left in a harrowing time of far-right power in the United States and Israel — a time in which reality has surpassed satire in its ridiculousness.

Valley spoke with me by phone from New York City, where he was taking a break from drawing a sock puppet on Jared Kushner’s hand in what would become this comic.

NATHAN GOLDMAN: Your comics used to appear in The Forward under the title “Comics Rescued From a Burning Synagogue in Bialystok and Hidden in a Salt Mine Until After the War.” In an interview with The Comics Journal, you explained that the title came from language about a Torah rescued during the Holocaust. Diaspora Boy is a huge book, physically, so I read it hunched over, with the book spread out on my kitchen table, following the panels with my finger. And it reminded me a lot of my experience reading the Torah for my Bar Mitzvah. So I’ve been thinking about those resonances. How do you see your work fitting into the history of Jewish texts, both sacred and profane?

ELI VALLEY: Wow, that’s quite the question. I love that idea. I have to be careful with over-self-aggrandizement, but I worship the brush — brush and ink. I have such a high estimation of that, so when I’m being more self-aggrandizing, I jokingly compare it to the Torah, creating scrolls. Actually, in the book I joke that the comics, along with the comments underneath them online, are like a page of the Talmud if the Talmud were written by lunatics. Obviously there’s acrimony in the Talmud, too, but hopefully nothing quite as nuts as the comments underneath my comics.

But even if the comics are hyperbolic and insane, I have very serious intentions with them, and I do aspire to the trajectory of Jewish literary and intellectual culture. And I know it’s a glib answer, but when people ask me who my readership is, the obvious answer is me and my friends, but the longer answer is ghosts from the past and ghosts from the future. As far as the past, I’m mesmerized by the kinds of writings and cultural output that was being created in Central Europe in the early 20th century, and I like to think that my comics are a reflection of and a debate with that. As for the future, who knows what’s going to happen — especially these days — but I like to think that future grad students will be looking at this book, along with a lot of other stuff, in order to figure out what the hell was going on (to paraphrase our horrible nightmare man in charge right now).

That’s very arrogant, obviously, but it’s not like I mean it to be literal. It’s just a reflection of how seriously I take this work, despite the seeming reckless glibness of the comics themselves.

You mentioned the part of the book in which you discuss the idea of the comics, with the comments sections being the Talmud as written by lunatics. Most of the comics in Diaspora Boy are accompanied by detailed commentaries that establish political context and explain publication histories and do other things. That also got me thinking about the history of Jewish thought as explicit interpretation and critique, from the Talmud on. And as I was thinking about that, I suddenly started seeing that all over the book — from those commentaries, to the comics themselves (in which you often are directly quoting the Jewish figures you’re lampooning), to your introduction and Peter Beinart’s foreword, to the publisher’s use of blurbs from your conservative critics, to the note on sources at the end — you cite the influence of scholarly books. There’s a lot of such intertextual stuff going on. I was wondering if that resonates with you — that Jewish history of commentary and intertextuality — and if you see that as something that has to do with your work.

Yes, but I see it more when you point it out. I think it’s more of an intuitive thing when I’m actually working. The nature of my work tends toward the obsessive, in terms of both the art and the research, so that’s just the way it ends up. It’s not a conscious thing on my part, because that would probably become self-conscious.

But on that note, in the book I talk about a comment on my “Photo Stroll” comic that was one of my favorite comments, because it actually questioned me, and it questioned my romanticization of earlier periods of Jewish history. That’s, like, meta on meta, but I think it might also fit in with what you were saying about intertextuality.

In that interview with The Comics Journal, you mention that at one point you were thinking of going into a PhD program. I was thinking about when I read the introduction, which includes a pretty thorough account of the history of Zionism and its influence on images of diaspora Jewishness, and then with the books you discuss in the note on sources. I’m wondering what your relationship is to scholarship on the topics that your work addresses.

Todd Samuel Presner’s Muscular Judaism was one of the first works I saw that really grappled with this stuff. It’s academic, and it gets very specific, but it also gives you an overview, and it talks about people like Ephraim Moshe Lilien, who was, visually, one of the sources that I’m grappling with. Also, the image of the teuton machine, from the introduction, I found in a book by John Efron on the history of German Jews and medicine. So I’m really indebted to academics for their archival work and analysis.

I think the best academics — obviously, because I’m self-centered — are the ones who can appreciate my comics. But I also know that a lot of academics, they just don’t understand comics, and they don’t understand how they fit into the intellectual tradition. There are people, I’m sure, in academia, who are in love with these Jewish cultural journals from Prague in the 1920s, but who would look at my work, and it would be a total cuneiform foreign language to them. And obviously I don’t respect those people. I do respect the ones in academia who see my work as not necessarily equivalent to the stuff back then, but contributing to the same trajectory. Those are the cool academics.

Could you talk a little bit about that comics history you see yourself drawing on — both that particularly Jewish history, with these early 20th-century Yiddish newspapers, and also any other comics history you see as being important to your development and your work?

I found MAD comics from the 1950s very informative and influential, and also obviously the independent comics from the ’60s and ’70s, which emerged partly because MAD comics had to be suppressed, as a result of Congressional hearings and the self-censorship of the comics code in 1954. That sort of led, indirectly, to the independent comics explosion in the ’60s, which were almost all influenced in some way by the MAD comics. But also, I see MAD comics as one of the pinnacles of diaspora Jewish culture — not just because they were throwing in Yiddish words everywhere, but because they were, in many ways, anti-establishment at a time when Jews had not yet been accepted by the mainstream in terms of culture and politics. So MAD is, a lot of the time, mocking consumerism and red-baiting and conformity in 1950s America, and it was largely the product of these outsider Jewish kids in New York, who were the children of immigrants.

And then, my sense was, by the time I started drawing these comics 10 years ago, that Jews had already entered the mainstream, entered all echelons of American society, and I was just wondering about that satirical energy. It seemed like there was a need to direct that satirical energy inward at a time when Jewish political culture had become the mainstream and there was very little dissent. There was certainly not harsh satire. But it’s funny, because if you go too far — MAD went too far, not in my view but in the view of American culture. In their spin-off, called Panic, they went after Santa Claus, and that got the issue banned in Massachusetts. Partly because of the strictures of the comics code, they eventually became a magazine, and the comic in some ways got neutered.

I’m not drawing direct comparisons, but my stuff does not appear in The Forward anymore. If you fly too close to the sun or whatever, if you keep mocking these institutions — I mean, it’s necessary, but the institutions will find ways to limit it. I’m not trying to make myself out to be some kind of a persecuted dissident at all. But there’s a parallel both in terms of the satirical impulse and the censorship that results.

I want to talk about that, because I think that’s an interesting thread in the book. The majority of the comics in Diaspora Boy were published in The Forward, but a good number of those that were not were ones that you tried to publish in The Forward, but for various reasons that you detail, they wouldn’t run them. And because the comics are ordered chronologically, the reader sees your relationship with The Forward changing until the point at which they weren’t going to continue publishing your work. Your commentaries reveal how difficult it was for you to get a lot of your comics published without changing them, and one thing that came up over and over was that it was difficult to publish comics that criticized specific leaders or organizations in the Jewish community. So I’m curious about the struggle to get those kinds of criticisms published in mainstream Jewish publications. What do you think is going on in our American Jewish culture that this kind of internal criticism is so often silenced?

It’s hard to say, because I don’t know to what degree The Forward is emblematic of wider trends. But the problem with wanting to be an outside, critical source while also playing internally in the politics is that it’s a contradiction, and you’re always going to run into walls. There are people on their board who loved my work, and I’m sure there are people on their board who hated my work. And when I say board, I mean donors as well and people who are influential in other Jewish institutions that I was mocking. Not mocking frivolously, but with specific points and critiques based on actual policies.

So it’s hard to say. But, for example, there was a person at The Forward who mentioned going to some benefit for Abe Foxman [the former director of the Anti-Defamation League], and he was concerned with what Foxman might say about my work. And those kind of stories, and then seeing them speak publicly with other actually really toxic figures in the Jewish community … there’s this buddy aspect. And we’re talking about the Jewish world, but it’s the same thing going on with, like, the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I mean, literally, journalists palling up with people in power, who are often horrifically corrupt. Or people like Mort Klein [the president of the Zionist Organization of America], who is an unhinged bigot, who is accepted as a standing member of mainstream Jewish communal institutions. It’s horrifying, actually, at this point. It was horrifying before Trump was in office, but now it’s … you lose your speech trying to comprehend how this is possible.

In your commentary on the comic “Abe Foxworthy,” which lampoons Abe Foxman, you discuss your disagreement about that comic with The Forward’s editor-in-chief, who objected: “There’s no balance in this cartoon.” You write, “This was the core of many disagreements that would follow — not so much the level of tastefulness but the inherently unbalanced nature of satirical art.” I want to hear more about what you mean by “the inherently unbalanced nature of satirical art,” and how that plays into both your conception of what you do and the difficulty you have had getting your work published in certain kinds of places.

In that particular commentary I mention that the editor once suggested getting a quote from the other side. This whole “both sides” needs of journalists, it’s so outside the parameters, or even the metaphysics, of satire. I’m not here to present both sides. I’m here to make an argument. It also gets to the whole idea of punching the downtrodden, you know? It’s like, “Let’s try to understand why the person in power is supporting policies that are disenfranchising entire communities. Let’s try and see their point of view — for our satire.” No, actually, we don’t need to do that for our satire.

I’ve been asked how I could have dialogue with the people I’m criticizing. How could we get them at the table to discuss these issues? And I’m like, I’m beyond dialogue. We’ve been trying to have dialogue for a decade now, and in that decade, look where we’ve come: the people in power continue to have power, and they continue to disenfranchise — I mean literally — voices in the community. And I’m not even talking about Palestine right now, but Jewish voices of dissent. You can see that with what’s happening with David Myers right now at the Center for Jewish History. The things they’re doing — they’re spearheading this McCarthyite campaign, and the things they’re saying about one of the preeminent scholars of Jewish history in the United States today, they’re so unhinged. I don’t want dialogue with these people.

Speaking of that, you get a lot of shit from the Jewish right: Commentary’s John Podhoretz called you a kapo, meaning a Jew who cooperated with Nazis; The New York Times’s Bret Stephens called your work “grotesque” and “wretched.” How do you feel about those kinds of remarks?

I think they’re despicable, but they’re entitled to their views. “Grotesque” and “wretched” is fine, actually. “Kapo” is inexcusable — although I’ve been using it lately. However, I think when I’ve been using it, talking about people who are normalizing Nazism in the United Staes, it has much more relevance and accuracy than calling me a kapo for doing a comic that was a cry of anguish after a Palestinian boy was burnt alive. That’s literally why Podhoretz called me a kapo.

But the larger issue is, these are the people who have been defining Jewish authenticity for the past decades in the United States, and they’ve been complicit in narrowing the boundaries of authenticity vis-à-vis non-Zionist or non-Orthodox Jews — particularly non-Zionists, or even critical Zionists, using terms like “self-hatred” and even sometimes “anti-Semitic.” And that’s been the norm. It’s been more extreme in the past 10 to 20 years, but it has roots in the stuff I talk about in the introduction, which is the denigration of the diaspora in place since the origin of Zionist thought.

In terms of goals for the comics, I want to pillory these kinds of people so people know they have zero legitimacy to be telling the majority of Jews that they are not worthy and that they are not legitimate. If these people are going to be saying these horrific things, I’m going to be coming at them and essentially demanding that they stop being trusted with the ability to define the rest of us.

Because you’re critical of Israel and Zionism and you critique Jewish figures — often harshly, and often representing them in physically grotesque ways — you’ve been accused of self-hatred and even anti-Semitism, which are charges the Jewish right likes to lob at the Jewish left. But you suggest in the introduction to Diaspora Boy that your work is, in part, a product of pride in Jewishness and what you call “Jewish confidence.” Could you speak about that tension between these accusations of self-hatred and your experience, in your life and work, of just the opposite?

I think one of the things that infuriates my critics is that I refuse to let them define Judaism for me. The whole idea of “self-hatred” is that you know what my self is, and already you’re defining my self as Zionist and, ultimately, Orthodox. That’s basically the subtext to the slur. If I say that authentic Judaism is secular, early 20th-century socialism, then John Podhoretz and Abe Foxman are self-loathing. If you just look at the majority of American Jews, they are more like Bernie Sanders than Joe Lieberman, in terms of secular versus Orthodox, or non-nationalistic versus nationalistic, or moral versus corrupt. There are all these articles that keep coming, saying that Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about his Judaism enough, or contrasting him with Joe Lieberman as the American Jewish icon, because — because why? Because Lieberman wears a yarmulke? Because he lends his name to extremist movements, like Christians United for Israel?

To me that’s not Judaism, and for the press and even the Jewish community to implicitly assume that these extremes are our norms — that is what is self-loathing, that is when we become self-hating. We’re not self-hating naturally. We’re only self-hating when we borrow the view of Judaism of the John Podhoretzes of the world. And so I think one of the things that just pisses them off, and it’s why they have to grab at all of their ad hominems, is because I refuse to let them define me. And not just me — I refuse to accept their definitions of American Judaism. And when they do try to define us, I pillory them.

It really is absurd. It’s just amazing to me that the vast majority of American Jews are progressively inclined, and our spokespeople and our arbiters of authenticity are on the right side of the spectrum. They’re not elected — they’re just self-proclaimed leaders. It’s like that quote from Abe Foxman in the comic “It Happened on Halloween,” saying, “I don’t represent. I lead.” That’s damn true, because none of these people represent us.

It’s like, if Clarence Thomas — it’s a faulty analogy, but just for the sake of an unrepresentative person — if Clarence Thomas was considered, you know, the “lead” African American, the embodiment of what it means to be African American. That’s preposterous, in terms of voting patterns alone. But that’s the way it is in the Jewish world. John Podhoretz is our Clarence Thomas.

As an American Jew who was raised in a liberal Reform congregation and who’s engaged to someone who wasn’t raised Jewish, I shared on a visceral level what I felt was your anger at those limited representations of Jewish authenticity. Your work is very analytical, but do you see it as coming out of that emotional space as well?

Yeah, and we haven’t really talked about the art itself, but I think it reflects that emotion. I’m not saying it’s deliberate, but the packed panels and the intense black-and-white art reflect that emotional and visceral approach, as well as the shtetl environment that I’m trying to capture, in terms of the multiplicity of voices and the cascading bodies and forms.

What was it like to compile 10 years of work and see it all together? Did thinking of the comics as all part of a book, rather than spread out across various issues of various publications, make you think of the body of work as a different kind of thing?

Yes. As much as I might have conceived of it as a single body of work when I was working on it, it was only when it came out in book form and I actually held it in my hands and went through it that I could note certain aspects that I might not have seen otherwise, in terms of evolution, or just changing … I don’t know, ideology? Early on in the comics, I was much more optimistic — not optimistic, but I believed more in the possibility of a workable solution to what’s happening in the Middle East. And I noticed that a lot of my early work was intra-communally Jewish, but it started getting more and more about Israel itself. And except for, like, “Dawn of the Chimpanzee,” it wasn’t really exclusively about Israel itself so much early on. But especially with the Gaza War in 2014 — those were all about Israel. And I know a lot of people became activists during that period. That’s actually when IfNotNow [an American Jewish anti-Occupation movement] emerged.

So it’s interesting, that kind of evolution. I was in this whirlpool of events, and they seem to have crescendoed during the Gaza War, and then my comics were largely about what was going on there. And then there was the aftermath, and the continuing shock and outrage that Netanyahu has been normalized by American Jewish leaders for his entire history in office. And the book kind of ends with that.

The other thing that’s interesting is that I wrote the introduction and put everything together during the election cycle but before the actual election. I thought Trump was a buffoon who wouldn’t win, but I still saw him as dangerous. I also saw any Jewish support of Trump to be a total shonda [disgrace], but I didn’t know how far it would go — that he would actually come into office, and there would be people like Mort Klein who are trying to normalize this stuff. But I did realize, once the book was out, that it was coming out at this precarious moment in American and Jewish history. It sort of expresses horror that American Jewish leaders were normalizing the same kind of bigoted demagoguery in Israel that we now see in the United States today. And there was responsibility there, and we have not accounted for it. And we need to account for it. And I feel like my book captures and reflects what led up to this in terms of the Jewish community. And again, it’s like: What the hell was going on?

I’m pretty young, and maybe it’s a vice of youth to overestimate the importance of one’s time, but it seems to me that, following the rise of the right and Netanyahu in Israel and Trump here, this is a major moment of reckoning for liberal Zionism in American Jewish communities. Reading Diaspora Boy, which felt like reliving the last decade of the relationship between American Jews and Israel, reinforced that feeling. Does it seem that way to you?

To me it’s a reckoning, but there are many sub-reckonings going on, and liberal Zionism would be maybe one of them. But to me it’s a much, much larger and broader reckoning. We’re in a cataclysm right now, basically. And that’s one of the reasons that, for some people, discourse might be important now. But for me, it’s horrifying that people who helped pave the way toward where we are are still in leadership positions. So the reckoning I see is this fissure. I think of Gershom Scholem’s On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. The subtitle of my book — Comics on Crisis in America and Israel — is a nod to his reference to crisis.

This is a huge rupture, basically. I really think that in crisis comes opportunity, and we have an opportunity now to set things straight, but it takes some serious work and ferocity. We finally have a moment of clarity now of where we’ve been heading, and we need to take advantage of that moment to stop normalizing fascism by the most definitive measures possible. That’s why when people say, “Can you convince your opponents?” I’m like, “We’re beyond that.” We’re in a crisis right now. This is not the time to all sit down and try to hear each other’s voices. Because the other voices brought us to this horrifying point. I don’t know if I’m sounding too insane right now …

No, I don’t think so.

I just get really angry, even thinking about this shit.

How do you see your work fitting into that response to the crisis? I totally get the idea of not being interested in dialoguing with the people you’re critiquing. But are there people you’re interested in persuading? Or are you more interested in provoking and inspiring? Who do you hope to be speaking to, and what do you hope to be doing for them?

I don’t hope to convince the other side at all. With these kind of comics, I don’t even think it’s within the tools of the medium, at least the way I use it. Since we’re in this moment of clarity, if this collection can shine a light on the past 10 years and help us see how we got here, and it can be a galvanizing force for either younger people or people who are already stunned by what is going on and want to find a way out of it, then that would be a success for me. That’s what I would aspire to. Because I’m not interested in convincing the other side, but I am interested in inspiring and giving strength to our side.

In his foreword to your book, Peter Beinart writes, “Eli Valley’s cartoons are outrageous and absurd. That’s because we’re living at an outrageous and absurd moment in American Jewish life.” That seems truer by the day. The president is a white supremacist who won’t condemn Nazis; meanwhile, major Jewish groups didn’t speak out against Steve Bannon so as not to upset donors, and Sebastian Gorka, who backed an anti-Semitic militia, is touring Israel and praying at the Western Wall. Going beyond the Jewish world, Trump is a caricature made flesh. We’re living in this truly absurd, caricaturish time …

Dystopia.

Yeah, absolutely. So how does a satirist — and particularly a Jewish satirist — work in this environment?

It’s a good question, and it’s difficult, because reality keeps exceeding satire. It used to be that it was mildly like satire. But now it exceeds it in cartoonish form. Cartoonish almost in a negative sense of the term — it’s like a cliché cartoon. Veep writers have complained about that, that there’s no way to be any more hyperbolic or satirical than reality is now. And so, it is difficult.

The other thing is, you know, when I would use swastikas — there were only, like, two comics in my book where I actually made references to Nazism. And now it’s all over my work. But back then, it was an extreme example, and you wouldn’t want to go there, because it would deflate the satire. But at this point … It started in July 2016, when I drew Trump drawing a swastika on himself and saying, “Now you’re gonna misinterpret this too.” That was after he pillaged white supremacist websites for campaign materials, like the one with Hillary on top of the pile of cash. So then I was stretching it to make a point. But now, especially after Charlottesville, the swastika is not very hyperbolic. That which was once used for satirical effect is now literal. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, in terms of the purpose of a comic — you just have to go in a slightly different direction with it. Reality is more horrifying now, so satire of reality will be more horrifying. Not because it’s hyperbolic, but because it’s literal.

In his review of Diaspora Boy in Haaretz, Josh Lambert writes, “For more than a decade, Valley has self-consciously drawn on the history of caricature to portray specific Jews as repulsive grotesques.” I think that’s astute, and I’d add that you also seem interested in caricaturing caricatures, as in the titular Diaspora Boy, who’s based on Zionist ideas about Jews in the Diaspora as physically, spiritually, and culturally deficient. This seems related to the right’s criticism that your comics are anti-Semitic. How do you think about the history of representations of Jews in your work?

That’s a big question. There’s a lot of ways to approach it. One of them is: I refuse to let the Jewish figure be defined by anti-Semites.

I have a book of Doug Marlette’s cartoons from the ’80s, Shred This Book, in which he talks about how there were complaints after he did a comic about Israel and Lebanon. Jewish groups were in his office, and they were literally comparing the sizes of the noses in his comics, the Jewish ones versus the non-Jewish ones, to determine whether he was anti-Semitic. And so I joke about that, because I have gotten that, people claiming that my comics are anti-Semitic caricatures, and/or measuring the noses … actually, I am a little bit self-conscious about making the noses more diminutive, to be honest, because I don’t want to give them ammunition. But that’s the only reason. I don’t want to deflate my point because they’re able to say it’s [Nazi newspaper] Der Stürmer.

But they’re going to say it’s Der Stürmer no matter what. That’s the thing. I can draw teddy bears. One of my comics is kittens as the IDF. They would say that’s Der Stürmer. Their point is not that my images are anti-Semitic. Their point is that I am anti-Likud, and to them anything that is anti-Likud comes out of Nazi propaganda. Those complaints are much more reflective of the people making them than anything else, because the only people who make those complaints are people who have normalized the rise of authoritarianism in Israel.

So, that’s one way to approach it. But, you know, I am inspired by grotesque art. I like it. It’s just the way I draw. My visual style is my visual style, and anyone who has seen my drawings of Trump knows that it’s not directed, visually, at Jews more than at anyone else. I don’t even like saying that, though, because it sounds like I’m being defensive, and I don’t think I should have to be defensive about this at all.

As a side point, I have noticed that I just draw Trump so ridiculously now that often I don’t have room for a nose. The lips just go so high, and then I have to throw in two eyes, and there’s really no room for a nose after that. So there’s a few comics where he just doesn’t have a nose. That doesn’t help my point, because he’s not Jewish. But still.

I’m curious about one more minor thread in your work, concerning Kafka. Two of the comics in Diaspora Boy, “Metamorphosis” and “The Trial,” reference Kafka stories, and one of them has a reference, also, to “Before the Law.” And on your Instagram, you pointed out that Diaspora Boy’s cover is modeled on Kafka cover art by Ottomar Starke.

Yeah. The Metamorphosis cover, actually. The title page.

Right. So I’m wondering about Kafka’s importance to you personally and as an artist.

Kafka is enormously important. Years ago I wrote a Jewish travel guide to Prague and other cities in the region. At the time, I was really into Kafka. It comes out a little in my work now, probably more subconsciously than it did then. Then I was reading all of his Letters to Felice, I was nuts, literally, when I was living in Prague. It’s a cliché, I know. But to this day, everything we say about Kafka’s a cliché, since his writings are seen, with 20/20 hindsight, as a horrifying prediction of what was to come, both with the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny, living in a police state. But in terms of influence, there’s the horror and the grotesquery, the allegory and hyperbole, the elevation of pulpy narrative, the Jewish obsessions, the generational tensions, but also the humor. I mean, Kafka’s stories were also meant to be funny, which is something that is not often appreciated today. Philip Roth called him a “sit-down comic.” If you read The Metamorphosis, it’s insanely funny that Gregor’s just trying to figure out how to get to work when he’s in insect form.

That being said, it’s dangerous to compare my comics directly to Kafka, as they’re much more influenced by MAD comics than by Kafka himself. But it’s possible that on some subconscious level, certain aspects owe a debt. Culturally, working in this period of enormous transformation for Jews and in Europe more broadly, I found Kafka a sort of guide to turning history and memory into a narrative, into art that becomes even more compelling than the tradition it replaces.

And there are specific things, like authenticity. Kafka was obsessed with Galician Jewish refugees in Prague at the beginning of World War I. He considered them to be the embodiment of authenticity. And in his diaries, he writes about them. He talks about how if he could be anybody in the world, he’d just want to be this little Jewish boy he remembered seeing, seemingly free of worry. He idealized them as true Jews, essentially. And that definitely stuck with me, because I’ve done similar things. I’m not proud of that, but we’re always trying to deprogram ourselves from what we have learned as authenticity when we were young. That’s one of the reasons I love that comment on “Photo Stroll,” where she calls me out for romanticizing “an earlier breed of Jew,” as I called it in the comic. It’s the same kind of thing, just thinking that they’re the authentic ones, because implicit in that is that we are somehow deficient. And honestly, if there’s no other point to Diaspora Boy, it’s to say we are not deficient. We are authentic. Honestly, it’s crazy that that should be a radical thought. That should be self-evident. But it needs to be said.

Nathan Goldman (nathangoldman.com) is a writer whose work has appeared in Literary Hub, the Kenyon Review Online, The Millions, and other publications.

The post Redefining Jewish Authenticity: An Interview with Eli Valley appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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Valley spoke with me by phone from New York City, where he was taking a break from drawing a sock puppet on Jared Kushner’s hand in what would become this comic.

No, I don’t think so.

I just get really angry, even thinking about this shit.

Dystopia.

Yeah, absolutely. So how does a satirist — and particularly a Jewish satirist — work in this environment?

That’s a big question. There’s a lot of ways to approach it. One of them is: I refuse to let the Jewish figure be defined by anti-Semites.

Yeah. The Metamorphosis cover, actually. The title page.

Right. So I’m wondering about Kafka’s importance to you personally and as an artist.

Nathan Goldman (nathangoldman.com) is a writer whose work has appeared in Literary Hub, the Kenyon Review Online, The Millions, and other publications.

The post Redefining Jewish Authenticity: An Interview with Eli Valley appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://ift.tt/2ySvAtX

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends

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