The Cairo speech (round two)

Allanm don't worry about me confusing you with Muslims, I don't even confuse you with Jews who follow the Law.
Have you ever pissed on Star of David on Independance Day;->>
BTW, for Muslims Torah, Bible and Koran is equally sacred books of the God. If some one treated them unrespectfully, he/she loses the qualification of being Muslim, because to be Muslim one has to believe in all the revealed books of the God. So, my friend I would't call someone Muslim who treats Torah as you said, he must be one of those secularists who has no respect to others laws except their own, who impose their laws to all others, Jews, Christians, Mulsims, etc. Secularists deny the right to law to all groups except their own.
You are a secularist, you don't follow the Laws revealed to Moses, you are happy and at home with secularist laws, that is the reality you have to admit to yourself, to be true to yourself. Say "Yes, I am secularist! I am anussim!".

Grand Sen~or.

For one, you could not convert to being a Nazi with all the effort in the world.

What a silly idea. Many people did convert to national socialism and got accepted by the nazis. Some jews did, athough they usually hid their jewish identity. Of course people played that down after the war since pretty much all of the converted quickly converted to something else.

Not one Jew on earth would ever countenance any genocide against the Palestinians!

Not one? Surely you miscount. But I agree, genocide against jews was part of Hitler's idea from the beginning, and it was not officially disapproved even before they actually began to do more than the same sort of concentration camps the russians did. The nazis did try to sell jews to other countries and claimed to be disappointed that so few were taken. The difference between the two is not as big as you say, but still there is a great big difference.

Ethnic cleansing, is not genocide. It can be done peacefully, and with respect for human rights. So if we kick them out of Jerusalem, we'll do so peacefully with minimal damage.

Your kindness and generosity are astounding. But there is something to this. Even in 1948 the mass murder was mostly restricted to the minimum needed to get most arabs to flee, with little attempt to kill off the refugees as they ran. And the Stern Gang was reprimanded for killing a single arab town that had been promised protection. I agree that israelis are better intentioned than nazis and better behaved than nazis. They aren't exactly the same. At the very worst israelis are like kinder, gentler nazis.

To claim we have committed a single genocide, is simply false. Not one genocide, in the history of the Jewish people. Not one.

Torah would seem to document some, but that was a very long time ago and the records should not be considered reliable.

This is more like a silly debate point, though. I don't feel responsible for US genocide done barely more than a century ago -- I don't want the USA to do genocide now. Legends about genocide by a different people with a similar name close to 3000 years ago? Silly.

But there is a serious core to it. Hitler's Mein Kampf proposed genocide. It wasn't an official policy manual or even a campaign promise but it surely had an effect on the nazi government. Torah advocated killing all the Canaanites and Joshua severely criticised the israelites for failing to do so. This could have an effect on religious israelis, and it's to their credit that it does not yet.

As per law - right of return doesn't give a damn if your mommy was Orthodox. It's that simple. You are Jewish by virtue of 1/4the Jewish ancestry.

I may have misunderstood the explanations that a few israelis gave me. Let me give you a true example and ask you how it goes.

An orthodox man marries a woman who was not jewish but who joined a Reform temple. They have two daughters who occasionally attended at the Orthodox synagogue and somewhat more often at the Reform, but who were not interested in religion. Does the Right of Return apply to the daughters?

The couple divorces. The man refuses to contribute money to israel because he objects to israel's treatment of palestinians, and his rabbi insists, and I don't have it clear whether he quits his membership or is thrown out. He accidentally gets his nisei secretary pregnant. Does his half-japanese son have right of return?

Later the man marries a woman who was raised protestant and who formerly had no connection to judaism. She joins his Reform synagogue. Does she have right of return?

They have a son. The two sons go to hebrew school on saturdays and both have their bar mitzvahs at the reform temple. I attend the second son's bar mitzvah; his teaching is that it is wrong to worship a god who would order the israelites to genocide. Does the second son have right of return?

(disclaimer -- I changed the story slightly. In reality the first wife was french and came from a family that had been Orthodox but from her grandparents on were atheists. And it was the first son's bar mitzvah I attended, I had to miss the second son's bar mitzvah.)

Jews represent the world from top to bottom, and can not conceivably be a race.

Unfortunately, many racists believe in races that are not actually races. The nazis for example had a trumped-up concept of an Aryan race. There is no such thing and there may never have been such a thing, the evidence is unclear. That didn't stop them from being racists. Racist white southerners had a sort of concept that anybody who wasn't black was white, although they also disapproved of catholics and jews. I remember an anthropological study where a family from india moved into a southern town and the racists had to decide whether the family was white or black. Dark skins, but after a few months the community decided they were white because they were middle class and they acted white.

Arguing that you aren't racist because jews aren't a race is the sort of jesuitical reasoning people stereotypically expect....

Your definition of racism, by the way, if applied to those you so defend - wow, I can't imagine if you tried for consistency, what kind of Islamophobe you'd become.

Agreed. I wouldn't want the USA to have with any arab nation the sort of relationship we have with israel. They would abuse the relationship and we would have problems.

What bothers me is that israel -- while culturally more like the USA than any arab nation -- abuses the relationship and we have problems.

It would be absurd for the USA to decide the israelis are devils and the palestinians are angels and switch sides, doing everything for palestinians that we now do for israelis and vice versa. But the israelis aren't angels either, and nobody should expect them to be.

Agreed - I agree - "racism" is a shut-up term, as can be anti-semitism.

But it isn't always. sometimes its a quick way to expose prejudice.

I think it might be better to look at the specific claims than to use the overgeneralised label. Unless the large majority is your sort of people -- in that case it's enough to tell them that a particular outsider is a bad outsider instead of a useful outsider who should be tolerated. Simple labels are good enough for outsiders who don't deserve much fairness anyway.

So what do you say to someone who tries to shut you up, by calling you responsible for a genocide- that has never happened, because some Chabbad guy killed in India, received a jewish journalists elegy, that some goyim found offensive!? It's crazy.

Everybody who considers himself part of a group will discriminate some in favor of his group. If he didn't do any of that what would it mean to belong? And outsiders will be concerned that they may suffer too much discrimination. Where do you draw the line that it's too much?

People who worry that jews as a group might be too powerful and discriminate too effectively will naturally pay attention to things that seem to confirm their fears. To me this looks like an example of that. Here's a terrorist incident that kills more than 180 people -- and six foreign jews. Apparently none of the thousands of local jews were involved. They were going after foreigners, particularly westerners, particularly american and british tourists. And the six jews. Afterward some jews made a big deal about it as antisemitism, when by the numbers that was a little sideshow. So these guys want to complain about the holocaust hype and how this fits into it.

Of course the zionist holocaust-hype gets tedious, but it's completely understandable. The Holocaust is the main thing that jews have in common today. Of course some of them push it as far as it will go. It's like -- my wife's grandfather was a Mason. That's her entire connection to the Masonic tradition. Her grandfather was a Mason and twice a month he wore funny hats. But lots of people whose only connection with judaism is their grandmother was jewish feel like they're jewish too, because Hitler threw people into death camps for having a jewish grandmother.

It looks like in the USA judaism survives best in all-jewish Orthodox neighborhoods. The rest tend to get assimilated. And so if you aren't Orthodox and you want to feel jewish it makes sense to make a big deal about it. Get all bent out of shape when somebody says something that could be considered a slight. Make sure everybody knows you're Jewish by taking offense easily, when that's the main thing you have to show you aren't just part of the mass culture.

I don't see why people would get much identity boost by being anti-jewish. But there are all sorts of people. Two groups like that would tend to build on each other -- jews get to feel persecuted by antisemites while antisemites get to feel persecuted by jews, and both get their group identities stronger as a result.

My own concern is about israel. Militant intransigent israel has become a liability the USA is less and less able to afford. If they continue their past methods the USA will have to cut the lifeline or go under with them. But peace might not be possible even if israelis could accept it. And the later the attempt is made, the less likely it gets. A great big problem to distract americans when we have our own giant problems.

As per "anti-semitism" I couldn't care less who invented the modern term - the fact has no inventor, it has a millenial history.

I don't think it's useful to discard concepts based on who named them. But named concepts do have some power, and it does make sense to notice that. "Antisemitism" is a fairly recent word whatever the reality. Similarly, "Masada Complex" is a recent name for a recent concept, though whatever reality it has goes back at least to Masada.

If israelis want to pull down the pillars of the temple and die in a grand gesture, I want the USA to be elsewhere. The USA will devote resources toward helping israel become a more-or-less ordinary nation. We cannot afford the status quo. We cannot afford a giant soul-satisfying catastrophe.