Judaism is a religion based on humanistic principles offering powerful arguments for social justice, but it has been hijacked by Zionists who have twisted it into an excuse for ethnic cleansing and mass murder, as Professor of Moral Theology Daniel C. Maguire describes.
By Daniel C. Maguire
Like the Palestinian people, Judaism is also suffering from siege and occupation. Zionism, a Nineteenth Century hallucinatory piece of fictive theology and a vicious ideology, has gotten a demonic grip on much of modern Jewish consciousness and has taken possession of U.S. policies in the Middle East.
Zionism is not Judaism; Judaism is 3,000 years old. Zionism is a heretical upstart based upon preposterous assumptions. In terms of theistic Judaism, Zionism teaches that God, the creator of everything in the universe from fruit flies to quasars, is also into real-estate distribution and has assigned Palestine to Jews or those who tenuously claim to be Jews … from dark-skinned Ethiopians to blue-eyed Russians.
The Prophet Isaiah (Illustration from a Bible card published by the Providence Lithograph Company)
This God wants all non-Jewish Palestinians (some of whose ancestral roots in Palestine go back for millennia) to be removed or brutally occupied and periodically bombed and starved into submission. That is Zionist theocratic policy and it has been a raging success.
Thanks to Zionist power and American complicit and compliant support, Jewish Israelis control 100 percent of Palestine and Syria’s Golan Heights. Non-Jewish Palestinians are either occupied or living under dehumanizing siege.
To forestall any charge of caricature, let the Zionists speak for themselves. Joseph Weitz, an administrator responsible for planning the takeover of Palestine, minced no words: “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both people together in this country. … The only solution is a Palestine … without Arabs. And there is no other way than to transfer Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer all of them, not one village, not one tribe, should be left.”
David Ben-Gurion, a man of no known theological expertise, saw the invasion and occupation as an exercise in theology: “God promised it to us,” he said. Yitzhak Baer joined the pious Zionist chorus writing in 1947: “God gave to every nation its place and to the Jews he gave Palestine.”
One could be tempted to think that God would have preferred pre-Zionist Palestine. In the Nineteenth Century, Jews were four percent of the population, Christians, ten percent, and the rest were Muslims and all lived together in harmony and peace.
The Zionist success is brittle and becoming more so. Fifty years ago, a professor at Hebrew University wrote presciently: “Israel may be able to win and win and go on winning till its last breath, win itself to death. … After every victory, we face more difficult, more complicated problems. … The abyss if mutual hated will deepen and the desires for vengeance will mount.”
In the age of suitcase-size atomic weapons and micro-biological weapons and pinpoint accurate drones, a reality-check should tell Zionists that it is past time to take paths to peace that are open to them right now. United Nations resolutions and Arab offers are on the table based on returning to the pre-1967 borders.
Peace is there for the asking once Zionist stop the land-theft (euphemized as “settlements”) and comply with international law. Israel can choose peace or expansion; Zionist Israel is choosing expansion and continued ethnic cleansing.
Equating Zionism and Judaism
But here is the piercing point of Zionism: Zionism would not settle for the land of Palestine. It demanded that Zionism be identified with and conflated with Judaism. This perverse effort has worked well so that now any criticism of Zionist imperialism is called “antisemitic.” “Antisemitic,” of course, is a misnomer since the occupied and besieged Palestinians are Semites, too.
What is meant is that any criticism of Zionist policies is anti-Jewish. Wrong! Even Adolf Hitler knew that Zionism is not Judaism: he despised Judaism, but in his Mein Kampf, he had praise for Zionism. Hitler admired racist oppression wherever he found it. Indeed, Zionism’s fatal fault is that it is not Jewish.
In my judgment, as a scholar in the field of religion, Judaism is the most profound, inspiring and practicable moral vision to be found in any world religion. Christianity and Islam are blessed to be among its heirs. In the years 1250 to 1050 B.C.E., the early Hebrews pressed history to turn a corner in such a wise direction that modern democratic theory owes deep debts to their achievement.
The Exodus/Sinai story in novels, films and homilies suffered shrinkage. It got reduced to historical facticity, i.e., stuff that happened and got recorded by ancient scribes trying to get their facts straight. The Exodus-Sinai epic is not history; it is metaphor.
As Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman put it: “There was no mass Exodus from Egypt.” Moses may not have been a single person but a composite of many figures assembled with literary freedom over centuries.
But that doesn’t mean nothing happened back there. Poetry happened. Revolutionary social experimentation happened. Forget the frogs and the parted seas engulfing the bad guys. What really happened was a social-political-economic revolution presented in epic form.
As Norman Gottwald shows in his monumental study The Tribes of Yahweh, those Hebrews (from apiru meaning outlaw) challenged the monarchical paradigm of one percent rule exemplified by Egypt. These poets were saying we need not live in the Egyptian model. The Sinaitic alternative beckons.
This Exodus-to-Sinai story is an epic poem in the genre of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid, but outstripping both Homer and Virgil in power and far-reaching effects. As Walter Brueggemann says it is as insightful and relevant as if it had been written yesterday. It has perpetual contemporaneity, the mark of a true classic.
People-Power
This epic poem was about people-power, about the 99 percent taking on the one percent. The story says you cannot trust the greed-driven one-percent. They are, as Micah said, “rich men who are full of violence, the city’s upper classes speak falsehood and their tongues frame deceit.” (6:12)
And he said that millennia before sub-prime mortgages and derivatives were cooked up like a witch’s brew. The exodus was a moral exodus from the one-percent rule in Egypt with all power moving to the top, to the Sinai model where “there shall be no poor among you” (Deut. 15:4).
In the Sinai model compassion was woven into the political economy. As Walter Brueggemann says, the Hebrew revolution which is the root of Judaism became “the first move toward a social safety net in the history of the world.”
Jan Dus says that what is contained in Exodus chapters 1 to 24 is the first ideologically-based socio-political revolution in the history of the world. The Judaism of Sinai and the prophets deserve two Nobel prizes, one in Peace and one in Economics. That is the stirring moral core of Judaism, the polar opposite of Zionism. It is this that should swell Jewish hearts with pride, not Zionism.
The poets of Israel warned that doom awaits societies that “grind the faces of the poor.” (Isa. 3:15) Security comes from planting a poverty-banishing justice (Isa. 32:17) not from kill-power. You cannot build “Zion in bloodshed.” (Micah 3:10) That’s a message the Zionists will not abide.
“Neither by force of arms nor by brute strength” will the people be saved. (Zech. 4:6) The “song of the military” will be silenced (Isa. 25:5, 2) Prophetic Judaism scorns an over-reliance on violence. With the over-used sword beaten into a plowshares the earth could turn green with hope and not red with the mayhem we call war. (Isa.22:4; Mic. 4:24) That’s the dream that the poets of Israel dreamed and bequeathed to all humankind.
Suppose Israel Were Jewish
Israel and the United States both started out with ethnic cleansing. Is the superpower United States going to repent and hand the country over to the Native Americans? Is Israel the fourth strongest military power and the sixth strongest nuclear power about to dissolve itself? The answer is No to both those naive questions.
What Israel can do is accept the peace offered to it by its Arab neighbors and prescribed by the United Nations. In March 2002, 22 members of the Arab League offered to recognize Israel’s right to exist and have normal relations with Israel, no small concession that.
This offer has been repeatedly reconfirmed. In April 2002, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which includes 57 nations, concurred with the Arab League offer, and the Iranian delegation expressed its full approval.
The condition was Israel’s compliance with the United Nations Resolutions 194, 242, 338 and the return to the pre-1967 borders. Hamas has said it will acknowledge Israel’s right to live in peace within its pre-1967 borders. Israel can have peace or continued ethnic cleansing. It is currently choosing continued ethnic cleansing.
A morally Jewish Israel, embodied in growing groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, would make peace and in so doing transform the roiled politics of the entire Middle East. No one expects Zionist Israel to do that. Hence the growing BDS (boycott, divestment, sanction) movement.
The reigning assumption today is that it is pressure, not conscience, that will move Zionist Israel to choose peace.
Daniel C. Maguire is a Professor of Moral Theology at Marquette University, a Catholic, Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is author of A Moral Creed for All Christians and The Horrors We Bless: Rethinking the Just-War Legacy [Fortress Press]). He can be reached at [email protected]
Much of the Bible is DESCRIPTIVE of the way life was lived in brutal times and it is disgusting. But there are breakthroughs in the Bible that contained ores that were later refined into modern democratic theory and socialist thinking. These are the PRESCRIPTIVE parts of the Bible that are positive. To miss them is to miss a lot. A good idea is a good idea no matter what its origin.
Check out my WEB page, http://www.religiousconsultation.org, especially the section on PALESTINE: DEATH OF A NATION
Can you tell us how Israel’s deceitfulness over decades for their pre-planned massacres and the expulsion of the Arabs in 1947-48 to take the land, fits in with the teachings of Christ?
Leaving aside the rather myopic view of the ‘Abrahamic’ religions which fails to note their embrace of violence, ‘otherness’, misogyny, and a host of other behaviors most ‘civilized’ people consider either ‘anti-social’, criminal, or even sinful, the point with which I take issue is the unsaid presumption that the Zionist state of Israel should exist under any circumstance, regardless of what concessions the “Arab States” may offer. They are not the designated spokesmen of the injured party: The Palestinians. Only the Palestinians are entitled to determine under what circumstances, if any, the ‘State of Israel’ is allowed to continue on occupied Palestinian land. This is the crux of the entire issue and is summed up as “Justice! Justice, shall ye pursue!” And, until there is justice, as the “Black LIves Matter” movement makes clear, there’ll be no peace.
Dear Mr. Mcguire,
Thank you for a thoughtful article on the distinction between Zionism and Judaism.
I might be at odds with your dissertation and most of the readers comments section in that I confer a certain legitimacy to Zionism and the creation of Israel.
It is a great narrative when one considers the entire arc of Jewish history….The return after thousands of years of life in the Diaspora,( after centuries of pogroms, expulsions and antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust), to the land of ones ancestral roots….to rise like the phoenix from the ashes of Treblinka, into a new Israel , a nation reborn in the guarantee of freedom and self determination !..A land , a country and a home of ones own !
It is great story that I loved my whole life !
It is still a great narrative, and would be 100% so, had nobody been” living there” prior to its creation !
Part of the duplicity and hypocrisy inherent in the creation of the state of Israel, is the brutal dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in order to achieve a demographic majority essential to Jewish self determination in its nascent “democratic”state !
Had the 800 thousand or so Palestinians been allowed to remain in 1948…the new state would have had a majority of non-Jews …and all the codicils accompanying both its” Jewish and democratic nature” could have been legitimately unwound during its formation !
The almost mind-numbing propaganda of denial and erasure surrounding the plight of the Palestinians and the cruelty inflicted upon them, makes perfect sense when one seeks to justly condemn the horrors of the Holocaust…
it never looked good , and doesn’t look good that Israel could visit genocide on Palestine while condemning (from the high moral ground), Nazi Germany’s genocide of the Jews !
Hence the whitewashing of the “Nakba”, even to this day, and the “editorial license” to exclude Palestinian suffering and marginalization, in all the print and news media in the west !
Even when recognition of Israels atrocities, its settlement land grabs, and cruelty toward Palestinians, is grudgingly permitted, it is housed in a language that obfuscates its criminality !
No one, even in the most liberal blogs, is ALLOWED to equate Israels land theft…with Hitlers ideology of Lebensraum (living space)..even though it is almost an exact carbon copy….No one is ALLOWED to equate the Israeli sniper taking out the Palestinian kid running in Gaza with the pot shots taken by the Nazi colonel at imprisoned Jewish kids in “Schindler’s List”….Even though it is the self same behavior of domination and dehumanization !
i recall a shocking photomontage on the Site of Norman Finkelstein in 2006, that juxtaposed real images of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps and its dehumanization of Jews with recent Photos of the almost identical behavior towards Palestinians.by the I.D.F…. the photomontage was removed from his website..
One is almost assuredly ALLOWED to “criticize” Israel, if you take the steps to “leapfrog back” over the “Nazi” brutality of the last century and equate it to the colonial expansion of the nascent United States two hundred years ago.
That’s OK !
…Israel “colonizes”…just like the US “colonized” …
..Israel kills Palestinians ..just like the US killed Indians..
.and so on and so forth…
.The very architecture of the criticism is meant to imbue Israeli transgressions with the hue of “american manifest destiny” not Nazi Lebensraum and Nazi occupation !
Of course when the United States colonized North America, two centuries ago..Hitler had not happened. and to do so was not an international crime…..The United States army may have fought the Indians, and slaughtered many in its “westward expansion ,but did so in an age bereft of International law and the horrors of the World Wars that established it !
Israel’s expansion takes place AFTER World War Two, the expansionist desire of Hitler, and the near destruction of western civilization as a result of confronting it !
From the point of view of the entire civilized world, all “colonizing and land stealing ” , post Nuremberg, is “Lebensraum”, in that it is abhorrent criminal behavior and a crime against humanity.
Israels brutish but clever attempt at selling “the war on terror” to the West, and its success, has enabled Israel to(falsely) rationalize its Lebensraum as ‘security”, provide ideological fodder to the “justness” of its enterprise, when no real “Justness” exists, and effectively circumvent “accountability” for the criminality of its expansion !
When , in the West, the conflict in Palestine is engaged, it is impossible to be ” a believer in human rights for all”…you are either Pro-Palestinian,or Pro-Israel, at least on the editorial pages and in the major media . The very essence of the propaganda precludes a ” fair and rational ” position and demands a contorted “bias” one way or the other !
Given the fact ,that to this day, Israel has no “peace” plan, ( a ten point outline of its interpretation of a just resolution to the conflict) and no desire to implement the “Internationalized” version that exits….one has to question, in no uncertain terms, whether its perpetuation of the “war on terror” is indeed, becoming self-referential and solipsistic !
If you have no plan for peace how can the other guy possibly be the terrorist ?
If Israel wants to avoid becoming ” that which it most despises”, it needs a peace plan….and it needs it fast !
Israel only exists because of Zionism’s deception — claiming to want peace while planning for decades to massacre and expel the Arabs until when, in 1947-48, they finally had a sufficient military force to do so.
The Zionist claim to the land is based on a combination of religious and racial supremacist bigotry.
The entire Zionist narrative to “justify” their religious and racial supremacy is proving to be largely exaggerated fabrications making their entire claim and Israel’s existence based on such as completely illegitimate.
Daniel C. Maguire writes “In my judgment, as a scholar in the field of religion, Judaism is the most profound, inspiring and practicable moral vision to be found in any world religion. Christianity and Islam are blessed to be among its heirs.”
Christianity is not an heir of Judaism.
Jesus repeatedly criticized those who, in his words, replaced the “Word of God” with the “wisdom of men.”
By the “wisdom of men” Jesus referred to the teachings of the Pharisees.
Phariseeism was probably brought back by the Judeans (‘Jews’) returning from the Babylonian captivity. Phariseeism was deeply influenced by Persian fertility cults.
The Pharisees created the Mishnah, which is the basis of the Talmud and therefore of modern rabbinic Judaism.
By the “Word of God” Jesus referred to the teachings of Moses as contained in the Pentateuch/Torah.
For a full discussion of the differences between Christianity and Judaism Daniel C. Maguire should read The Old Paths (a.k.a. The Talmud Tested – A Comparison of the Principles and Doctrines of Modern Judaism with the Religion of Moses and the Prophets) by Dr. Alexander McCaul, D.D.
McCaul was a polymath from Dublin who declined a fellowship at Trinity College and instead spent ten years converting Jews in Poland in the 1820’s. Later he became Professor of Hebrew and Rabbinic Literature, King’s College, London.
Once Professor Maguire has read the book I doubt he will repeat his fulsome praise of Judaism.
Jews’ role in the U.S. civil rights movement is legendary. Now they are Mississippi.
How Zionists took control of British and American press and politicians is described here.
http://warprofiteerstory.blogspot.com
The article is recommended by ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern here.
https://consortiumnews.com/2014/06/03/the-real-villains-of-the-bergdahl-tale/#comment-170961
I agree with 90%.
The most blatant error is that , the author considers the Jews who invaded, (backed by British guns) the entity Zionists call, Israel , as SEMITIC. They are not
The only Semitic Jews were already there living, working and doing business, in HARMONY, with SEMITIC, Muslims, Christians in what is truly PALESTINE, not Israel
There is MORE than sufficient research and evidence proving they are descended from KHAZARS a tribe of very warlike pagan people ( who would have thought) who lived in the area close to what is now called UKRAINE.
Zionism is the civil rights movement of the Jewish people. Period.
How is it that the “Jewish civil rights movement”, as you refer to it, can justifiably deny Palestinian Arabs their human rights to property and life itself?
What happens as more people begin to recognize Israel’s decades of atrocities and war crimes as committed against the Palestinians — and join the movement for Palestinian rights?
The truth is becoming unburied like the 500 Arab villages the Zionists raised during the 1947-48 Nakba.
Tribal aggressiveness should be nothing more than ancient history among civilized people in this day and age.
Darn! If Hitler had discovered that pitch.
Are civil rights movements necessarily good?
Does freedom of religion mean Satanists should be exempt from laws against murder so they can sacrifice children to their Master? Not to me.
Equally civil rights for Jews deserve support only in so far as Jews seek the freedom to meet internationally respected norms.
But the behaviour of the Zionists indicate they want Jewish actions accepted no matter how outrageous. If that is the concept of civil rights Frank wants respected then he brings the civil rights into disrepute.
I stopped reading when I read that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all lived in harmony before ’48. Jews could not worship freely. Muslims sided with Nazis. Pogroms took place unnoticed in Palestine. Beyond that, Jews have been essentially kicked out of every Arab country in the Middle East since the 70s. Why would I think anything else would have happened in Muslim-controlled Palestine? What would have happened to the one million plus Arab-Jews that were refugees were it not for Israel being born? (Not that they were treated great initially, but like the Sudanese and Ethiopians at least they eventually got it right and have a safe haven.) Also, imagine how ISIS would be destroying all the holiest sites in Israel right now if it wasn’t for a strong democracy like Israel. (Some might debate this but there are more people serving in Israel’s government who are against the government than any other country in the world. These include pro-Arab Muslims and Jews.) None of this touches on the fact that Jews were attacked after the internationally-recognized partition plan and won a war that led to a legal Jewish state. Then there destruction was sought again in ’67 and miraculously won that war too that led to the country’s expansion, including the buffer zones of the Golan Heights plus other buffer areas that were needed to preserve security. There can always be improvements, but I recommend supporting those who discourage glorifying blowing up supermarkets versus those who make holidays out of 9/11!
Typical response from a zionist that is muddled with propaganda and half truths. The “Muslims” did not side with the Nazis. One leader that was not elected or representative of the population was pro-Nazi. It was the Israelis who started the 1967 war, there are many quotes from Israeli leaders admitting to this. To call Israel a democracy is just an example of doublespeak.
Is it any wonder that zionism is losing the propagand war when such blatant distortions are promoted by its supporters.
Now you are upsetting our muslim sensitivities. For many the cooperation with Nazi Germany was one of the great moments in recent history. Google “Bosnian SS, Farhud, Husseini, et al”. The cooperation continued after the war when coumtless Naxi war criminals found refuge in arab countries, mostly Iraq, Egypt and Syria. Original anti Jewish Nazi propaganda is alive and well in all Arab states. Today.
Nonsense, if you want to talk about cooperation with Nazi Germany why not bring up the collaboration the Zionists had with the Nazis, all to further their cause of a pure zionist state. Or about the support and funding that Jewish leaders like Ihor Kolomoyskyi give the neo-Nazis in Ukraine (the Azov Battalion). The greatest source of racist propaganda originates from the Zionist camp.
You are correct — the present cycle of violence between Jews, Christians and Muslims started shortly after the European Zionist invasion into the Mid-East began around 1900.
Modern Israel was born through Zionist terrorism — without which there would be no Israel today.
While claiming they wanted to peacefully coexist, Zionists plotted for decades until 1947-48 when their military forces were sufficient to massacre and expel the Arabs from Palestine.
Zionist terrorists continued to recruit indigenous Jews and commit acts of terrorism in Egypt and Iraq, among others, during the 1950’s; search (((Lavon affair))). That Zionist terrorism is what prompted the Arabs to send the Jews in those countries packing for Israel…
No one likes modern Israel’s “true history” — especially Zionists — that’s why they’ve concocted such elaborate lies to obscure the truth about Zionism itself…!
I fail to see your quote, “I stopped reading when I read that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all lived in harmony before ’48.” in the article David. They lived in harmony until the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the British and the French divided up the Middle East. Lawrence of Arabia and his Arab army were denied what had been promised, the Balfour Declaration had come forth with no specific mention of the indigenous Palestinian people, and Zionist were on the march. Land Muslim Palestinians mainly worked was oft owned by absentee landlords (Christian Palestinians were more numerous in local businesses). Some of these tracts were purchased through foreign Zionists funds and the Palestinian labourers kicked off. (there was a Zionist law that only Jews were to work the purchased land, amounting to only 6 – 7 % of land offered to Jews at the time of partition.)
Yes elements of the Arab population sided with the Nazis, but it wasn’t because they believed in Nazi policies or thought. They had no faith in Britain or France offering them a road to fairness after the way they had been treated. Besides some star Zionists were in negotiations with the Nazis to help build the future Israel. I don’t think they believed in the Nazi code either :-)
This is all about how religion gets distorted with political beliefs and aims. The true message gets lost in the game and people suffer, NA Indians, SA Indians, Africans, Palestinians etc. Can’t we just cut out the bull and work together to create a better world before it’s too late.
You say; “with no specific mention of the indigenous Palestinian people”
Yet the Balfour Decision says:
“it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”
As you say, the Balfour Declaration just says ‘existing non-Jewish communities’ it doesn’t mention them by name other than Jewish, and those non-Jewish communities were never asked for their opinion or informed of the matter before hand.
DISCUSSING RELIGION
Discussing religion is popular among commenters it seems. So
many assume that Zionism is because it IS.
I agree with “Mark” that Zionism is now and always has
been a colonial terrorist project. I am a passionate anti-Zionist.
The responses of apologists for Zionism feigning “shock”
or its equivalent assume that no one else in the world
could question their supremacy, racism, and “chosenness”.
I cannot waste time with those trying to present themselves
as “victims” while decimating thousands in Gaza and
elsewhere. (Perhaps if you are “chosen” you are
permitted to “mow the grass”, murder, rape, destroy
homes, massacre, starve etc. God is on your side,
you say! Who wants to live with such a brutal
divinity who encourages extermination of “the other”?
See Prior cited below.)
I am not a theologian. I defer such discussion to Michael
Prior, THE BIBLE AND COLONIALISM: A MORAL CRITIQUE.
—Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
@ john p : Surely we can all start to create a better world as soon as we terminate the synagogue of satan elitist beast and all of its regenerative tentacles that continues to exterminate humanity ( except for the chosen few ) .
That is very sweet to oppose those whom would massacre 300 people in a supermarket . Do you have any idea who was behind the 9-11 massacre of 3000 people ? ( A confirmed factual hint : Larry Silverstein had explosives planted in building WTC 7 long before the smoke cleared from the WTC twintowers collapse where it normally takes about a month to demolition prep a WTC 7 size building ) .
If Judaism endows the title of ‘God’s chosen people’ upon itself then it can never be trusted with political power. However, if the term is understood specifically in relation to their conflict with the Egytptians then that’s all good!
A question then: is it Judaism or just Zionism that claims Jews to be God’s Chosen race?
There are no legitimate claims to exceptionalism amongst the nations or races of humanity.
This is about as an inane and ahistorical piece of nonsense as I have ever read. So-called “humanistic” Judaism is first and foremost the originator of the pernicious myth of patriarchal monotheism. The deity invented by the ancestral desert nomads is one whose cruelty and capriciousness mirror the harshness of that environment. He demands his adherents “love” him before their families, their children, their parents, their spouse, their community. His presence is invasive: he demands ultimate authority over your sex life, your wardrobe, your diet, and the ways you think and feel. Even death cannot free you from his baleful influence. The gods imagined in more sophisticated pagan cultures, by comparison, left you free to live life as you saw fit, as long as you made the occasional token sacrifice to honor them.
The great American patriot Tom Paine spoke for all rational people when said this in his masterwork, The Age of Reason, about the “holy” book of the Jews, “Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon, than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it, as I detest everything that is cruel.”
Through Christianity and to a lesser extent, Islam, knowledge of the dreadful Jewish god has been imposed on virtually every culture in every corner of the planet, at a tremendous price in human misery. Historically, the cultural traits that have always flowed from this toxic belief system are ethnocentrism/racism, misogyny/sexism, homophobia, intolerance, authoritarianism, and the worst curse, relentlessly dualistic thinking. We feel free to condemn the extremist Christian and Muslim advocates of these practices today but it is a mighty cultural taboo to objectively critique the Judaism that inspired them.
In the creed of the Jews, the natural impulse to love another human, expressed through sex, became a prisoner of the counterfeit impulse to fixate upon, adore and worship an imaginary tribal deity. With emotional attachment, and its associated fears and anxieties, displaced from fellow humans to Yahweh, whose wiles only an elite caste of priests could interpret, the sexual drive itself was shackled to a bizarre assortment of imperatives, taboos and prohibitions. There is no finer recipe for inducing the culture-wide neurosis that our civilization still struggles to overcome even today.
Bullshit article. Too many historical inaccuracies to even comment.
For historical “accuracies” and analysis, try reading Israeli historian Ilan Pappe”s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.” Oh, by the way, your comment, Andy, is tawdry and priggish…
Pappe’s revisionist rants have been disproven by so many serious historians that it is embarrassing or plain stupid to even refer to him in 2015.
Agreed. But you have to admit that he played it smart and that his antisemitic/antizionist history will guarantee him eternal gratitude from those who put all the blame on the Jews.
“Harold” (Why do so many of these people NOT put their full names to what they write?) The stupid thing is not to include even one of the so-called historians that have disproven Pappe’s analysis in the book I referred to. And using such loaded language as “rant” is not in the vocabulary of reasonable people wishing to educate others to what they believe is the truth of a matter; neither is calling someone “stupid”.
So you believe Jews only if they are Jew-hater communists?
How is it, that for some Zionists any one who supports rights for Arab victims of Zionism is automatically labelled an anti-Semite or “Jew-hater”?
Do you understand that defining criteria means Zionists supporters MUST go along, or look the other way concerning all of Zionism’s considerable history of deceptions, coercions, massacres, ethnic cleansing, propaganda and general war crimes?
Sounds like the only Israeli history you’ve studied wasn’t really history at all but is what’s Israelis call “hasbara” and is better known as propaganda.
See my comments above to “Harold”
Thank you for your impassioned arguments. Just one thing: Let us be clear about what Judaism is, when it began, and when the so-called “Israelites” disappeared.
Anyway, the conflation of Judaism and Zionism has, tragically enough, gone two ways, not just one. True, Zionism has taken over Jewish communities almost everywhere in the US and Europe. Which was, however, far from a done deal before WWII and the Nazi crimes against all of humanity. But even then, I see very little “humanism” than what you seem to imagine in this “Judaism” we keep talking about, whether before or after WWII. Judaism in the modern period, at least, is largely an invention, just like the Anglo-American Christian Zionist view of the Jews. To its misfortune, Great Britain and America suffered the greatest influence of the Old Testament, a tribal document that everyone now admits has been a forgery. Far more than Germany or France.
recorded history shows that Judaism has been transformed many times and unevenly throughout the centuries in the Christian era, which at least we know a little about (before that is mostly dark). Moreover, Jewish communities have been invisible before suddenly gaining prominence under the tyrannies of Enlightenment’s and the French Revolution’s offspring, all bent on imposing their libertés and fraternités with violence and conquest on an unprecedented scale. This invisibility is contradicted only by the Torah, a forged tribal document, as I said, and its Old Testament version; plus the false witness of delerious Western European intellectual dilettantes writing,from the Reformation, through the Enlightenment…all deeply disenchanted with their own societies and seeing a sign in the Jews about the end of times.
They have been invisible in the Isamic world, despite their large numbers and official recognition everywhere. They have been invisible in Europe, despite their commercial influence and access to three worlds: the Roman Empire, the descendents of the barbarian Western Provinces of the Roman Empire, and the Islamic world.
Beyond this, the Judaism and the Jews you speak of are simply a product of the imagination. a fusion of Western Church theology and the new history-writing of the Reformation. Judaism died a long time ago, and there is almost no record telling us who the Israelites were, which is an altogether separate story in itself. Judaism does not go further than the fictitious Babylonian Exile, a mere four or five centuries before Christ.
In hindsight, I think it’s best we admitted that what we understand by “religion,” despite the mayhem committed in its name today, is all but dead. There is no such thing as an independent Judaism, any more than there is a Western Christianity. Both have fed on each other after the Western Church separated from the body of Christianity many centuries ago in the great schism, but even before then. What we have has been somethign quite stillborn.
The truth is that no one in the West, except perhaps you and I, gives two hoots about the last roots of the original Christianity either in Palestine or in the Levant, where in fact it truly found its birth. These are the last remnants of Christianity, as mangled by time as they. But we are too busy butchering it Syria along with everyone else.
What a shame! And what a greater shame that we keep babbling the same inanities we have since the Reformation.
GOOD TRY FAILS
Mr. Maguire’s article is a good try to distract attention from the
oft repeated horrors of the Pentateuch. Even as a “legend” or “epic”
it’s primary emphases are on extermination of others, on murder,
appropriation etc. (See Michael Prior, CM, THE BIBLE AND COLONIALISM:
A MORAL ANALYSIS.)
This is not to say that Zionism is anything but inhumane and basically
oppressive. (Norman Finkelstein’s analysis of Zionism in its contemporary
context is most relevant here. See THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY.)
With the best of intentions, Maguire fails to confront the Torah’s
insistence for groups to behave as Zionism has done.
[Incidentally, it matters not a whit whether Palestinians are Semitic
or not. Oppression is oppression. Murder is murder. Rape is rape.
And so forth even if the victim is of the same color, religious faith,
ethnic origin etc.
Specific Biblical citations and analyses are to be found in
Prior, op cit. Prior was a theologian and has a grip on these
matters as I do not. Although his very Christian remedy does
not hold water (forgive him, he is Christian!) his criticism
and history of Zionism are painfully accurate..
While your article attempts to give us hope against hope
it ultimately fails when put against the scholarly works cited.
—-Peter Loeb, Boston, MA USA
Ma
No group of religious extremists have equaled Zionism in the lengths it would go to accomplish it’s goals.
One method included lobbying and coercing foreign governments for support from nearly the beginning of Zionism and it continues as much or more than ever today. Search = (((Israel lobby control US government))).
By controlling the narrative, highlighting certain facts and leaving other facts completely out of the picture, Zionism has perverted the “news media” in the West to the point that it cannot be considered “news”. To get the true picture of how Zionist deceptions manipulated sentiment to be favorable among Western nations, “Western news” concerning Israel must be seen and understood as the propaganda it is — the Zionist/Israeli “settlements” are not settlements but are land thefts — the three “wars” in Gaza over the past 7 years were not wars at all, they were slaughters complete with manufactured excuses for Israel to collectively punish Palestinians for resisting the continuing theft of their lands and being alive — in all reality these are war crimes!
Zionism is largely a fictional glorification of itself and in all reality is based in either religious or racial supremacy or any combination of the two.
Zionism is just the national movement of the Jewish people which aimed to build a state for the Jews who were bullied by Christian nations in Europe. That’s all. More than 95% of the Jews are Zionists, as most Americans are patriots. Is that means that only left lunatic Americans are real Americans?
If Europeans has your right to conquer all of Northern America and annihilating most of the indigenous Indians and Mexicans, why you blame the Jews who were never left their land of Israel in all written history, although were conquered and occupied by many foreign invaders, including Arabs?
Why Arab Muslims from Arabia do has the right to conquer a quarter of the world and Islamizing it, yet the Jews have no right to occupy (although Zionist Jews always bought land from the Turkish and British occupiers and conquered the other after being attacked by Islamic armies) and live free in their historical land?
Why the US and Europe see fits to attack some Islamic forces half the way around the world and Israel is not allowed by people like you to defend her citizens one inch from her border?
What would Obama do to Mexio if Mexicans would have shot one rocket a day at New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California? One rocket a Day? I’m not sure he would ignore the first shot, and immediately attack back the attackers.
The real situation is as Hamas Interior Minister said: “We are Egyptians and Saudis and Yemenites and other kind of Arabs…. “ https://youtu.be/Bd3tA_dAl-A?t=104
The better solution is 2 states – Israel between the Jordan River and the Sea and Palestinian state in Trans Jordan as Abu Abbas said to Prince Ali in Arabic: “Jordanians and Palestinians are one People that has Two States†(0:24) and Prince Ali agreed. https://www.facebook.com/AJYAL.FM/videos/1156862480992397
(Taken from Al-Quds Arabic Press http://www.alquds.com/news/article/view/id/560402 ).
To anyone familiar with the facts concerning Zionism and Israel, your comment validates everything stated in my original — quite typical of a Zionist propagandist or anyone that believed their propaganda and who now defends Israel’s past and present deceitful murders, expulsions and land thefts committed against Arabs and Christians.
Search: (((Israel paid propaganda)))
Zionists and their supporters have gone to great lengths — well beyond any other group its size — since the early 1900’s to propagandize Western nations — it is a matter of historic record.
Search (((Israel control news media)))
The good news is that more and more people are seeing the truth about Zionists and the historic deceptions and political coercions they’ve foisted on the world for over one hundred years now…
most of this is Zionist revisionism.
I dont think even Hamas claimed that Jews had no right to presence in what was long their homeland [but bear in mind Jews have lived in large numbers *outside* Israel/Palestine for over 2200 years – and have NEVER occupied Israel/Palestine alone]
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010/06/17/top-ten-myths-about-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/view-all/
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/chosen-people.html
Each of your messages is built on lies and hatred of truth.
Hamas is talking about the destruction of Israel and the Jews. They keep saying it over and over again, just look for some of the YouTube. But even if there were no say it, so what can you expect from Muslims who have weapons in their hands and they can carry out their plans? Just take a look how the Muslims kill each other all around the Middle East, Christians are murdered. So why not murder Jews?
About the history of the land of Israel you have to learn first and not from Hasbara Palestinian books (HasbarAllah). Jews lived in a large mass until the 7th century AD. Anyway Jews and Muslims were killed or fled during the Crusader invasion to Israel Holy Land in 1099. Later, few Muslims and Jews have returned to Israel and in any case there hadn’t any local Arab Palestine people ever since. The invention of the Palestinian people is relatively very late – in 1974, while Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas wrote the “phases plan for destruction of the Zionist entity”, which is the basis for Palestinian invented narrative and plan of actions relevant until today.
Zuheir Mohsen: “Between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese there are no differences. We are all part of ONE people, the Arab nation. Look, I have family members with Palestinian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Syrian citizenship. We are ONE people. Just for political reasons we carefully underwrite our Palestinian identity. Because it is of national interest for the Arabs to advocate the existence of Palestinians to balance Zionism. Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity exists only for tactical reasons. The establishment of a Palestinian state is a new tool to continue the fight against Israel and for Arab unity.
A separate Palestinian entity needs to fight for the national interest in the then remaining occupied territories. The Jordanian government cannot speak for Palestinians in Israel, Lebanon or Syria. Jordan is a state with specific borders. It cannot lay claim on – for instance – Haifa or Jaffa, while I AM entitled to Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem and Beersheba. Jordan can only speak for Jordanians and the Palestinians in Jordan. The Palestinian state would be entitled to represent all Palestinians in the Arab world en elsewhere. Once we have accomplished all of our rights in all of Palestine, we shouldn’t postpone the unification of Jordan and Palestine for one second.â€
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuheir_Mohsen