Judaism Is Not The Problem
A Position Paper
That's the principal raison d'etre of this post. Ideally, it will serve as a handy reference for future online discussion and debate, so that a simple link to this page will obviate forever the hassle of having to repeat my position on this issue. It's been adapted from a comment posted at ZioFascism.net about a month ago and later made into a post by the consistently reasonable, never-afraid-to-tussle-with-idiocy site owner. The link might even be useful to you in the same way and for the same reasons, depending on your own position.
My position on the problems we face -- from the standpoint of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement, anti-Zionism and as an anti-war realist who understands how central Israel and Zionism is to the post-9/11 war agenda -- and how those problems should be addressed, i.e. how the fight should be fought and what constitutes effective activism, is different to that of the ever-emergent fringe element of the anti-Zionist community, and everything I do and write is premised on that position. I consider my position to be uncontroversial given the facts. I don't accept that a focus on Zionism is 'anti-Semitic', and I would loosely describe it as the mainstream position of the informed anti-war majority: that is, those who identify as anti-Zionists as readily as they do anti-war, anti-corporate and anti-everything else.
On the fringe is another element, borne of illogic. The twisted sibling of its sane counterparts, it's a munted child of the Internet and the limitless free-flow of information it has afforded us. Cast in a crucible of fear, outrage and vitriol is a minority who, faced with a sudden and even traumatic dose of the truth, represent living evidence that being well-informed doesn't necessarily leave a person better equipped. In this category are the likes of Prothink, Adam Austin, Brendon O'Connell et al, who come across as borderline if not outright racists. It's doubtful that they 'hate' anyone anymore than the next person, but their reckless bullshit makes them liabilities to the movement and leverage for the enemy regardless of their real potential to do harm, just as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "inflammatory" rhetoric has been a cornerstone of the pro-war narrative, misrepresented by the lying Western media and used to convince the masses that preemptive war is not only justified but the only sane and reasonable response.
This element is a fringe minority for a reason: its views fall apart under the weight of scrutiny, truth, sanity and reason, so there are no notable or credible voices within it, only a slew of low-profile players. The limitations built into movements this warped and dysfunctional serve as a glass ceiling that can't be broken even by its most credible and charismatic proponents, a kind of natural law that prevents toxic ideology from contaminating mainstream dissentience. Dr David Duke is an example, even if today he's a source of accurate information, and less a fringe nutter than an honest broker who refuses to be filtered and burdened by political correctness. Either way and regardless of his future accomplishments, he'll never win another local election or be taken seriously as an author, and while his tidbits and factoids may be useful to some, sadly he'll always discredit the individuals and groups that he associates himself with (just ask professors Walt and Mearsheimer). The reality and corrosiveness of this guilt-by-association effect is what makes the fringe element of anti-Zionism the major obstacle to the mainstreaming of the movement at large, which has never been more ripe for it.
O’Connell says:
“zionism” is not the problem - “judaism” is.
Judaism wasn’t behind the 9/11 attacks; Zionism was. Almost all the visible perps (and accessories after the fact) were secular Zionists. Very few were religious Jews. Silverstein, Lowy, the Israeli players and the majority of the neocon cabal were secular Jews. Some were religious Christian Zionist gentiles, some were religious Jewish Zionists, and others like Cheney and Rumsfeld were just Zionists. The Zionist media was and is for the most part secular; it’s predominantly Jewish, but it can’t rightly be characterized as being religiously Judaic. The broader Israel lobby (or the Jewish lobby, or the Zionist Power Configuration as James Petras calls it) is not about religion; it’s about politics. The common thread here, the one thing the 9/11 perps, the neocon hawks, the Jewish media, the Israeli elite, AIPAC, PNAC, WINEP, AEI, JINSA, Hudson et al all have in common is a passionate attachment to the state of Israel; that’s Zionism.
Most 9/11 researchers would agree that the 9/11 attacks (and the subsequent bombings in Bali and Britain) were carried out to make Israel’s business a global enterprise. Islamic terrorism, a practically exclusive Israeli preoccupation, would now be an American problem and a European problem -- the world's problem. A manufactured fear of radical Islam would sweep the globe and the only winner would be Israel. The global “war on terror”, brainchild of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, would go on to be Israel’s most profitable export and the U.S. would fight two disastrous wars in the Middle East for Israel with a third (Iran) on the agenda. It was a simple con — problem, reaction, solution — with Israeli regional hegemony the ultimate goal. That’s Zionism.
A stronger and greater Israel would become an immediate to mid-term certainty with the right people in the White House and a pliable U.S. Congress. A solid platform on which to foster global sympathy for, and solidarity with, Israel's Islamic problem would last well into the long term, propped up by ongoing false flag terror in Bali, Iraq, London, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere to water the seed and consolidate the terror meme kicked off by the trauma and outrage of 9/11. All of this has served and facilitated one thing almost exclusively: the legitimization and fulfillment of political Zionism.
Judaism may have benefited indirectly from 9/11, insofar as a sympathetic light had been lit over Israel and the Jews in stark contrast to the darkness cast over Islam, and in the new media-cultivated climate of fear and sense of ever-impending terrorism, the specter of the Holocaust - invaluable propaganda fodder and political leverage for Israel - had become that much easier to invoke. But these two latter factors have been used more in the service of Zionism than Judaism, as we see play out over and over in the post-9/11 media pantomime.
Fighting Judaism: A Fool's Errand
It doesn’t make sense to wage war on Judaism. The statement "I am an anti-Judaic activist", if ever uttered with a straight face, will certainly come from the lips of a fool. The anti-Judaic Brendon O’Connell is a rabid Christian nutjob who proposes that we embark on a religious war that is doomed to fail. As a relative neophyte to the Palestine issue and not being much of a reader, he had his mind blown by a book about Judaism by Michael Hoffman sometime in 2009. In the context of his devout faith and identification with Christianity, he proceeded to build an entire worldview from the narrow standpoint of the education he'd received from the book, regarding the problems that threaten humanity, how they came about and a viable way to craft himself an us-and-them outlook that made sense. At least, that's how it seems to have unfolded to those of us who have watched his development from early 2007 to the present. 2010 saw O'Connell stumble into a series of colossal fuck-ups with serious real-life implications which, with the help of a few sensational but baseless claims and some outright lies, earned him the staunch support and admiration of a small following of White Nationalist types and other assorted fringe-dwellers impressed by his getting-arrested skills. Thus, an anti-Judaic Christian warrior was born.
The reasons why a war on Judaism is doomed to fail are obvious to me personally and, I would think, to anyone of a driver's-license-and-above intelligence level. The shame here is in knowing from the outset that I'm not writing for an intelligent readership but for the stupid people, and on purpose, and that now smart people will know that I argue with stupid people. Let this sentence be a disclaimer for the smart people, that it's not meant for you and to go no further, but in the interests of spelling it out for the O'Connells of the world, here are some of those reasons.
Firstly, there is simply no popular support for a war on Judaism - or even peaceful anti-Judaic activism - and that is as it should be. Judaic fundamentalism is the product of a nasty, supremacist doctrine and people are starting to see that it plays a major role in Israel’s bad behaviour, but at the end of the day what we face is economic and political power, on a global scale -- religion has almost nothing to do with that. Railing against Judaism simply doesn't address any of the actual problems we face. And importantly, the racist, supremacist elements of Judaism legitimised by the holy books of the religion are embraced only by a minority, albeit by some very powerful and influential Israeli political figures. Corrosive Judaic values do make their way into Israeli policy and manifest directly as action, but it would be accurate enough to say that this is an almost exclusively Israeli phenomenon. Religious American Jews painted with the same brush as their Israeli counterparts would suffer unjustifiably under the punishment that would be meted out to them by angry anti-Judaics, being that their values and identities are defined by totally different philosophical stuff. The average American Jew harbours no sense of superiority over the goyim and the few that are aware of the Talmud's evil side view it as irrelevant, archaic and even laughable. Simply put, Jewish supremacism is almost entirely absent in the diasporas of developed countries like Australia, Britain, Canada and the U.S.
Christians should be readily able to understand the significance of subtle differences in religious interpretation and how dramatically it affects one's thinking and behaviour. Most of them are modern religious realists who carry around more complex worldviews than those prescribed to them by biblical fairy tales like the story of Adam and Eve, a real life parting of the sea, and literal interpretations of parables that should obviously not supplant real history, i.e. people walking on water and turning it into wine. Christian realists can expect us to infer for ourselves the discernment and pragmatism that flavors their religious beliefs, and in the absence of aberrant behaviour there's no reason why Western diaspora Jews shouldn't be afforded the same courtesy. To summarise, outside Israel the contemporary Jew is in most cases perfectly normal and reasonable (leaving aside their natural proclivity toward abhorrent political ideologies like Zionism, which, to be fair, is just as prevalent in Christians as it is in Jews, and just as common among the non-religious). They're no threat to our way of life. Outside Palestine, Jews are not the problem.
To demonstrate the truth of this by way of a simple thought experiment, consider a scenario in which all the world’s Jews - both religious and secular - were rounded up, put into camps and taken out of the picture, as Brendon O’Connell and others have publicly advocated. Elite gentiles would rush in to fill the power vacuum in every sector of society without there even being a bad day on the stock market. You wouldn’t even hear a sucking sound. Global capitalism wouldn’t skip a beat; the Fed, the IMF and the rest of the global banking system would remain in place; Monsanto would still be patenting genes; Big Pharma would still be profiting from our heart disease and cancer, fueled by an incentive to keep us that way (literally making a killing); powerful weapons manufacturers with more money than most third world economies would still have a vested interest in war (and the banking cartel which owns them would be, as they've always been, more than happy to loan our governments, particularly the U.S. government which spends as much on weapons as the rest of the world, debt-created money at interest in order to get it straight back from the U.S. defense budget when the government blows it all on the high tech weaponry peddled by the cartel's military arm - genius, really). There would be no systemic changes whatsoever in the advent of a wholesale Jewish roundup, and this is true regardless of what one believes about the origins of the system's core structure. I, for one, have been satisfied by ample evidence that modern banking started as a largely Jewish enterprise, but I see no reason why saying so should be controversial. I see no reason why Jews shouldn't be proud of their historic role in it, just as they celebrate the history of Jewish ownership and control of Hollywood and other industries. But regardless of the extent to which Jews created and founded the modern institutions adopted by the West, the fact remains, plainly and self-evidently, that it's our system now and it would quite effortlessly survive the total and sudden disappearance of the world's Jews, down to the very last one.
Secondly, you can’t outlaw ideas, much less eradicate them (they're bulletproof, remember) but you can phase out or even outlaw certain behaviour, systems and practices on moral and ethical grounds, without seriously compromising individual freedom and liberty. (Actually, I believe forcible and prohibitive action undertaken by outside authority is only justifiable when it benefits freedom and liberty and the greater good, because law and prohibition is by definition an infringement on personal freedom, but that's going in another direction.) South African apartheid is an example of this: an unjust and un-sane system, vast, established and held together with the glue of entrenched power transformed for the greater good by a massive imposition of will from within and without.
History has shown that efforts to suppress religious freedom go hand in hand with tyranny and always fail. Those of us who know a bit about Judaic extremism -- and any other truth worth knowing -- can and should use every opportunity to show the others its true colours, especially in light of the Zionist media campaign to vilify Islam, but making war on it and it alone will go nowhere. It's about as viable (and desirable) and every bit as ludicrous and futile as trying to eradicate Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam -- all of which have their own nutty fringe groups which hold extremist views just (or nearly) as repugnant as those we've seen come from leading rabbis of the Jewish faith.
In any case, it's beyond debate that putting people in detention camps against their will is not how an enlightened society would deal with its problems, and given that the idea is to do better than is being done to us, it's aeons away from a viable solution. It's both laughable and despicable. We were all born into economic and political slavery; enslaving others physically should be the last thing on our minds.
Thirdly and most importantly, the people focusing exclusively on Judaism are sabotaging the burgeoning anti-Zionist movement by making us all out to be racist nutters. Sometimes, it's because they actually are racist nutters, representing for Palestine and fucking up our game. Most of the no-such-thing-as-an-innocent-Jew crowd use the word 'Judaism' as a euphemism for all Jews, religious and secular, which is evidenced by their suspicion and contempt for non-religious Jews. After all, even if a Jew isn't Judaic, surely they are infused with Jewish values. Paranoia is rife because, even if there were a way to distinguish the religious from the secular it couldn't be seen from behind a computer. Even in person, you can never be sure; perhaps the parents are Jewish, it's better to be safe than sorry. This is the problem faced by the 'anti-Judaic activist', the slippery slope of idiocy combined with paranoia and the inevitable outcome of fighting religion, which can only exist as ideas inside people. Astute observers of the anti-Judaic activist will always spot this dilemma and see racism, bigotry, hate and 'anti-Semitism'.
What's for certain is this: the only way to make this approach succeed -- that is, this war against Judaism -- is to mainstream it, which has fuck all chance of happening because it is innately nonsensical, invasive, futile, authoritarian, illogical and fascist. Normal people (that is to say, the average human being, mentally and socially conditioned with Western values) intuits a lack of logic and an ugliness in the idea (if I may be so presumptuous as to speak on behalf of that group for the duration of the rest of this sentence). 9/11 truth is an example of a fringe group that has consolidated itself into a global movement with real credibility, and despite the spirit of truth, justice, compassion, honour, transparency, righteousness, non-partisanship, tolerance, blindness to colour and general energy of goodness that it engenders it has moved at a snail's pace and is far from the breakout threshold of real political clout. With that in mind, consider the likelihood of a movement borne of twisted logic, dense minds, paranoia and a negative energy establishing itself to the same degree.
More likely, the nascent and ill-conceived push for a war against Judaism and/or Jews will remain what it is: nothing more than dead weight dragging at the heels of the compassion-based, common sense-oriented pro-Palestine, anti-Israel, anti-Zionist movement. And as long as this movement which does make sense and which is compatible with the antiwar, anti-corporate, environmental and 9/11 movements can be written off as "hate", racism and "anti-Semitism" through its association with that aberrent part of itself, it will always be easily marginalised by Zionism and its footsoldiers for being the cancer and nothing but, and nothing more than the aberration that characterizes the minority fringe. The armies behind the pro-Israel agenda being pushed by the media and our governments are already containing our movement this way pretty effectively with imagined "hate" and in the absence of any real "anti-Semitism", although people are clearly growing tired of the old anti-Semitism canard and wising up to its arbitrary use by apologists for Israeli crimes. The rise of the fuckwit brigade, this cancerous aberration, will only hand to the propagandists what they've been having to make up all this time.
So besides the fact that targeting Judaism and Jews in general (and rounding them up for internment in "rehabilitation" camps) is a violent, fascist fantasy that couldn't possibly be taken seriously by anyone other than a crazed lynch mob, it makes no sense, simply won’t work, and not only that, it’s doing far more harm than good. The let’s-genocide-the-Jews crowd are working for the other side, whether they know it or not.
Zionism
Focusing on Zionism does make sense. Anti-Zionism is a natural corollary to the anti-war movement. That most of the peace movement, spearheaded by liberal Zionist gatekeepers, has been slow to catch on to that obvious fact doesn't make it any less true. It simply doesn’t make sense to be anti-war and pro-Zionist, especially given the key roles of American Zionists and the broader Israel lobby in pushing, planning, and overseeing both post-9/11 wars in the Middle East. And there is no such thing as non-racist Zionism. Zionism is by definition a racist enterprise which can only express itself through land theft, ethnic cleansing, apartheid and the displacement of indigenous Palestinians to make way for Jewish-only settlements. Neither is there any such thing as legal Zionism, since almost all that it entails contravenes international law.
For all these reasons, anti-Zionism is an idea whose time has come. The only things between it and the mainstream are fragile lies and an ongoing media propaganda campaign pushing hard in the other direction. Hippies, leftists, activists and bleeding hearts who march and write and agitate for peace, equality and minority rights but support the Israeli state are left with the impossible task of reconciling the staggering hypocrisy of their views, so conscientious anti-war, anti-corporate, and/or human rights advocates are obligated to renounce Zionism in order to conform to the values that define them as people -- either that or be forced to bask naked in their own hypocrisy. Campaigners for peace who support occupation, land theft, displacement and apartheid - and the inevitable cost of that - are about as useful as tits on a bull and have nothing to stand behind but sleight of hand and subterfuge.
Anti-Zionism is a legitimate, honourable and viable movement. It's growing rapidly and progressing nicely, thanks to Israel’s own manifestly evil policies in Palestine and abroad: the 2006 Lebanon war, the 2008-9 Gaza massacre, the Dubai hit and Mossad passport fraud, the Gaza Freedom Flotilla incident, and the emerging truth about the USS Liberty, Israeli spying and 9/11. Along the way, people are learning about the history of Palestine and the illegitimate state of Israel, the early Jewish terrorism upon which it was founded and Israeli false-flags like the Lavon Affair. They’re waking up to the Jewish supremacism behind Israeli policy and starting to take a closer look at Judaism, which informs Zionism today but for the most part precluded any idea of the legitimacy of a Jewish state until it became convenient in the 1940s.
The dominant ideology that has shaped the U.S. war agenda for at least the last 20 years is Zionism, and with the focus shifting to Iran, that is becoming harder and harder for the anti-war movement to ignore. Fortunately, Zionism is destined to fail; Israel is well on its way to disappearing from the map altogether, and once that happens the game changes forever. The global capitalist system (the aforementioned banking system, Monsanto, Raytheon etc) will still be in place, but that’s why our work should have a broader focus. I myself have a particular disdain for Israel, Zionism and Jewish power so I choose to focus most of my attention on that, but I also meet with the local chapter of the Zeitgeist Movement because as far as I’m aware, the Resource Based Economy (RBE) model is the only viable alternative to the profit-oriented, debt-based monetary system (i.e. global capitalism). The Rothschildian corporate banking / fractional reserve / money-as-debt scam is the biggest con in history, but it’s the monetary system itself that has inverted our values and put profit above sanity (example I; example II). Monetary reform and public control of the banking system isn’t going to cut it in the end, although it would certainly be a good start. It would clear the way for the implementation of an RBE or something similar, by dismantling the most entrenched criminal power structure on the planet.
The stakes are too high for us to allow sanity and reason to be pushed to the fringes, and to make the mistake of throwing good negativity at bad negativity. This is a serious game for those of us who believe that a better life on Earth is worth fighting for, and perhaps the only thing worth a fight. Even if you suspect as I do that ultimately this thing is just a ride, an illusion, that nothing real can ever be damaged or killed and that consciousness will emerge unscathed no matter what, we're still on the ride and so are our children. Suffering is still hell. Experience will always arise out of thought and become real by our actions and choices, and the power of that creative process has become such that it will also determine the quality of the ride for all of our poor, hapless cohabitants. Their fate is in our clumsy hands. We've dreamed up devices and methods capable of destroying all life on Earth, and we can't even be trusted not to do it. We're so stupid that it could happen by accident, and nearly has. It's happening by accident right now. As individuals we're slaves to entrenched power and yet it feels as if no-one is in control. If we don't think and act out of love and let it characterise everything we do, the future will be a living nightmare. As trite and corny as it might sound, love is the key -- that much is certain.
Labels: 9/11, Anti-Semitism, Judaism, Zionism
posted by Infensus Mentis @ Friday, December 10, 2010
Israeli Minister of Trade, Industry and Labor, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, says the world is tired of Israel and that Israel, rather than the Gaza Strip, is actually the terrorist state. 
