I mentioned the Karsh essay in a previous post. Thanks for setting up link.

Here are a couple of more short pieces that readers would want to know about:

"A Postcolonial State" by   Eamonn McDonagh

eamonnmcdonagh.wordpress.com/.../a-postcolonial-state

Here is its conclusion:

"And yet, despite the hostility of so many, Israel at 60 thrives. It has absorbed huge numbers of immigrants from the Middle East and farther afield (indeed it has recently become a magnet for Sudanese refugees), it has enviable indices of human development, contributed a huge amount to science and maintained the only liberal democracy – imperfect, like all others - in the Middle East and all this in a context where it has constantly had to defend itself from attacks designed to be mortal. It therefore deserves the warmest possible congratulations on its 60th birthday and it’s to be hoped that Palestinians will soon be accepting congratulations for the foundation of their own state too."

The whole essay is well worth your time.

Here is the second one which is more historically oriented:

The Family Secret, by    S.O.Muffin

Here is its conclusion:

"So, this is the big family secret that nobody wishes to acknowledge today, each for their own reasons. And a good reason to bring it to light is the current unlimited, toxic hatred of the “anti-imperialist camp” toward the existence of Israel and all she stands for ‐ not toward Israeli policies, whatever they might be, but toward the very existence and legitimacy of the country. This hatred is always based upon ignorance and cultural insensitivity and often segues into open, explicit antisemitism. And, as always, hatred rests upon a lie and lie rests upon ignorance."

Thanks for a moving post that tenders an incisive precis of the Israeli - Palestinian conflict, Mr. Peretz. This issue of Commentary sits on the table across from me where I am typing this on my laptop. I have not yet read the Karsh essay but I will forwith. The piece on Putin and Russia by Richard Pipes is well worth one's time. I wish to join jacksondyer in wishing Israel a happy 60th birthday. And may the Palestinians be meted out a state of their own when they decide to stop hating the Israeli one.

The issue of Commentary also contains a terrific short novella by S. Y. Agnon: "To This Day."

Franklin Foer should trade Martin Peretz and James Kirchick to Commentary for 1,000 new subscribers and two first round draft picks.

Thanks, jacksondyer. I will read the Agnon story upon your recommendation. Ndmackenzie: Your post is lame, as usual. There is some overlap with Mr. Peretz and the Commentary crowd on matters of foreign policy but Peretz's loathing of the malefactors of Wall Street finds no equivalent in the land of neoconservatism. The TNR blogsite should give ndmackenzie away to Counterpunch for nothing.

No thread on Israel is complete without some dumb comment by the antisemitic mackenzie.

jacksondyer uses the word antisemitism as his personal orgasmotron - and in doing so betrays the memory of all Jews who have ever suffered genuine anti-semitism.

In an article in the Independent (of London) Johann Hari attacks the malice of the likes of jacksondyer:

-- In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

-- The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis.

-- Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

-- We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: "You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

www.independent.co.uk/.../johann-hari-the-loathsome-smearing-of-israels-critics-822751.html

The likes of jacksondyer don't care about decency.

Jackson and I don't get along mackenzie, but I would have no trouble deciding that his sense of decency puts yours to shame.  The thing is, neil, that you ARE an anti-Semite because you believe that it is perfectly justified for Arabs to kill Jews, civilians, children, soldiers, whomever, until their grievances are satisfied in a manner that you approve of. I don't use that label anti-semite much.  I don't have much need or occasion to do so.  But in your case, it fits.

By the way, mackenzie, the liberal Jews I know, many of them Peace Now members, have been coming around to the view that there is no point in trying to make peace with the Palestinians.  I don't happen to agree, but the Palestinians are driving away even those Jews and Israelis who formerly used to sympathize with them,  Of course, that is the deliberate strategy of Hamas because it believes that if the war continues indefinitely, it will ultimately win and destroy the State of Israel.

Ndmackenzie: I wouldn't talk about decency if I were you. You rant and rave about Israel and talk about war crimes when what Israel does is defend itself from terorism. Now, I weep when innocent Palestinians are killed and sometimes the IDF responds with too much firepower but its soldiers would be barracked if the Palestinian leadership really meant peace instead of just talked it. And now Hamas doesn't even talk peace, except to seduce eternal naifs like Jimmy Carter and Ezra Klein.

Roidubouloi: You are correct. I have noted that the campaign of homicide bombing decimated Peace Now.

Ndmackenzie “jacksondyer uses the word antisemitism as his personal orgasmotron - and in doing so betrays the memory of all Jews who have ever suffered genuine anti-semitism.”

This notion comment is repeated by mackenzie any time someone points out her antisemitism.

It a notion thought up by some “Jewish” leftist like Chomsky in order to justify their own hatred of Jews. The fact that real Jew haters like mackenzie can refer to it shows you what its worth.

Antisemites are people who vilify Jews as Jews for whatever reason. Mackenzie is certainly guilty of that. She has repeatedly referred to Israelis as “zionazis” and has called for the liquidation of Jews who live on the West bank.

Moreover, the fact that he equates Jews with the very people who have tried to annihilate them is in itself an antisemitic act.

Antisemitism is not a dead issue. It is an ongoing phenomenon as is the struggle against it.

Hence referring to people like mackenzie as antisemites does honor to those Jews who were murdered by people like him, in the past, since it continues the struggle against those who would wish to destroy the Jewish people.

No quotation from a self serving Jew-hater can white-wash mackenzie’s antisemitism.  

Finally the quote from the Independent (itself an anti-Israel and hence antisemitic newspaper) is purposefully false:

“In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.”

As with most such comments there it is full of empty rhetoric. It also makes a false claim since the people who claim to be “silenced” are in possession of TV stations and own newspapers where they publish their vile attacks on the Jews living in Israel. The Independent is not exactly a minor newspaper.

In England most news organizations from the BBC to the Guardian do nothing but vilify Israel day in and day out.

In a recent review article in New York Times books section Geoffrey Wheatcroft a well known antizionist made a similar complaint. He said that people who criticize Israel are denied access to the media.  This while writing a piece in the New York Times criticizing Israel.

These twisted claims are baroque.  They are meant to intimidate and to silence any criticism of their point of view.

Hence, they are demonstrably guilty of the very thing they complain about.

In terms of offering evidence of pro Zionists “vilifying Holocaust survivors” this what it says:

“These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps.”

First Norman Finkelstein is not a survivor himself. Second the man has written attacking what he calls “the Holocaust industry; (the book is used by German Nazis to deny the Holocaust), third Finkelstein has called on Hezbollah to attack Israel,… I could go on, but why bother.

Here again the author of the article Johann Hari has it backward. It’s not pro Zionists who are attacking Holocaust survivors it’s the son of a survivor who has been attacking other Holocaust survivors.

Hari’s article is a pathetic attempt to exculpate himself from charges that his reporting from the West bank was at best shoddy and one sided if not outright propagandistic.  

As with most anti Israel writers Hari is motivated by some personal obsession than with a concern for the truth.  

One last note: the reference to McCarthyism in this context is also absurd. McCarthyism itself was a pretty mild form of censorship compared to the wholesale suppression of human rights not to mention the killing of millions of people in Communist countries in the same period.

Jacksondyer: You rose to the heights of eloquence on this reply to ndmackenzie. I think that this is your best post on any topic. It is amazing how anti - Israeli voices in democratic polities can consider themselves to be censored.

Now Roi, in fariness, I think you're getting ahead of yourself. There's no Mac without Jack, and I'm tired of the anti-Semite abuse being thrown around on this site. I don't think Mac is anti-Semite and would caution against using that grave insult too freely.

I expect it from Jack and a few others, but it's disapointing coming from you, a poster I respect.

One can pretty well judge a poster’s views about Jews and especially Israel by their attitude towards the antisemitic mackenzie:  those who deny his antisemitism are themselves open to that charge. Those who are ambivalent about his posts are themselves ambivalent about Israel.

One problem, Marty, with your analysis is that if the Palestinians had accepted the partition plan in 1948, a strong and possibly victorious faction in Israel would have advocated taking the rest by force when their military position improved.  That is, at least, what David Ben Gurion said according to Segev's book - that Jewish acceptance of the Plan would buy them time to get more powerful.  I agree that supreme Palestinian intractability and inability to get the best deal they could (which at this point would be pretty good - better, certainly than the Arabs would offer had they the upper hand) is to blame for the Palestinians curent woes, but the fundamental point here is that when both sides look to a book of myths and consider it to be God-willed history, you are going to have nothing but conflict.  And Jews who still persists in believing God "gave" them the land (which shouldn't be important to the argument anyway) and that the Exodus story is actual history (when archaelogy proves otherwise)  shouldn't have any trouble understanind why Christians and Muslims really believe that the clearly myth-laden, sncretic, and derivitive Gospels and Koran contain God's messages as well.   Once everyone knows what God wants, what sort of peace is possible?

Given his own hostility to the Jewish State it’s not surprising that the Ignorant Bigot would deny that mackenzie is an antisemite.

jerb said: “One problem, Marty, with your analysis is that if the Palestinians had accepted the partition plan in 1948, a strong and possibly victorious faction in Israel would have advocated taking the rest by force when their military position improved.  That is, at least, what David Ben Gurion said according to Segev's book - that Jewish acceptance of the Plan would buy them time to get more powerful.”

Jerb, you have substituted an analysis based on what actually happened to one based on might have happened if….

Moreover, Segev is not one of the most trustworthy “historians” writing about Israel. He is a self styled “post zionist.” The veracity of his claims have been challenged by other Israeli historians such as Karsh as well as Anita Shapira:

  en.wikipedia.org/.../Anita_Shapira

and here:

ontology.buffalo.edu/.../Shapira.htm

There is also a long review of a Segev book at the New Republic but which apparently is not online.

As to Segev’s putative analysis of what might have been, here is a counter analysis:

Ben Gurion included in the Israeli declaration of independence clauses which explicitly give Arabs residents of Israel equal rights. Had he wanted to “ethnic cleanse” the country he would not have done so.

Also against Segev’s claim is the reality of a very large Jewish contingent of intellectuals of the period inside and outside of Israel who had been working for a bi-national State. Hence had the Arab accepted their proposals Ben Gurion would have had a hard time going against them. It was the Arab belligerent response that destroyed any hope of reconciliation.

The reality is that the Arab leadership in and out of Israel (except for individual people) did not want a Jewish State established in their midst, not even a bi-national one.

I am not sure why a Zionist is unbiased in this regard either.  Segev excerpts a letter Ben Gurion wrote that used that rationale to argue why the Jewish side should support the partition - because it would look good and the Arabs wouldn't accept it anyway and even if they did, they could just take the rest later.  

The fact of the matter is that there were few Jews in Palestine in 1900, there was a concerted effort to overwhelm the place, take it from its inhabitants and either remove them or make them second-class citizens (can you imagine America putting a cross on its flag and defining itself as a Christian state)?  I mean, what did the Zionists expect the native Arabs to do?  Just disappear?  Acquiesce to being lesser citizens of a Jewsih state (the concept of an ethnic and religious state should be repugnant to any liberal - I raise holy hell whenever I hear anyone refer to America as a "Christian" state or godforbid a White one - I am from the South and it makes me madder than hell when southern folks try to pretend black people aren't relevant to southern history with their whites only notion of southern histroy and culture)  I don't see how any intellectual gymastics can change this situation - no "jewish exceptionalism" or any other sort of similar argument.  This, of course, is a far, far cry from justifyinig the brutality of Palestinian religious and cultural life - I root for Israel to pound the crap out of Hamas every chance they get and would love to see the dictators that surround Israel disarmed and weakened.  I would be willing to commit our nuclear arsenal to the defense of Israel against threats like Iran.    And while I don't see how any neutral observer can't understand that Israel would have long since offered and committed themselves to a very decent deal for the Palestinians had they been open to any sort of acceptance of Israel, I also don't understand how the strong pro-Zionists can make the case that the Arabs had no reason whatever to be a bit upset at the influx of Jews and their stated intentions during the Mandate period.  I mean, what American can't understand why the Sioux and other Native Americans fought against us, even while being glad we won?   And of course, with religion mixed up on both sides - how will things ever be resolved?  The Jewish founding myth (which I guess many of these folks believe) invloves God having told them to wipe out and remove people from Palestine and even getting angry when the slaugher was not complete enough.  Of course, we know this isn't the case at all - that Judaism developed slowly from Caananite religion and that ploytheism only gradually gave way to monotheism at a very late date, but religions have never let facts get in the way of their revelations and the political claims based on them.  

I have never understood how in 1900 Zionists though they were more entitled to a state i Palestine than the people who already lived there.  Without the biblical myths, I just don't see the case.  Can every ethnic group just return to where it was once located 2000 years ago and claim right to the place?   Does it depend on the amount of oppression they have faced?  We need to figure out where Gypsies came from so they can go back and form a "gypsy state" to the exclusion of the folks who are already there. Why can't Israel just admit that European Jews wanted a state, had goo d reason for wanting a state, so a chance to get a state and then took it with a combination of good politics and force in the time honored land-grabbing tradition.  That won't in any way diminish Israel's correct insistance on security but it will just remove the smug self-righteousness with which the whole situtaion is discussed.  (and, if TNR were a rabidly pro-Palestinian place, I would be lecturing them on their whiny resentment and victim-mongering).  If Israel could jettison its self-righteous contempt and the Arabs their self-righteous resentment, then we might get somewhere.  But with each having a religion that uniquely nurtures both poisonous orientations, it will never happen.  

jerb said:  "I am not sure why a Zionist is unbiased in this regard either.  Segev excerpts a letter Ben Gurion wrote that used that rationale to argue why the Jewish side should support the partition - because it would look good and the Arabs wouldn't accept it anyway and even if they did, they could just take the rest later."

The issue isn't zionist or non zionist historians, btw. The issue is historical truth. Private letters may or may not indicate private motives and wishes, but they are not the same as public policies.

In any case, could you post the entire letter and not just allude to it, jerb? Let's see the letter in full!

“I have never understood how in 1900 Zionists though they were more entitled to a state i Palestine than the people who already lived there.  Without the biblical myths, I just don't see the case.”

You seeing or not seeing the case is not the issue, Jerb.

Firstly, Jews have an historical connection to the land of Israel and not just a “biblical one.” The Jews lives continuously in the land till they were ethnically cleansed by the Roman Empire.

Second, Jews moved back and forth from Palestine to the Galut throughout their history.  There is no century when some Jews didn’t go up to the land to live there. They weren’t able to reclaim the land because the powers that be (Roman, Arab, Turkish) didn’t allow them.

Third, small numbers of Jews still lived on there continuously through the Arab invasion of the country and till modern times. In 1948 Jews were actually a majority of the residents of Jerusalem till they were ethnically cleansed by the Arabs in the wars of 1947 and 1948.

Fourth, Jews when they began settling in Palestine in large numbers did so on worthless land that they bought from local landowners in the late 19th century and early 20th century.  They developed the land on their own. They were not strong enough nor would the Turkish authority have allowed them to take any land by force.

Fifth, the Jewish claim to Israel is much stronger than the claim of say White New Zealander to those islands or of Arabs settlers in the Sudan or of any other non indigenous people which settled on land that is not theirs.

Sixth, Israel is hardly a unique case of peoples dividing the land and establishing States after centuries of Statelessness. This was true of Greece and is certainly true of Pakistan which was never an independent Muslim State. The Kurds who never exercised independence, unless one considers the ancient Median Empire, are also trying to establish their own nation State. There are other States one can mention in this regard.

Finally, your comments show a strong anti Jewish bias based on putative moral ground without regard to actual historical facts.

Your rhetorical  move from questioning Ben Gurion's motives to questioning the rights of the Jewish people to a country of their own in their ancestral lands is very telling, jerb.

I have to go home and get my copy of Segev to get the citation.  

"The issue isn't zionist or non zionist historians, btw. The issue is historical truth. Private letters may or may not indicate private motives and wishes, but they are not the same as public policies."

That is a good point.  My only contention is that acceptance of partition by the Jewish Agency cannot necessarily be though of as consiliatory on their part, but rather strategic.   I think I agree with Benny Morris politically - Israel's founding is not what it was cracked up to be in myth and had many elements that a liberal conscience should be ashamed of (but perhaps the founding required those things, so was it for a greater good?  Maybe.) but the Arab reaction is out of all reasonable proportion to the provocation and has given rise to demagogues, thugs and religious nuts that need no historicizing to denounce and destroy.

I am willing to accept that Ben Gurion didn't accept his own argument, but that it was a way of getting the hard right on board with accepting partition.  I actually admire Ben Gurion a pretty good deal, because he was at least honest enough to admit the Arabs had a right to be mad and that he would be attacking Jews if he were one of them.  I think Ben Gurion, being a bit of an idealist, reckoned to get the state first and then try to convince Palestinians that it could help them as well so that maybe no more bloodshed would be necessary when the obvious idealistic perfection of Israel was realized.    

I am just not sure why it is so important to Israel to make their founding appear squeaky clean and cosmically justified.  For once, Jews got to exercise political and military power at the expense of someone else and did so with great skill and courage.  Are Jews just not comfortable with cold hard victory?   As I said before, you aren't going to find an Anglo-American alive today who will justify our brutal conquest of the continent while you will also not find an Anglo-American who would reroactively reverse any of it or go to super-human lengths to make things the way they were Why is that not good enough for Israel?  Why must they always be righteous victims as well as victorious conquerors?  

“My only contention is that acceptance of partition by the Jewish Agency cannot necessarily be though of as consiliatory on their part, but rather strategic.”  Jerb

Even if this were true, the moves a player makes on the world scene (no matter the intention) and the result of such a move is seldom what was calculated. Ben Gurion was too smart not to have realized that.

He unequivocally and publicly accepted the partition plan.  Had the Arabs accepted it also it would have been a whole different ball game. The Jews were not strong enough to dispose the Arabs, nor would the international community (not to mention all the major Jewish intellectuals who were working towards reconciliation with the Arabs) would have allowed any dispossession of Arabs from the land.

The Jews became stronger as the conflict grew. This was in part as a reaction to another possible massacre of Jews.

Read the footnotes to Karsh’ article they tell the whole story. He quotes many Arab sources and not just Jewish ones.

You also say:

“As I said before, you aren't going to find an Anglo-American alive today who will justify our brutal conquest of the continent while you will also not find an Anglo-American who would reroactively reverse any of it or go to super-human lengths to make things the way they were Why is that not good enough for Israel?  Why must they always be righteous victims as well as victorious conquerors?”

The difference should be obvious to you Jerb:

The US is one of the strongest countries in the world and its legitimacy is not being challenged by the Muslim world.

One question, Jerb, are you British or Canadian? Just curious.

Ignorant Populist -

You forget that Zionazii trolls like jacksondyer use the word "anti-semite" to mean someone they disagree with. And in abusing the word anti-semitism for their own malicious and bigoted ends they piss and puke on the memories of those Jews who suffer and have suffered genuine anti-semitism.

jacksondyer claims that I have "called for the liquidation of Jews who live on the West bank. "

Liar, liar

Pants on fire

jacksondyer

Is a liar

Liar, liar

Pants on fire

jacksondyer

Is a liar

Is this a FLAME ad in TNR or a message board post.

"Firstly, Jews have an historical connection to the land of Israel and not just a “biblical one.” The Jews lives continuously in the land till they were ethnically cleansed by the Roman Empire."

Ethnically cleansed by the Roman Empire?  The account of Josephus seems no more than par for the course for the time period - didn't Israel allegedly "ethnically cleanse" Palestine?  And isn't the book of Maccabeas a tale of religious hatred toward Jews who don't tow the religious line - the hatred therein of religious loons against cosmopolitan "hellenized" jews seems to mirror what we now loathe in actual anti-semitism.   Not to mention the apparent hatred of Jews for Samaritans, who were clearly momotheistic worshippes of Yahweh as well.  All of these apologetics just reek of Jewish exceptionalism that must have the bible as its basis.    What other ethnic groups dislocated by the Romans are going to come back.  Should we give Turkey to the Irish since Galatia was inhabited by Celts?   Thankfully, we are quite confident the whole of the OT is a myth - we know quite well the Hebrews were just another group of Caanaites who very slowly began to deem Yahweh the only God (where they formerly worshipped his brother Baal, his father El, and his wife Ashera as well as savior gods like Tammuz).  Assimilation and amalgamation is a bigger factor than extirpation.  

Even so,  historical connections never have a "sell by" date.  By that token, I reckon American blacks could go flooding back to Sierra Leone 2000 years from now and lay claim to it.  Or, better, Palestinains can move to America, wait 2000 years, and then come flooding back.  This is just Jewish Exceptionalism.  We wouldn't tolerate this logic with anyone else, not as a "special" argument anyway.  And I argue (and I think this is a liberal as well as historically accurate one) that ethnicities don't mean a hell of alot.  I would guarantee that the folks you now call Palestinians have a significant number of folks whose ancestors were Jews who became Arabicized by learning Arabic and converting to Islam or Christianity.  Tthe Arabs wouldn't be happy to hear this either, since being an Arab means little more than having been an ethnic group assimilated into the Arabic language.  All of the ethnicities we know about from the Persian and Greek period didn't just disappear - they were assimilated.  I take a pretty dim view of this idea that we have neatly separate ethnic identities that mean anything from a  "blood standpoint" - this used to be a liberal idea, but I gues snot anymore.  

Second, Jews moved back and forth from Palestine to the Galut throughout their history.  There is no century when some Jews didn’t go up to the land to live there. They weren’t able to reclaim the land because the powers that be (Roman, Arab, Turkish) didn’t allow them.  

How is this remotely relevant?

Third, small numbers of Jews still lived on there continuously through the Arab invasion of the country and till modern times. In 1948 Jews were actually a majority of the residents of Jerusalem till they were ethnically cleansed by the Arabs in the wars of 1947 and 1948.

Sure, Jews lived there.  No argument here.  I love how you say Arab invasion as if Jewsih invasions aren't really invasions (again, if you believe the OT which I hope you do not, but bet that you do.).  I again don't see how any of this is relevant.  Is there some critical mass of lingering population that allows a group to come back millenia later and retake the place?  

Fourth, Jews when they began settling in Palestine in large numbers did so on worthless land that they bought from local landowners in the late 19th century and early 20th century.  They developed the land on their own. They were not strong enough nor would the Turkish authority have allowed them to take any land by force.

Yes, they bought some of the land with money from overseas and then later took the rest.  The "on there own" stuff is more of the myth - would Israel be what it is today if it had never received a dime from the US taxpayer?  

"Fifth, the Jewish claim to Israel is much stronger than the claim of say White New Zealander to those islands or of Arabs settlers in the Sudan or of any other non indigenous people which settled on land that is not theirs."

No, their claim is exactly as strong.  No more, no less. I don't believe in mystic connections to land.  A Jew from France is French, not Middle Eastern. A Jew from the US is American, as American as I am.   It is strange how that sentiment was once considered liberal and inclusive and is now considered intolerant.

"Sixth, Israel is hardly a unique case of peoples dividing the land and establishing States after centuries of Statelessness. This was true of Greece and is certainly true of Pakistan which was never an independent Muslim State. The Kurds who never exercised independence, unless one considers the ancient Median Empire, are also trying to establish their own nation State. There are other States one can mention in this regard."

The  big difference, of course, being that those people actually lived in the land of the State they proclaimed - they didn't have to immigrate their from somewhere that had been their actual and cultural home for millenia.  

"Finally, your comments show a strong anti Jewish bias based on putative moral ground without regard to actual historical facts."

Lack of bias toward Israel is sen as bias against it.  

Why are all these strained arguments necessary?  Why not just say that Jews were fed up with being second class citizens in Europe, had seen other groups of malcontents effectively colonize other places and reckoned they would do the same and it was unfortunate but served a greater good that they had to step on some toes to do it, but it was for a greater good and they did their best to make ammends once Israel was established and those efforts were violently and irrationally rejected by people more concerned with being right that the well being of their people.  I am not holding Israel to a different standard than I hold any other country - it only seems different because Israel is accustomed to exaggerated deference.  My own country has a duty to do right by the descendants of slaves and Native Americans who were harmed by our expansionism and colonization but I certainly dont' think they necessitates our being driven into the sea or putting up with terror or violence from those people, which, thankfully, we don't.

I love how "anti-Jewish" is thrown around so readily in this debate.  If being an active admirer of Jewish cultural and artistic achievements, actively wishing there were more Jews in my country, and angrily defending the inclusion of Jews in our religious and cultural landscape is consistent with being anti-Jewish, I am not really sure what the term means.    I am probably more hawkish about what Israel should do now than you might imagine.  I don't think any amount of historicizing is needed to deal harshly with rocket launchers, suicide bombers, and crazy thugs who flippantly talk of driving people into the ocean or destroying people with bombs.  

mackenzie to populous bigot:  "You forget that Zionazii trolls like jacksondyer use the word "anti-semite" to mean someone they disagree with."  May 9, 2008 1:39 PM

This mackenzie just can't helpe repeating himself. Hence I will too here is why I replied earlier:

Ndmackenzie “jacksondyer uses the word antisemitism as his personal orgasmotron - and in doing so betrays the memory of all Jews who have ever suffered genuine anti-semitism.”

This notion comment is repeated by mackenzie any time someone points out her antisemitism.

It a notion thought up by some “Jewish” leftist like Chomsky in order to justify their own hatred of Jews. The fact that real Jew haters like mackenzie can refer to it shows you what its worth.

Antisemites are people who vilify Jews as Jews for whatever reason. Mackenzie is certainly guilty of that. She has repeatedly referred to Israelis as “zionazis” and has called for the liquidation of Jews who live on the West bank.

Moreover, the fact that he equates Jews with the very people who have tried to annihilate them is in itself an antisemitic act.

Antisemitism is not a dead issue. It is an ongoing phenomenon as is the struggle against it.

Hence referring to people like mackenzie as antisemites does honor to those Jews who were murdered by people like him, in the past, since it continues the struggle against those who would wish to destroy the Jewish people.

No quotation from a self serving Jew-hater can white-wash mackenzie’s antisemitism.  

mackenzie is off his medications again.

"Ethnically cleansed by the Roman Empire?  The account of Josephus seems no more than par for the course for the time period - didn't Israel allegedly "ethnically cleanse" Palestine? " jerb

The term ethincally cleansed came into usage during the Balkan wars as far as I know.

However, in most historical cases of ethnic cleansing hundreds of thousands are killed.  Nothing even remotely resembling that occured in 1948.

'And isn't the book of Maccabeas a tale of religious hatred toward Jews who don't tow the religious line - the hatred therein of religious loons against cosmopolitan "hellenized" jews seems to mirror what we now loathe in actual anti-semitism. "

The Maccabean revold occured almost two centuries before the Romans, Jerb. You are conflating two different periods in Jewish history.  In any case there are many ways to read the Mccabean revolt none of which is relevant to what happened in 1948.

“What other ethnic groups dislocated by the Romans are going to come back.

Should we give Turkey to the Irish since Galatia was inhabited by Celts?”  

This is pretty daft. Had there been an ethnic group that maintained itself on the hope of reconstituting itself in their homeland they would no doubt have tried to do so. Even there was "Celtic" people claiming part of ancient Galetia they wouldn't be asking you or me for permission to fight for their homeland.

“Thankfully, we are quite confident the whole of the OT is a myth - we know quite well the Hebrews were just another group of Caanaites who very slowly began to deem Yahweh the only God (where they formerly worshipped his brother Baal, his father El, and his wife Ashera as well as savior gods like Tammuz).  Assimilation and amalgamation is a bigger factor than extirpation.”

You are confusing history and myth. You just don’t seem to like the fact that Jews survived millennia of persecution as a people and have managed to reestablish themselves in their homeland, jerb.

“Even so, historical connections never have a "sell by" date.”

Meaning what? Again Jews have had and will always have as a people and as long as they are a people a connection to the land of Israel. All your other suppositions are irrelevant.

“I would guarantee that the folks you now call Palestinians have a significant number of folks whose ancestors were Jews who became Arabicized by learning Arabic and converting to Islam or Christianity.”

You don’t get it. This supposition is also irrelevant. There are many peoples who disappeared from history and Jews who became assimilated by whatever means ceased being a part of the Jewish people. This is the usual pattern in history. But the Jewish people who did not assimilate they are the ones who constitute the “am Israel.”

Yes, this is an exception, and because it is an exception all your other scenarios are pretty fanciful.

Also the fact that Jews moved back and forth to Israel means that they kept a connection to their ancestral land in fact and not just in their religious myths as you call them.

“Sure, Jews lived there.  No argument here.  I love how you say Arab invasion as if Jewsih invasions aren't really invasions (again, if you believe the OT which I hope you do not, but bet that you do.).  I again don't see how any of this is relevant.  Is there some critical mass of lingering population that allows a group to come back millenia later and retake the place? “

Whether I “believe in the Tanach (old testament is the Christian appellation) or not is irrelevant since I am only bringing up historical data. However the ancient Hebrew got to Palestine they were there when the Greeks and the Romans got there centuries later.

You keep repeating your comprehension as to why “the Jews” have a right to this or that…. Fine since you are not going to accept what is said then there is no need to argue these points any further.

For example when I mentioned New Zealand you came back with:

“No, their claim is exactly as strong.  No more, no less. I don't believe in mystic connections to land.  A Jew from France is French, not Middle Eastern. A Jew from the US is American, as American as I am.   It is strange how that sentiment was once considered liberal and inclusive and is now considered intolerant.”

This is both ignorant and malicious, jerb.

It is ignorant because it ignores the fact that Jews in Europe where not considered citizens of their countries for most of their sojourn there. They were considered “Oriental” interlopers. This view which was and is still very strong there is what led to the Holocaust.

Even after the founding of the Nation State when Jews were given citizenship it was also often reversed.  Jewish nationality was never an uncontested issue not even in France.

The modern Zionist movement grew out of these wars against the Jews in Europe.

Your claim is also malicious because you take it upon yourself not only to rewrite history, but to tell other peoples what they are.  Today you say that Jews are not Middle Eastern tomorrow after the Jews are again kicked out of Israel you will say that they are.

Your claims remind me of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote:  in the 30’s his father told him that the walls of many European capitals had scribbled on them “Jews go to Palestine” in the 60’s when he visited Paris he saw graffiti which read “Jews out of Palestine.”

You and people like you are not the determiners of what Jews are and whether they are a nation of not. This is up to the Jewish people to determine.

You may not think so but your argument dovetails nicely with that of people like David Duke. This doesn’t mean that you are anti-Jewish consciously at least only that your argument which questions the legitimacy of the Jewish people do support an anti-Jewish agenda.

For example, you find this kind of comment which you wrote on many antisemitic web sites:

“Yes, they (Jews) bought some of the land with money from overseas and then later took the rest.  

Money from overseas; whose monies, yours?  You deny that the Jews are a people and then when they act like a people you think it is somehow unseemly. The monies used to purchase lands in Palestine in the 19th and early 20th century was money donated by Jews. Jews who saw themselves as a people and not as you claim merely as nationals of another country which saw them as foreigners.

Then conclude with this little gem:

“The "on there own" stuff is more of the myth - would Israel be what it is today if it had never received a dime from the US taxpayer? “

The US didn’t start supporting Israel with large amounts of aid till after the 67 war. It did so because it saw an advantage to its own interest. It didn’t do it because of charity. In any case, you don’t really mean “myth” do you? You seem to throw around that term quite freely. It just means anything you disagree with.

The Jews are an exceptional case in history, Jerb. Doesn’t mean that the bible is historical fact, it isn’t. It mixes up history and myth, but it does mean that you have to judge its history on its own terms. If there are other exceptional cases and there might they too must be judged on their own terms. Your need and desire for a uniform standard of judgment in human history is as fanciful as many of the biblical claims you deride.  

"The Maccabean revold occured almost two centuries before the Romans, Jerb. You are conflating two different periods in Jewish history.  In any case there are many ways to read the Mccabean revolt none of which is relevant to what happened in 1948."

I am not conflating anything.  I am merely saying thatt the notion that we are supposed to be horrified at Roman anti-semitism in the first century (which was really just how upstart rebels were treated by them) but not pay any attention at all to Maccabean fanatacism or the brutality of conquest stories that justify Hebrew presence in Israel is just weird.  

"You and people like you are not the determiners of what Jews are and whether they are a nation of not. This is up to the Jewish people to determine."

This just strikes me as ethnic and race hucksterism - cultural nationalism of the Louis Farrakhan or Stokley Carmichael sort.  We all are quite aware that a history of oppression doesn't make racial demagoguery and cultural nationalism any more attractive or useful when it is black folks we see taken in by it - folks who see  racism everywhere and deny any complexity or progress in the situation.   As if all Jews define themselves the same or haven't argued vehemently themselves about what it means to be Jewish.  The Maccabean period is just one example of Jews trying to define Mewishness means for other Jews (Hellenizer is still a term of derision for any Jew who doesn't follow a narrow definition).  Another is the current tension between religious and secular Jews.  Can an atheist and skeptic be a good Jew in your opinion?   I simply think that the history that tries to see Jews as a unique people unchanged and consistent in a perfect line back to the 1st century BC is listening more to myth that to the facts of assimilation, amalgamation, and vague borders (where do you think the Jews picked up Aramaic over Hebrew and why does Israel fetishize Hebrew when Aramaic was spoken for so much of Israel's history?)   The idea that a Ashkenazi Jew from Germany and a Spehardic Jew from Morocco have more in common with each other than with others in their home country is precisely letting others dictate what it means to be Jewish - why let who European Christians chose to call Jewish dictate to you who is a Jew?   I don't see how being an integrationist makes me a racist or anti-semite.  I want to see less balkanization and more intermarriage and interaction between Jews, gentiles, blacks, etc.  Again, this used to be the liberal position.  I don't see how a person can be an anti-semite if they actively wish for Jews and gentiles to intermarry and interact.   I have no concern about "race pollution" or any other sort of backward racist notion regarding my own culture, so why is it ok for Jews to worry about this?  The alleged death of a culture  isn't "genocide" unless it involves the actual suffering and death of people, which we should all be concerned about regardless of ethnicity.  And cultures don't "die", they just blend and I think that is for the good.  The idea of cultural purity is just bizarre to me.

jacksondyer,

I am going to play on your team for a minute after reading some of the stuff above.  While I think the term Nazi is quite accurate to describe the tiny fringe of messianic hard right folks that really wants to see Arabs killed and exterminated, it is not remotely accurate for run of the mill pro-Israel sentiment and it is the hieght of foolishness to apply it in that regard, especially if one is trying to engender sympathy for Palestinians when any moron can see that Israel is ready to give all manner of concessions.  I mean, I crticize Israel and don't have alot of patience for some of the self-serving nonsense we hear in theorectical support of Zionism (jewish exceptionalism, "land without a people" and all that) , but this isn't even in the same ballpark, not even the same universe, as Nazism.  Israelis are as susceptible to shame and guilt as any other Enlightenment culture and I suspect that without exsistential fears (justified or otherwise) you'd see a large movement of Israelis willing to bend over backword to make ammends to Palestinians.  The suffering of the Palestinian people at this stage of the game has as its direct cause the fact that their culture and religion is so enamored with death and resentful  righteousness that they won't trade an ounce of acceptance of Israel for what would be a massive reduction in that misery.  Who can listen to Hamas for two seconds without marveling at just how self-destructive and consumed with narcissistic hatred a people can be?  I feel badly for whatever secular and sensible Palestinians there are out there who would like to see some accomodation made with Israel and get on with their lives because the thugs and bullies that de facto represent them would as soon kill them as allow them to let go of their resentments for one second.  Makes one long for the good old days of the PFLP - at least there was some chance of accomodation with them since Marxism was a somwaht more flexible religion than Islam.  There is truly no hope for the Palestinians - What concession could Israel possibly make that would satisfy the men with the guns and bombs?  A minority with guns and bombs can dictate terms to everyone.  

jerb said:  “I am not conflating anything.  I am merely saying thatt the notion that we are supposed to be horrified at Roman anti-semitism in the first century (which was really just how upstart rebels were treated by them) but not pay any attention at all to Maccabean fanatacism or the brutality of conquest stories that justify Hebrew presence in Israel is just weird.”

But jerb, you also said that the Biblical account is mostly myth. You can’t have it both ways, to say that the Bible is myth and then accuse the Hebrews of acquiring the land “through conquest” as if it were historical fact.

The origins of the presence of the Hebrews in ancient Canaan are lost in history. We don’t now how they got there whether through conquest or not. We do know that ancient peoples loved to portray themselves as conquerors. If they did conquer the land then it would a very common act. In fact till the late 18th century most peoples were proud of being conquerors. This was true till Napoleon; he was the first as far as I know who claimed not to conquer peoples but to liberate them from oppression. After Napoleon most conquests began to be portrayed as liberations.  

Now that Maccabean rebellion has been variously portrayed as a war of liberation as well as a civil war, take your pick. It’s not relevant to our discussion of what happened in 1948.

Jerb the rest of your argument is just a rant.  

“(where do you think the Jews picked up Aramaic over Hebrew and why does Israel fetishize Hebrew when Aramaic was spoken for so much of Israel's history?)”

If you knew even the first thing about the Hebrew language you wouldn’t be writing such nonsense.

Modern Hebrew incorporated elements of both biblical Hebrew as well as Aramaic, just as Yiddish incorporated both Germanic words as well as Hebrew ones.

“The idea that a Ashkenazi Jew from Germany and a Spehardic Jew from Morocco have more in common with each other than with others in their home country is precisely letting others dictate what it means to be Jewish”

Your are pretty desperate to prove that the Jews aren’t a people, aren’t you, jerb?

For your information most Israelis are not intermarried so that most Jews in that country have relatives who are both Ashkenazi as well Mizrahi or Sphardi.

Israel isn’t just a country of European Jews it’s a country with an even larger Mizrahi as well Sphardi population. And among second and third generation Israelis there is an even larger number of mixed parentage.

And anyway, yes an Orthodox Jew from Poland had more in common with an Orthodox Jew from Egypt than they did with Christian Poles or with Muslim Egyptians.

“why let who European Christians chose to call Jewish dictate to you who is a Jew?   I don't see how being an integrationist makes me a racist or anti-semite.  I want to see less balkanization and more intermarriage and interaction between Jews, gentiles, blacks, etc.  Again, this used to be the liberal position.”

It makes an antisemite because it imposes your values on Jews. It also means that you want to wipe out the Jewish people through intermarriage.

In any case, this was never the “liberal position.” There never was a “single “liberal position on any issue.”

I am for people deciding for themselves and not for imposing my values on them.

You, on the other hand, are upset that the Jewish people exist at all and not just Israel.

To you the existence of a Jewish people  

“….strikes me as ethnic and race hucksterism - cultural nationalism of the Louis Farrakhan or Stokley Carmichael sort.”

If this is what you think than there is nothing more to talk about.

Who or what is a Jew is up to Jews themselves to work out and has nothing to do with you, btw.  

I am following this discussion, and now I must ask ndmackenzie to clear up my confusion about h(is)er  gender, since I can not infer from other posters' address of you. Thx

ndm, I'm not planning to write about you in third person, btw.

CORRECTION:

The followiing,

"For your information most Israelis are not intermarried so that most Jews in that country have relatives who are both Ashkenazi as well Mizrahi or Sphardi."

Should have read:

"For your information most Israelis are NOW  intermarried so that most Jews in that country have relatives who are both Ashkenazi as well Mizrahi or Sphardi."

Tomeg: I believe somebody referred to him as "Neil" the other day. He is an inferior poster. He takes thought experiments the wrong way, he hyperventilates, he postulates absurd analogies. Here I employ the third person but only in response to your question. I have addressed him directly before.

" It also means that you want to wipe out the Jewish people through intermarriage."

This soundslike rhetoric from the Stormfront playbook - white supremacists fear intermarriage for the same reason - that it will wipe out Whites as a people.  I don't believe races or ethnicities are rendered "impure" or "contaminated" by contact with other cultures and being against marriage with other peoples is racism pure and simple.  Nobody is "wiped out" by intermarriage.  Thisis the same sort of hperbole that I condemn in folks who call Ziomists Nazis - trying to equate the act of getting married and having kids with genocidel  I say the sooner ribalism ends the better.  I guess that means I hate white people too because I want to "wpe out" white culutre (whatever the hell that is) by suggesting that people stop being so hung up on ethnicity and more hung up on other sorts of values.  Cultures don't disappear- they live on in admixture - as if modern Jews aren't culturally different from their 1st century forebears owing to a long sojourn in Europe.  Cultural mixing is good for everyone and if somebody can show me a pure culture, I'd like to see it - exactly when do we take the snapshot and freeze it to call it pure.  Intermarriage, of course, will have the effect of spreading Jewish culture and mixing it with other elements - that is hardly the death of a peple, but the birth of more diverse people.   I think culture at large benefits by contact with Jews (as with other groups) and I prefer an amalgamatory cosmopolitanism to a ghettoized cultural nationalism with all people. Again, these would have all been liberal arguments (and  denounced by antisemites) 100 years ago when Jews made eloquent and enlightened arguments for just such an inclusion.  If this view, the polar opposite of what the Nazie believed, is anti-semitism, what isn't anti-semitism?  

I cerainly don't believe in the nonsense of the OT and its self-serving mythology (just as I don't believe in the coopting nonsens of the NT and its self-serving mythology)  but wthout it, I am unclear whu Israel has any more claim to Palestine than it does to, say Egypt,which had a large populaton of Jews during the Roman period and was more its cultural and intellectual center than Palestine was by that point.  

jerb said:  "This soundslike rhetoric from the Stormfront playbook..." May 9, 2008 8:10 PM

Yes, it does, but then you are the one who said it:

"I want to see less balkanization and more intermarriage and interaction between Jews, gentiles, blacks, etc.  Again, this used to be the liberal position.  I don't see how a person can be an anti-semite if they actively wish for Jews and gentiles to intermarry and interact....The alleged death (sic) of a culture isn’t "genocide" unless it involves the actual suffering and death of people, which we should all be concerned about regardless of ethnicity."   May 9, 2008 4:22 PM

Genocide is the planned eradication of a people or a culture. It doesn’t matter if its done violently or in a more kinder or gentler way. The fact that you can not see that is really troubling, jerb.

It also doesn’t matter if it’s done in the name of “racial or cultural purity” or in the name of eradicating “tribalism” and culture inmixing.

What you wrote is a bunch of malicious nonsense.  It also doesn’t matter what you think of the so called Old Testament. You can’t even seem to get it that Jews don’t refer to the Bible as “the old Testament.”

Your blindness isn’t innocent and it’s not based merely on ignorance. It’s based on your desire (a Christian and Muslim desire, btw, to supplant and eradicate the Jewish people by whatever means.  

What is interesting about your rants, Jerb is that on the one hand you say you admire Jews and on the other you want their culture to disappear. Your argument is based on some mixed up passions and is not well thought.

You are also wrong about cultures not disappearing but becoming incorporated into other cultures. Cultures disappear either through annihilation or through absorption into other larger cultures. One can see some influences of a culture which is assimilating in the first and sometime second generation but after that it is gone.

The Jews of Spain who had been forcefully converted disappeared and in the opinion of many Spanish historians it made the host culture a lot poorer for that. The first and second generation of Conversos did make some outstanding contribution to Spanish culture in religion, law, philosophy and literature but consequent generations of conversos contributed almost nothing of distinction.

Trying reading some actual history (your vies of the Maccabeans is laughably one sided) and not merely the books of narrow minded polemicists like Christopher Hitchens whose views I think inform your understanding of Jewish belief and history.

In any case, I am through answering you rants.

So far Jerb has said that he doesn’t like what he calls The Old Testament, doesn’t care for the Hebrew language, doesn’t like the fact that Jews consider themselves a people, doesn’t like it that they exist as a nation (he says Israel but it’s clear that he means anywhere), wants them to disappear through intermarriage (a softer gentler kind of genocide), yet he doesn’t consider himself anti-Jewish.

Yeap,, hatred of the Old Testament does drive some people mad as in insane, bonkers.

Jacksondyer: Yours is a good point on the Old Testament. Many Christians don't realize that  name was given to the Tanakh by Christians after they purloined - and reinterpreted - it and which then comprised two - thirds of their Bible.

liberal reformer said:  “Jacksondyer: Yours is a good point on the Old Testament. Many Christians don't realize that  name was given to the Tanakh by Christians after they purloined - and reinterpreted - it and which then comprised two - thirds of their Bible.”

Indeed, Christians think of their scriptures as the second part of a two part book. Many of them don’t realize that to Jews the Bible isn’t part of anything else.

In fact to Jews the Bible isn’t a single book at all but a series of books which together comprise the Tanach which is an acronym standing for different kinds of writing.

Besides in Jewish culture the book is also a literary masterpiece much like Chaucer or later Shakespeare which subsequent writers both refer to and challenge.

In any case, what is really loathsome about my previous interlocutor (who I would judge by his spelling to be either British or Canadian) is that he seems to think that because he, like Christopher Hitchens, hates religion thinking it responsible for many of the world’s problems that the Jews, whom they blames for religion, should be done away with. He is too cowardly to embrace the “final solutions” of other more honest antisemites so he prattles about erasing the Jews through intermarriage.

Besides, like most antisemites his knowledge of history is very basic confined to a few factoids: the Maccabean rebellion was not as he imagines a fight against assimilationist Jews.  It was a rebellion against imperial domination and in all such rebellions those fighting for their freedom also had to contend with some in their midst who supported the imperial forces. This happens in all such events. In the American Revolution which was one of the most benign rebellions against imperial rule one third of the populace supported the British. Many of them were driven out and went to Canada.

It was even worse in other rebellions. The fact that the Maccabeans appealed to religion to make their case had more to do with the kind of language used to rally support than anything else. Had they lived in our time they might have used the language of human rights, or of Marxists, etc.

It was Hitchens’ who attacked the Maccabeans because he imagined that the Greeks had a superior culture. He was wrong on two accounts; first, the Classical Greek culture was confined in that period to a small number, and second because outside Greece it was watered down to the point of non existence. In fact many Greeks who could read saw the scriptures of the Jews as something rivaling their own wisdom.

It is also ludicrous to blame religion for most of the problems we have today when in the last hundred years more people have been killed by secular regimes and in “wars of liberation” than in all the religious wars combined.  In any case there is no way one can blame Islamic fanaticism on the Jewish or Christian traditions since they have their separate tradition of violence and conquest.

Thank God Jackson, whom I may not directly address, was here to answer Jerbil.  It's almost as if though Jerbil considers us a kind of cattle who merely breed.  On the other hand, he insists that Jews are no different from those they live among.   Nobody here would suggest that intermarriage is wrong.  But Jewish heritage is like no other.  Sorry if that makes me an exceptionalist, but I doubt you'll find anywhere else such a small a minority having contributed so much to the world.  Look at the percentage Jews make up of Nobel peace prizers and tell me there's nothing different about us.  

Furthermore, I live among plenty of Persian Jews, and from what I can tell, we have plenty in common.  Our last names are similar--they have Levis and Kohenzadis, for one thing--we share near-identical customs and rituals (somewhat adapted to the culture and geography from our adoptive countries) and fairly similar values--among them a desire to excel.  

Furthermore, Mr. Jerbil, every male among us shares the same mitochondria.  And this is just the beginning in genetic differences.  If  these not make us a people, then what does?  What a freak.  

Jackson makes a good point about Conversos.  

Shriber:  Wonderful two sentences to drive home the point.

Jacksondyer: You probably know this - Christopher Hitchens is half - Jewish on his mother's side. He writes about being told this well into life in an essay that is - I believe - included in his collection Prepared for the Worst. Back in my left days, I talked to Christopher a couple of times by phone (1993 and 1995, if memory serves). He was quite affable and charming, Politically, he has moved on and so have I. He is no longer a Trot and I never was. He is often erroneously called a neocon because of his support for the Iraq war but that label is far off the mark. I've been expecting that he might flip on Israel, too. He once edited a book with Edward Said; after Said's death in 2004, Hitchens began to be critical of him. Christopher is a ferociously talented polemicist but is unreliable, politically. A few months ago, I read his book god is Not Great. He attempts to offload all that is bad onto religion while lowballing the good. I myself am a non - believer but Hitchens take on religion - and that of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett - is far too Manichean. Damon Linker wrote a superb review in the pages of TNR on the phenomenon of these militant atheists late last year. The world is far too overdetermined a place to have the certitude that these scribes do. We attempt to confect convincing narratives about the cosmos and our place in it. But many of these attempts are shots in the dark. These writers often remind me of the eugenicists like Margaret Sanger: if only we could cut loose the idiots (religion, in their telling), the world would be such a far better place. I have studied enough science, history and philosophy, inter alia, to know that the cosmos is a strange and multivariegated and anfractuous realm that is not always layed out on a rationalist grid.

Do you know of the website "Hitchenswatch"? It is put up by a virulently anti - Hitchens force. Frequently it contains links to Hitchens' writings, as well as commentary lambasting and ridiculing him. Their motto is: "We watch Hitchens so you don't have to".

Jacksondyer and others: My longtime friend MIke G. from college has become interested in my posts and the posts of others on this blog. He said that I should ask you guys - and girls - what you think about the likelihood of a US strike on Iran before the November election. Anyone have some thoughts on this topic?

I don’t care if you address me or not, Molly.

Just don’t call Israeli Police patrols looking out for suicide bombers among Arab residents fascistic.

Fascists don’t violate human rights, they kill people. They don’t ask for identity papers of suspicious persons they intern them in camps and let them rot there. Even Western democracies have not always dealt with insurgencies and terrorists in a humane manner.

The Brits during the Boer war invented the concentration camp. They sent whole families of Afrikaners into those camps and many died there from disease and malnutrition.

If the suicide bombers in Israel were Yeshiva Bochers then the police would be checking their papers. Israel all in all has responded more humanly in these crises than most other countries would have.

Btw: I have had a similar experience with a family of “Persian” Jews. Once many years ago while I was in a public place a woman started to address me in very familiar terms asking all sorts of questions. I didn’t know her and was taken aback by the familiarity. Her son who must have been no more than ten asked her if I was Jewish too. Her mother said, “Why of course, can’t you tell?” It turned out they were Jews from Persia who had left that country right after the Mullah’s took over. The fact that people I never knew from half way around the world recognized me as “one of them” made a deep impression on me.

Jacksondyer: Did you see my post above? I am interested on commentary about the possibility of a US strike against Iran this year. Good point about fascism and its practices.

liberal reformer said: “Jacksondyer: You probably know this - Christopher Hitchens is half - Jewish on his mother's side. He writes about being told this well into life in an essay that is - I believe - included in his collection Prepared for the Worst.”

I haven’t read his collection of essays but I did know that his mother was Jewish. His brother, btw, disputes the fact claiming that she was only party Jewish and that she didn’t bring her children up as Jewish.

In any case his “Jewishness” is not relevant. I don’t care if he were an Orthodox Rabbis son. The guy turned me off when he attacked Elie Wiesel in really disgusting terms.

www.thenation.com/.../hitchens

He had embraced David Irwin the Holocaust denier at one time. It was only after he realized that his embrace of Irwin would cost him his support among left intellectuals did he conveniently find a “Jewish mother.”

The redoubtable Deborah Lipstadt book History on Trial talks about this sordid affair.

Here is a review:

dir.salon.com/.../lipstadt

I have written about this already here and I don’t want to repeat myself.

I know that Christopher is supposed to have changed but it comes to Jewish issues unless he seem them fighting some magnificent dark force he still doesn’t to show much sympathy for them.

It seems to me that they guy doesn’t much like and is embarrassed by Judaism and Jews who are unashamedly Jewish.

“Back in my left days, I talked to Christopher a couple of times by phone (1993 and 1995, if memory serves). He was quite affable and charming, Politically, he has moved on and so have I. He is no longer a Trot and I never was.”

Many people have written about him in the same terms so I don’t doubt that he probably does have a lot of charm. I never met the guy so I don’t know how I would have reacted to him in person. One is often more forgiving in face to face encounters than in print.

“He is often erroneously called a neocon because of his support for the Iraq war but that label is far off the mark. I've been expecting that he might flip on Israel, too. He once edited a book with Edward Said; after Said's death in 2004, Hitchens began to be critical of him.”

Was this another self serving move on his part? Said came under increased scrutiny after 911 and the kinds of historical and intellectuals blunders that were often overlooked came under increased scrutiny. These days Said is the hero of mostly anti-Western academics.

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/.../article3885948.ece

From my point of view the guy’s intellectual work except on Joseph Conrad is worthless.  I read Orientalism when it first came out and couldn’t believe that people took the book seriously. But then, “Black Athena” too was taken seriously back then.  

“Christopher is a ferociously talented polemicist but is unreliable, politically. A few months ago, I read his book god is Not Great. He attempts to offload all that is bad onto religion while lowballing the good.”

Yes, indeed. I started reading the book but soon gave up. His comments on Judaism are very inadequate. He repeats t allegations about Judaism which were current in Voltaire’s circle in the 18th century and his book add nothing to our understanding of either religion or atheism.  His glorification of Athens at the expense of Jerusalem would have made a 19c German intellectual antisemite proud of him.

This opposition was very much debated at that time and modern antisemitism came out of these debates and so did the kind of philo-Semitism (of say Matthew Arnold and George Eliot) which looked down on, but which at the time was a benign force.

“I myself am a non - believer but Hitchens take on religion - and that of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett - is far too Manichean.”

I too am a non believer but I am not against religion, per se since the term connotes more than a single phenomenon. I find the positivistic approach to both science and religion by Dawkins and Dennett very troubling. They too seem stuck with 19c notions of what science and religion is.

“Damon Linker wrote a superb review in the pages of TNR on the phenomenon of these militant atheists late last year. The world is far too overdetermined a place to have the certitude that these scribes do. We attempt to confect convincing narratives about the cosmos and our place in it. But many of these attempts are shots in the dark. These writers often remind me of the eugenicists like Margaret Sanger: if only we could cut loose the idiots (religion, in their telling), the world would be such a far better place. I have studied enough science, history and philosophy, inter alia, to know that the cosmos is a strange and multivariegated and anfractuous realm that is not always layed out on a rationalist grid.”

Nicely put.

My owns view is that whatever premises we start from whether religious or anti-religious we end up leaving out unexplained large chunks of reality and human experience. The notion of a personal god is untenable and the notion of a mechanistic universe is also untenable.

“Do you know of the website "Hitchenswatch"? It is put up by a virulently anti - Hitchens force. Frequently it contains links to Hitchens' writings, as well as commentary lambasting and ridiculing him. Their motto is: "We watch Hitchens so you don't have to".”

I’ll pass, I have read all the Hitchens I am ever going to read. And I don’t need any more website watch to take away from my reading and living time.

“Jacksondyer and others: My longtime friend MIke G. from college has become interested in my posts and the posts of others on this blog. He said that I should ask you guys - and girls - what you think about the likelihood of a US strike on Iran before the November election. Anyone have some thoughts on this topic?” liberal reformer

I would very muck like to see the regime of the Mullahs’ being taken out, but I think it prudent to wait till the next President whoever he or she be to do the job.

I don’t trust Bush to do it right. The guy would fuck up a wet dream (forgive my G.I. talk).

I also don’t think that single strike would accomplish much except turn the world against us and make the Mullah’s even more belligerent. We need to build a broad coalition. Germany and France are already talking tough on Iran. I am not sure Germany would participate in a strike but I don’t think the Merkel government would oppose it either.

Iran is flexing its muscles in Lebanon and it may also be prudent to see that plays itself out since it would mean that many of the Sunni Arab government in the region would support taking Iran out if they succeed in overthrowing the Sunni led government there.

I also believe that Obama’s let’s talk approach is not what is needed right now, and I am still hoping (against hope no doubt) that Hillary or at least Al Gore will be at the top of the ticket. Other than that a President McCain is more to my linking than a President Obama.

Of course, it's possible that events in either Iraq or Lebanon will dictate US action and that a confrontation with Iran will not wait till January 09.

These are just some of my random thoughts, LR.

Jackson,

Okay, okay, I get it.  I missed you.  I couldn't stand being on your bad side.  It's like when I get into a fight with my husband.  I'm miserable the whole time--whether or not I'm right.  Don't worry,  I have no designs on you.  I'm quite happy with my old man.  But we've come too far to let it go.  (Sounds like a really bad pop song from the seventies.)  

Mollysimon: I feel a group hug comung on here. Solidarity forever.

Jacksondyer: You mean David Irving. I always thought this his sidling up to Irving was the oddest thing. Some opponents of Hitchens would think that he would naturally cozy up to Irving because of H's anti - Isreali views. But Irving is a nutter and a rank anti - Semite and Hitchens has done things like quote August Bebel to the effect that anti - Semitism is the socialism of fools.

Thanks for your comments on my passages regarding the "new atheists". I have thought a lot about thiese topics and it is good to have a chance to put them into print.

I like your take on Bush. When I read it to my girlfriend Sheena, she said holy ----. She was amused, too. Bush is just the worst incompetent. He would surely mess up an Iranian strike.

Jacksondyer: I forgot this on a previous post but I wanted to thank you for the link to the fascinating article in last Tuesday's New York Times on smarter not being better. Absolutely amazing piece.

Yes, I meant David Irving. Glad  you caught the typo.

jacksondyer said: " In 1948 Jews were actually a majority of the residents of Jerusalem till they were ethnically cleansed by the Arabs in the wars of 1947 and 1948."

In fact, Jews have formed the largest group of residents of Jerusalem since the mid-19th century; they have been a majority for more than a hundred years.

Jacksondyer: I forgot to thank you for your response to my query on Iran.

Lord, let's take these things one at a time:

"So far Jerb has said that he doesn’t like what he calls The Old Testament"

I don't like any ancient books that claim to give God's opion of what we should do or claim to be history we should model our world by.  Think I am hard on the Hebrew scriptures, dont' get me started on Christian. Moron, or Muslim ones. And any religious "moderates" who try to give me some alternative view of religion are just kidding themselves.  By what authority do you picka dn choose the parts you like and don't like?  If some of it is historically contingent, what methodology do you employ to decide what parts?  If you believe in God, but don't believe he gave revelations to ancient of modern people, you are of no concern to me.

"doesn’t care for the Hebrew language"

I like the Hebrew langage fine - I just think the resurrection of it as a snapshot of "ethnic" Jewishness disregards a very long history of Judaism that had no connection at all with it (To the esclusion of Greek, Yiddish, Ladino, and Aramaic which had a much longer and broader history of usage in Judaism).  My broader point was about mythologizing in the interests of nationalism.   It is fetishizing an imagined history like Afrocentrism, the fetishization of Latin by catholiciscm,. that has more to do with self-esteem and identity building than history.  What I hate is identity politics that overly simplifies and limits individuals and creates a false history and I am not picking on Jews here - I am picking on every variety of this that we all ridicule in pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, etc.   Jewishness occupies an area that can free of itself from the criticisms we level against other ethnicities that oversimplify their heritage.   I think the borders of ethnicity are far more fluid than a sort of insistant nationalism allows and I am suspicious of nationalisms that base themselves on shared blood, "national soul" or anything else rather than on shared ideas, values, or political systems.   The larger point I am trying to make is there is no such thing as a "pure" tulture.  Every culture is a syncretic mixture of other cultures (I wish the Arabs could see this - it might save us some trouble).  

"It is also ludicrous to blame religion for most of the problems we have today when in the last hundred years more people have been killed by secular regimes and in “wars of liberation” than in all the religious wars combined. "

You have to be kidding me - Communism was precisely a religion as was Nazism.  They had all the important trappings of religion apart from theism - black/white moral worldviews, us vs. them ideologies, absessed with notions of doctrinal purity, historical inevitabiligy, etc.  What makes religion dangerous is not its theism, it is the doctrinal lideology aspect of it - not that one believes in God, but that he has specially revealed to you what he wants.  

"Doesn’t like the fact that Jews consider themselves a people".

I don't like tribalism.  Has nothing to do with Jews in particular. I think Jews and everyone else takes a step backward when they beigin thinking that sharing religious claims or "blood" with people makes them more important or valuable than others.  

"Doesn’t like it that they exist as a nation "

I don't like nations based on blood.  Nations are political entities comprised of their citizens. I guess I hate white pople because I insist that the US is a country of its citizens and that our laws and symbols not be exclusive to whites and Christians but inclusive of our citizens.  

"wants them to disappear through intermarriage (a softer gentler kind of genocide)"

I want every tribalism to disappear - again, we all admit it is bad for everyone else, but not for our group.  So I guess Hitler was right to not want the German people to disappear through intermarriage with Jews?  That is vile rubbish.   Anyone who thinks cultural sycretism is genocide has no appreciation of actual genocide  - we don't bemoan the passing of Mayan, Aztec, or any other "dead" culture because we know they really aren't dead, just mixed and changed.   I want Jews to be so influential on other cultures that the best aspects thereof are present in every culture in which they live - this is the polar opposite of Hitler's fears.  If a thing and its opposite can both be anti-semitism, then I guess we have gone through the wormhole.  I want the best that every culture has to offer to become part of the broader culture and I want the worst culled out.  Anyone who says intermarriage is a "soft genocide" cares more about culture than human suffering and it is abhorrent to me as a liberal.  I don't worry that the white race is going to die out from intermarriage with jews or blacks like your apparent pals at Stormfront do.  How dare you tell someone who is of mixed cultural or ethnic ancestry that they are part of a terrible "dying out".   I have a mixed race niece.  If some black power advocate accused her or my brother-in-law of committing soft genocide, I would punch them in the face.  Genocide involves killing and suffering!  It doesn't involve folks finding love with people who aren't "like them".  

"Yep, hatred of the Old Testament does drive some people mad as in insane"

I thnk revealed religion is a poisonous idea.  It seems to me one contribution of Judaism is that many secular Jewish thinker learned very early to see the dangers of this (being on the receiving end of it for so long).  

Of course, I am quite supportive of Israel against its barbaric tribalistic neighbors - not beause it is Jewish but because it is a state with some appreciation for Enlightenment values and I think there is a good chance those values can continue to be fulfilled in a reduction of tribalism in the future.  Israel is at its best when it puts Enlightenment values above Jewish ones (and by Jewish values I mean values that a secular person wouldn't have any basis to hold).

" His glorification of Athens at the expense of Jerusalem would have made a 19c German intellectual antisemite proud of him."

The point I am trying to make is that this is a distinction only made by a narrow definition of Jewishness.  Many Jews in the hellenistic period were quite enamored of Athens and Greek culture and sought interaction with it to augment their Jewishness.  But to you tribalists, they don't count as real Jews.  If any Jews decided that the barbaric ritual of circumcision, for example, was a stupid custom and not ordained by God, then they are not a Jew and committing cultural genocide worthy of the murderous fanaticism described in Maccabees.  It seems to me that it was the Maccabbees who insisted on purity while the Hellenists were interested in contat and interaction with other cultures.  

All these attacks on Hitchens show folks who haven't read the book or contended with his arguments.  It is very simple.  Every religion relies on the idea that God vouchsafed special revelation to people and this is a foolish idea.  Period.  No amount of intellectual gymnastics changes things - if you base your life and values on such revelations, you are kidding yourself. And these revelations have a tendancy to cause insularity and tribalism.  And any "moderates" who soften or make excuses for the nasty content therein are only importing a morality learned from the Enlightenment retroactively into the texts.  Some religions lend themselves to this process than others and that is a good thing.

jerb, you are jsut repeating yourself and your comments the second time around are not any truer ot logical:

two points, though:

You say:

"You have to be kidding me - Communism was precisely a religion as was Nazism.  They had all the important trappings of religion apart from theism - black/white moral worldviews, us vs. them ideologies, absessed with notions of doctrinal purity, historical inevitabiligy, etc.  What makes religion dangerous is not its theism, it is the doctrinal lideology aspect of it - not that one believes in God, but that he has specially revealed to you what he wants."

This is ignorant. It is a mantra that doctrinaire atheists use in order to save their anti religious views.  

Claiming that there is no god is one thing, claiming that people who beliieve in god are more prone to use their beliefs to justify violence than do atheist is something else. The first claim is tenable the second one is an illusion.

Not only was Communism not a religion it was anti-religious. Your claim that it is, is Orwellian. Nazis too was not a religion even though it adopted some of the trappings, mostly theatrical of religions.  

Second, no one cares about your positions on the existence of peoples. Whether you like it or not peoples (and tribes) do exist and will always exist.

Try telling a Chinese person to stop being Chinese and intermarry with Indians.

Your position is ludicrous and since you have chosen to target a small people like the Jewish people it is also antisemitic.

I have read Hitchens book and so has Liberal Reformer. His and yours views of the Maccabeans is anti-historical and biased. (Introducing your hateful comments about male circumcision makes it also antisemitic.)  In any case, his book has been weighed in the critical scales and found wanting, so to speak.

Jerbs comments about circumcision shows that he knows nothing about ancient Greek religious practices: if the Jews circumcised for religious reasons the Greek refrained from circumcision also for religious reasons. They believed that the gods favored those whose bodies were intact. To the Greeks it was something only “barbarians” meaning non Greek speakers circumcised. Add to that the usual castration fears that man have about circumcision and you get a sense that these folk abjure circumcision for equally irrational and barbaric reasons. (The Nazis btw also adopted a pretty fierce anti circumcision stance and called it barbaric. They of course were as we all know a model of civilized humanity.)

Almost every human activity in the ancient world, including the Greek Olympics, was performed for religious purposes. Read Plutarch and other ancient writers for crying out loud. The Spartans refused to fight the Persians, even though they were in danger of being overrun, till they performed their rites to the gods and finished their sport games dedicated to one of their deities.  

Some points on the preceding discussion --

jerb: "I have never understood how in 1900 Zionists though they were more entitled to a state i Palestine than the people who already lived there."

As Mr. Peretz points out, the people who lived there included many Jews. And the Arabs who lived there in 1900 did not have a sense of being any sort of nation, never mind aspiring to a state for that nation.

The Ottoman state was dissolved in 1918. Britain divided what had been the Ottoman province of Syria with France. Pre-WWI Syria extended to the Egyptian border, including the town of Rafiah, presently divided on the Egypt-Gaza border. The Ottoman system had never included a province of Palestine. For more than 400 years, Syria had always included what are presently called Israel and the Palestinian territories. In the early 1920s, when a Hashemite prince claimed the throne of Damascus against French preferences, the Arabs of Jaffa, Ramallah, and Jerusalem began agitate for reunification of their region with Syria.

In 1900 Zionists lived in what many Arabs called "Suriya junubiya," southern Syria. The vision of many in that era was that the Jews would get their state in the southwest portion of Syria, and the Arabs would have their much larger state in the rest of Syria. Further, the Syrian state, Hashemite ruled, would become the core of a greater Arab state, ruled by a benevolent king, perhaps caliph, hopefully in the moderate style of the Ottomans and the Umayyads.

Of course, it didn't happen quite that way.

Regarding an ethnic state, whether Israel or France -- clearly many see problems in states with ethnicities that are too disparate, in terms of maintaining peace. Switzerland underwent numerous ethnic wars. Belgium for centuries has endured conflict between Flemish speakers and French speakers. Even Canada experiences tension between Anglophones and Francophones. The effort to assimilate -- brutally -- the Native Americans in the US, the indigenous people in Canada, and the aborigines in Australia, has often been recounted. Jews, Japanese, Greeks, and others in the US may be experiencing a kinder, gentler form of assimilation into the dominant paradigm today. At least they're not experiencing what the Tibetans and the Sinkiang Muslims are at the hands of the Han Chinese. Even France,  Germany, and Sweden, paradigms of secular Western values, are experiencing some bumps in the road in assimilating very different minorities.

Further, since we cannot know which system or culture or even "civilization" (perhaps the French usage initially) is the "best" for humanity, it may be better for humanity to run numerous independent testbeds. In this I may be quoting Mazzini.

Jerb: It is you that has to be kidding. To call Communism a religion is to drain the word of all meaning. You say that is a religion except for the theism. That is akin to saying that conservatives are liberals, except for the right - wing part. Sure, Conmmunism is a belief - system but that does not make it a religion. Jacksondyer is exactly right - this is a signature move of radical secularists.

jerb: "And Jews who still persists in believing...the Exodus story is actual history (when archaelogy proves otherwise)..."

"Thankfully, we are quite confident the whole of the OT is a myth."

If you read one book, and that book was Finkelstein's _Bible Unearthed_, I think one can be "quite confident." If you've read more than one book on the topic, then the confidence diminishes.

Bible archeology is an active field that goes back quite a way, and today most consider that archeologists cover a spectrum from "minimalists," "moderates," and "maximalists." Unlike physics and chemistry, archeology is a field which allows a fair amount of room for opinion. I think the "moderate" view is the perspective of most archeologists today, which regards much of the Bible as substantially true.

The Bible may compare in this regard with the Iliad, tho not to equate, what Greeks regard as their own (stylized) national story. For centuries, most classicists saw the entire story of the siege of Troy as heroic fiction. Then Schliemann (not a professional archeologist) found Troy. It doesn't prove the Iliad happened, but it gives a great deal of substance to many of the details.

The Exodus is said to have occurred about 3,200 years ago. It's difficult to prove many historical events from that long ago. Further, it's extremely difficult to prove any sort of negative -- e.g., that the Exodus did not happen.

It happens that the Egyptians were notorious for excising the record of their defeats. Most historians argue that a Semitic people, the Hyksos, conquered Egypt and held it for a time. But when the Hyksos were overthrown, Egyptians erased every physical record of them they could find. Egypt for centuries cycled between the rule of north and south, Upper and Lower, and every time a dynasty violently seized power from another, the triumphs of their predecessor were erased from the public and monumental record. Their view of history was something like that of Saddam's information minister.

So even if we assume a large, embarrassing defeat of Egyptian power occurred, and a slave caste managed to flee eastward out of Egypt -- with or without Divine intervention -- we certainly must assume that Egypt did everything possible to eradicate public records of the event.

More recent events described by the Bible -- the rule of Omri, of Ahab, of Solomon, these only about 2,700 years ago -- are attested by archeology without much dispute, even from Finkelstein.

jerb: "But with each having a religion that uniquely nurtures both poisonous orientations, it will never happen."

Actually, religion can be a bridge among people of different religions. See for example

www.haaretz.com/.../979551.html

The former president of Indonesia, Abdurrahman Wahid, runs the world's largest Islamic organization, and Wahid has sought for many years a rapprochement between the Islamic and Jewish religious communities. So has Rabbi Jonathan Sacks of Britain.

jacksondyer writes that belief in a personal God and a mechanistic universe is "untenable."

Oddly, many of the geniuses who founded modern Western mathematics were devout theists and active theologians: Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Leibniz.

Not clear what "mechanistic" means specifically in this context. Certainly physics, chemistry, and most disciplines derived directly from these rely on predictability as a criterion for what qualifies as "science." We believe we can predict the exact second the sun will rise tomorrow, and even the exact second it should rise a hundred years from now. Is this a "mechanistic universe"?

The founder of Western science decided that a sort of intelligence had to have put the universe into motion. Aristotle, tho not a Jew, did describe something called the "Agent Intellect." Not the man with the long white beard flying around in a chair that Yuri Gagarin talked of, but something more abstract. The British philosopher Anthony Flew recently defended something much like the "Agent Intellect" recently.

If you posit the "Agent Intellect," or something of that sort, it's not a particular leap from there to an omniscient entity, and from there to a "personal God."

Or, like Newton, you can support the idea of the one, without the extension. It's possible to believe, or not to believe, but it's inaccurate to call the idea "untenable."

In contemporary physics the "anthropic problem" is frequently discussed, yet another way that theology necessarily bulges into any discussion of science.

Historically, religion tends to be the basis for human rights. Overtly atheistic regimes are inevitably vicious regarding human rights. This is because the statement Jefferson included in the Declaration is a religious concept, a leap of faith, that cannot be proved or disproved. "...all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights..." Not surprisingly, states that oppose human rights and elevate an abstract notion of the state or the people above the individual are actively opposed to monotheism.

Tho jacksondyer points out that Marxism and other ideologies are responsible for more deaths than any religion, the argument of the Columbia professor Mark Lilla might be mentioned here. Lilla cites Norman Cohn in claiming that Marxism is fundamentally derived from monotheism, especially in what he sees as its progressivism, its egalitarianism, and its messianism, and sees this as a bad thing.

Lennonism, as someone recently called it, argues that all war and all bad things come from religion and nationalism. Lennon wrote great songs with his first partner. After he dumped McCartney for Ono, he produced few songs with any meaning. A brilliant artist, but not much n history.

A brief review of the wars of the US shows that hardly any had anything to do with religion.

Most economists, and many other people, would argue that wars generally are quarrels over resources, whether land, oil, water, or coastline. The quest for political power, shorn of religion or nationalism, is also a typical cause of war. Henry of Navarre changed religions to gain Paris; the Hohenzollerns did too, to hold Brandenburg; Henry VIII of England became Protestant because it served him, not because he was abruptly overwhelmed by the rightness of its theology.

*****

Judaism has always endorsed intermarriage -- the book of Ruth is part of the canon, in part to demonstrate that anyone can convert to Judaism and become a Jew, even a Moabite woman. The wife of Moses himself was a convert. On the other hand, part of the reason Esau's mother turned against him was because Esau chose wives from outside, presumably who didn't convert.

Jacksondyer: Thanks for pointing out that I read god is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I paid it close attention; I read every word in the book. Hitchens is simply Manichean on religion. As a secularist, I think that theism is a ladder that probably can be discarded but I also contend that it has had its usefulness and still repays study today. Hitchens notion that it is religion that poisons everything is just unsupportably ludicrous. He is the most interesting guy; he borders on the misanthropic often enough and yet he believes that banishing religion would greatly improve the human species. I have some real estate in the Sea of Tranquility that I would like to offload on him. After reading his book, I phoned him (it had been more than a dozen years since we last spoke) but he was in California, so I left my number and a message telling him that I diagreed with his book's overarching thesis. That was months ago and I don't expect to hear back from him.

Jacksondyer: Thanks for pointing out that I read god is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. I paid it close attention; I read every word in the book. Hitchens is simply Manichean on religion. As a secularist, I think that theism is a ladder that probably can be discarded but I also contend that it has had its usefulness and still repays study today. Hitchens notion that it is religion that poisons everything is just unsupportably ludicrous. He is the most interesting guy; he borders on the misanthropic often enough and yet he believes that banishing religion would greatly improve the human species. I have some real estate in the Sea of Tranquility that I would like to offload on him. After reading his book, I phoned him (it had been more than a dozen years since we last spoke) but he was in California, so I left my number and a message telling him that I diagreed with his book's overarching thesis. That was months ago and I don't expect to hear back from him.

“Tho jacksondyer points out that Marxism and other ideologies are responsible for more deaths than any religion, the argument of the Columbia professor Mark Lilla might be mentioned here. Lilla cites Norman Cohn in claiming that Marxism is fundamentally derived from monotheism, especially in what he sees as its progressivism, its egalitarianism, and its messianism, and sees this as a bad thing.”

Actually, FBC Cohn in his book on millenarianism makes a distinction between Communism, especially primitive communism and Marxism. The former notion is very ancient and can be allied to religion, though it doesn’t have to be. Marxian communism is or pretends to be scientifically based and is antireligious in nature. Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin and so himself as tracing the evolution of economic societies in the spirit of Darwin.

"That was months ago and I don't expect to hear back from him."  LR

No, I don't expect you will. Hitchens doesn't sound like the kind of person who likes to be disagreed with.

Jacksondyer: No, Christopher Hitchens doesn't brook differences well. In a profile in the New Yorker on him - maybe a couple of years ago, or so - he was described as setting upon a woman doctor who supported Howard Dean in the '04 primary season. The author conveyed to the readers that he was terribly abusive. Now, I was not favorably disposed to the Dean campaign but Hitchens was horrible in that exchange.

By the way, what are you going to do now that it looks as though Hillary is going down? Like you, I have extremely grave reservations about Obama but I don't like the crowd that McCain is running with. From 2000 to early 2004, the McCain persona was attractive. If he were to run as equivalent to a conservative Democrat, this would be compelling to me, as you recently opined. But if not, what then?

LR, I am going to wait till the conventions before I decide. It will all depend on who his running mate is and what his platform looks like

If he chooses Mitt Romney as a running mate there is no way I'll vote for him.

I am not going to vote for Obama neiither. If there is no candidate I can vote for I'll just skip the Presidential slot and vote for the local democratic slate.

Jacksondyer: Thanks for your reply. Mitt Romney is my bete noire. Your orientation is very sound. I suspect more than a few people think as we do.

jacksondyer: "Actually, FBC Cohn in his book on millenarianism makes a distinction between Communism, especially primitive communism and Marxism. The former notion is very ancient and can be allied to religion, though it doesn’t have to be. Marxian communism is or pretends to be scientifically based and is antireligious in nature. Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin and so himself as tracing the evolution of economic societies in the spirit of Darwin."

Haven't read Cohn's _Pursuit of the Millennium_ since Tony Grafton assigned it years ago; I was referring to Mark Lilla's recent article in the NYT magazine. Lilla seemed to rely on Cohn in blaming religion for Marxism. Lilla also blamed religion for Nazism, I think. The article was just a few months ago. Lilla also has appeared in TNR.

Cohn was a linguist by training, I think. Many of his insights are powerful. Others not as much. _Pursuit of the Millennium_ has been very influential in Europe for many years, I've read.

Much as I like Cohn, and tho I'm impressed with Lilla's flypaper memory, I'm not persuaded. He's not the sharpest analyst I've read. His effort to contrast "faith" with "reason" seems oblivious to the reality that all reason relies on axioms, that is, on faith.

Lilla's article appeared August 19 in the NYT Magazine, titles "The Politics of God."

www.nytimes.com/.../19Religion-t.html

FBC: I think that you are too much the foundationalist. There is an endlessly dialogical interweave between our reasoning and the world out there. I'm post - Enlightenment to a significant extent, though far short of the rotters like Lacan but I am not on board with the notion that science is a house of cards, built on faith like about everything else. The cosmos is too complex and variegated for reductionism to function all of the way down, although it has done much good work. The fact that we cannot prove all axioms and first principles is not supportive of your foundationalism but rather of the notion of a vastly pluralist cosmos.

"Haven't read Cohn's _Pursuit of the Millennium_ since Tony Grafton assigned it years ago; I was referring to Mark Lilla's recent article in the NYT magazine. Lilla seemed to rely on Cohn in blaming religion for Marxism. Lilla also blamed religion for Nazism, I think. The article was just a few months ago. Lilla also has appeared in TNR."  FBC

Mark Lilla is a first rate journalistic intellectual writer. He is not a scholar who does orignal work. I have his "The Reckless MInd" which I value highly, as a guide to further research, but not as an original contribution to intellectual history.  

I suggest you read Cohn's book

Another first class work, which unfortunately is out of print, on religion which you might want to look at is: Weston La Barre's  "The Ghost Dance: the Origins of Religion."

I don't know how you can say, FBC, that you haven't read "Cohn's _Pursuit of the Millennium," and then say Much as I like Cohn, and tho I'm impressed with Lilla's flypaper memory, I'm not persuaded."

You are not pursuaded by whom? Cohn whom you haven't read or by Lilla's view of Cohn?

In any case, the I am also confused by this:

" His effort to contrast "faith" with "reason" seems oblivious to the reality that all reason relies on axioms, that is, on faith."

The faith of religion and the faith of science (axioms) are not congruous: the faith of religion is an end in itself, the axioms (faith in your vocabulary) is a means to further research and testing.

liberal reformer: "The fact that we cannot prove all axioms and first principles is not supportive of your foundationalism but rather of the notion of a vastly pluralist cosmos."

May be that the fact that certain things cannot be proved is a foundationalist axiom, as you term it.

jacksondyer:

I don't know how you can say, FBC, that you haven't read "Cohn's _Pursuit of the Millennium," and then say Much as I like Cohn, and tho I'm impressed with Lilla's flypaper memory, I'm not persuaded."

Quite correct; but jacksondyer's not quoting what I said.

What I actually said was that it's been many years since I read Cohn.

I read Lilla's take on Cohn in August.

I'm not persuaded by Lilla's thesis in that article. Seems not merely reductionist but inaccurate.

Haven't read Lilla's recent books, but he holds the title of "Professor of Humanities" at Columbia, so I figure he must have attempted some original work.

jacksondyer: "The faith of religion and the faith of science (axioms) are not congruous: the faith of religion is an end in itself, the axioms (faith in your vocabulary) is a means to further research and testing."

Nope, most people who wrestle with religious faith do so with an attitude of hypothesis-testing. Augustine is famous in this regard, but there are plenty of examples. Some even find this in the etymology of the word "Israel." Nor do many religions view faith as the "end in itself" at the center of the religion. Consider Hillel's famous reply to the Roman soldier. No mention of faith there.

Axioms by many definitions aren't tested directly.

I've heard it argued that a main reason Western science historically has surpassed that of East Asia is simply because of differing axioms that derive from philosophy and religion.

Aristotle viewed the natural world as a unity, informed by a singular intelligence. His view in this is consistent with that of Judaism, as Maimonides and Gersonides wrote, and with that of Christianity, as Aquinas held.

China tho is strongly influenced by T'aoism, which has a more pluralistic view of the cosmos.

Thus an anomaly in physical results in Western experience had to be reconciled with all else that was known, or believed to be known. And thus science advanced. Whereas in east Asia, these anomalies were shrugged off as signs of pluralism in the cosmos.

Thus the axioms of religion and philosophy are very much associated with those of science.

"Haven't read Lilla's recent books, but he holds the title of "Professor of Humanities" at Columbia, so I figure he must have attempted some original work."

I wouldn't go by titles, read his book.

"Nope, most people who wrestle with religious faith do so with an attitude of hypothesis-testing. Augustine is famous in this regard, but there are plenty of examples. Some even find this in the etymology of the word "Israel." Nor do many religions view faith as the "end in itself" at the center of the religion. Consider Hillel's famous reply to the Roman soldier. No mention of faith there."

If you can show how a religious article of faith can be tested, or falsified then I would have a better idea about what you talking about.

Thanks, everyone, for this fascinating and provoking discussion/debate. I have learned much and look forward to learning more in my reading at least some of the recommended books. (Somewhat insipid remark, I admit, but sincerely expressed.)

Tomeg: That was a lovely post.

FBC: Nice try. You attempted to double me back on myself with your self - referential move. As in there are no absolutes, except this one, right here. There are always paradoxes - some veridical, some falsidical, as the late, great W.V.O. Quine taught us. Yours surely is a falsidical paradox and I am still not a foundationalist.

Jacksondyer: Norman Cohn is a great scholar and a pleasure to read.

Seems reasonable to surmise that if Lilla is a professor, he holds a Ph.D., and most doctoral programs require original work.

jacksondyer: "If you can show how a religious article of faith can be tested, or falsified then I would have a better idea about what you talking about."

An axiom by definition isn't tested. As Godel and Cohen demonstrated, a system can be either consistent or complete, but not both. Axioms are those statements that exist outside a consistent system.

Thus the Kierkegaardian leap of faith.

In a great many fields there is no particular certainty that the framework you've chosen is objectively "true." Nor are they immediately testable. Yet decisions need to be made, and courses taken. Some statements may be true, yet not be falsifiable. E.g., "music soothes the savage beast."

May depend on how we define truth.

If you reject everything that includes non-falsifiable statements, then you're rejecting all of social science. There are 400,000 mental health professionals in the US alone. Do you want to throw all of them out of work? And innumerable political scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists. Not that they can't be counted, but most of them struggle with quantitative thinking.

So many religious assertions, "articles of faith," are untestable axioms. Some argue these may be what in logic may be called meta-statements or meta-propositions. Possibly these are testable inductively.

Haven't read much of modern atheism or theism, neither Dawkins nor Flew. But I read Dawkins's review of Behe's recent book in the NYT Book Review, and Dawkins wasted an entire page on sneers, ad homs, and elitist patronizing, without much spent on actually discussing the book. TNR's review of the book was much more sensible, longer -- and it seemed Dawkins could have paraphrased some of it.

Dawkins also evidently is an anti-Semite.

FBC said: "An axiom by definition isn't tested. As Godel and Cohen demonstrated, a system can be either consistent or complete, but not both. Axioms are those statements that exist outside a consistent system."

Not quite. In fact, Godel's Completeness Theorem, which was his doctoral dissertation, shows that so-called first-order logic is both consistent and complete. (This, btw, was by itself a stunning achievement.) Godel's First Incompleteness Theorm, which he proved a couple of years later, shows that no consistent set of axioms, powerful enough to describe the arithmetic of the natural numbers (e.g. the Peano-Dedikind axioms), is complete.  What this means, in effect, is that arithmetic truth and arithmetic provability are not co-extensive: there is no consistent set of axioms in which every truth of arithmetic is provable.

JPKatz: Excellent post. I read Rebecca Goldstein's magnificent book on Godel a couple of years ago;  I highly recommend it.

liberal reformer: "FBC: Nice try. You attempted to double me back on myself with your self - referential move. As in there are no absolutes, except this one, right here. There are always paradoxes - some veridical, some falsidical, as the late, great W.V.O. Quine taught us. Yours surely is a falsidical paradox and I am still not a foundationalist."

Quine classified paradoxes. But it didn't seem to me that he said we just accept them comfortably.

JPKatz: "Not quite. In fact, Godel's Completeness Theorem, which was his doctoral dissertation, shows that so-called first-order logic is both consistent and complete."

Seems to me that FOL is an incomplete system, lacking certain properties. It would be surprising if Godel's 1931 Incompleteness Theorems reversed his 1929 Completeness Theorem. Thus the 1929 theorem regarding FOL is a case within the Incompleteness Theorems.