“…every snake-faced gangster and exbryonic yegg in the Twin Cities is a Jew.”

65 Replies to ““…every snake-faced gangster and exbryonic yegg in the Twin Cities is a Jew.””

1. ET: The Arabs were offered the ’48 borders in ’47 and you know what they did.
   Between ’48 & ’67 there was no push at all for a Palestinian state. This is very a very important fact because it implies that the call for one now might well be just a tactic.
   There was a war in ’67 that the Arabs lost but they would still not make peace.
   The ’48 & ’67 borders are not militarily defensible and there has been no blanket Arab/Muslim acceptance of your idea anyway. The ’67 borders (almost) were offered in 2000 but there was war. Israel simply left Gaza & this provides a test of what would happen. We see the result INCLUDING the fact that those who espouse your view, and there are many, simply don’t care about Israel’s security and will blame it no matter what.
   If the Arab attitude towards Israel does not change, what right do you have to demand that Israel give up security captured while defending against aggression?

2. “I think that Israel should not be settling the West Bank. Period.” ET
   You think there should be parts of the planet where Jews are not allowed to live. That’s rational. When you say “Israel” do you mean Jews or Israelis, or non-observant Jews, or observant Jews who are not Zionists, or secular Jews or just all Jews?

3. ex-liberal – your transformation of my words is disgusting. I didn’t say anything about ‘parts of the planet where Jews are not allowed to live’. That’s really disgusting of you to even imply that I said such a thing about my words.
   I said that Israel, which is a POLITICAL entity, should not be settling the West Bank because it was set aside by the UN and international consensus as the land base for a Palestinian state.
   When I say ‘Israel’, I don’t refer to any religion, any secular or observance of any religion. Nor am I talking about an ethnic group. I’m talking about a political entity. That’s really quite disgusting of you to change my political comment to a comment about a people, a religion.
   greenmamba – right, the Arab nations rejected the Palestinian state and immediately launched a war. My own view of this – and I blame them as heavily, if not more so than Israel, for the lack of a Palestinian state, is that the Arab states didn’t want a Palestinian state, much less didn’t want an Israeli state.
   I think they didn’t want one because Palestine would be set up right from the start in a civic and democratic model. And above all, the Arab states didn’t want an Arab civic democracy in their midst. It would give their own people ‘ideas’.
   The Arab states have always considered Palestinians as ‘the lowest of the low’ as a people, as an ‘ethnic group’. They were never, ever, interested in them, in absorbing them, in helping them.
   As for what is happening now, my view is that the rise of Islamic fascism, which is a post WWars result of the tribal political infrastructure in the Arab States, has taken over and is using the Israel-Palestine conflict as a cover for their fighting against the West and against any notion of democracy in the Arab States (al Qaeda is against democracy).
   Yes, Israel has a right to defend its borders, but I don’t think it has a right to settle the land set aside for the Palestinians. As I keep saying, my view is that it should recognize the political reality of a Palestinian state and should not settle the West Bank. Period.
   As for the hatreds that have grown up on both sides, and it is naive to think that irrational hatred of ‘the arabs’ doesn’t exist among Israelis, this will take time to dispel. But I still think that a two state solution would work very well – and the two states would probably find their economies deeply interconnected with each other.
   At the moment – there are several factors harming such a solution. One, is Israel’s refusal to recognize a Palestinian state, and its settlement of the West Bank; the Other is the Islamic fascist’s takeover of the situation and their using the Palestinians as Al Qaeda’s front-line.
   Again, my view is that neither Al Qaeda nor the Arab states give a damn about the Palestinians; both are using them for their own agenda.

4. You’re right ET, it is disgusting to suggest that there should be no Jews in the West Bank.
   Whether you agree or not, when people say Israel they mean Jews

5. ET,
   I have never excluded tribalism as a cause in a myriad of causes. Neither have I excluded the inherent tribalism in Islam today. Regardless of whether you don’t believe in the Ummah as the super tribe that is Islam, it doesn’t matter. Because they do.
   This is entirely where your argument falls short. You argue on an historical/material basis, disregarding all else. Almost like looking at an overview of the entire Islamic drama as if its simply single cell organisms reacting in a petrie dish. You exclude belief and its impact on history.
   Furthermore, I don’t “consistently get upset” about anything. You, however, consistently and purposefully misrepresent my argument, belittling what I say, relegating it entirely to the texts and not the entire ideology and its history as I have argued. Including, once again, what they (Muslim leaders, scholars and clergy) say and believe. As well as what noted historians and politicians have said during the entirety of Islamic history.
   You maintain that Islam is the result of the Byzantine incursion into Arabia. I say that’s absolutely false, and nowhere to be found in historical accounts, including what is stated upon the founding of Islam in the Hadith and Sira. Don’t you think they’d know? Don’t you think if what you were saying was true, that the perpetually victimized Muslims would be throwing this up as a defence?
   I and others have repeatedly asked you to provide the evidence. You have not done so. Therefore it can be assumed you don’t have any.
   Just because you simplistically believe something to be true does not make it true.

6. ex-liberal – what is digusting was your claim that I said that there was some part of the planet where Jews were not allowed to live. My reference to the West Bank had nothing to do with religion but with a political entity, Israel. Aren’t there other religions also allowed in Israel beyond Jewish? And your suggestion that a Palestinian state would not allow Jews within its borders is specious; the focus would be on whether they accepted being citizens of a Palestinian state.
   irwin – I have provided the evidence, including even a book for you to read (Patricia Crone). I have also told you that in order to understand the thesis that the Islamic ideology began in the 7th c as a nativist reaction of a pastoral nomadic economy to an expanding agricultural settlement of the Byzantines – you also have to know:
   – differences in societal systems between settled agriculture and pastoral nomadism
   – the ecological nature of the entire area; this includes soil type, water sources, climate, native plants and animals
   -demographics; this includes population expansion
   Then, you have to know what happens when population increases beyond the carrying capacity of an economy
   I’m certainly not going to fill up kate’s blog with the data about these areas but have given you names of various authors who deal with this. You’ve ignored that I’ve done so and continue to claim that I know nothing about what I’m talking about. Unfortunately, I know quite a bit about these areas –
   You call all of the above ‘single cell organisms in a petrie dish’. That’s an absurd metaphor. Why? Because what goes on in a lab is isolate; what goes on in reality is not isolate.
   I suggest that YOUR theory, based only on the ideology, is isolate and in that petrie dish. You totally ignore the ecology, the economy, the population size and stresses of that population on the economy, the stresses on a population by other peoples moving into their domain, etc.
   Again, you still haven’t provided any data on WHY the Islamic religion emerged and developed. The statements by Islamists, made some centuries AFTER the emergence of Islam as an ideology, are hardly historically factual or analytic.
   You are the one who confines the analysis of Islam to its texts – including the outlines by Islamists of their history, their laws, their ideology. I’m saying that a valid history has to look OUTSIDE of the texts and into an examination of: the ecology, the environment, the economic realities of the ENTIRE area, including the economies of other peoples, the demographics, the carrying capacities of the various economies. Just reading what Islamists have written about themselves, won’t provide you with a valid history.
   Again, WHY did Islam develop?

7. Irwin, it’s hopeless, but here goes anyway (I know, I know – Patricia Crone)
   An answer to “why did Islam develop?” (sure to be rejected by ET)
   by Rabbi Ken Spiro
   During the days of Jewish clashes with the Roman Empire, Jews fled to areas outside the control of Rome and founded many towns and villages in Arabia. One very famous town, almost certainly founded by Jews, was Yathrib. Today Yathrib is better known as Medina and is considered Islam’s second holiest city (after Mecca).
   As in Rome, the local Jews attracted significant numbers of converts to their way of life and many more admirers.
   M. Hirsch Goldberg, in the Jewish Connection (p. 33), sums up the story before the early 600’s:
   “In Arabia, whole tribes converted to Judaism, including two kinds of the Himyarites. French Bible critic Ernest Renan remarked that ‘only a hair’s breadth prevented all Arabia from becoming Jewish.'”
   One of those impressed by the Jews’ uncompromising devotion to monotheism was a young trader named Mohammed ibn Abdallah.
   Although his travels had exposed him to Christianity and he was clearly influenced by it, he found aspects of it troublesome — in particular, the doctrine of the Trinity did not seem strictly monotheistic in his eyes. He is recorded as having said:
   “Unbelievers are those that say, ‘Allah is the Messiah, the son of Mary’ … Unbelievers are those that say, ‘Allah is one of three.’ There is but one God. If they do not desist from so saying, those of them that disbelieve shall be sternly punished.” (Koran, Sura 5:71-73)
   However, there is no doubt that in the early stages of his spiritual awakening, Mohammed came to be greatly impressed by the Jews. Writes S.D. Goiten in Jews and Arabs (pp. 58-59):
   “The intrinsic values of the belief in one God, the creator of the world, the God of justice and mercy, before whom everyone high and low bears personal responsibility, came to Muhammad — as he never ceased to emphasize — from Israel.”
   He clearly had some knowledge of the Torah as later he would quote Moses (though usually not accurately) more than one hundred times in the Koran, the record of his teachings which became the holy book of his newfound religion. Of the 25 prophets listed in the Koran, 19 are from Jewish scripture, and many ritual laws, as well as civil laws, of Islam parallel Judaism — circumcision and prohibition against eating pork, for example.
   CHILDREN OF ISHMAEL
   Mohammed believed the ancient tradition that the Arabs were the other children of Abraham – through the line of his son Ishmael by the Egyptian maidservant Hagar – and that they had forgotten the teachings of monotheism they had inherited ages ago. He saw his mission as bringing them back. Paul Johnson, in his History of the Jews (p. 167), explains:
   “What he [Mohammed] seems to have wished to do was to destroy the polytheistic paganism of the oasis culture by giving the Arabs Jewish ethical monotheism in a language they could understand and in terms adapted to their ways. He accepted the Jewish God and their prophets, the idea of fixed law embodied in scripture – the Koran being an Arabic substitute for the Bible – and the addition of an Oral Law applied in religious courts.”
   There is no argument that the Arab world into which Mohammed was born was badly in need of moral values and social reform. The Mecca of his day was a central place of pagan worship. The Arab tribesmen of the region worshipped a pantheon of gods there, including Al-Lat, the sun goddess, and Al-Uzza, a goddess associated with the planet Venus, both of whom were daughters of the chief deity, known as Al-Ilah, (Allah) or “the God.”
   The Kaaba, the shrine enclosing the famous black meteorite which was worshipped in Mecca before Mohammed’s time, was also a site for an altar where blood sacrifices were offered to these and other gods.
   The morality of the neighboring tribesmen could, charitably, be described as chaotic. Huston Smith, in his classic The Religions of Man, (p. 219) goes so far as to call the Arab society before the advent of Mohammed “barbaric.” Tribal loyalties were paramount; other than that, nothing served to mitigate the blood feuds, drunken brawls and orgies that the harsh life of the desert gave sway to.
   MOHAMMED’S VISION
   Mohammed was repelled by the cruel and crude reality around him. In the year 610, at the age of 40, he escaped to a desert cave where, according to Muslim tradition, he experienced a series of mystical visions, including revelations from the Angel Gabriel. He returned from the desert imbued with a spiritual mission to transform the pagan society around him.
   Preaching an end to licentiousness and need for peace, justice and social responsibility, Muhammad advocated improving the lot of slaves, orphans, women and the poor, and replacing tribal loyalties with the fellowship of a new monotheistic faith – which he called Islam, meaning “surrender to God.” (One who submits is a Muslim.)
   Initially, he attracted very few followers. After three years, Mohammed had barely forty converts. But, imbued with a passion that has been the hallmark of the truly great visionaries of the world, Mohammed would not give up. And, little by little, he built a steady following of committed loyalists.
   The more followers he attracted, the more attention, and with it, the more hostility. The merchants of Mecca, whose livelihood depended on the pagan sites and rites of the city, weren’t going to be easily displaced. A murder plot was hatched, but Mohammed escaped just in the nick of time.
   While persecution of the Muslims was mounting in Mecca, the city of Yithrab was experiencing problems of internal strife and a delegation decided that the fiery preacher from Mecca would be the man to bring order to chaos. After winning the pledge of city representatives to worship only Allah, Mohammed agreed to migrate. His journey to Yithrab in the year 622 CE, the year 1 of the Islamic calendar, was immortalized as the Hegira.
   Thus his life was saved and a new horizon opened for his teachings. It was in Yithrab — heretofore to be known as Medina, “the city of the prophet” — that Islam took hold in a major way.
   Once he had made Medina his stronghold, Mohammed mobilized an army of 10,000 men and, in 630 CE, moved against Mecca, meaning to purify the Kaaba and turn it into a center of worship of the one God, Allah.
   His success is legendary. Two years later, when he died all of Arabia was under Muslim control.

8. I ask you for evidence and you throw one name at me? This is evidence?
   It’s like reading something in the Enquirer and believing it to be true.
   As far as demographics and population expansion goes – it was not due to an innocently expanding Arab population. It was due to military and cultural imperialism, subjugating whole populations of other races and people. In other words, an expanding Islamic empire, driven not by population expansion, or starvation, but mostly by greed and fear to keep the conquered in check.
   “The statements by Islamists, made some centuries AFTER the emergence of Islam as an ideology, are hardly historically factual or analytic.”
   Worse, still, are statements made by a 20th century author, with loads of theory but no evidence.
   I’d much prefer to rely on eyewitness accounts at the time, Islamic or otherwise.
   To your point – just depending on unsubstantiated theories presented 1400 years after the fact won’t provide anything, let alone valid history.
   And certainly, disregarding their texts, peoples beliefs and eyewitness accounts is absurd.
   As I’ve said before, there are a number of reasons why Islam was invented and developed. You might read Efraim Karsh, Ibn Warraq, Andrew Bostom, Joseph Schacht, David Margoliouth, Snouck Hurgronje, Vajda, Abel, Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, Jeffery, Lammens, Spencer – even Maimonides.
   As far as Palestinians allowing Jews to settle in a Palestinian state – did you read my post at 3:32? Did you read today’s National Post article on page 3?
   Perhaps you should start reading what Palestinians say and believe. You might start understanding that their theory does not fit with yours in the slightest.

9. ex-Liberal,
   A hagiography that the apologists Esposito, or Armstrong would have been proud to write. I’d prefer Ibn Warraq, Spencer, or the many others included in the post above.
   Mohammad, according to their own Sira and Hadith was a brutal monster. It’s believed that his religious apprenticeship included some of the more arcane teachings in the Kabbala and Talmud. The final version of his cult taking on a lot of Zorastrian belief as well. Regardless, it’s a mish mash that only served his own lecherous and perverted sexual desires and greed all too well, with his convenient revelations that only he benefitted from – such as allah sanctioning his marriage to his son’s wife, etc., ad nauseam.

10. ex-liberal – of course I reject such a romantic and biased outline. It begs the questions, many questions and is obviously written only to support Judaism as a foundation of Islam.
    By the way, according to Irwin Daisy, Arabia is a desert and my outline of pastoral nomadic tribes living there, and reacting to Byzantine incursions isn’t valid. Yet, you outline Jewish settlements there! (By the way, the religion really isn’t that relevant; what IS relevant is the economic mode).
    Also, the outline doesn’t explain what the admiration for the Jewish religion/way of life’ was about. What was admirable? After all, Judaism is not a religion focused on conversions. Why were people converting?
    I’ve read documents outlining conversions of natives to Christianity which extoll the virtues of such a conversion in a similar tone as your rabbi above.
    For instance; it doesn’t explain why monotheism is preferred over polytheism. Your rabbi assumes that monotheism is better. Why? There is no intrinsic value of either, but there ARE explanations for both types! By the way, the ‘trinity’ comment is straight from the debate between Arians and Athanasian views of the Christian trinity.
    I also disagree that the morality of the nativist tribes was ‘chaotic’. Tribalism isn’t chaotic; no social organization can’t last for centuries if it is – and tribalism was centuries old.
    I also disagree that Mohammed’s agenda was to move the people to ‘ethical monotheism’; polytheism is equally ethical. And the outline of ‘drunken brawls’ and orgies is pure nonsense.
    Your rabbi’s outline is pure romantic fiction, in the manner of the Heroic Individual mythic tale. It doesn’t explain why Islam was accepted. The people could just as easily have moved into one or the other of the other monotheistic religions (Judaism/Christianity). They didn’t.
    Most certainly, the religious ideology of Islam is primarily Judaic/Christian. In my view, Islam is less of a religion, because of that, and is primarily a socioeconomic and political mode. You haven’t explained that.
    irwin daisy – ‘it was not due’ -I’m not sure what population expansion you are referring to.
    I’m talking about the emergence of Islam, which was not due to a population expansion by the nomadic arabs but to population expansion and territorial expansion by the agricultural settlements of the Byzantine Christians into the nomadic territory of the Arabian peninsula –
    which is NOT, as you insist, an empty desert; the fertile central plateau is grasslands; the other parts have oases; the economic mode is pastoral nomadism.
    You still haven’t explained the reasons for the emergence of Islam. Your list of authors doesn’t do that. Again, why did Islam emerge and develop? Why did people follow it? What was going on at the time?
    So, in my view, you have to consider the economic and demographic realities of the time. You haven’t done that; you’ve never done that. It cannot be due to the romantic notion of One Man. That doesn’t explain WHY it was accepted and followed.
    By the way, many Jews talk with the same vitriol against Palestinians as your 3.32 example. I think that both can be discounted; there are decent people in both groups.

11. Judaism is the foundation of Islam. It is also the foundation of Christianity. Christianity kept the Old Testament, Islam picked what it wanted, and discarded both Old and New Testaments.
    “Also, the outline doesn’t explain what the admiration for the Jewish religion/way of life’ was about. What was admirable? After all, Judaism is not a religion focused on conversions. Why were people converting?” Have you ever heard of God-fearers? Pagans in the Roman world who hung out around Jews and Jewish places of worship because they saw something “admirable” in the Jewish way of life. It wasn’t materialism or economics or the sword that made them do that – it was the power of the ideas.
    I think you are also falling victim to cultural relativism. Societies based on ethical monotheism (the idea that the creator of the Universe is also the absolute when it comes to ethics and morality) are clearly “better” (in terms of sanctity of life, equality before the law, freedom, etc) than pagan societies (ancient Rome for instance). When did you become such a multiculturalist?
    Also I’d be curious to see the frequency and intensity of those vitriolic statements by Jews (or do you mean Israelis) about Palestinians?

12. no, ex-liberal, I’ve never heard of ‘god-fearers’ and I don’t accept that people thought that a monotheistic way of life was better. What is a monotheistic way of life?
    I also don’t accept that pantheism was worse, as far as ethics and morality.
    What I DO accept is that the difference between an ideology based around vague unnamed ‘spirits’; and moving to distinctly named spirits – is basic to mankind and was found in all early bands, clans, tribes. The spirits are usually local forces and directly related to the needs, physical, material and thus emotional, of the local population. So, you’ll have the spirit of the summer rains, the spirit of the hunt, etc.
    And, this is also directly related to the size of the population. Larger populations move into specifically named gods, multiple gods, such as those of the Greeks and the Romans. I’m sure you can’t disparage their ethics, morality and ability to reason.
    Larger populations move into monotheism. Nothing to do with any inherent truth of monotheism being better than polytheism; just the size of the population and the need for a cohesive authority.
    No, this isn’t relativism, which looks at different beliefs/behaviour within the same economic system/population base and thinks they’re all OK. This is an historic view that looks at ideologies in different (not the same) economic systems/population bases.
    Were the polytheistics less ethical than the monotheists? The various religious wars in Europe and the ME – eg, in the 13, 14, 15th etc centuries are hardly examples of ‘lower ethics’.

13. What I can’t figure out is ET’s persistent claim that Israel did not go along with a Palestinian state. Of course it did. Didn’t Barak offer 95% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Didn’t Arafat reject this deal and launch the second intifada? Didn’t Clinton finally recognize that Arafat was a insincere rotter?
    Israel has proven over and over again its sincere desire to live in peace behind defendable borders. She gave back Sinai to Egypt TWICE. After the Six-Day war it offered to give back all its gains in exchange for peace and Arab recognition of the State of Israel. However, in Khartoum, the Arabs issued their infamous “three nos” rejection. The “occupied territories” were taken in a defensive war; they are therefore NOT occupied territories, say, in the sense that Iraq became an occupied territory. Generally, lands taken in a defensive war are NOT returned to the aggressor. Israel attempted to do this, but was offered no assurances in return. To return land to an anihilationist aggressor for NOTHING in return, is suicidal. To counsel that action is pure anti-Semitism in my books. The double-standard referenced above.
    You do know that Arafat was Egyptian I presume? A Muslim Brother, trained by the KGB and a relative of the Nazi Haj Amin Al-Husseini, the Jerusalem Mufti, who was directly invovled in the Holocaust. In what sense could Arafat be the “father of the Palestinian liberation movement” not being “Palestinian”. Wasn’t his interest from the get-go the destruction of Israel? Yes, he downplayed Islam, but without question, he was doing jihad, disguised as “national liberation” for western consumption.
    The Arab countries weren’t motivated by preventing a “Palestinian” state. Their motivation was the destruction of the new State of Israel, pure and simple.
    The “Palestinians” never wanted a state. Never objected to Jordan annexing the West Bank; never objected to Egypt’s occupying Gaza; stuck with the Ottomans till the bitter end. There was no genuine nationalist movement except in the sense of destroying a new nationalism.
    This illegality argument drives me nuts. Great Britain ILLEGALLY changed the Mandate given it by the League of Nations. ILLEGALLY gave 80% of it away to Jordan. There’s the “Palestinian” state as has often been argued here. As mentioned Jordan ILLEGALLY annexed the West Bank in 1948 and Egypt ILLEGALLY occupied Gaza.
    Of course nations have a right to exist. A people has a right to self-determination. Can there be a better claim to people-hood than the Jews? The whole nation state system is based on this right to self-determination. You’re playing with semantics here.
    Judea and Samaria (West Bank) are the very heart of the nation of Israel. Without them, Israel is simply not viable — not defendable.
    Finally, after much re-consideration, I have to say that in making the claim that Canada is post-anti-Semitic Kay is nuts. The universities — students and profs – are hugely anti-Zionist, and no, sorry, there’s no difference. I simply do not accept the legitimacy of anti-Zionism, and steadfastly equate it with anti-Semitism.

14. After reading through all the learned detail in the above discussion . . .
    * * I suggest that YOUR theory, based only on the ideology, is isolate and in that petrie dish. * *
    . . dissected back to the petrie dish, there seems to be a missing result.
    Some like the Jews and some do not. Free preference is allowed, but where are the clear thinking cures to the impasse?
    Screwed up, bogged down, in limbo.
    Let*s have solutions, oh learned ones, please.
    Quibbling and no result? = TG

15. “By the way, according to Irwin Daisy, Arabia is a desert and my outline of pastoral nomadic tribes living there, and reacting to Byzantine incursions isn’t valid.”
    ET, are you suggesting that I don’t believe there were tribes in Arabia? Because if you are, that’s an outright lie.
    However, the Byzantine incursion isn’t valid. You’ve proven that yourself by offering zero evidence for it after many, many requests.