The noxious article with the title above is here. Waiting for the Guardian's companion piece, entitled "Global Islamic violence, intimidation, and irrationality are feeding the cancer of Islamophobia"? Don't hold your breath. You see, that too is the fault of the democratic nations. In the Western press, as in the Muslim press, the Islamic world bears no responsibility for any of its actions, no matter how destructive or mad -- such as cartoon rage. They are forever passive reactors, perpetual victims lashing out in entirely understandable outrage against Western enormities.
What's that? A jihad ideology of global supremacism, totalitarianism, and subjugation? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?
An absolutely brilliant riposte from Stephen Byers in 2004 on the notion that Jews bring anti-Semitism upon themselves through their support for Israel:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1169275,00.html
The author of the article has his email address at the end of his story. I couldn't resist letting him know my feelings on his article. Let's just say it's the first time in my life I've ever swore at a member of the clergy.
Melanie Phillips responded to this article at her blog yesterday:
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001601.html
Thanks for the link to Melanie Phillips, Caroline.
OT - sorry, I couldn't resist - a Mac site (Macworld UK) is boasting that an Islamist film was "cut on a Mac".
http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=13909
That's like a Carl Zeiss fan boasting that Leni Reifenstahl used their lenses in filming. Bah! let's get our priorities straight, Mac fanboys. Makes you want to spit.
In Europe we have exterminated our brilliant jewish culture and replaced it with a dangerous and unproductive muslim one - how sad. The perhaps greatest danish scientist of the 20th century was partly jewish:
http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1922/bohr-bio.html
I wonder what the explanation for the impressive brainpower of the jewish peopel is? Genetics? Culture?
Odin:
Nature + nurture. It takes both an inquiring mind and a mind capable of inquiry.
As for Ostreicher's ghastly opinion piece, I urge all to read Melanie Phillips's diary entry as she excoriates him and the typical lies he tells exquisitely.
What we read here is what I would style: "battered nation syndrome." The West, just like a battered woman says: if only I'd have his coffee ready on time in the morning he wouldn't beat me. If only I'd keep the kids quieter and the house neater, he wouldn't go into these rages. He's really a good man you see, I'm the one who makes him do this, it's really all my fault.
Now elevate this thinking to the international level and you've got a perfect case of co-dependence, enabling and battered nation syndrome. Or in a word - dhimmitude.
The latest bit of bunting cant from The Guardian is a natural reaction to a rare moment of sanity that it had yesterday, when denouncing sharia law. Patronising and riddled with false equivalence, particularly from Madeleine Bunting (she of the cant), this rag is a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Paul Oestreicher's article is quite typical.
The Guardian is a loathsome thing, God wot!
that article made me sick.
attacks on Jews by Muslims? its all Israels fault.
sickening.
The full text of Melanie Phillips's reply to the author of the article in The Guardian deserves to be posted in full here:
February 20, 2006
Just how sick is this?
The Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, is constitutionally confrontation-averse. He has also formed a brotherly bond with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, which isn’t surprising since in many ways they are two of a kind, being scholars who are less than comfortable at finding themselves expected to navigate the political piranha pool. So Sir Jonathan’s stinging attack last week on the Church of England for its vote to support disinvestment in Caterpillar Inc. because the Israelis use its bulldozers to destroy Palestinian houses – a vote which Dr Williams supported – is all the more notable. It shows just how grave Sir Jonathan thinks the situation is when the Church, as he said, has chosen this of all moments to extend to Israel vilification rather than support, just when Israel is under renewed existential threat from Iran and Hamas and has itself risked civil war to carry out the Gaza withdrawal.
Today, a churchman has replied to Sir Jonathan in terms which suggest that the Chief Rabbi’s remarks understated the unfathomable depths of the venom towards Israel within parts of the church. In the Guardian Paul Oestreicher, a former member of the General Synod, former director of the Centre for International Reconciliation at Coventry Cathedral and now a chaplain at the University of Sussex, has written a riposte which turns the stomach through its combination of manipulation, misrepresentation and sheer unadulterated hatred – which is even more disgusting because it has the gall to present itself as love. Yes, says Oestreicher, Sir Jonathan is right that hatred of Judaism continues to stalk the world. But then, having carefully wrapped himself in the mantle of both Judaism and the Holocaust through his Jewish-born father, and having even more carefully identified himself with ‘Jewish fears’ over Iran’s threat to obliterate Israel, he says this hatred of the Jews is their own fault. They have brought it on themselves through Israel's behaviour. And he supports this odious claim with a series of gross misrepresentations. Thus:
"I cannot listen calmly when an Iranian president talks of wiping out Israel. Jewish fears go deep. They are not irrational. But I cannot listen calmly either when a great many citizens of Israel think and speak of Palestinians in the way a great many Germans thought and spoke about Jews when I was one of them and had to flee."
Now let’s get this right. He’s comparing Israeli Jews to German supporters of the Nazi party. German Nazis believed the Jews were a global virus which had to be exterminated. Israelis have been under existential attack by Palestinian Arabs for fifty years. Israelis don’t want to wipe out Palestinians; Palestinians want to wipe out Israelis. The comparison beggars belief – and Oestreicher wraps himself in the mantle of the Holocaust to make it.
"I passionately believe that Israel has the right, and its people have the right, to live in peace and in secure borders. But I know too that modern Israel was born in terror and made possible in its present Zionist form by killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing. That is history."
No it is not. It is propaganda. Modern Israel was not born in terror. It was born as a result of a decision by the United Nations finally to honour the pledge made decades earlier to restore the Jews to their ancient homeland but reneged upon and blocked by Britain until the Holocaust shamed the world into action.
It was not born through ‘killing and a measure of ethnic cleansing.’ On the contrary, it had to defend itself from ethnic cleansing and annihilation by the onslaught from five Arab armies which tried to strangle it at birth. And what on earth does ‘made possible in its present Zionist form’ mean? Zionism is the movement for the self-determination of the Jewish people. Israel is the physical embodiment of that movement. Oestreicher’s comment appears to be part of the current attempt to demonise Zionism by redefining it as the policies used to contain the war by terror being mounted from the disputed territories, policies which are themselves misrepresented and demonised. In the light of all this, Oestreicher’s ‘passionate’ belief that Israel should live in peace and security is the purest humbug.
"The Israel characterised by the words of Golda Meir that ‘there was no such thing as Palestinians ... they did not exist’ is an Israel that is inevitably surrounded by enemies and that can only survive militarily and economically as a client state of the world's only superpower, for now."
What Golda Meir meant by that, as she went on straightaway to say, was that there was no such thing as a distinct Palestinian people – which was the truth. ‘Palestine’ was an artificial colonial construct and the Arabs who lived there considered themselves to be part of the wider Arab nation; Palestinian national identity was created solely by the attempt to destroy Israel. And to blame this perception of the Palestinians for the fact that Israel is ‘inevitably surrounded by enemies’ is grotesque. Israel has been surrounded by enemies since its creation, simply because it exists.
"Peace cannot be made by building a wall on Palestinian land that makes the life of the miserably conquered more miserable still. A Palestinian bantustan will be a source of unrest and violence for ever."
But the security barrier is being built as a last-ditch measure to prevent Israelis from being systematically murdered. It is not this barrier that prevents peace; it is the refusal by the Palestinians to make peace that necessitates the barrier.
"I say all this despairing of the Israel I love. Its people are my people..."
Oh please. Spare us this cant.
"The Palestinians are my neighbours. I wish they had stronger and better leaders. I wish their despairing young people had not been driven to violence. Just as I understand Jewish fears, I understand their despair."
They have not been ‘driven to violence’ by despair. They have chosen violence because they have been taught to hate – by being fed the kind of malevolence that Oestreicher is spouting, and worse.
"And there are Jews in Israel and in the diaspora who know it. Most of them, out of a fear of being thought disloyal, are afraid to say what they know to be true. The state of Israel has become a cruel occupying power. Occupations, when they are resisted, are never benevolent. They morally corrupt the occupier. The brave body of Israeli conscientious objectors are the true inheritors of the prophets of Israel. They are the true patriots. What nation has ever loved its prophets?"
This is really disgusting stuff. The claim that Israel is ‘a cruel occupying power’ is a lie. The only reason it imposes hardship on the Palestinian Arabs is because they remain in a state of war against it. Yet only those Jews who condemn Israel, he is saying, are the true Jews. So Jews who defend Israel against its aggressors are betraying their own moral heritage. To be true to that heritage, apparently, a Jew must turn upon and traduce his own people for having the audacity to try to prevent themselves from being murdered. And Oestreicher has the indecency to wrap himself in the shroud of the Holocaust to say so.
"But the main objective of my writing today, is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it practised today is in effect to be antisemitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler’s racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought antisemitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel's betrayal of its true heritage."
Well, if many feel condemned to silence because of this, I’d really hate to be around if they actually felt free to voice their opinions. The fact is that Israel is demonised, dehumanised and delegitimised every day, in language which openly uses the motifs of medieval and Nazi Jew-hatred.
"I wish it were mere rhetoric to say that Israeli politics today make a holocaust the day after tomorrow credible. If the whole Muslim world hates Israel, that is no idle speculation."
So if there is a second Holocaust of the Jews, in Oestreicher’s view the cause will not be those who exterminate them but the Jews themselves who will be responsible for their own destruction. Just what kind of moral sickness is this?
Singling out the Jewish state for delegitimisation by misrepresenting as aggression, through the systematic use of distortions and lies, its attempts to defend itself from extinction -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism; misrepresenting Israel’s history so that the Jews are presented in a false and hateful light -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism; demonising Israeli Jews as Nazis -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism; blaming the Jews for their own prospective annihilation -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism; claiming that the only true Jews are those who would refuse to support Israeli attempts to defend themselves and the Jewish state from annihilation -- a treatment meted out to no other people on earth -- may not be considered antisemitism.
So what is it?
Posted by melanie at February 20, 2006
_____________________
There are a few things to add to this eloquent reply. Melanie Phillips did not have the space to explain the real demographic history of the area, within the Ottoman Empire, that later formed the Mandate for Palestine, created by the League of Nations. She did not have the space to explain that the Jews in Muslim-ruled lands had for more than a thousand years endured chattel slavery, as in Yemen, daily humiliation and persecution, as in Morocco and Iran, and all the islamically normal disabilities that all non-Muslims had to endure. And Oestreicher apparently does not know that now these Jews from Arab and other Muslim lands found refuge, could find refuge in numbers, only in the Jewish state.
The other thing Melanie Phillips had no time to deal with is the nature of the ocnflict. Oestreicher presents it as one that is subject to compromise, that if only the Israelis give and give and give, following upon negotiations, "peace" will be attained. No it won't. This is not a conflict over borders. It is a refusal, an absolute and total refusal, for Muslims to accept the idea that a permanent Infidel sovereignty can conceivably exist in the middle of Dar al-Islam. This is a concept impossible to accept, and it does not matter if one declares one's oppoosition without nuance or camouflage, as does Ahmadinejad, or the leaders of Hamas, or before Arafat Ahmed Shukairy and Azzam Pasha (Secretary-General of the Arab League), or if one is the "smyler with the knyf under his cloke" (as Chaucer put it), the plausible casper-milquetoast mild-mannered accountant, Abbas and Fatah.
Oestreicher apparently suffers from the vulgar and complacent assumption that his half-Jewish ancestry entitles him to an exemption from the requirement to know history, to know the specific facts and not to present an uninterrupted series of lies and nonsense.
And while Melanie Phillips did not have time to discuss Islam, which requires a little warming-up in these frightened times, what was Ostreicher's excuse? Does he not know the history of Jews under Islam? He needs to read a little Bat Ye'or. He needs to talk to Christians from Pakistan (can Patrick Sookhdeo somehow manage to talk to him?), and Indonesia, and Iraq, and North Africa, and Hindus and Buddhists as well.
Oestreicher is clearly hopeless. Fine. And no doubt most of those who can still stand to buy and read The Guardian are hopeless. Fine.
But not all are. Some may be genuinely ill-informed and confused about Islam. They need to understand they are being systematically lied to, or not told about, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics, of Islam. And for thirty years and more, ever since the Six Day War, the entire Westen world has been fed by Arab and Muslim propaganda, aided and abetted by the irreducible antisemites who of course tend, when they are journalists or diplomats, to self-selectively gravitate to areas having to do with Israel (for how else to find the most appropriate and acceptable way to relieve oneself by indulging one's mental pathologies?), has redefined the conflict not as the Jihad -- the Lesser Jihad until the oil money could begin to pay for the Greater Jihad against Infidels everywhere, and the Muslim migrants in Infidel countries were sufficiently numerous to join in -- but merely as some "nationalist" conflict.
It is all so transparent to those who have studied Islam and its history, and are not bought-and-paid-for apologists, or those eager not to offend Muslim colleagues so choose to play ball or remain silent.
And it is all so confusing to those who, from the malevolent Oestreicher, to the appeasement-minded bureacrats who run the E.U., are helping to distract Western Europe, and make it intellectually ready for its possibly inevitable -- if enough people do not come to their senses in time -- islamization.
Israel is only a small part of the Greater Jihad. It has to be understood in, rather than out, of context. It cannot be used to distract Infidels, so unwilling to face up to trouble, so eager to embrace any possiblity that will allow them to deny the onrush of that trouble, from the meaning of Islam -- and the menace of Islam.
School invites anti-Semite to speak to pupils - is forced to withdraw invitation:
It turns out that Qumsiyeh "... hadn’t been at Yale for more than a year ... and ... wasn’t a professor when he was there." He is, however, "very active as a Palestinian extremist".
At least one child was not deceived and remarked:
A tony private school’s PC attitudes go too far for even liberal parents
"In Europe we have exterminated our brilliant jewish culture and replaced it with a dangerous and unproductive muslim one - how sad. The perhaps greatest danish scientist of the 20th century was partly jewish"
Albert Einstein was Jewish.
Robert Oppenheimer was Jewish (born NYC, but German father)
Andrew Grove (founder of Intel, born Hungary)
Sergey Brin (Google, born in Russia)
Milton Friedman
Karl Marx
Mikhail Gurevich (of MIG aircraft fame)
Edward Teller (H-Bomb, Hungarian born)
if you want more , heres a very very big list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Scientists_and_Philosophers
The title should be changed to "Guardian editorial policies are feeding the cancer of anti-semitism." In recent times, we've seen a perfect fusion of the extreme left and the far right - both are united in their loathing of Israel and, by default, Jews.
Anti semetism is dangerous-- not just because of what hatred leads to--but because it takes one's eye off the true problem(and it ain't the eternal Jew). It blurs one's vision(like Buchanan or Justin Raimando or I would add Jimmy Carter) towards reality. The issue no longer is seeing the world for what it is, but in explaining everything . . . Iraq, even the cartoons, foreign aid through the prism of an insidious consipiracy of 'neocon Jews' pulling the strings. The the issue with Iran is not what the threat is to us or to Europe if such fanatics gets the bomb, but, rather, how the neocons or Israel are 'beating the drums for war.' Justin Raimando(a leftwing Jew hater) goes so far to blame the cartoon controversy on the neocons(he asks who benifits by showing the Muslims as intolerant fanatics--why the Zionists is his answer). Buchanan is off the chart! He is MR. AMERICAN FIRST--doesn't like foreign aid--hates it--wants to draw up the bridges--stop meddling in foreign affairs--Israel is the root of our problems--ect--ect--and yet he drew the line the other day, joining Jimmy Carter to support US aid to Hamas. Here, hatred of Israel(by proxy the eternal Jew)trumps his well-principled stance.
I guess the analogy, Jihad Speaking, would be if I hated France with a vengeance, considered them pompous US haters, then I would sit back and relish in the car bombings(I'd say they had it coming . . . the bastards)forgetting and taking my eye off the big picture which is not Israel, not France or Chirac, or Blair or Italy, but a global intolerant idiology with religious and political components that never sleeps or rests. Sir Winston, where are you when we need you? Look, I voted for W twice, but I'm getting disgusted with this dubai port issue--what the f$$$ is this with the no comment. Why entrust these people with our security.
SORRY ABOUT LENGTH BUT WHEN I READ THIS I HAD TO CUT AND PASTE IT. SHOULD BE SHOWN TO ALL WHO APPEASE.
'Whoever insults the one true Church deserves to be killed.' (News report)
David Aaronovitch
“EUROPE MUST LEARN to live in and with the world, not to dominate it, nor to assume it is superior or more virtuous. Any continent that has inflicted such brutality on the world over a period of 200 years has not too much to be proud of, and much to be modest and humble about.” Martin Jacques, The Guardian, on the cartoons row.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe . . .
From a Reuters report, Rome, some time around now
The Vatican has protested in “the strongest possible terms” against the publication in paperback of Dan Brown’s bestselling novel, The Da Vinci Code. Cardinal Loopi, of the Office of the Defence of the Faith, condemned the book for defaming Catholicism and, in its suggestion that Jesus Christ was married, of heresy. “We demand that the book be destroyed and that the author be punished,” said Loopi, “otherwise we cannot be held responsible for how Catholics throughout the world may react.”
Excerpt from a speech by Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor
Merkel: “The affront to the honour of the one true Church is in fact an affront to the worship of God, and to the seeking of truth and justice, and an affront to all the prophets of God. Obviously, all those who harm the honour of the one true Church . . .”
Crowd: “Death to Dan Brown.
Death to Dan Brown.
Death to Dan Brown.
Death to Dan Brown.”
From the Paris correspondent of al-Jazeera
A Lyons priest today offered half a million euros and a top-of-the-line Toyota as a reward to anyone who killed Dan Brown or any executive of the Da Vinci Code publishers, Jonathan Cape. Speaking to a 1,000-strong crowd gathered after Mass outside the church of St Marie-la-Vierge, Fr Jules Monbiot announced that the offer was “a unanimous decision by all bishops that whoever insults the one true Church deserves to be killed, and whoever will take this insulting man to his end will get this prize”.
News stories in al-Ahram (Cairo)
Bookseller shot dead in Poland, by teenager shouting: “For God, and the Pope!”
Ten killed in Lisbon Dan Brown riots, when police opened fire on mob ransacking the Canadian Embassy. “We thought he was Canadian,” says riot leader.
Violence in northwest London as Jews go on rampage against Holocaust denial in Muslim countries. Kebab restaurants and curry houses ablaze from the Finchley Road to Edgware.
Iranian and Syrian embassies and consulates attacked in 20 cities worldwide. Iranian Embassy destroyed in Canberra. Australian Government describes violence as “regrettable, but understandable”.
Speech by Angela Merkel, about the convening of an international conference in Berlin to “investigate” Islam
“We propose the following to the Muslims: if you are not lying, allow a group of neutral, honest researchers to come to Mecca, and to talk to people, examine documents and let people know the findings of their research about the Muhammad myth. You have even prevented your own scholars from researching this issue. They are allowed to study anything except for the Muhammad myth. Are these not medieval methods?”
Reuters report from Berlin
“German Chancellor Angela Merkel today caused alarm in diplomatic circles when she called for the Netherlands to be ‘wiped from the face of the earth’.” She went on, “The establishment of the Dutch regime was a move by the world oppressor against the Catholic world.”
Summary of an article in French government newspaper, Le Monde
The Netherlands may have created the avian flu virus in order to damage the economies of Europe, and cleverly planted it first in the Far East to divert attention away from the real plan.
Angela Merkel on German attempts to produce a nuclear weapon
“Those who oppose us should be grateful that our people has acted nobly towards you so far, and has been patient. We want to remain patient. Don’t make us lose our patience. The peoples have awakened. The world of Christendom has awakened. Do not make us reconsider our policies.”
Reuters reports from Munich
Fr Rudiger Schlitz, the assistant to the head of the Catholic Church in Germany, has said that it is doctrinally permissible for nuclear weapons to be used. “When the entire world is armed with nuclear weapons, it is permissible to use these weapons as a counter-measure. According to church law, only the goal is important . . .”
Al-Jazeera News. Mark Seddon reporting . . .
These are the pictures of Our Lady’s Church in Shoreham, following the explosion in which 31 parishioners died, along with the suicide bomber, who is believed to belong to the majority Anglican community. This is the fourth such bomb attack on a Catholic church in the last two years.
Statement from Human Rights Watch . . .
Calling on the Italian authorities to order an immediate, independent investigation into the violent suppression of an apparently peaceful demonstration by Seventh Day Adventists in Naples on February 13, 2005. Hundreds of demonstrators, including women and children, were injured when police and armed militia from the Catholic Enforcement League broke up the protest, apparently using excessive force, and as many as 1,200 protesters are believed to have been arrested. A year later 200 of those detained are still being held without trial.
Report from al Quds-al-Arabi
Finland. Mr X, a local celebrity and Muslim, was exhumed after his funeral and given a Christian burial, despite his widow’s objection that he had not been to Church since he was a child, and had converted to Islam at the age of 15. A church court had considered the case following a complaint from a local Lutheran preacher, and ruled that Mr X should be treated as a Christian.
Excerpts from Amnesty International Report for 2006
In Newcastle, England, a special court sentenced a Gateshead woman to be burnt to death for witchcraft. Betty Spencer, 53, was immolated in front of a crowd that had gathered in the Newcastle United football stadium. It was the sixth such execution since the year 2000.
In Idaho a teacher was killed and three of his pupils badly injured when militia members of the “Party of Christ”, who object to girls being educated on the same premises as boys, fired into a packed schoolroom.
And finally, the good news . . .
From hiding, somewhere in Pakistan, Dan Brown apologises to the Judaeo-Christian world for the publication of The Da Vinci Code, promises to donate the proceeds from all his books to any charity nominated for the purpose by Opus Dei and undertakes to become a monk in a silent order at a monastery atop a high mountain in the Apennines.
Slightly OT for this thread, but I think when they finally see sense and outlaw Islam, there are going to be many lost and confused Peaceful Religionists who will need some serious rehabilitation and psychiatric help judging by these crazies...
http://www.shopmetrospy.com/cgi-bin/cNc/showPage.plx?db=shopmetro&pid=70
Among the many great Jews of the twentieth century one should also count the artists - Chagall, etc. - the founders of Hollywood, and the great American cartoonists. How many people are aware that Superman, Captain America, Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men are all-Jewish creations? And that the Orthodox Jew Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) is probably the greatest artist in any artform in the American twentieth century? And what about Bob Dylan, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin? Even in Italy, whose Jewish minority is tiny, the greatest scientists (Civita Levi, Fermi, and Segre) and one of the greatest writers (Moravia) were Jewish.
"Among the many great Jews of the twentieth century one should also count the artists"
with that much creativity, science , engineering , philosophy , art etc coming out of a relatively small group of people, i'll have my "vast zionist worldwide conspiracy" anyday over the inane,backward, 7th century, nihilistic world of the Mullahs.
For all but specially if there are any Guardian readers, please take the time to read this scholarly essay by Bernard Lewis
BERNARD LEWIS ON THE NEW ANTISEMITSM
http://72.14.207.104/u/hnnus?q=cache:7wSpeLcskkEJ:hnn.us/blogs/entries/21832.html+bernard+Lewis&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&ie=UTF-8
It is long essay but worthwhile.
How many Guardian readers does it take to change a light bulb?
None they sit in the dark and blame the Jews, Israel and the USA.
Nothing more than swill seeping from that sewer of fantasist filth, those foetid cadgers, liars, and scum of the Guardian...
Would they ever dream of blaming the Ummah for the rise in "Islamophobia"?
archduke wrote: "if you want more , heres a very very big list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Scientists_and_Philosophers"
Thanks for the link... By the way, one of the most famous danes in the 20th century, the comedian Victor Borge, was also jewish:
http://www.kor.dk/borge/b-bio-2.htm
Somehow I doubt that a muslim could have his comic genious, they have very little humour.
I'm taking my boys to the UK later in the spring, and this is a perfect example of why I'm extremely apprehensive about our trip. We were planning to go in 2002, but the relatives asked us not to come- they were afraid of what might happen to them if four little boys wearing yarmulkes would be seen staying in their home. I miss the England I used to visit, as I wasn't afraid to travel then.
"...they were afraid of what might happen to them if four little boys wearing yarmulkes would be seen staying in their home..."
Yikes! I didn't know it was as bad as this... What part of England?
Radlett, which isn't far outside of London. And yes, things were this bad even before 9/11.
I sent the following email to Mr. Oestreicher:
Dear Mr. Oestreicher:
With all due respect, I think you are stretching your own identity way too far. By this I mean that if you insist on being a victimized Jew, a victimized Christian and a victimized German ... and apparently all at the same time ... then you can only see Palestinians as victimized. This is ultimately very condescending to the Palestinians and borders on the egotistical in representing your own capacity to bear the suffering of much of the world.
The Palestinians have been quite active in determining their own development. They should bear some responsibility for their situation. For you to state "I wish their despairing young people had not been driven to violence," is to provide the suicide bombers with an excuse. The devil (Israel) made me do it. This sir, I find morally reprehensible.
And if the Palestinians (and you as their interpreter) don't want to take responsibility for their situation, they also have their fellow Arabs and Muslims to blame at least as much as Israel. If Israel's policies, especially occupation were feeding anti-Semitism, then why has the pull out of Gaza not brought love and approval (from the Palestinians, Arab and Muslim states, Europe or even from you)? Isn't the fence better than tolerating more suicide bombers?
I wish you continued success in finding new and more creative ways to portray yourself as suffering on behalf of humanity and seeing yourself as a modern day prophet.
Recommeded for the silly, scabrous, self-loathing author: "Anti-Semite and Jew" by Sartre.
libbysmom-
You might consider doing what others have in similar straits, and put a team baseball cap on over the yarmulke. This way you get to serve Caesar (or the Yankees or Narnia) as well as Yaweh. And avoid any problems with Muslo-yobs in Merrie Olde...
Be sure to show them the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum.
And have some fish and chips in Piccadilly Circus. (Named after the "picadil", a 17h century frilly collar. Tell your kids that, and you'll be the perfect tour guide.)
Bon voyage!
Here's the letter I sent to this piuos preachy predicant:
Dear Mr. Oestreicher:
In any fair discussion about Zionism & anti-semitism you also must discuss more deeply the backdrop of entrenched Jew-hatred among the cultures of Islam and Arabia. The ideas which you present make it seem as if Israel exists inside some kind of neat historic alembic... One which only considers Europe's hateful legacy of anti-Semitism -- at best, this is misleading. At worst your discussion is a mendacious distortion of reality. You only give passing reference to Islam in your discussion, and do this in a most distorted way. Rather than forthrightly discussing the hatred which Muslims are taught towards Jews and "infidels" in general, and the exigencies which this hatred may require of the Jewish state, your only real mention of Islam brings up the tortured notion that "as some now think, today's Jews are the Muslims..." !!! Although you distance yourself from this poisonous sentiment -- the idea that you'd give vent to this vile distortion is evil. One is forced to wonder why you chose to neglect discussing the topic of Zionism at least partially through the lens of the rampant Islamic fascism which festers all around Israel? It certainly reveals a lack of depth and compass in your thinking -- I can hardly imagine the realities which confront the Jews in Israel -- their tiny precarious state is a fragile island in a roiling sea of hatred, Islamic terrorism, and genocidal intent... I will not go so far as to suggest that this enormous omission on your part represents some kind of anti-Semitism -- but I think it illustrates an intellectual and emotional insensibility to the Jewish plight, despite your prayerful claims at the end of the commentary.
Let's see -- only 20,000,000 Jews and 1,200,000,000 Muslims in the world -- for some reason, you -- along with all of the millions of Muslim fanatics around the world are focused on the exact same scapegoats that have been vicimized over the millenia. It's repugnant to attempt in any way to justify the anti-Semitism in Europe (or of your own heart if such is the case) by blaming (yet once again) the Jews for the hatred or contempt with which they're treated. Are you aware that you sound uncomfortably similar to other Jew hating bigots? Even if you are not a bigot, there is enough in your insidious mentality to chill me completely... The thought that you're a chaplain in a Christian church... frightening!
Sincerely...
Are they sure it's not 'THE GUARDIAN'S' policies?