zaterdag 12 oktober 2024
What is Judaism — a religion, or a race?
11 October 2024, by Eric Zuesse
Unlike most if not all other religions, Judaism’s “laws,” which it claims come from “God,” include ones which make it be both a religion and a race.
A religion is defined by its belief. By contrast, a race is a physical biological category. To define a religion by a biological category is like to define a race by an ideological category — it’s not merely false; it is stupid (poor thinking), as well. But many people do it, heedless to logic (which is basic to any science).
Since Judaism — like all religions — is a religion, what does it believe? To determine this, one must refer to its basis, which for Judaism is the Torah, the first five books of the Christian Bible. Everything else than the Torah — including the rest of the Christian Old Testament, and also including the Talmud by Jewish clerics — is not religious Scripture, from “God,” but religious commentary upon it, from mere humans, and therefore is, for Jews, not from God, but from men who expressed their interpretations of “God’s Word.”
Before a religion has formed, it’s just a group of people, and it becomes a religion only at the time when its allegedly holy and inerrant Scripture becomes canonized by its believers as BEING their Scripture (which, in this case, occurred at some time no later than 164 BCE). Prior to that time (whenever it was), these people might have been tribe(s) or even a nationality, but they had not YET become a religion. They became a religion ONLY when the defining BELIEFS of the group (such as monotheism) became officially stated in, and by, its canonized, allegedly unchangeable (because from an unchangeable God), Scripture. Before their Scripture became canonized, the Jewish religion did not exist as-such.
Zionists are Jews who define Judaism not ONLY by its Scripture, but also by its tribal, actually pre-Judaic, supposedly racial characteristics, from when they were ONLY a group of tribes, who constituted “God’s Chosen People,” so that Zionism is a racialized religion: they define their religion so as to exclude any individuals who aren’t BOTH believers in the Torah, plus descendants of believers in the Torah. ONLY by being a descendant of Jews can a Jew believe that Israel is “my” land. Even many Orthodox rabbis don’t like to talk about this fact, but the Library Journal review of the 1990 book Your People, My People: Finding Acceptance and Fulfillment as a Jew by Choice, noted that this book indicated that “Unlike many religions, Judaism has always discouraged converts, and the obstacles facing a prospective convert are manifold.” And even individuals who nonetheless succeed in proving to a rabbi that they believe in the Torah, are looking forward to raising their children to be Jews. In this way, the faith is intrinsically racist. The only opportunity it allows for the faith’s expansion, since proselytization (or evangelization) into Judaism is discouraged within Judaism (and even some Jews have pointed this fact out), is (Genesis 1:28) “Be fruitful and multiply.” Liberal Jews might refuse to accept that reality, but it (the joint religious and racial character of Judaism) cannot logically be denied — not if one accepts the Torah as beingthe Word of God.
In this Scripture are, for examples, the following, which all Jews must believe to be history, not myth, or else they cannot BE Jews, but are instead non-Jews, even if their parents had all been Jews:
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Genesis 15:18
"On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates."
Deuteronomy 2:16 2:17
"You must not let any living thing survive among the cities of these people the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance. 2:17 You must completely destroy them the Hethite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite as the Lord your God has commanded you."
Joshua 6:21
"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword."
Samuel 1 15:3
"Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." (Christian Standard Bible)
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For every Jew, those are commands of God, not of any human. Even the Christian Hitler, as a believer in both the Old Testament and the New, believed this, and in his private notes to himself in 1919, just before he entered politics, he referred to the “Bible — Monumental History of Mankind” — in other words, as being (not only in the New Testament but the Old Testament — the entire Bible) “History” instead of myth. Such individuals interpret whatever national constitution exists in their country only insofar as that constitution is consistent with the “Laws of God” in the Bible (and so they will diminish anything that is not consistent with their Scripture).
A great investigative video journalist, Corey Gil-Shuster, went into the West Bank and asked “Jewish Settlers: Why do you steal Palestinian land?”, and most of them said it’s to get back “our land” “given to us by God,” which Palestinians “stole from us,” but a few others, who didn’t seem to care about the morality of the matter anyway, said that all Palestinians whose property was transferred to Jewish settlers had voluntarily sold it to Jews — none of it was “stolen.” An excellent investigative news video report, “Seizing the West Bank: Extremist settlers in power - BBC World Service Documentaries”, showed clearly that violent theft of West Bank land by Jews is, as a matter of policy, supported by Israel’s Government and Army — the BBC actually filmed this being done. So: all of the Jewish settlers there were giving only lies as ‘justification’ for what their Government is doing. If they actually believed those lies, they were thieves who were also fools; if they didn’t, then they were thieves who were also liars. In any case, they were Zionists — racist Jews — regardless whether fools or liars. Both their religion and their race are basic in their thinking.
Some people think that they are Jews, and have both parents who likewise did, but who reject the idea that their “God” ordered Jews to exterminate Palestinians (Arabs in Palestine, many of whom descended from the very same peoples whom the Torah had ordered to be exterminated). These are non-Zionist Jews, but are they really Jews? They reject key laws of Judaism (i.e., from the Torah). Even if they attend synagogues, are they actually Jews? Perhaps their synagogue endorses Zionism, but they themselves don’t endorse Zionism. Are they Jews merely because they pick-and-choose which of God’s commandments to accept? Or is that merely the synagogue’s cheating about how many Jews there actually are, so as to make their numbers seem larger than is actually the case?
Although rabbis (teachers of the Jewish faith) view the Torah to be a work of history instead of a work of myth (not reliable to cite by historians as being credit-worthy evidence for its allegations), historians (as opposed to teachers of Judaism) have disproven much that is in the Torah (as I have disproven much that is in the New Testament), and therefore base their historical reconstructions upon other, more credit-worthy, items of evidence. Consequently, Zionists (supporters of the existing state of Israel) are relying upon the historicity of what is by now well established to be a myth — and an extremely partisan one, as well — and so their “historical” ‘justifications’ are exceedingly shaky, at best, and not worthy to be taken seriously by the International Criminal Court (or any other), except as constituting evidence of what Zionists really believe to be true. In point of fact, on October 9th of 2024, a highly skilled investigative team presented their video news report, “The Killings They Tweeted | An Airwars Investigation”, displaying their findings to the International Criminal Court confirming the allegations by South Africa that the Israeli Government’s operation in Gaza is not targeted to eliminate Hamas as Israel alleges, but is instead genocidal, intentionally targeted to eliminate the 2.3 million Gazans.
All of this is not merely an Israeli operation, but it is an American operation, because almost all of the weapons for it, and much of the support to Israel’s economy — $18 billions in total donated to Israel’s Government from U.S. taxpayers during this year alone — is crucial to the carrying-out of all this theft and genocide. The International Criminal Court will not succeed unless it expands its own targets, to include Joe Biden. But no one expects any better to come forth from Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
Both the Israeli Government and the American Government have been lying to the public denying that what is being done to the Gazans is genocide, and no justification has been given by either Government for the numerous statements by Israel’s top officials saying that God gave all this land to “the Jews,” and even citing specific verses in the Torah as authorizing the elimination of Gaza’s residents.
Whether or not the existing International Criminal Court will have any real legitimacy will be determined by what it decides in this already overwhelmingly documented-by-events case — the first large genocide since the one that Hitler and his supporting Christians in Europe perpetrated (based upon the entire Bible) against Jews in Europe during WW2. The land-thefts in the West Bank are in addition to the genocide in Gaza. The horror of the U.S. empire — including its Israeli colony — won’t much longer be able to be ignored by the rest of the world.
There is a lot of ‘history’ that’s actually not. Scholars have botched it.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
Het Lijden van de Palestijnen
In Het Parool van vandaag, zaterdag 12 oktober 2024:
Het demonstratierecht is ingewikkeld, maar burgemeester Halsema handelde op maandag 7 oktober volgens het boekje, stelt hoogleraar staats- en bestuursrecht Wim Voermans. En dat Halsema van PVV-leider Wilders het land uit mag? ‘Dat ondermijnt de rechtsstaat.’
De jurist Voermans wijst er terecht op dat:
vrijheid van meningsuiting – het recht kritiek te uiten op de overheid, op situaties, of op andere opvattingen – stelt heel weinig voor als anderen er geen kennis van kunnen nemen. Vrijheid van meningsuiting en betogingsvrijheid houdt ook in dat er verschillende – tegengestelde – meningen kunnen worden geuit en gehoord. Zelfs onwelgevallige.
From Scotland Peter Howson can see all the way to Gaza
From Scotland Peter Howson can see all the way to Gaza
The war artist didn't go to the Middle East during the recent conflict. But in his mind he was there, recording the despair
Mike Wade
Wednesday February 11 2009, 12.01am GMT, The Times
Cluster bombs are preoccupying Peter Howson. “I’m obsessed with cluster bombs right now,” he growls. “And this picture - you even have the mosque in there, with the bombs going off all around it.” The artist stands by the window in his study. Behind him, the Ayrshire hills shimmer on a crisp winter’s morning, a beautiful, tranquil prospect. But Howson’s attention is entirely focussed on his work, scattered over the floor, images of desolation that he has pulled from the 20 or so sketchbooks piled on his desk.
Each one is more terrifying than the last. A line drawing of a figure in agonising pain. Children fleeing some unseen horror. A couple embracing - they seem lost in a moment of sexual ecstasy, until you look closer. “It’s actually a dying pregnant woman,” Howson says in his slow, resonant voice.
“Oh Peter, I’ve not seen this one before. That’s beautiful,” cries his fianc?e, Annie McKay, who has her coat on, ready to go out on some errand for him. She is pointing at a Pietà , a figure sorrowfully carrying a broken body. Howson picks it up and places it next to another, a skeleton on its haunches leering out of a pattern of explosions and death. “I have spoken to people who have been in Gaza since the ceasefire,” Howson says gruffly. “It is like the aftermath in an earthquake zone.”
To those who know his work, it is almost logical that Howson should have reached this point, working manically during the recent Israeli invasion to pour out his rage over a war that has cost more than 1,300 lives. For the best part of 30 years he has visited many other scenes of despair, from the dossers of Glasgow recorded in his early work to the corpses of Kosovo, which he conjured up as an official war artist in Bosnia.
Along the way he has endured all sorts of personal nightmares. He has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism sometimes associated with intelligent people, but which often blights their relationships with others. Its influence on him is unknowable, but at different moments, marital breakdown, drug addiction, alcoholism, and religious conversion have overwhelmed his life.
Through all this his prodigious output has rarely diminished, but - even by his own obsessive standards - the period since Christmas was immense. In just a matter of days, hundreds of these Sketches of Gaza appeared, as the artist was swept up in what he calls the “ecstasy” of creativity. His routine is daunting. Rising at three every morning, he prays for half an hour in a tiny chapel beside his rambling Victorian house. Then, inspired by the visions that fill up his mind, he starts sketching again. The aim, eventually, is to create a series of oil paintings and mount a show to rival his Bosnia exhibition, sponsored by The Times, which ran at the Imperial War Museum.
“Images come to me, like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. “I’ve got millions inside my head, it’s like I ask and they come pouring out. I know that the strength, whatever it is, doesn’t come directly from me. It can’t do. It’s like keying into something much more powerful, into the pulse of the Universe in a way. I know it sounds a bit flowery. But it is stunning.”
Howson has made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem in four years and most recently was in the Holy Land in the weeks before the Israeli offensive. There he listened to a Mass that moved him to tears, and met George Sa’adeh, the Christian Deputy Mayor of Bethlehem, whose 12-year-old daughter was shot dead by an Israeli soldier. “He is the most courageous man I’ve met. He wants to forgive, and I don’t know how he can. He was the perfect embodiment of all the people I met over there, of Christianity, of any kind of religion, in action,” he says.
Speaking on the eve of yesterday’s general election in Israel, though, he is pessimistic. It hardly matters who wins, he says, “they are all as bad as each other”, but Binyamin Netanyahu - whose brother Yonatan was killed in the raid on Entebbe in 1976 - has a dark side that Howson fears. “Netanyahu’s brother was a hero, and he himself has become the ultimate anti-Hamas, anti-Palestinian leader. He is likely to get in narrowly, and when he gets in, it will be apocalyptic. ”
Howson’s only embarrassment is that these new images are works of his imagination. He wanted to be in Gaza “at the eye of the storm”. He even talked of being smuggled into the conflict zone, this pale, 6ft 4in former bodybuilder, crawling through a tunnel to get to the other side. He snorts. The image would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic.
Howson was born in London in 1948, but moved to Prestwick when he was 4. He started at Glasgow School of Art, but in his first year, signed up for the Army, in which he served for nine months. He hated the experience. When he finally graduated, he emerged in the 1980s alongside Ken Currie and Steven Campbell, his work quickly finding its way into the Tate in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA in New York. His marriage, to Teri, was short-lived, but he has a daughter, 20-year-old Lucie, a blast of energy in the house today, who suffers from Asperger’s and epilepsy.
His early success brought celebrity, drugs and drink. For a while Howson hung out with David Bowie, Bob Geldof and Robbie Coltrane. He was even mates with Madonna, until he disobeyed her wishes and painted her nude; with that, Madge stopped ringing. But Howson was that rare thing, a modern British artist with rock-star appeal before anyone had heard of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. And by the way, he says, their work is elitist rubbish.
By 2000 he believes his addictions had brought him close to death and he checked himself into a clinic. It was there, that he saw the light and felt “this overwhelming sense of peace and love come into my life”. That was the start of his new journey, he says, when he became a Christian. “I’m not saying I turned into a saint, but I am trying to do the right thing. I haven’t betrayed Annie, or anyone.”
But it is a hard God he serves. He keeps a full bottle of Captain Morgan rum by his desk, a reminder of the bad old days, and lets his work emerge between the poles of absolute excess and utter self-denial. Simply finding the middle way appears to require a huge effort. He can be “15 different people”, and for the platoon of friends and helpers who surround him, he is, he admits, a nightmare.
Howson survives only on a rigorous, self-imposed schedule. Sleeping is “a waste of time” and he habitually rises early to sketch in his study and listens to Bach, whose work he “obsessively” collects. At 7am, he is driven to his studio, 30 miles away in Glasgow, where he paints all day, or talks to Frank, the artist and heroin addict who shares his studio space. He travels home on the coast road, to give him time to relax and talk to John, his driver and helper.
And then there’s Annie, who has left the house to let us talk. She is the art teacher who Howson ran into six years ago at a gallery opening at Gourock on the Clyde. For a while they lived in adjoining flats in Glasgow, until Annie found the pile they have been living in for the past 18 months. A tiny photograph of the pair of them is stuck on the wall near the fireplace, and Howson already wears her wedding ring, though they are only engaged to be married.
“We don’t have what you might call a normal relationship,” he says. “We stay in different parts of the house. She takes care of me a lot of the time, I take care of her in some ways. Sometimes we get a bit confused, but not really. I know we are a couple who love each other very much and care for each other. We’re just not a proper couple in that we don’t have a physical relationship.”
We’re way off topic now, Howson complains. His message is clear: “The people who are suffering here are the innocents, that’s what we are saying. The innocents are suffering and Israel cannot get away from that. These aren’t people who want war.” What should he call his exhibition of these Gaza paintings, he wonders. “Unholy Land”? “Samson in Gaza”? “David and Goliath”? Then he pulls himself round to his domestic circumstances again.
He meets Annie in the evenings, he says, for a hour or so, when they sit in front of the television. When their programmes are finished, they go their separate ways to bed.But how can such a passionate man resist a beautiful woman such as Annie? “I love women, I do,” he pleads. “Probably that’s one of my big dangers. I’m a visual person, I love beauty. There’s comes a point in life... Beauty can lead you to God, in the way that Dante was led through Beatrice. You have to sanctify it at some point.”
He moved to this house for Annie, but he misses the city. “But then I don’t really like being anywhere, apart from work. The idea of happiness doesn’t really come into it for me. It’s a different feeling, part of the Asperger’s. I don’t really feel here. It’s like watching the world through a television. Even talking to you is strange.”
