Posted on 08/08/2002 5:25:40 AM PDT by SJackson
I especially loved this part:
Your objections here, given your earlier statements, are laughably hypocritical. The site is an Orthodox site, and Orhtodox rules govern. Just as there are no female Catholic priests, there are religious rules affecting Jewish practice at the Wailing Wall. If the Ancient Order of the Hibernians can ban gays from the St. Patrick's Day parade, the Orthodox can limit access to the Wall by gender
...wherein you pretended to so totally miss LaBelleDame's point as to prove it for her. Excellent! Of course you realize the irony in Sen. Feinstein's having had the "most moving moment of her life" at an orthodox Jewish site whose policies she would denounce as "discriminatory" and misogynistic if anyone dared import them here, to "pietistic Protestant America." Just like she denounces the Hibernians' saint's day parade as "homophobic."
How did you come up with that utterly ridiculous comparison? Southern Baptists sincerely believe in G-D and the Bible. They are anti-abortion. They believe homosexuality is a sin. The theological perspective of Reformed "Judaism" is whatever happens to be in vogue at the moment which right now happens to be gay and lesbian chic and worship of the Clintons.
How did you come up with that utterly ridiculous comparison
See my post above. Zhabotinsky is merely trying to prove LaBelleDameSansMerci's point by pretending to be an idiot.
I watched Driving Miss Daisy. Does that count?
Having lost in battle what they could have had in the peace envisioned by the 1947 Partition Plan, Palestinian Arab terrorist groups, called "Fedayeen", began systematic raids against the Israeli civilian population. 1,300 Israelis were killed and wounded by Arab terrorists between 1949 and 1956.(1) The "Fedayeen" operated from bases located in and controlled by Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan.
and how many from 1967 to current?
Uh, let's see. Let's start with the convoy of 100 Jewish doctors and nurses traveling to the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. Unarmed medical personnel. Slaughtered and mutilated -- 78 of them murdered -- by Arabs. That was 1949.
Following the United Nations' vote, the Arabs wasted no time preparing to make it impossible for the Jews to declare an independent state. From November 30, 1947, to May 14, 1948, the Arabs waged war against the Jews. Soldiers from Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt stole into the country to organize Arab attack forces.
That little country Israel has been attacked by the Arabs since Day One. This was after those very Arab countries, and the Arabs living in the British Mandate themselves, rejected the establishment of a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel in exactly the areas now under "occupation." They wanted the whole enchillada and they are still trying to get it. They could have had a garden flourishing just like Israel does. Just think what they could have accomplished if they did not dedicate every fiber of their being to Jew hatred.
Suggest you read a historian like Max Dimont -- a non-Jewish Finn -- who chronicles the history of the area and provides excellent side-by-side timelines (Jew; Arabs) in the Appendices of his books. His works are footnoted copiously so all his sources are transparent and you can judge for yourselves if he is biased.
1953-1957. 1300 Israelis killed or wounded by guerilla activities organized and assisted by Jordan and Syria. Ignored by the rest of the world (so what else is new?). Fedayeen raids into Israel from Egypt under Egyptian army control. Syria violated a 1949 armistice 108 times in 1955. Continued violations of armistice by the Egyptians.
1958-1962. Terrorist attacks by Palestinian forces against Israel from Lebanese territory.
1964. PLO established. Fatah's first raid into Irael in 1965.
Timeline courtesy of Max Dimont.
But this means nothing to you. Heaven forbid your agenda be interrupted by facts.
The point being that the occupation of those territories had and has nothing to do with Arab Jew-hatred and their goal to eliminate the Jews in the Middle East and, if they could, the world.
"....And where did you study American history. St. Hitler's Academy of Inquisition and Bible. Anybody who has ever looked at his currency knows that Rome had some impact. Anyone who knows anything about Washington and other patriots knows about the Society of the Cincinnati...."
Perhaps he wishes to put us in mind of a WWII Japanese soldier who, unaware that the war ended, has been discovered hiding in the jungle in the South Pacific by some American tourists looking for souvenirs. The local hotel proprieter has only a few, old black-and-white hollywood movies from the 30s--on beta, no less---and in an effort to reintroduce the poor old thing to civilization they force him to watch a movie about a gingham-clad school teacher who travels by covered-wagon out to the vast prairie and sets out to drum some book-larnin' into the bright, but uneducated, children living there. They learn all about the Founding Fathers--and their deep admiration for the Roman Republic. One of the children eventually grows up to become President of the United States and is fond of quoting the old Roman Sages in his stump speeches.
Anyway, one thing leads to another, and before you know it, this old Japanese warhorse has joined Free Republic and is commenting upon American education using the nom de guerre zhabotinsky---although how he came to choose that name, I can't imagine. Perhaps it's part of the cunning mask.
Still, I can't shake the sinking feeling that zhabotinsky is exactly who he's pretending to be; that he really is one of those all-too-common, hearty souls who is not cursed with self-consciousness. Whelp, since this is the cross I must bear........
Ah yes. TheClash of Civilizations.I've heard so much about it. How you must long for the good old days of the ghetto, when Israel was a spiritual home rather than a blunt geo-political reality--a modern Nation State playing in the Big Leagues. One is tempted to sneer: "Get used to it pal" and point out that Church destruction has been the national pastime in the West for well-over two centuries. But that sort of enlightened urban renewal is precisely the kind of advancement that has made Western Civilization the thing worth defending that it is today--as Professor Lewis and his apostles so reassuringly inform us. Still, those pesky Clashes of Civilizations keep tripping over each other no matter how hard we try keep them safely segregated.
Here is an article from the Jerusalem Postof December 1, 2000 which proves the point far better than my paltry persuasive powers ever could---albeit unconsciously---for how could the author know that you and I would be taking up the cudgels here on Free Republic?
Strasbourg is a city of contrasts. The language is French, but the architecture, food, and wine are overwhelmingly German. Cities and towns all over Alsace have German names and many streets are a French German hybrid like rue Unter den Linden. Here the clash of history is evident everywhere you go as you recall that over the centuries Alsace changed from French to German hands and back again many times.
"... Strasbourg is also home to some 16,000 Jews and it's a good starting point for exploring the province's rich Jewish history. Like Jews in other parts of France and the rest of Europe in the middle ages, the Jews of Alsace suffered through expulsions, blood libel accusations, and blame for the Black Death. They were driven out of cities and towns, exploited by the Christian aristocracy, forced to pay high taxes, wear identity tags, and to get permission to marry. Jewish children born out of wedlock were forcibly baptized...."
I pause here only to brag about how deftly this travel reporter has proven my point concerning the contextual judgements of historyas appled to Christian Europe. Surely the author has been to the United States--world-renonwn Last Remaining Superpower on Earth--and has witnessed the progressive taxation policies which it employs? Surely he knows that in all modern, progressive States one must not only obtain permission to marry, but must also obtain a license from the local, State and Federal government to pass gas (among other things.)---That a citizen in any enlightened Nation State must identify themselves by race, religion, ethnicity, eye-color, weight and smoking habits. Surely he must know that children, in or out of wedlock, BELONG to the State by virtue of almost every step in the march of Progress? The lot of bastards is not only to belong to the State but also to serve as lab rats in various human improvment experiments which the State may see fit to perform. I won't continue to bore you with these strange echoes---such as the ongoing fate of those hayseeds unfortunate enough to be born in the rural West just as the State has percieved the progressive need to cleanse these areas of human activity.
Continuing with this time-travel to Strasbourg
"...Alsace became part of France in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia, but it was only after the French Revolution that Jews were granted civil rights...."
We've arrived smack-dab in the middle of a Clash of Civilizations!!!!
Here is a snippet from Citizens--a history of the French Revolution by Simon Schama--which describes the day-to-day leaps in this Great Leap Forward in the advancement of civil rights:
....."Or take another placard: the "Compte Rendu au Peuple Souverain"....Nothing could have made the connection bwtween a war to the death at the frontier and a preemptive strike in Paris more crystal clear:
"...What then followed has no equal in atrocities committed during the French Revolution....Disturbed by its horror and poorly trained in their professional discourse to contemplate it, historians at this point tend to avert their eyes and dismiss the event as somehow incidental or "irrelevant" to any serious analysis of the dynamics of the Revolution....a particularly egregious record, rather as though a dinner guest had met with an unfortunate but inexplicable accident in the college common room.
"....Until very recently the literature on the September massacres was dominated either by counter-revolutionary martyrology or the massive volume by Pierre Caron, which self-consciously set out to purge the record of hagiographic myths. Caron's claim was that careful sifting of contemporary sources would produce a more "objective" account of the episode, one cleasned of tendentious moralizing. The book that resulted, and which is still cited reverentially by historians, is a monument of intellectual cowardice and moral self-delusion. Purporting to evaluate eyewitness accounts against some scholarly index of reliability, Caron, in fact, privileges those which reflect the official revolutionary version while dismissing sources from the prisoners themselves (like the Abbe Sicard) as, by definition, "suspect". In a strenous attempt to fit the event onto the procrustean bed of "objective historical explanation" Caron aruges that the massacres were, somehow, no one's responsibility. Rather, they were the inevitable product of impersonal historical forces: mass fear, and, he often imples, justifiable desire for revenge against the casualties of the tenth of August. The overall effect is meant to be comforting for the revolutionary historian: the scholarly normalization of evil...."
I won't bore you, zhabotinsky, with a recitation of these best-forgotten anecdotes in the great triumph of civil rights in that, long ago Clash of Civilizations;
Anecdotes like:---"...priests taken there under armed escort from the mairie...When they reached the prison...another crowd demanded summary "judgement." A grotesquely perfunctory interrogation was followed by their being pushed down the steps and into the garden where their killers waited armed with knives, axes, hatchets, sabres and, in the case of a butcher (by trade) called Godin, a carpenter's saw........
...Later on the sanguinary scene was repeated at the Carmelite convent...In the days that followed, return visits were made to the Abbaye, where the murderers subsequently referred to their travail (labor)---for which, evidently, they had been promised specific wage rates.....
....According to the army officer Jourgniac de Saint-Meard, who somehow survived, and whose story of what he called his "thirty-eight hours of agony" is one of the best accounts of the slaughter, the horror was compounded by "the profound and sombre silence" in which the executioners worked.....
...Among those who escaped was Martin de Marivaux, the Parliamentarian advocate who, in 1771, had borrowed Rousseau's nostrums on popular sovreignity to attack the "despotism" if Chancellor Maupeou. By 1792 he had evidently had quite enough of the General Will.....
...What was really taking place at Bicetre was the systematic butchering of adolscent boys....
....At La Force, the Princesse de Lamballe, passed the time by reading devotional manuals and attempting to comfort the terrified ladies-in-waiting to the Queen.....Required to swear an oath of loyalty to Liberty and Equality and one of hatred to the King, Queen and monarchy, she accepted the first but refused the latter. A door was opened off the interrogation room, where she saw men waiting with axes and pikes. Pushed into an alley she was hacked to death in minutes. Her clothes were stripped from her body...and her head was struck off and stuck on a pike. Some acccounts, including that of Mercier, insist on the obscene mutilation and dispaly of her genitals, a story which Caron dismisses with the cloistered certainty of the archivist as intrinsically inconceivable....What is certain is that her head was carried in triumph through the streets of Paris.....For Pierre Caron this kind of thing was no more that the regrettably inevitable "excesses" committed at such moments....He describes the exhibition of Lamballe's head noncommittally as "the custom of those days" as though it were a picturesque folk pastime. And he goes to great lengths to dismiss stories of other atrocities....
...Caron's dismissal was based partly on their not being recorded in the revolutionary sources to which he gives exclusive credence, and partly on his refusal to believe that human beings, especially those claiming to act in the name of the Sovereign People, could have perpetrated anything so obscene. He was writing, however, in 1935.....
Losers in the ongoing game of Clashing Civilizations never really die but rise up again as mocking spectres to preside at the inevitable turning of the Wheel of Fortune. The Clash of Civilzations being hawked to the masses by the carnvial barkers in Washington DC is not precisely the clear, clean, bracing, precision-bombing, thing of beauty they claim it is.
The Islamic Jihad with whom we are now allegedly clashing---actually, we're merely carefully nudging it so as not to interrupt the warm flow of black gold-- was created in the bubbling progressive laboritories of the two great inheritors of the French Revolution--Soviet Russia and Making-The-World-Safe-For-Democracy America---our Homeland. And, as you may have noticed, in liberty-loving France, some Holocausts may not legally be denied---but others MUST be denied or the winners in History's great lottery will lose their hold on "the facts on the ground". Of course, in denying the intimate realtionship between themselves and the "losers", the winners guarantee themselves a trip to the abbatoire at some future date. And so the travel-writer from the Jerusalem Post continues:
.....Today the Jewish community of Strasbourg retains its predominantly Ashkenazi character, unlike most communities in France. This vibrant community made a comeback from the devastation of the German occupation and the Shoah and is an integral part of life in the city. Many of Strasbourg's Jews live in the area around the main synagogue - a lovely and fashionable neighborhood around the Parc des Contades. The imposing Synagogue de la Paix, (1a rue du Grand Rabbin René Hirschler) was built in 1958 to replace the synagogue on the same spot that was destroyed by the Germans during the Occupation. The interior is equally impressive - a circular sanctuary nestled beneath a Star of David. ....
Not to worry!! The Forces of Freedom (on the winning side in that Clash) were busy emancipating Dresden from it's chains of medieval architectural popery!! But wait, could there be some mysterious connection bewteen the two? Could both sides have been---gulp--fighting on the same side without knowing it? Or worse, instinctively knowing, and not caring? Civil wars are always the worst, they say. Here the tour guide brings us to the point--or maybe I should say "to the iceburg that lurks beneath the tip" in the Clash of Civilizations---when theology meant something; (and benighted, backwards, unemancipated humans had not yet learned the liberating techniques of holocaust.)
...Take a walk through the heart of old Strasbourg. There's plenty to see of Jewish interest. Oddly enough, we'll start with a church.
To the left of the portal as you face Strasbourg's Cathedral of Notre Dame are two statues - Ecclesia and Synagoga, circa 1230.The one on the left represents Christianity - a woman adorned with a crown and wearing a flowing gown. She holds a staff with a cross in one hand and a chalice in the other, and grins in triumph over her enemy. The one on the right represents Judaism. Her garment is disheveled and clings tightly to her body. Her staff is broken and the tablets of the Law are about to slip from her hand. As is typical of Ecclesia and Synagoga, we do not see her face - her head is bowed and she is blindfolded because she cannot see the truth of Christianity.....
Again, No problem. Europe progressed and wiped that irritating grin off Ecclesia's face. Most enlightened folk would say it was worth every drop of blood.
I will close with another bit of unconsciously provided evidence in my case that the Clash of Civilizations is not exactly what it appears to be from the mouths of the officially sanctioned sages---(and also, by-the-by, a bit of proof that God speaks more often to us with ironic wise-cracks than through burning bushes.) A news report exposing the Root Cause of the latest round of French anti-semitism:
....With approximately 700,000 Jewish citizens, France has experienced the most anti-Semitic incidents. According to Prof. Porat, the reason is connected to French President Jacques Chirac’s October 2000 welcome to Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat prior to the Paris summit with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In this speech, Chirac condemned Israeli action and supported the Palestinian cause. This was interpreted by anti-Semitic groups as a green light for attacks on Jewish institutions.....
"... So you support feudalism then....
Of a sort. Can any rational person do otherwise? I think not. I support humanity, humor, kindness, fidelity, honor, courage....I know, I know. That puts me on the side of the losers. I stand proudly with those millions-upon-millions---most of them far better people than I.......
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