God's Chosen People (Destruction of Israel called for by famous Norwegian writer)

Israel is now history. We no longer recognize the State of Israel. There is no way back. The State of Israel has raped the world's recognition and will not achieve peace until it lays down its arms. The State of Israel, in its present form is history, writes Jostein Gaarder.

There's no turning back. It's time to learn a new lesson: We no longer recognize the State of Israel. We could not recognize the apartheid regime of South Africa, nor did we recognize the Afghani Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. We need to get used to the idea: The State of Israel, in its current form, is history.

We don't believe in the notion of God's Chosen People. We laugh at this people's capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds. To act as God's Chosen People is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance. We do not believe in divine promises as a justification for occupation and apartheid. We have left the Middle Ages behind. We laugh uneasily at those who still believe that the god of flora, fauna and the galaxies has selected one people in particular as his favorite and given it silly, stone tablets, burning bushes and a license to kill.

We call baby killers "baby killers" and will never accept that people such as these have a divine or historic mandate excusing their outrages. We just say: Shame on all apartheid, shame on ethnic cleansing and shame on every terrorist strike against civilians whether carried out by Hamas, the Hezbollah or the State of Israel! Unscrupulous art of war

We acknowledge, and pay heed to, Europe's deep responsibility for the plight of the Jews, for the disgraceful harassment, the pogroms and the Holocaust. It was historically and morally necessary for the Jews to get their own home. However, the State of Israel, with its unscrupulous art of war and its disgusting weapons, has massacred its own legitimacy. It has systematically flaunted International Law, international conventions, and countless UN resolutions and can no longer expect protection from the same. It has carpet bombed the recognition of the world. But fear not! The Tribulation will soon be over. The State of Israel has seen its Soweto.

We are now at the watershed. There's no turning back. The State of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms. Without defense, without skin

May the spirit and the word blow the apartheid walls of Israel down. The State of Israel does not exist. It is now without defense, without skin. May the world therefore have mercy upon the civilian population; for our prophecies of doom are not aimed at the civilian individuals.

We wish the people of Israel well, nothing but wellness, but we reserve the right to not eat Jaffa oranges as long as they are foul tasting and poisonous. It was endurable for some years to live without eating the blue grapes of apartheid.

We don't believe that Israel grieves any more for the forty killed Lebanese children than it has wailed over the forty years spent in the desert three thousand years ago. We note that many Israelis celebrate such triumphs in the same manner they once cheered the plagues of the Lord as "fitting punishment" for the people of Egypt. (In that tale, the Lord God of Israel appears as an insatiable sadist.) We ask ourselves if most Israelis think that one Israeli life is worth more than the forty Palestinian or Lebanese lives.

For we've seen pictures of little Israeli girls writing hateful greetings on the bombs about to be dropped on the civilian populations of Lebanon and Palestine. The little Israeli girls are not cute when they strut with glee at the death and torment on the other side of the fronts. The retribution of blood vengeance

We do not recognize the rhetoric of the State of Israel. We do not recognize the spiral of retribution and blood vengeance that comes with "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." We do not recognize the principle of ten or a thousand Arab eyes for one Israeli eye. We do not recognize collective punishment or population thinning out as a political weapon. Two thousand years have passed since a Jewish rabbi criticized the ancient doctrine of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."

He said: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." We do not recognize a state founded on anti-humanistic principles and on the ruins of an archaic national and warlike religion. Or, as Albert Schweitzer expressed it: "Humanitarianism consists of never sacrificing a human being for a cause." Compassion and forgiveness

We do not recognize the old Kingdom of David as a model for the 21st century map of the Middle East. The Jewish rabbi claimed two thousand years ago that the Kingdom of God is not a martial restoration of the Kingdom of David; the Kingdom of God is within us and amongst us. The Kingdom of God is compassion and forgiveness.

Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and thoroughly humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

For two thousand years, we have rehearsed the syllabus of humanism, but Israel doesn't listen. It wasn't the Pharisee who helped the man who lay by the wayside, having fallen prey to robbers. It was a Samaritan; today we would say, a Palestinian. We are humans firstly - then Christian, Muslim, or Jew. Or as the Jewish rabbi said: "And if you greet your brethren only, what more do you do than others?" We do not accept the kidnapping of soldiers. But neither do we accept the deportation of whole populations or the abduction of legally elected parliamentarians and government ministers.

We recognize the State of Israel of 1948, but not the one of 1967. It is the State of Israel that fails to recognize, respect or defer to the internationally lawful Israeli state of 1948. Israel wants more - more water and more villages. To obtain this there are those who want, with God's assistance, a final solution to the Palestinian problem. 'The Palestinians have so many other countries', certain Israeli politicians have argued; we have only one.

Or as the foremost protector of the State of Israel puts it: "May God continue to bless America." A little child took note of that. She turned to her mother, saying: "Why does the President always end his speeches with 'God bless America'? Why not, 'God bless the world'?"

Then there was a Norwegian poet who let out this childlike sigh of the heart: "Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?" It was he who wrote so beautifully of the Jew and the Jewess. But he rejected the notion of God's Chosen People. He personally liked to call himself a Muslim.

We do not recognize the State of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath. If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population has to flee their occupied areas into another Diaspora, then we say: May their surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is an eternal crime, without mitigating circumstances, to lay hand on refugees and a stateless people.

Peace and free passage for the evacuating, civilian population no longer protected by a State. Shoot not at the fugitives! Take not aim at them! They are vulnerable now -- like snails without shells, vulnerable as slow caravans of the Palestinian and Lebanese refugees, defenseless as the women, children and elderly of Qana, Gaza, Sabra and Shatilla. Give the Israeli refugees shelter; give them milk and honey!

Let not one Israeli child pay with his life. Far too many children and civilians have already been murdered.

There's so much here that is just plain factually wrong, let alone morally so, that it is nearly impossible to respond. Add to the equation the fact that Gaarder has a severe case of Jew-hatred that has compromised his ability to rationally think, and it is almost worthless to respond. Almost. I'll address a couple of the standout idiocies in his article.

We are now at the watershed. There's no turning back. The State of Israel has raped the recognition of the world and shall have no peace until it lays down its arms. Without defense, without skin

As others have pointed out here, if Israel lays down its arms, Israel will really cease to exist - and over 5 million Jews will be massacred in the process...which is obviously what Gaarder wants, even if he doesn't explicitly say so. The simple fact is that even before the Shoah/Holocaust the Arabs were massacring Jews in what was then the British protectorate of Palestine. Even a mere 3 years after the Shoah/Holocaust, Israel and its people had no peace - and that before the commission of any of the "crimes" of which Gaarder accuses Israel and it people. Israel and its people have NEVER had peace, and likely never will for one moment until Moschiach (the Messiah) comes, simply because the thing that infuriates the Arabs surrounding Israel is the fact of its mere existence in any form, on any amount of land (even land purchased for fair value from its owners), as well as the act of all Israelis in continuing to breathe.

There are limits to our patience, and there are limits to our tolerance.

"OUR" - who is that? Does he presume to speak for 6 billion people (as if they would all agree that the sky is blue, let alone a political question)? Arrogance on top of massive and wilful ignorance and blind hatred...gee, what a wonderful guy he must be.

We don't believe in the notion of God's Chosen People. ... To act as God's Chosen People is not only stupid and arrogant, but a crime against humanity. We call it racism.

Here's his ignorance and hatred showing itself, because he utterly misunderstands and purposely misrepresents the concept of "chosenness." The Jews have, indeed, been chosen by G-d - chosen to bring a message to the world, first that there is one and only one G-d, and second that He wants us to all live according to a certain code of morality, ethics and actions. This chosenness is actually a very heavy burden, for 2 main reasons: first, because Jews have obligations that no one else has - there are 613 laws and numerous "regulations" that Jews are called upon to abide by, whereas non-Jews only have to abide by the 7 Noahide laws. Second, as Gaarder's screed demonstrates, this is so easily misunderstood by the lazy, the ignorant and the hateful that it becomes a club with which to beat Jews over the head. If Gaarder understood - no, if he CARED TO UNDERSTAND - and if he gave a damn about the Truth, then he'd have never said this.

Two thousand years have passed since the Jewish rabbi disarmed and thoroughly humanized the old rhetoric of war. Even in his time, the first Zionist terrorists were operating.

Without getting into any aspect of the issue of the Jewish rabbi of 2,000 years ago, let's talk about "Zionist terrorists" of that time. I believe that you call people trying to liberate their nation from under the boot of Roman occupation "soldiers" or "liberators" or "resistance fighters," not "terrorists." And, no, I don't believe in the nonsense of "One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter." That kind of moral equivalency is a completely bankrupt moral philosophy. Terrorists, by definition, attack randomly and usually (if not always) try to maim and murder defenseless non-combatants. True freedom fighters, liberators, soldiers, etc. fight the armed enemy - and this is what the Jews of 2,000 years ago were doing. There were, BTW, virtually no Roman civilians living in ancient Israel to attack anyway, even if they had been inclined to do so, proving that Gaarder is (once again) completely off base.

"WE" - there he goes again, presuming to speak for all human beings...and, YET AGAIN, he's wrong. Dead wrong. The Arabs did not in 1948, nor do they today, really and truly recognize the right of Israel to exist. The fact that the PLO was founded long before the 1967 is clear evidence of this - because there were no "occupied territories" between 1948 and June of 1967, unless you are an Israel-loathing Arab who views the entirety of pre-1967 Israel as being "occupied territory." Oh, and even if Egypt and Jordan have signed treaties that nominally recognize Israel, those are thin fig leaves - if 99% of the people in either country had the ability to push a button and make Israel disappear, they'd do it in a heartbeat.

We do not recognize the State of Israel. Not today, not as of this writing, not in the hour of grief and wrath.

Who gives a rat's arse?

If the entire Israeli nation should fall to its own devices and parts of the population has to flee their occupied areas into another Diaspora, then we say: May their surroundings stay calm and show them mercy. It is an eternal crime, without mitigating circumstances, to lay hand on refugees and a stateless people.

Well, how generous, how kind of you - you condescending, ignorant, lying anti-Semite SOB. Oh, and note the phrase "...and parts of the population has to flee their occupied areas into another Diaspora..." Gee, what about the other part? Why won't they be fleeing in your Nazi wetdream, hmmmm? I'll tell you why - because they're the ones that'll get massacred, that'll suffer rapes, torture, calculated mass murder, etc. on a scale not seen since...oh, let's pick a random time in history...Gaarder's hero Herr Schicklegruber and his band of merry men had the run of Europe about 65 years ago.

Here's my real response to you, in words more eloquent than mine written by someone far more qualified than me to do so:

DEAR WORLD

By Rabbi Meir Kahane, (November, 1988)

http://www.kahanetzadak.com/dear.html

Dear World,

It appears that you are hard to please. I understand that you are upset over us, here in Israel. Indeed, it appears that you are quite upset, even angry and outraged! Indeed, every few years you seem to become upset over us. Today, it is the brutal repression of the Palestinians; yesterday, it was Lebanon; before that it was the bombing of the nuclear reactor in Baghdad and the Yom Kippur War campaign.

It appears that Jews who triumph and who, therefore, live, upset you most extraordinarily. Of course, dear world, long before there was an Israel, we, the Jewish people - upset you.

We upset a German people who elected a Hitler and we upset an Austrian people who cheered his entry into Vienna and we upset a whole slew of Slavic nations - Poles, Slovaks, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, Romanians. And we go back a long, long way in the history of world upset.

We upset the Cossacks of Chmielnicki who massacred tens of thousands of us in 1648-49; we upset the Crusaders who, on their way to liberate the Holy Land, were so upset at Jews that they slaughtered untold numbers of us. We upset, for centuries, a Roman Catholic Church that did its best to define our relationship through Inquisitions. And we upset the arch-enemy of the Church, Martin Luther, who, in his call to burn the synagogues and the Jews within them, showed an admirable Christian ecumenical spirit.

It is because we became so upset over upsetting you, dear world, that we decided to leave you - in a manner of speaking - and establish a Jewish State. The reasoning was that living in close contact with you, as resident-strangers in the various countries that comprise you, we upset you, irritate you, disturb you.

What better notion, then, than to leave you and thus love you - and have you love us? And so we decided to come home - to the same homeland from which we were driven out 1,900 years earlier by a Roman world that, apparently, we also upset.

Alas, dear world, it appears that you are hard to please. Having left you and your Pogroms and Inquisitions and Crusades and Holocausts, having taken our leave of the general world to live alone in our own little state - we continue to upset you.

You are upset that we repress the poor Palestinians. You are deeply angered over the fact that we do not give up the lands of 1967, which are clearly the obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Moscow is upset and Washington is upset.

The Arabs are upset and the gentle Egyptian moderates are upset. Well, dear world, consider the reaction of a normal Jew from Israel. In 1920, 1921 and 1929, there were no territories of 1967 to impede peace between Jews and Arabs.

Indeed, there was no Jewish State to upset anybody. Nevertheless, the same oppressed and repressed Palestinians slaughtered hundreds of Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Safed and Hebron. Indeed, 67 Jews were slaughtered one day in Hebron - in 1929.

Dear World, why did the Arabs - the Palestinians - massacre 67 Jews in one day in 1929? Could it have been their anger over Israeli aggression in 1967? And why were 510 Jewish men, women and children slaughtered in Arab riots in 1936-39? Was it because of Arab upset over 1967? And when you, World, proposed a U.N. Partition Plan in 1947 that would have created a Palestinian State alongside a tiny Israel and the Arabs cried and went to war and killed 6,000 Jews - was that upset stomach caused by the aggression of 1967? And, by the way, dear world, why did we not hear your cry of upset then?

The poor Palestinians who today kill Jews with explosives and firebombs and stones are part of the same people who - when they had all the territories they now demand be given them for their state - attempted to drive the Jewish State into the sea. The same twisted faces, the same hate, the same cry of "idbah-al-yahud" - "Slaughter the Jews!" that we hear and see today, were seen and heard then. The same people, the same dream - destroy Israel. What they failed to do yesterday, they dream of today - but we should not "repress" them.

Dear World, you stood by the Holocaust and you stood by in 1948 as seven states launched a war that the Arab League proudly compared to the Mongol massacres.

You stood by in 1967 as Nasser, wildly cheered by wild mobs in every Arab capital in the world, vowed to drive the Jews into the sea. And you would stand by tomorrow if Israel were facing extinction. And since we know that the Arabs-Palestinians daily dream of that extinction, we will do everything possible to remain alive in our own land. If that bothers you, dear world, well - think of how many times in the past you bothered us.

In any event, dear world, if you are bothered by us, here is one Jew in Israel who could not care less.

_______________

By the way, Rabbi Meir Kahane was murdered in Manhattan in 1990 by a Moslem Arab who was "upset" with him - for being a living Jew, presumably, and particularly for the further "crime" of speaking out on behalf of a people and a nation that has been oppressed, harrassed, stolen from, exiled and butchered for the better part of 2,000 years...by people like Gaarder.

So here is my response to him: As far as I'm concerned Gaarder can go and perform a physically impossible act upon himself. I don't care if it isn't an eloquent response - eloquence is hardly required in response to someone who has announced that he doesn't care if you live or die, and in fact makes it clear that he'd be quite happy if you did. There's no response to that kind of attitude other than "Come get some." This Jew isn't going to roll over and die for free, to hop onto a cattle car and walk into a gas chamber...and, thankfully, neither is the nation of Israel.

Oh, and one more thing: I think that Gaarder is in trouble, and with an Entity a bit more important and powerful than the State of Israel....

"And I will bless them that bless thee, and him that curseth thee will I curse; and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."

G-d to Abraham, Genesis 12:3

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