Posted on 10/06/2001 10:02:00 AM PDT by Masada
Disaster doesn't always bring out the best in us.
Sometimes, tragically, it brings out the worst. A case in point: the finger-pointing in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, seeking to blame the atrocities on America's supposedly misguided support for Israel — and on Jewish Americans who supposedly manipulate the system to tilt our policy the wrong way.
No, it's not a national groundswell. You hear it mainly on the margins, and if past experience is a guide, it will stay there. Still, the variety and persistence of the finger-pointers is startling: left-wing professors in California, right-wing fanatics in Idaho, Arab-American activists in Michigan, smart-alec journalists in New York. There's enough of it to be worrying.
In reply, important voices are being raised from within the Jewish community, declaring that the attacks and the hatred behind them have nothing to do with America's support for Israel. Osama bin Laden and his ilk are motivated, we are reminded, by larger, more global issues: suspicion of modernity, secularism, democracy and the Western civilization that champions them. On the policy plane, his passion is driving American troops off the holy soil of Arabia. Israel isn't on his screen, except perhaps tangentially, as one more example of the West's corrupting influence.
The fact is, things are a bit more complicated than that. Bin Laden and his allies are driven, above all, by an extremist version of fundamentalist Islam. And Islam, as many of those same defenders of Israel have noted countless times, regards the mere existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East as a cardinal theological challenge. Indeed, pessimists in the pro-Israel community have been pointing for decades to the power of Islam's territorial imperative as a reason to dismiss Israel-Arab peacemaking as impossibly naïve. It's hard to see how that reading squares with the notion that the world's most dangerously fanatical Islamist just isn't interested in Israel.
But we needn't search the theology texts to divine bin Laden's motives. He's spelled them out repeatedly in various public statements. He's on a self-declared holy war against "Crusaders and Jews," with a three-fold goal: "liberating" Mecca and the rest of Arabia from American "occupation," "liberating" Al-Aqsa in Jerusalem from Jewish "occupation" and lifting the Western embargo on Iraq. They're always stated in that three-fold form, and usually in that order.
The fact is, Israel is one of the issues, though not the only one, driving bin Laden and his cohorts. It is foolish to deny it; that merely undermines the credibility of Israel's defenders at a time when Israel sorely needs defending. The best defense is always the truth.
And the truth is that America and Israel are allies, not because of some cabal of Jewish lobbyists, but because their two peoples demand it. America's support for Israel is not misguided, but profoundly moral. America and Israel share a deep community of values. They are partners in the democratic enterprise, cities on a hill devoted to something larger than themselves. Both are imperfect, at times painfully so. Both become impatient when their imperfections are pointed out. Still, both are societies striving to represent the better nature of humankind, and for that reason they deserve defending.
If America's defense of her values sometimes puts her on the firing line, then that's the right place to be. That's not a hard case to make. Most Americans, like most Israelis, understand it instinctively.
The Rat God says the Jewish religion, like the Christian religion, like the Muslim religion, like the Hindu religion, like all other
religions, has some good stuff in it and some total crap in it. There is a lot of good in Judaism, but some of the stuff in Judaism
such as the kosher killing of animals is as barabaric as the worst of the most primitive chicken plucker religions in the world. I am
amazed secular Jews tolerate the abuse of animals involved in Kosher killing. No Rat God would permit this injustice to animals.
Which puts the Judaic God below a Rat God on this issue.
74 Posted on 10/06/2001 15:17:45 PDT by hoplophile
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And you're a paragon of virtue? LOL!
Passin Pilgrim
Lematha
J Harris
LeeAnn6
Astonished
Sawgrass
tynker
Kudzu Flat
Samaritan
You seem to know too. Is it a secret?
Meanwhile, the palestinian cheap labor in Gaza and the bantustans your pals have set up can't vote -- but ideological mercenaries can.
Sort of proves my point, doesn't it, about the absence of REAL democracy in your hobbyhorse country.
Just out of curiosity, why did you discard the uniform of your native land?
Doing your bit to hasten the rebuilding of the temple and thus bring about the Second Coming? Just asking, because that view is pretty popular with a small, ignorant segment of backwoods Bible thumpers.
Got a feeling you fit that bill pretty neatly.
With messianic nutcases, neither does common sense. Nice to know you put your country's interests and security in second place to your crackpot religious beliefs. It's a reminder to anyone else who has watched this thread devolve from civil discussion to lunatic theology that the enemy isn't just terrorists and Arab dictators, it's also fools on the homefront.
When the 700 Club is over, why don't you go see if the red heifer has turned up in the milking shed yet? It'll keep you out of trouble and save the rest of us from annoyance.
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