Haaretz: Zionism uses religion to define national identity

[Keit]

_http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/you-can-t-be-a-jewish-muslim-1.309646

Just like the story about the late Israeli politician Moshe Sneh, who raised the tone of his voice because his arguments were not persuasive, Professor Shlomo Avineri raises the tone in his reply to Salman Masalha, both of whose opinion pieces appeared on these pages earlier this month, and paints him as a racist. But Masalha did not claim that there is no Jewish people or that Jews do not have the right to self-determination. His argument is simple: If the state is defined by religion, it cannot treat all its citizens equally, as required of a democratic system of government.

Its true that from its inception, Zionism intended to turn the Jewish people from a religious community into a modern nation, but Avineri ignores the regrettable fact that the project of secularizing the Jewish people has failed. Israel has no legal definition for Judaism other than the religious definition, it does not recognize an Israeli national identity defined on the basis of citizenship, and it does not recognize a Hebrew nationality that is culturally defined.

Well, we know that it hasn't failed, and that it isn't really a regrettable fact, because it was their plan all along. Zionists don't have any foot to stand on when it comes to Israel without tying it to religion (i.e a lie). And now secular Israelis wonder how it happened (out of convenience), since they think that Zionists were strictly secular. They are confused because it negates Zionists' initial ideology. While the answer is simple, that psychopaths, who don't have any real ideology, use various definitions and ideologies as they see fit in order to further their agenda.

The comparison to other countries where religion and nationality are linked is irrelevant, because those countries have a secular definition of the state and citizenship. You can be a Polish Jew or an Egyptian Jew, but you can't be a Jewish Muslim or a Jewish Christian.

In the attempt to make the Jewish people a nation like all others, Zionism strove to unite it through one language and concentrate it in one territory. There were arguments and struggles over this, and they were decided in favor of preserving the centrality of religion in the definition of the national collective. Instead of picking one of the languages that Jews spoke day in and day out, Hebrew, the holy tongue, was chosen.

Regarding territory as well, absolute secularists did indeed think that Jews could be settled in Uganda or Argentina, but the gravitational pull of the Land of Israel was decisive. The Bible was transformed from a religious text into Zionism's title deed, the justification for the demand for ownership of the territory. In other words, instead of bringing about the secularization of Judaism, Zionism turned religion into the central element of the definition of national identity, and turned the State of Israel into a tool of the religious redemption project, especially after the capture and settlement of biblical areas since 1967.

Defining the State of Israel solely as democratic and revoking the special privileges of Jews does not contradict Zionism, and certainly not Judaism. The connection to Judaism will remain in the calendar and the Hebrew language, in the name of the state and in the Jewish majority (if we manage to free ourselves from our rule over the Palestinians in the territories ).

Democracy is based on universalist Jewish values, such as "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" and "Ye shall have one statute, both for the stranger, and for him that is born in the land." That requires separation of religion and state, something that will be good for both. Because in the current situation, not only does religion corrupt the state, but the state corrupts religion and pushes it toward nationalistic extremism.

Why isn't Israel a modern, democratic nation-state? I suspect that the secular Jews are not ready to relinquish the special privileges that the Jewish state grants them. With no other definition for Judaism, they are ready to accept the yoke of the religious establishment and give up democracy and equality. In my view, that is the meaning of the continued impossible defense of a Jewish and democratic state.

Woe to such Zionism: conservative and complacent, lacking imagination and vision. After such a bitter failure, we should start thinking of tikkun, of repair. Tikkun is a kosher concept; it's both Jewish and democratic.

Perfect definition of a psychopathic state.

 

[go2]

Judaism serves as a plastic mythology, a vehicle for psychopaths of the Zionist orientation or for humanists of the Toledo school of Sephardic Judaism in Lyndon LaRouche's essay on the Secrets Known Only To The Inner Elite. LaRouche's model of history admits humanist and anti humanist elites share the secret that mankind is most effectively controlled by their mythology. He was a US Army intelligence operative in India during WW2. This gives his perspective a certain slant and insight on the method of creation of mythology as an instrument of power. He traces this secret knowledge and its use, humanist or anti humanist, since the humanism of Socrates/Plato versus the anti humanism of Aristotle. The following quotes place Judaism in its manifestation as Zionist Israel in the anti humanist camp. It is a long and tragic history of a people harnessed by the synthetic cult mythology of Judaism to act the destroyers for the anti humanist master slave ideology of psychopathy.

We now cite one related, important case here. We cite the case of that influential hoax known as the Jewish religion. (3)

The modern Jewish religion originated not with the Kingdom of Solomon or earlier, but centuries later, as a synthetic cult created by the order of the Babylonians and other non-Jews. The first step in the fashioning of the Jewish religion was based on piecing together scraps of Mesopotamian legends (and anti-Phoenician and anti-Egyptian propaganda), with odd pieces of actual Babylonian and other history added to the mixture. The latter infusion gave a credible calendar to the otherwise fraudulent concoction. This original Mesopotamian hoax was reworked repeatedly, always under the supervision of non-Jews, with the basic structure of the Old Testament hoax completed during the Persian Empire period.

This hoax was first introduced into European languages about 230 BC, on the recommendation of the same Aristotelian Peripatetics who contrived the exotic cults of Ptolemaic Egypt, and on orders from the Ptolemies. That edition, of the "Seventy," is otherwise notable for the fact that it was produced in a variety of demotic Greek peculiar to such locations as the waterfront brothels of Egypt. (4)

Later, when Philo of Alexandria attempted to develop a Platonic version of Judaism (the roots of the later Sephardic tradition of Maimonides and Avencibrol), Philo avoided, for obvious political reasons, simply throwing out the mess before him. He attempted to circumvent the problem by the rabbinical, Pharisaical ruse of the "commentary," tolerating the text while fundamentally altering the reading to be attributed to it.

The Christian Apostles, confronted with the same general problem, rid Christianity of the worst implications of the Old Testament by emphasizing the "Dispensation of Christ," and warning against the dangers of the “concision." Christ had freed man from such barbarisms as the Old Testament. Only those sections of the Old Testament which pointed toward the coming of the Messiah or otherwise happened to coincide with Christianity were to be treated seriously.
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The methods of creating synthetic religious cults as instruments of state domestic and foreign policies is known in some significant detail since Babylon. The original synthesis of what later becomes the Jewish religion represents only one form of such Babylonian synthetic religious cults. It is not the details of these cults that ought to occupy our attention here, but rather the characteristic features of such cult-design from then to the present time.

The usual form of the religious cult down to the Christian era was associated with a pantheon of polymorphs, gods and semi-deities whose images combined either features of several animals into one form, or which combined human and animal forms. The essential, political effect of such religious cults is to destroy the concept of a qualitative distinction between man and the lower beasts. These were, indeed, all "greenie" religious cults. The interesting distinction of the Jewish cult, among the usual, polymorphous productions of the Babylonian "foreign office," is evolution over subsequent developments away from the polymorphous image of worship. However, otherwise, the Babylonian intelligence-created cult of Judaism was the most thorough of the ancient zero-growth cults.

Although the following involves an included element of speculation, the elements of knowledge drawn upon as circumstantial evidence are valid without question. Only the specific, historical connection we interpolate for further investigation of the matter is properly considered speculative.

It is known that the Israel and adjoining nations of the period of Saul, David, and Solomon - especially Solomon's Israel, were buffer-states of the Phoenicians (e.g., Tyre). In a manner consistent with city-builders' policies, the backward people of Israel had been 'brought up, largely, to a civilized state through a city-builder program. (Hence, the Freemason legend of the early Freemasons as Phoenician-trained builders of the temple of Solomon.) It is also known that there was no trace of "Judaism" as later defined, but rather a strong influence of the cult of Baal otherwise widespread throughout the region, together with Phoenician cults. I

We also know, from the standpoint of epistemology, that the characteristic philosophical outlook of Thales, Heraclitus, et al. is an expression of the world-outlook upon which the city-builders' culture converges. Hence, philosophical beliefs converging upon the views of the Ionians, Socrates, and Plato were in fact influential among the leading strata of eastern Mediterranean city-builders prior to the Ionian period, including therefore leading strata in Israel.

The function of the Babylonian creation of the Jewish religious cult was to transform the people of Israel into an advance-post Babylonian puppet-state for Babylon's war against Tyre. Consequently, the Babylonians were constrained by the kinds of religious belief which already existed in an area strongly influenced by Phoenician culture. Hence, the ordinary sort of polymorphous-image cults might not have succeeded in that region.

We know also that the city-builders and their antihumanist adversaries often did not attempt to directly uproot existing mythologies, but rather to recodify existing mythologies in such a way as to serve the policy of the state. The mythology was adjusted to embody, as a mythology, the impulses appropriate either to a city-builders' or antihumanist policy. The thrust, on the humanist, or city-builders' side, throughout the known sources, is toward the deified human hero or heroine, for which the Herakles-Prometheus model is typical: the giver of knowledge (reason) to a whole people. The antihumanist policy emphasizes the opposite policy: it proposes the irrationality of the deities, it insists upon the unfathomable mystery of the order of the universe. On this basis, we can not confidently assume that the existence of image-worship in itself meant one thing or the other. Only the features of image-worship or other forms of worship which are characteristically Platonic or anti-Platonic are solid evidence.

The durability of the synthetic religion of Judaism, through its various evolutions up to the Christian era and its survival after the onset of that era, reflects the cumulative, "environmental" selective effect of the Platonic-Neoplatonic revolts against the older form of religious polytheistic antihumanist cults. This revolt took its decisive form in the rise of Christianity, which was politically and philosophically a Platonic-Neoplatonic upsurge within the Hellenistic world against the monstrous evil represented by the Roman Empire and Roman law. This same principle is reflected in the original political thrust of the Prophet Muhammad, and in the emergence of the Ismaili current within Islam. During that latter period Judaism itself was divided between the reactionary "orthodox" currents and the tendency for humanistic, Neoplatonic transformation of Judaism. The emergence of the humanistic Sephardic current out of the Ismailite Judaic faction, and the emergence of Maimonides, Avencibrol, et al. of the Toledo school, reflect the course of the latter aspect of the development.

In general, the main course of development of religious and philosophical belief among humanist and humanist-influenced currents, has been away from the polytheistic, image-centered doctrines toward the Logos-principle, and toward the trinity doctrines as exemplified by the internal determinations of the Platonic dialogue. The survival of Judaism coincides with the effect of such circumstances. It is merely, in itself, a plastic form of belief, which can be made either humanistic or antihumanistic, and serves the latter purpose with the advantage of being ancient, and also largely free of the incredible, hated polytheistic forms which were discarded in the wake of the Mediterranean worldwide hatred of Roman Latin imperial order.

Another decisive feature of Judaism is the ancient association of nominal Jews with banking. Throughout the period from Babylon into the persecution of the Jews during the thirteenth century and afterwards in Europe, one faction of Jews was continuously associated with monetarist policies of finance throughout the Mediterranean littorals, whereas the other faction, the medieval Sephardic faction, especially during the Christian era, was associated with Ismaili humanist policies of opposition to monetarist financial policies. Despite the inevitable, large-scale assimilation of Jews into the mainstream of the cultures in which they were situated, a kernel of Jewry remained defined and otherwise self-defined as "outsiders" to the mainstream of the cultures in which they resided. (And, so forth and so on. The relevant points should be clear.)